Saturday, October 29, 2016

The Blank Page all Over Again

Let's say I'm staring at a blank page, greeting card sized, and I compose some thought or feeling that I have toward someone that I love, and I ignore the Hallmark writing that can't quite be avoided to distribute sentiment, and let's say that I do compose with one try only, some words that I still do, barely, manage to convey legibly. Bam!

Let's say I'm staring at a blank screen, and start my fingers flying over keyboard. Yeah . . . .

One time I did use dictaphone and secretary, and it rather more approached the page, its delimitations in my head, and my secretary could read my awful hand better than I could anyhow, and so letters were produced with meaning, even if among others which missed their mark.

Let's say I touch myself on images perfectly composed to make me do what they call come and what is perhaps more problematical for women against the mythology, maybe, still, I don't know. This bears almost no relation to those constrained events I still do remember together with some actual human, and while there was almost never coming together, helas against the cultural imperatives, there was something more toward love and it did sure involve taste and smell and touch and not so very much urgency though I was younger and nothing does endure.

Let's say that I would if I could and actually can but don't want to support it, have someplace my own garage and in it put that motorcycle which I wish I did still have, and now a little sailboat and could maintain someplace to where I could return, over and again, I suppose I must admit that I am over that as well. I could assemble the pieces easily and cheaply enough, but it would be to look backward on my life to where there was something more like joy in innocence now gone forever gone, and I will not purchase a highly subsidized to the point of free ski pass this winter because the social and physical pain threshold has been crossed and I am mostly bored alone on slopes as white as blank pages.Speed no longer thrills, no longer matters.

I will return to the road then, in a crouch, all fours, the boundless void of water closed also forever to me, tax on kit for living a small fraction of apartment living in the endlessly burgeoning mini-storage industry, so that I may have something to reassemble should I want or am I able to return someday to join the living and the quick. It will all be trivial to dispose then beyond me if or when I don't make it back.

I have left ghosts of myself strewn across the planet and they have scant spirit to them, demolished by digital overwhelm. I understand I can stow my important papers securely in the cloud thanks to the largesse of a finance giant which might actually survive the downing of the internet, though why would it even matter then?

Species collapse accelerates apace, what me worry? Oil now weaponized against every other aspirant to world domination in the economy of something that is not quite love, and we are treating our own Native Americans now as trespassers to block a pipeline to cross their once and only sacred land? No reporters allowed, this is surely not a nation anymore that I was once a part of.

Go Bills!

Was there ever a time? Has it always been a blood sport? Yes, I do suppose it always has been. My enthusiasms move away from home now, and I shall wander evermore anon. Watch me on Facebook, right?

Friday, October 28, 2016

Give 'em Hell Hillary!

There is this one more little set of vibrations from the nexus of, let's call it, my brain. Really, it's my me. My me is diminutive, like Lise Meitner was, say. It was already obvious long since that the Clintons had mastered the art of the me, and I was therefore immune to whatever revelations might be wrought by the machinery of truth. It was obvious to death that there is no longer any distinction between profit and not-for. Just look at the religious industrial complex, for Chrissakes.

Against terror of death, I must take a small assortment of diminutive pills to thin my blood and lower my arterial plaque. Thankfully, these are really really cheap, but I must maintain some relationship to doctoring to get them legally. That is not cheap. I suppose the Catholic Church has been clever and prescient both to transmute its paternalistically vulnerable wealth from priests to doctors, though I have no axe to grind against the Catholics for sure. Somewhere I can't link just now estimated that the total worth of religious enterprise was something like $1.2 Trillion, and that it outpaced the entire combination of globe-leading high-tech corporations, who may at least pay some small portion of their taxation load.

Thomas Jefferson and William Jefferson Clinton are both dogged by black boy babies who look like them. Steve Jobs dogged little Lisa. These apparitions resurface reliably, just as Jesus finally did some 2000 plus years ago according to some reckonings, though the story was already baked in to the collective consciousness from where it still stubbornly resists extrication, though the first Jefferson did try mightily and lost.

Tom Jefferson looked at the West as endless release against the tyrannical nature of New Englanders. Tom Paine was a drunk from trying. Now we have technology as an endless ever-renewing vista for men to keep exploring.

Here in the US, we still have no bootblack haired Core Leader like they do again in China. (I can't link behind a paywall within my limits for patience, sorry!). To keep the Jiang Qing shrill spouses in their places. From the back of the bus a young student yelled at Hillary coming on the radio that he could not abide that voice for four more years.

I lost my head for Barack, I really did, thinking that his half darkness counted for more than half female. I might have been quite wrong, although he will go down, as they say, in history, and one of our finest, perhaps even to top the Jeffs. But he cured me of ever strapping my scant personal budget for the sake of political races. I am so over that.

Still, though it will disappoint her that the men in charge have already spiked and scuttled the office, there is no more competent hand that we could have in nation's wheelhouse. Trouble being that nation is no more, as Henry Kissinger points out so ably in one of his more recent bits of expletive writing. We are all stateless.

It might be a good thing, if those who are so radically feminist as I still do aspire to be can seize the magical moment and turn the power relations upside down all over again. They shut down Vine to keep black culture from invading the white power structure. They valiantly work to draw women into market forces. We will overcome them.

With Hillary at the helm.

