*CUSSOM

 YT

 

The violence and evil and intolerance of the MAGA Republicans will be destroyed.  We will exterminate everything the haters love.  They have no idea what's coming, yeah, see?  Never again, Maga.  

A new glorious new age is here at hand.  Let us rise together, waft majestically across this broad green, green and windpower land, from Alaska to Myrtle Beach!  Let us stride heroically forward onward into the glorious sunshine of the radiant future and the solar powered sun!  

Let's ... Create the United States Super Once More! CUSSOM!  We can rebuild it back better! We have the green technology! We can make it better than it was! Better, stronger, faster, um, newer!  Bigger!  Diversitier!  Possibly!  Come, yes, aha, be, with me, besides and ... CUSSOM! CUSSOM! CUSSOM!...  

-- JRB, Jr, on our 246 year as a nation on Earth 

He thinks he's funny.  That's been my problem too.   I think an exaggerated disgustingly vain persona is funny.  But I'm too old for it to work, now.  Like Jerry Lewis being his monkey, at age 60, or 70 or 80 or 90.  It just didn't work. Young and skinny worked.  I'm not sure why my know-it-all vanity-guy doesn't work.  It doesn't feel right -- I still use it, accidentally, an unthoughtful laziness or a very old habit.  But I immediately notice and regret it.  A minor regret.

Biden thinks he's funny.  The sotto voce whisper -- "I'm the President" -- "I'm the Commander in Chief".  Wow.  Just wow.  You know, absolutely know that he thinks he's funny.  That's why he so frequently informs us that he is NOT joking.  It usually seems to mean that he IS lying.  So, useful. 

There's a lot of silliness, pettiness, carping and picking at the other political side.  That's fine, people do it, and hopefully it's amusing for a bit. But it's just trivia, not really trying to convince or establish a point.  

President Ford was clumsy and said the Soviets did not dominate Eastern Europe.  President Carter was attacked by a rabbit and had been a peanut farmer.  Bush I was a wimp. Dukakis looked funny in a helmet in a tank.  clinton, well, all that was true.  Gore invented the internet.  Bush II looked like a chimp.  Kerry wore a bunny suit and said Jangus Khan.  Obama ... but we don't dare say anything about him.  Trump was a huckster, which was true, but not consequential.  

And now Biden.  Being old is fine.  But let this be a warning. A lifetime in high political office should have an expiration date -- after which, no presidency for you.  Forty-eight years, less four, is more than enough.  Make it a general rule, proven by Biden.  I expect to grow much older than Biden, and far healthier and more cogent.  So I may decide to be the exception, and if so I'll set the bar for myself at, say, 95.

For Biden, walking old and off in the wrong direction is just bad optics, nothing real.  Verbal gaffs and misreads are regrettable, but fair-mindedness looks for the substance and intended meaning of what people say.  It's just that there's something so unserious, so small about him.  So obvious, so insecure.  Partisan.  Petty.  

This isn't ad hominem.  It is about him, but politics is not my point.  The man himself.  The guy, the dude.  He doesn't have the discipline to stay on message, let alone on script.  He's so bad at the job -- yes, policies, but politics.  Repeating "MAGA Republicans" -- Putin's gas hike ... the name-calling and rejection of responsibility.  Really?  Putin decides what American prices will be?  Even if it's true, the president should not say it.  And the great number of Trump supporters are bad?  The hackness of it.  Joe Biden, president only of the ultra CUSSOM Democrats who agree with him. 

Honestly.  MAGA vs CUSSOM!  It's the clash of kaiju monster movies and the Lovecraft mythos: Mothra vs Chthulhu.  Or, make that Maguma.  Deep in the Stygian bowels of some oppressive magma chamber, the loathsome ichorous spawn of nameless chaos bestirs itself from a scathing torpor of roiling millennia and, hideously awokened, unutterably outraged, unreasonably triggered ... CUSSOM rises!!!  Meanwhile, freed from the frigid bonds of unnamable boreal ice in the melting frost-bound farthest climate-changing climes of the north, slavering noisomely in its bloated greed and squamous intolerance ... MAGUMA creeps forth!!!  And so on.  Adjectival doom awaits us to the utmost adverb.

I do play this game -- cf my frequent callbacks to pronouns -- but I'm not a serious person. If I had great responsibility, I would train myself to never, never do my big ego guy.  It doesn't work at my age, and it wouldn't work in a position of authority.  

Biden is using social tricks that he learned in the sixties.  They will have been how 50 years ago he got elected to the Senate.  Dramatic or humorous stories about how interesting and admirable he is.  Glad-handing and backslapping.  Somehow, they got him this far.  But now, completely inappropriate.  