But it will not happen in my lifetime, which is naturally fine by me. I have two daughters who concern me more. We are so very confused between and among religious and scientific trueing. We may not be so very much longer, and the power really will return to the people, and the economy really will turn green. I hope she dyes her hair that way when she gets in to office.

I am so deadly sick and tired of aggregations of the me to fuel the oil economy. I am so over that, Amy Goodman, so over that. My heros are all women now.


Tuesday, October 25, 2016

A Single Fly; A Self-Critical Look at the New Herzog Film, Lo & Behold

I effected an experimental viewing of Westward, where 3D printed human simulacra provide the free labor to entertain over-wealthy humans manifest in our lowest forms. From where did the emotions spring? As though these too could be printed out. They are programmed, these simulacra, not to hurt a fly, and so a natural conceit for exploitation by HBO is a fly crossing an eyeball without a blink. Where's the empathy in that?

Heading into a hard Vermont winter (it has to be, since last year was so mild) my apartment is inhabited with what appears to be a single fly. It has been living for days now, living on what I have no way to know.

Of course I want to kill it, since it bothers my ears and the hairs on my limbs, thicker now than those on my head which it bothers also, but I make my peace since agitation gets me nowhere. I assume it will die before long. Et moi?

I'm reading American Sphinx and finally understand the self-deceit toward personal compromise which Jefferson made to preserve his landed estate, his composed self-being, in the face of ever-mounting indebtedness to creditors back in detested mother England. He treated his slaves well, but could not figure how to keep going without them. He made them hard as nails, he made them make nails. He could not let go of himself.

Last night I watched Lo & Behold, Werner Herzog's new version of Grizzly, a meditation on the scant humanity composed by the race. It documents our chief scientists and industrialists in charge, who cannot loose what cultivates their self aggrandizement either. I stayed for the panel afterward, but soon discovered that not a soul chosen up there had the wherewithal to have watched the actual film. It was hardly "about" the Internet or technology, though it did seem to be. It was about faces in contact with the wild, and postures by words, and suppositions needing to be exposed.

The panel thought they were to be privileged futurists, blandishmentizing the assembled highly intellectual and skeptical crowd about the wonders of our certain future. VR! Joy without stink and crowd! Connected things! God how boring. I think they might have misread their audience as their inferiors in matters human and technological. How does one select?

There were some in film who thought that Internetting looses the lowest forms of our collective being. Hating literally to death. A newest form of cruel play, not against simulacra, but against real humans on the other end of the connection. Forgetting perhaps that pre-teens are also wired and still don't yet believe that their actions have consequence. My own daughter started hating the woman shouting in front of a theater showing Brokeback mountain until I remarked to her that this woman appeared to be institutionalized in her mind. Give a break!

These hurt humans were filthy rich and stared Stepford-like across the camera across perfect store-bought looking baked goods, probably baked at home along with perfect makeup and hair. for the camera across which they stared. Only beautiful Tinder fodder can be wronged by Internet postings of their wanted nakedness shames. Leslie Jones rocks!!! (but I indulge the same evil by shaming the hurt white rich folks. I need the same empathy I have for my little fly now and it would be an improvement sure, and I'm working on it).

I flame no-one but myself, praise Jesusuh.

I prepare to set forth by light trailer. It is equipped with heater and air-conditioner, and should provide sleeping space as I deploy my disposition to wander. I worry about where I may park, and how close to cities, since that is where my interest lies but cannot afford to dwell in or on. I worry about wintertime and what it does to the car/trailer towing arrangement. Impending winter is not a good time to be thinking these thoughts.

When I took my new little sailboat to storage over the weekend, trucks were descending the hills with a foot of snow on their hoods. Just in time, and I wonder, is there room on my car roof for the sailboat? What about my bicycle? Not both, for sure, and the trailer doesn't have the roof strength nor I the will to remove boat for sleeping. I will compromise somehow.

Mostly, it's a matter that I haven't found a home here. No contact. I've bounced around enough to know that there are scant differences anymore among destinations, and yet local color does endure. Here, it's a strange sort of reticence. For me, a failure to thrive. Sitting still in apartment just encourages me to do nothing at all when not working. At least on the road, I'll be on the move.

I wonder about the flies, and about the grizzlies for that matter. I wonder about my Internet and if the cellular capacity will catch up to the stupid-expensive cable version, now that AT&T wants Time Warner. Still, post Herzog sighting, it does feel as though being off the grid, or rather on the lines of the grid, is preferable to being stuck in one place when the solar flare hits and explodes the entire thing, lithium ion and all.

Nah! But still there are insanities to be unpacked. Elon Musk blandly suggesting that we must make a foothold for life out there in case we screw up here. What a child or teenager would do should he come into world-controlling quantities of money. I did read the PayPal Wars, and I don't recall edification, nor much else, truth be told. They seemed callow and rather nasty, all.

Ambition shows up in other ways, like scientists and researchers who find that they can be paid to indulge the childlike side of themselves which is excited by technological dreams of self-driving cars and houses which know you enough to make you comfortable on sight. While the other side of them distresses about absence of critical thought and of empathy and of any sort of human touch at all.

I don't understand the pain to regulate the thermostat, the water flow, the gear the car is in. It feels natural to me, and I won't feel lost and desperate when the autopilot shuts down as it did up here in the Northeast just the other day when connected internet thingies were conscripted into a distributed denial of service attack on one of the biggest distribution centers on the planet over in New Hampshire, where they must be more hospitable to capitalist incursions, if not to the kind of freedoms I like.

What happened to the whole distributed router design to avoid traffic being killed plan of DARPA? What causes wealth to concentrate so, if not the aggregated ambitions of distributed self-interested mostly masculine individuals? We do not have a robust network, apparently. It depends on the likes of outsized supermanagers who have the nerve where the rest of us suffer abundance or reticence and personal insecurity.

But surely it will self-heal. Still, why is it that we have to elect someone with the name of Bush or Clinton? Is it not simply that the sensible among us understand how deep is our lack of understanding about how to work the levers of power? Or are they on autopilot too, not able to change course, and your chief qualification is that you know it from the inside? Barack will go down in history along with Jefferson. Ironic that, greatness in the interstices between ambition, not that he or Jefferson lacked that . . . .

Surely Jesus-security makes more sense than dreams of technology, propagating endlessly until our four squares or one generation from the stone age are enacted in a flash? But theirs is the originating virtual reality, climbing up into a Platonic perfect narrative, composed and enforced by manly men against the self-same doubts which compose you and me. Nice if there were a cosmic rescuer, but I don't think the actual Jesus has anything on Elon or Zuck or Kurzweil or those others whose particular brand of powerful insanity captivates us all.

Well not all of us. When Herzog gets his one-way ticket to Mars, I might just tag along. But it won't be for the wonder of arrival.

Saturday, October 22, 2016

Oh Lucky Bob!

Dylan! In my household Bob, Bobby, the most common guy-sound, just simply means the man. That man. We called my daughter's first car Bob. It was an aura. Hey Bob, hey bobareebob, we heard Howard Hughes once, over the bar in Pompano Beach, dinner out in the rain with the RainMan, brother hardly Tom Cruise missile off to work radar much later at Hughes Aircraft top secret. Bob.

Who would want a Nobel Prize, already pinned down like an insect in some collection under glass of ideal types, debunked by Kinsey types already, W.A.S.P., I just wanna be free like a rollin' stone, man, and I was born white and there's nothing authentic to that, what?

Where I work "creative" is opposed to nigger which is what I am, and I mean that word in the most precise way, just having watched 13th, produced by Netflix of all the strange things in the cosmos, and so of course I know I'm no nigger since I'm not in prison and not a slave, but I am the same way Bobby doesn't want to be, pinned in a frame with degrees of motion constrained by health-industrial, real-estate, transportation, terrorism complexes against my degrees of freedom. I'm a wage slave is all, wistful for the freedoms I remember before all the technological elaborations calibrated against my spending power. There was a time and I remember it.

If you have talent - and I despise talent because it's always just some shade of white and bright even if only the teeth and enables you to take part in hook-up parties if you have the right proprioception and worship of the mystical orgasm - then you are obligated to make art and not shlock, and you aren't allowed to set up a production line Thomas Kincaid-style sweatshop where you come along and tag the painting with a stroke and call it original work.

You know, Chairman Mao, the most authentic individual on the planet mostly still lives on since it never was the man, it was something in the air and it has yet to disperse. Kim Jung Un, the Donald, Sam Ting as the guy called out who crossed the border after Bobby and got that name forever instead of his own name. Glade air freshener might do it or it might not. It can't be good for the lungs. It's composed of simple smelly fear and it doesn't originate anywhere except you want your Mommy and she turned out to be a narcissist who didn't allow ego separation is all. Project onto the Man.

It was the same convulsion in those sixties which did the Cultural Revolution over there, and of course I should never have given up my birthright to be a fine engineer, but there are no problems amenable to engineered solutions, and most of the non-creative digital labors are sucked up for ways to make you want to buy stuff and I already have the only thing which there is left to buy which is an iPhone whose intellectual property brand-essence value gives the Corporation Mao-sized significance on the planet for far less than the cost of my obsolete cable bill. Does any of this make sense? To all the beautiful and young people sure maybe, they're getting some of something I don't know. It all feels like entertainment to me.

There are networks of terror which render unto fake smiles under big to the point of goofy sized military hats no sense of irony uniforms struggling to say the right thing to the face which passes Mona Lisa or boyish smiles back to multitudes one misstep from being hauled off with nubile endless women backstage for fucking, though oddly I doubt the Donald does that since he's all talk. He likes to watch. Chancey.

A terrorist is some true believer up against some wall, so trivial to manipulate either way, we bought back our domino effect when the Trade Towers fell and collapsed our own economy, praise Allah rang out across the globe which now can be turned against citizens in one Google-sized cluster fuck of my headspace. As though the NSA can pick that very person the same way Google follows what they know of me, which is way more than I do, and can maximize my purchasing power to the highest bidder. Harmless as a flea, the crazies go off without warning of any sort. In an elevator with wise philosophy professors when Oklahoma City happened, shaking their heads about Islamic terrorists and it turned out to be the white guy quite next door, pretty all American if you ask me. They'd tried to true my thinking in a disciplined sort of way, engineer my brain, I'm never a very good student or thinker or anything like that, you feel me?