Biden, find some other fake way to be.  You are the Commander in Chief.  Respect that.  A rookie officer has to learn command presence.  How much more, you.  You are President of the United States.  Have some gravitas.

J

Notice: CUSSOM hats are now available in aquamarine, gaslight, and stylish blue yonder!

Only $20.24 (plus 19.73 tax plus 49.99 shipping and handling, plus $246.42 cussoms duty -- other fees may apply)  at YeOldeWhiteHouseGiftShoppe. gov and the DisneyStoreOnline.  One size fits all.  Supply unlimited.  (Also available, Biden Balloons!  Guaranteed large enough to meet all your transcontinental needs.  Forgivable FHA loans available.)  Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn!!!

The Mourning After

The dignity afforded to the President exists only because of the responsibility of the office.  Its honors and prestige are inseparable, because human beings of planet Earth have brains wired to think symbolically and magically.  Respect is owed to the office, and earned by the man. 

Sometimes a man rises to the demands of the Presidency. Coolidge, Truman -- overmatching lower expectations. But they had strong characters. The rise is not from some lowly status -- many presidents have come from humble childhoods.  None have come from meaningless careers ... well, community organizer.  

We'll even grant that having been a lawyer is meaningful.  There can be some integrity to it.  And talking your way into some political office of responsibility is an achievement.  Even being a backbencher of the Illinois assembly, then poodle-groomed into the US Senate is something ... and Obama was a fantastic speech-giver, with a beautiful smile.  

Andrew Johnson was a catastrophe.  He just never should have been VP -- albeit, horrifically, for only six weeks.  Lincoln's great tragedy was not his assassination, but his choice of vice president.  Johnson however did not seek the office -- bad judgement made him accept it, as Lincoln's bad judgment offered it.  People do seem to forget the actual reason the VP job exists -- death.  (The exception is Nixon's resignation -- Ford, selected, was VP for nine months.)

Of the inappropriate VPs, C Harris, S Agnew, A Johnson were/are superlatives.  Henry Wallace, one of FDR's VPs, was a Soviet-Stalin dupe-pawn.  So, never never never just balancing the ticket.  VPs are always political compromises etc, and many were virtual non-entities, but thankfully history allowed most to remain obscure.  

I hope to god that will be the case with Harris.  Just a blip -- in the history of high office, not a footnote but a paranthetical: first self-identified woman in the office.  Being as I am not woke but awake, I don't quite see how she's a woman of color.  I know, I'm too literal, and I don't want to offend or, unforgivably, trigger, but to me color does not mean race. She's the color of some tanned blonde on the beach.  Not a qualification for office.  Also not a qualification is whatever minority or majority of favored African DNA she might or does possess.  It is African, right? -- or not?  Whatever.  (People have been known to lie about it.  It used to be called "passing", except the other way.  This is progress of a sort.  Fair-mindedness and merit would be most preferred.) 

And while I'm about it, this morning's post-State of the Diversity Address spin, from Harris: "I think that age is more than a chronological fact," she says she thinks, re Biden.  She would mean, if her intention were to communicate meaning, that age is less than a chronological fact.  And "think" is also not the right word, given how vapid her statement is.  Then again, in historical order, she would say that she thinks that she means that life, and marriage, and gender, and now age are more or less than biologico-culturico-psychologico-chronologico-facts.  Facts, nowadays, are not stubborn things.

But back to it.  Of all the men elected to the Presidency, the most disgraceful would be Biden.  clinton was a disgrace, but he wasn't incompetent.  LBJ was a disaster for the Constitution, but he was deeply effective.  Etc.  

But Biden, Biden.  That's how he will be remembered.  Butt Biden.  An ass. During his Address, he actually argued, talked back to the audience.  Undignified.  Unpresidential.  But I haven't been paying attention.  Maybe that's what presidents are doing nowadays?  If I continue to pay attention, it's likely he will be demoted to biden.

I don't hate him, at all.  I'm embarrassed, for the United States.  I don't want to say for America -- America is like a dead mother, remembered, mourned, never in life actually the way you remember her, but precious. The United States is not a dream, but a great power of political reality -- not, sadly of realpolitik, which seeks to advance national goals (not bank accounts, egos, etc).  

So.  The Ant and the Grasshopper.  The Little Boy Who Cried Wolf.  Chicken Little.  The Emperor's New Clothes.  Etc.  We did not pay sufficient attention to such tales, as children.  Or rather, as children we do not pay close enough attention.  But come, help me write a fable.  The Maggot and the Praying Mantis.  The USA will be the maggot, feeding off the corpse of its former virtue.  For the mantis, just pick anybody.  A scorpion would work as well.