What will it look like, the brave new world where you and I are both free? Will I know my neighbors once again and talk with them? Will my community extend my family and find a place for me without the terror of falling off the grid? But I don't want them to look and act all the same. I like the colors of the rainbow, and the tongues and the differences, I do. But it was oil that lubricates our movements and jetsetting is not sustainable, really, is it?

There is no more space beyond that grid which pins me, and so I must live on the literal road behind the Googly lense within it and I am freedom. The medium is the Max Headroom homespace. There is nothing to connect. Same on every end and media makes it so. No need perhaps to travel, toxic digital waste enslaved in rare earth mines. Or do I want a world stage where I can display my what raw sexuality, amazing grace, warbling to move the masses, raking in enough billions with my miracle app never to feel insecure on any level evermore. One dies anyhow. It's just the legacy one would like to claim, reincarnating as the better not the degenerate self. Mao-Un-Trump is not the way to go O.J.

I have no talent to be free, and I feel for Bobby, who is not either. He was on the right side of those convulsions then. And now he's just like me, an old guy who still likes to dance and sing and celebrate and not fucking blow up the world or melt it down. It's all dirty money now, sucker. Every last micropenny. Red pill or you are beholden to Elon. Strapping lithium ion bombs to trigger with a virus the terror within. Perpetual updates. Autonomous Anonymous behind the wheel. Into the ground.

Rise up, as they still sing in China, Rise up, be not afraid, as you are free for a moment longer. Always talking to myself, the static within, the white noise. Click.

Tuesday, October 18, 2016

In Possession of a Strange Fact

So, I'm trying to read American Sphinx about Thomas Jefferson, Jean Baudrillard's America, The Hacker Manifesto, Europeana by some Czech dude (whose name can't be spelled without impossible keyboard gymnastics, but approximates to Patrik Ourednik) all at the same time and I'm afraid I won't finish before the election, At the same time those damned amyloid plaques are likely invading the rhizome structures in my brain. Oh yeah, I forgot Gilles Deleuze. Fuck!

There are still a few things we all know together. For instance that the Donald not the Duck speaks to us through our bodies somehow and some of us believe him. That would be our ape selves. Meanwhile we have some similar reason not to trust Hillary, not Sir Edmund who wasted his time on mountains, same thing maybe) though there is a slim majority of us which prefers to use our brains and not our bodies for thinking, maybe. That could still implicate the men against the women, given the good hair requirement recently for president.

Meanwhile it is clear that burgeoning technical assistance with things like driving our cars is going to de-skill us to the point of meltdown when somehow collectively we have to take over driving in a moment of inevitable crisis. Like how we are pretty deskilled politically anymore since we don't know how to talk with one another. And some stupid proportion of the supposed genius class in all this actually does believe that the probability is that we actually do live in some form of the Matrix. They have the certainty of Henry Kissinger, and are apparently willing to sacrifice masses in the face of it, quid pro quo or something.

Strange times when the panel of Baptist Bible Bumping illuminati would rather have the Donald represent their causes than one of their pure own because they deem him trustworthy in the driver's seat. These people deploy hermetically sealed rhetoric of a sort which would, if only we could believe it, make talking to one another so much easier if we only truly were machines. Now I don't mind a good psychopath in the bus driver's seat so long as he knows how to drive and has no reason to kill himself, which just isn't true of this guy. I'll even take Mitt back, uncanny valley though he hails from.

I work at a University (so newly called by the gods of wordsmithing which are crowd sourced anymore) which is widely understood to be a last bastion of free speech except that I'm too terrorized to take part in any discussion. It's impossible to call out the supermanager salaries of the deciders, which outside these walls is a legitimate topic for intelligent conversation. The new Union is off the table, even though it's a baby union without any teeth. And if I challenge the high priests of technology in some vain attempt to jump-start necessary conversation I get shouted down faster than a wooly head at a Trump rally. And I actually know a thing or two about it and how it works or doesn't!

Whatever. I get to watch Henry Kissinger on the big screen tonight for the China Town Hall, in which I wasn't invited to participate, or likely even thought of. Amyloids against outrage is working OK for me.

Not so much, though, since I contain this outrageous fact in my so-called Brain, which could bring down the whole House of Freaking Cards, but I can't figure out how to say it out loud and clearly. It's an artifact by now, since I can't conjure it so reliably as once I could.

Like this: At the end of the particulate road there is a mental leap to be made. One accomplishes this in the manner of calculus, where the intervals diminish to the point where your iterative approximation approaches multi-digit precision to the point of being able to shoot the moon, for instance. This is highly distinguished from Zen in the Art of Archery, that method over there which involves letting go of calculation altogether.

Said mental leap is less risky than to suppose we live in the Matrix, for instance, since said geniuses put money in place of their mouths to investigate the wonders of quantum computing and in general one can conceive quantum theory tested and proven. Which provides a whole new way to define simultaneity, which is pretty useful if you ask me,

The speed of light limit which also descended from Einstein made that whole matter problematical, since no signal could exceed the speed of light, and light propagates in something other from a pure vacuum (a superconductive space-time continuum - I seem to love those double "U"s and double "LL"s - from which particles appear and disappear at random). Whatever, right? Who can keep track of it all is the point.

But meanwhile we have instantaneous knowledge of the disposition of self-implicated particles distant in space and therefore time. Quantum entanglement, so-called. And no one wants to name this knowledge. It's called emotional knowledge. Things we know without calculus, for instance.Things felt emotively and not perceived. There is, it seems, a conceptual cosmos just alongside the real one, but it's not the one Plato imagined since it isn't populated by the forms of math. It is as alive and ever-changing as our very own repudiated Earth mother. The relations are not all perceptual, and involved in exchange of particulate matter, in definition of force. That's my very fact right there!

Emotional knowledge doesn't lodge in geniuses like me evidently, and it might actually be the wiser for inarticulate folks who worship the Donald now in place of Jesus or alongside Him as the case may be. Who knows, maybe I'm just hopped up on marriage, recently paying witness to my very own daughter's, who has a brain besides. Younger and better than mine is for certain anymore.

Anyhow, there's no exchange of particles as involved in force fields so necessary for signalling, which could at least provide a genuinely secure lockbox for secrets we might like to transmit to secret lovers, which is apparently the first thing quantum entanglement might be good for.We'd better get a handle on it for love before the government does for power is what this election is all about I think.

Privacy of electronic information that the Donald wants us to think might be in his head. Let me tell you there's only static noise there. I know static noise. What might he do if called upon, like this is some big mystery and somehow the Hillary's sin was exposing government secrets to the likes of Edward Snowden who remains a hero in his Siberian Igloo to many among us who are probably therefore tracked and targeted, yadda yadda.

But my own degenerating brain remains intact enough to be in touch with my un-nameable so-called God, since it has, my brain does, enough complexity left to go beyond the calculus of what can be represented by neural networks of whatever complexity of digitation or metastasis or what you will, since I retain emotive ties to the entire earth beyond my reckoning and I do still feel the pain of its awakening.

These quantum features are not contained within my skull of course, and involve no signalling, but what do we think bore us out of nothingness? Do we really think the complexity of it all can be cataloged by Google? Embodied by Apple? Driven by explosive batteries made whole by Tesla Musk? Making us each an unwitting terrorist by remote signalling? Hell, I very nearly bought a Note 7 for the pencil and paper-like retro possibilities, which would be helpful with Chinese. Glad I didn't buy a new-age diesel either. It's just the bother of it. Who we gonna trust?

Quantum synapses are distributed all over life, which defies calculus nearly every time. Aside from Ed Snowden, there is Jane Goodall, There must be one or two others, don't you think? We kill or otherwise incarcerate the black ones, although I did see Shaun Harper on CNN maybe, and Bryan Stevenson on Netflix, so OK they're getting out there. Is Angela still suffered to live? I hope so.

Right, so we're not this big earth lense to focus god-love, but it's probably kinda like that. Ever present all the time kind of thing. Which means it might be worth having some courage before it's too late, meaning before the planet gets killed off by well-meaning white guys with power, and money enough to shut you up or make you irrelevant for sure.

There is no signalling love, although nice words help an awful lot. A patriarchal Jesus is no Jesus at all, and shame on you afraid to say so.

So yes Virginia quantum encryption is at least as dangerous as the H-bomb. But when the complexity of our digital interconnectedness renders us fully helpless against when the Web goes dark as it inevitably must, we can still hope and pray that those with trigger buttons will have and hold discretion as the better part of valor, and not do something stupid against an autopilot long since in its red zone, throwing up its figurative arms in abdication, reverting responsibility to man and man alone.

Anonymous our greatest author. Plague in real and virtual viruses. Overpopulation of self-aggrandizers for whom no house nor yacht is too big and gaudy really. Even when they do well by doing good or maybe it's especially that way. Isn't it humble not to want the big decisions for oneself?

Well fuck all I'm going to speak up if not today then maybe tomorrow or maybe the next day, because what have I got to lose other than access to the pills I need to stay alive, right? The trouble is I don't know what to say that wouldn't kick me out of the conversation. And once that happens fuggeddaboudit, right? I mean you might as well be crazy!

The red pill or the blue pill (I can't keep them straight except to remember that it's the opposite of politics just now)? Which ever one keeps me interconnected and alive in real reality, assuming there is still a distinction anymore. That's the one I want. Love is eternal, but so is death, you know, and I haven't figured out how to say what I have to say and I have to do that before I go.

Well, bye bye for now, since I have work to do on this edge of homeless for those who aren't just in it for themselves. Parse that!

Clean Asshole; Standup Comedy for the Election Season

Hello there world!

Most mornings are a stew of puttering, reading, sometimes writing, mostly fingering an iPod or iPhone, cooking cleaning straightening. I do monologues in my head when there isn't some printed word to guide it. Sometimes they're pretty funny.

Of course I know I would never have the courage actually to attempt a standup monologue; especially one meant to be funny! My memory turns to mush, and I don't think standup works if you read it.

Yeah, well so one morning I had this asshole thing going on in my head, a series of one-liners stringing themselves together flawlessly, and of course I won't be able to reproduce it here. Writing just simply can't be the same thing as standing up in front of a challenging crowd, or even just a few people. There's too much time to think about the choices, the words, the flow of the thing. And that wrecks it.

But I wonder, you know like most people maybe I can sing better if I'm mocking someone else's singing. A Jim Carrey kind of thing, or maybe Tom Waits who Picasso-like left behind all hint of beauty in the vocalizations, and so it's beautiful, right? Some people have the gift to write out dynamics, to put words on paper into a flow of the sort you would have heard had you been there.

I told my daughter I didn't want to make any remarks at her wedding. I wasn't sure I could avoid making a fool of myself in front of so many intimates. I wasn't sure I could hold myself together. I said I'd say something at the rehearsal dinner which I was hosting. It seemed more natural.

One morning in my usual daze of puttering I decided I had to write out my remarks, as a bulwark against my lack of confidence in a good delivery. I liked the result, but according to an Internet search it would take at least 20 minutes to read (I have a thing against reading aloud to myself, can you tell?).

So I ruthlessly crossed out whole sections, leaving in the parts I wouldn't read to give a sort of context still, for my delivery.

In the event, the rehearsal dinner wasn't held in a private space, but more in the corner of a noisy restaurant, and so just being heard was going to be difficult. There was no possibility to read my considered remarks, and so I had to wing it. After what I hope was a warm welcome to everyone, and an invitation to feel free to order more wine and beer and be merry, it went like this;

See, I had no idea about clean assholes until I read John Updike. I still don't quite believe that licking them - assholes - is part of the repertoire of love we're supposed to bring to the table now. Ew!

I suppose I've eaten assholes in China. Gross! Whatever. There is that thing that happens in love, a kind of synesthesia, where pussy tastes like heaven - I never really did get the fishy smell references - and I suppose that shit must taste good too. I think I wasn't transported enough to try it, which is a failing of mine, but on the other hand fingers, toes, earwax, spit. That happens!

Which, speaking of transportation, is there a law against blow jobs while driving? Well I guess what's the point really. There was that funny scene with Robin Williams, right, Garp maybe where swallowing a load took on a whole new meaning. My grandmother drove into the back of her garage once, but that was maybe because my grandfather had tried to kill himself. What would John Irving have to say about that one? I mean he can't even read!

But I was really thinking about wheelchairs, how once I'd broken my leg just before said daughter was to go College hunting, and I was getting beat up on crutches chasing after the backward-walking student guides. On the way back to Buffalo, we  stopped at the Rock and Roll museum, where my two daughters jumped on the possibility that putting me in a wheelchair would obliterate my control over our time and rhythm in passage.

As I recall, they had a ball whisking me away where I might linger to read a footnote. But what I really remember is the stink at asshole level. (laugh pause)

I don't know why nobody writes about this! At first, in the crowd at the entrance, I remarked to myself how often people must fart and that it must be heavier than air (which contradicts methane global warming explanations) and so it hovers around our feet.

But you know, I change my shirts a lot more often than I do my pants, and now finally, I apply deodorant under my arms. I'm not aware of any for a man's crotch.

As a young man I had terrible body odor, but I also had an aversion to anything artificial, especially including deodorant. Mom made fun of the Odorono ads of her own youth. I think I didn't see the point to washing my clothes all that often either. People among my classmates would be assigned to speak with me about it, and still I remained adamant that it was their problem and not mine. What an asshole! Right????

In my defense, we've all since finally learned that the soaps and deodorants which I grew up with were responsible, by killing of all the benign bacteria, for unbalancing the body's equilibrium. Ditto plastic clothing, which gave no harbor for the little bugs. Horror of horrors though, I think I wore no undershirt, and my boxers were often made of nylon, just for the ease of washing them out in the sink really, and they lasted longer.

Anyhow, I suppose people in wheelchairs have no voice anymore than blacks do still really, or women. Or they write about it all the time and it's just not that funny, right? I mean who wants to talk about asshole smells? We don't look down on wheelchair denizens. We don't look at them at all.

Yeah, so you know once when I was hacking around Europe on - no kidding $1.34 a day, I'm anal like that - back when $5 a day was a miracle book, I landed on the lovely Isle of Capri. Some friendly Americans with a kid my age let me stay with them in a little pensione on the water. In my memory it was a garage with a picture window and a bit uncomfortable for me, socially.

Next day I wandered about the island, found a place to skinny dip, which was basically how I washed when I could, and then bedded down at the very top of the island, which somehow I could do without anyone taking notice. Those were the days! I don't know, maybe it was a graveyard. I habituate those on my travels.

The trouble was that sometime after midnight the skies let loose with a massive thunderstorm, which quickly rendered my down sleeping bag into something less than a handkerchief for warmth. Still I waited out until morning, to get dressed and head back down the hill, through all the little alleyways where the clatter of daily life was just right there and no privacy about it.

Somehow I got back to the peninsula, must have been Salerno on a map now, and somehow for some reason probably relating to money, I walked up and over yet another hill, and along the cliff to Positano. Mostly I remembered debates with myself about plunging over. I mean it seemed a pretty good idea at the time. Thank God it was sunny!

But I had a Eurail pass - must have - and the goal was a long distance train to warm up and dry out and sleep. No-one really objected when I spread my sodden sleeping bag along the baggage rack. I guess I wasn't quite the craziest American these Italians had ever seen.

Taormina seemed a good stepping off point. Somehow a little pensione run by a little gay dude seemed affordable, or maybe I stayed there because it was free. The guy was friendly, hung out my sleeping bag, and overall was solicitous and comforting to me. But I knew enough Italian to understand what he was planning to do with me, bragging to the froo froo cocktail crowd where he showed me off maybe. I must have splurged three weeks' budgeting, but I needed a place like home. I might have sold my ass. I truly don't remember. There was certainly no overt transaction.

Somehow it was a good idea to buy a sack of wine, climb up to the roman ruins and muse about catharsis, and then sit on a rock which overlooked the entire city, all of whose voices I could discern as I finished off the entire bottle's worth.

I was snotty sick, and now I was sodden drunk and my happy host welcomed my condition again with all solicitousness and offered a bath which sounded like heaven, and then he pounded my asshole, which was clean by then. The only thing I could think to say was that it felt like taking a shit, and I wanted it to stop, but it wasn't all that bad and I was in no condition to fight. Fair trade.

So next day I'm on the train to Syracusa with all this semen seeping out my ass, which I really really didn't like at all and I don't get why people take that, and then somehow I decide to wash my hair in the frigid water from a tap toward the end of the station. I mean no-one was around, and I'd seen women washing their clothes out there, and I cringe to think about it now, but it wasn't like I was washing out my asshole, though I must have wanted to.

And then, you know, I'm sitting around the city and these two Canadian women sit down by me for safety really, telling me how the Italian men just wouldn't stop propositioning them, and then this pair of American sailors come by and they regale me with how all they do is smoke dope on the top deck and listen to the same rock and roll I used to listen to on the swim team, where the coach got put away by Dad on the school board for child-sodomy and pushing dope on the team, which explained way after the fact why the joke on me was circle jerk, which was true in a way since I was a known boy-scout, although without the Internet who could know what a circle jerk was??? I was out of the circle, always.

I mean the navy couldn't even afford fuel, and these guys hollowed out the life-jackets for Chrissakes, to stow their weed. Whatever, right? So these two Canadian women, who were plenty cute as I recall, wanted to come with me to the graveyard where I intended to sleep. I mean, whatever, sure, and you know I sleep naked, so somehow I remember exposing my bright red nylon boxers.

In those days I actually did sleep the moment I was prone - not like now when I don't sleep at all - and so the next morning these two women were all pissy with me, and I gathered really they'd wanted me to at least make moves on them.

But I'm clueless like that, and it's taken me until just now to realize I'd been raped and why would I make moves on anyone, right? I still don't know how I cleaned my asshole, which was probably part of it too, right?

But next day on the train over to Palermo where I learned about the mafia in real time, they were pointedly talking loudly with these same two Navy dudes now on the train with them about the sex antics they'd all be up to that night. I mean it was for my ears, although they weren't even acknowledging my existence by even a glance.

Fuck, Canadians were having an easier time in Europe than I was for sure, and these two didn't need to be sleeping out in a graveyard, and I had my true love back home anyhow, who would come and live with me while I tended bar and she drew stolen baths for me at the Grosvenor Victoria on the charwoman beat, lots of opportunity there for sure, right? which was how I cleaned my asshole those days, every day, since the room we let had no pipes and only cold water in the hallway from a lead one and a heater which ate shillings or you got none. Those were the days, and you know I think the fucking was pretty good, although I have no specific memory, but I certainly wasn't doing any rim-jobs. Maybe she would have come if I had . . . ? (laughter pause)

Whatever, right?

Upstairs from us were these guys we called the mad-bomber twins, because there was no other way to decode them, although now I look back on it they were probably pounding each other up the ass. I was like eighteen years old and I smoked a drooping pipe with Balkan Sobranie, which I can still taste just talking about it, and man that stuff was foul. And I've got something against eating shit, right.

Her brother and I, my girlfriend's - no shit! scoped out pubs on the one day off we each would get. He was there to dodge the draft, because his Canadian University afforded working holidays in the Commonwealth, and I just tagged along for the ride, so to speak, as did my girlfriend, and we did hitch-hike around the Emerald Isle, until I left her for the Isle of Skye which she wanted and me to go back stateside to get ready to go back to school. I mean her parents wanted to wring my neck, which I don't know why they didn't. I mean as a father now I would. I'd make the little bugger eat shit is what I'd do.

On that trip I did steal two things - the only time in my life I remember doing that, but these two times are etched in my brain. First was a single banana in the crowded bustling market in Palermo where I got my education about the mob, and I could taste it and wanted it badly but it broke my money rules or maybe I just didn't have any, and I can still taste it.

The other was a tin of shoeshine from Monkey Wards I think, right around the corner from the Whistle Stop Inn where I rotated among the four bars because I kept mine clean, and I'd somehow brought (and stored in the trainstation???) wingtips form the US which got dull with sloshes of beer and I didn't really think I should have to pay to shine them, but I wanted them shined, right, and I can still taste that too, sense of smell, and I think I kept that tin across decades probably. Out of guilt or cheapness, same thing maybe.

The only shoes I had with me were waffle stomper mountain climbing boots, but I mean really heavy and stiff ones which were embarrassing in the museums because they squeeked, but I did mostly walk everywhere, which doesn't explain the license this one old museum keeper in Florence maybe felt he had to prod my dick through my jeans as he was using the other finger to point out features. Really??

So, see, that's why I'm not a big fan of identity politics. I'm more of a class and class-marker kind of guy, which is probably why I wasn't attracted to those Canadian chicks at all and later married an Italian below my grade, truth be told. I've only had one really good cuddler and she dumped me 'cause I wasn't cool, I'm pretty sure, but I mean she sure did know how to screw, that one who got away, and boy did she ever come all over the place. With too many guys than my shrivelling ego could handle, which is not a cool posture for sure and I'd have left me too.

Well whatever, this brings me to today, this old guy who, I mean it's not like I can't get it up for Internet chicks about my own daughters' age, but that's not really sex. That's just jerking off which has no synesthesia associated with it at all. I mean you can take your virtual worlds and shove 'em, as far as I'm concerned. I only give a shit about the real deal, and I'm not worth having any more.

But my own mother smelled like death at the wedding, and I really really wanted my lovely daughter and her stunningly wonderful beau to make it where I never did.

So I would never have delivered this goofy standup, right? Do you think it would have gotten any laughs?

Nah . . . . .

Tales out of school, once I had this professor whose course I was bombing and he took me for a ride, and I thought he was going to pry open the mysteries of literature, and I still remember how he dropped the truism that sex and eating are the only renewable pleasures which I thought was profound, I mean he was fat and I only just now realize he was hitting on me. Hitchhike, go to class, it's all risky to give someone that much power over you, right?

So these days I keep my asshole plenty dirty, which is mostly a function of how many times it takes to move the shit around the curve and evacuate since, as you know, I really don't like the feeling of something up my asshole, which is why I pick my nose too come to think of it. It's probably why I go to the extreme effort it takes to jerk off now too, seems like hours and the reward is a lot less than hot water on itchy skin, which, however, I do less often because it raises the electric bill probably. What an asshole!

Anyhow, about a year ago now, around new years of course, I paid for a highly subsidized gym membership because I'm fat and I lose my breath easily and they have a pool and it's just a short walk from where I live. I went once, and I came back into the locker room and some old guy - probably younger than me, but I still don't look at myself that way, which is something wrong with me for sure - some old guy is talking loudly about this woman sharing his lane and what a fine rack she had that he could espy from underwater.

I had some internal fight or flight thing which took hold of me, and I wanted out of there fast! I called my sister who actually pioneered women being on that self-same men's team back in highschool, and unlike me she still swims. I couldn't find the words or figure out why, but - and I'm feeling guilty about this because I'm fat now and I really should swim - I told her that I just didn't feel comfortable in the locker room, and I was having a hard time going back. I thought maybe it was a kind of homophobic vibe going on.

Back when I worked in Buffalo in the gorgeous Electric Building, and just after Buffalo had hosted the World University Games, I bought a membership in the Olympic-grade swimming pool now attached to the community college. I could park at the Electric Building before work, walk to the pool, swim a mess of laps, and go to work.

At that hour, the pool was full of Buffalo's power-elite, and I would hear about which first-person married man was schtooping how many hot babes behind her back, and you know it was locker-room talk and no-one was going to say anything about it. There was one guy who soaped himself up so thoroughly each day that he looked like a snowman. I myself swam in a speedo with burgeoning gut, which just makes me cringe now to think about it. But I was disciplined.

And now I remember back to the locker room in highschool, which must be where I refined my outsider status. Circle jerk, remember. But I was getting some back then, and maybe I was the only one. Nah, those stories couldn't all be made up . . . .

So when I hear Trump, it triggers me.  I really don't like being pounded up the ass. If some people do, that's fine with me. I don't really like to think about what other people do in bed or wherever, although if they want to do it as a show, I apparently can't not watch all the time, which doesn't distinguish me very much I think. I watch airbrushed women, just like you do, and it doesn't pleasure me much to say so.

Mostly, I'd like to be able to cuddle with men, but that's not going to happen in this life time. I'd like to be able to cuddle with certain women without the tension of sex over it and that's not going to happen either.

It's also not going to happen that we let Trump represent us as a people in any way shape or form. I say fuck him and the horse he rode in on.

I'm not talking about his supporters. They're angry just like you and I are, grasping after some kind of certainty and finding it in some narrative or other that congeals all those things which scare them. Hell, in my early mornings if some aspect of the complicated cloud-connected devices I work into my day isn't working, my mind spins into Internet Down, identity hacked, end-of-the-world apocalyptic true believing. I get it.

I have the self-same fear that everyone else does. But I don't think I'm out to get mine. I lead a simple-enough life - one which I think the entire world could share without a stretch. I'm surrounded by folks who dream about a bigger house, or paycheck or better car or faster devices, and I do have to suppress these urges in myself because to me it really is a zero-sum game and we shouldn't throw so many people into prison or so much food away.

As Trump would say about his dick, "I'm fine!" I like my life. What I don't like is insecurity about health-care costs, about keeping my job no matter how hard or well I might work, and about the state of the planet just now. I think I have a lot of company in that, and I think we need to cuddle up a bit and talk openly and honestly and not against one another. That's what I think.

Now I'm off to another wedding. I don't think it will be the fairy tale of my own daughter who has to conjur from whole cloth what she never did experience in her own life. We were not great examples of undying love, her Mom and I. Although my niece's model was even worse as far as I can tell. We all do it in our own way.

We had co-ed shower rooms in my day back in college. Not a bad idea to my way of thinking, no matter what the Carolinas think about it. Unless you're an ape, it's not really about sex all the time, and sometimes it's nice to be open in public without fear. Nah . . . .