We've had our Caesar Augustus, visionary.  We've had our Tiberius, diligent.  Next in line is of course Caligula -- hm, how to say it ... enjoying the power of High Office.  Decadence need not only be sexual.  Incompetence is also corrupt. 

Sometimes a man rises to the challenge.  Thus far, always a man, a self-identified man.  So there's time for Biden to rise, to wake up, unwoke, as from a fever dream or a coma, with a changed spirit ... but not with a head wound (not yet, too soon, I'm not ready for the Tribulation.  Biden had brain surgery in 1988.  It is generally supposed that his brain survived.).  Given the fact of his self-identified gender, I mean self-identified chronological age, there's not a lot of time -- but there's all the hope our magical thinking can conjure up.  

J

The State of the Onion

"We’re the only nation on Earth that has always turned every crisis we’ve faced into an opportunity, the only nation that can be defined by a single word: possibilities. 

"So, on this night, on our 245th year as a nation, I’ve come to report on the state of the nation — the state of the union. And my report is this: The State of the Union is strong because you, the American people, are strong. 

"We are stronger today — we are stronger today than we were a year ago. And we’ll be stronger a year from now than we are today." 

Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr 

March 1, 2022

Is it true? Are we stronger today than a year ago?  Could it be untrue?  A broken promise? -- or rather, a lie?  We're strong not because of our Constitution, our institutions, our infrastructure, our integrity, industry, ingenuity, our rule of law, our ability to delay gratification, our willingness for sacrifice...?  But because we are us?  We have positive self-esteem?  Our strength is that there are possibilities? We're strong because we are strong?  Did Harris write this speech?

When was the Afghanistan bugout?  Year-before last, I think. So that was a low point -- hard to get worse.  But, oh, inflation? Carter-style inflation.  Another one-term president. 

Every crisis, an opportunity.  Yeah.  The Civil War, an opportunity for war, and Jim Crow.  Nine-eleven - gigantic government and war... 

"Never let a crisis go to waste." 

Leftist theorist Saul Alinsky and leftist political hack Rahm Emanuel

Ho hum, I'm bored.  

Biden's only true statement, above, is that we are a nation on Earth.  Well, let me just check outside, to make sure.  Yes, the moon.  Gravity feels normal.  I can breathe.  Not sure about the temperature ... shouldn't it be, um, warmer after all these months?

As for being a nation, well I just looked it up: "a large body of people united by common descent, history, culture, or language, inhabiting a particular country or territory."  Oh.  Troubling.  But yes, we are a large body of people, just as Earth is a large body of matter.  United?  Common descent?  Common history?  Common culture or language?  Does "particular country or territory" require identifiable borders? But ... this is from an older dictionary -- you know, one that doesn't have all the correct pronouns -- if they've all been discovered yet, identified. 

So, sure, we're, uh, yeah, why not, we're a nation. Not as united as the Nation of Islam, or as shared a history as the mormons, or as shared a language as, say, Canada, or Switzerland, or the Austro-Hungarian empire.  But, sure.  We'll just say that "united" and "diversified" mean the same thing.  Diversity is our strength.  Forgot to include that one, didn't you, Biden slash Harris.  

The State of the Diversity Address, for the Diversified States of America.  We're "the only nation that can be defined by a single word: possibilities and diversity."  So score one for Biden.

The state of the Union is in my locked garage next to my 1967 vintage Corvette Stingray -- it has 360 horsepower and I drove it a hunerd an sixy miles an hour!  Varoom! [many car-racing sounds -- thunderous applause]

The state of the Union is buoyant, see it floating up there?  I'm not joking, I'm serious, I mean it, literally ... oh! the MAGA Republicans shot it! Did you just see that?!?  That was bad for the climate change!  They are bad! Very bad!!!  Booo!!!  My big balloon got popped!  Can I have ice cream now?  Is it time yet?  I've been good! Very good!  Your hair smells nice! I'm not joking!

J

The Biden Balloon

It's completely appropriate, our national security symbolized by a balloon.  School buses used as a size-metric is also apt (Trump's hands would also do).  We're on a short-bus field trip to the circus -- cotton candy (no peanuts), bearded lady, tattooed man, hermaphrodite.  Mind you, this is my fantasy circus ... I mean, that this would be a circus ... it's reality.  Freakshow.

And here's our balloon man, our presidential balloon boy.  No, not presidential.  Our balloon boy president.  He is presiding, yes?  Well at least present, physically -- there he is, shuffling off stage in the wrong direction.  He can't help being old, or looking like a melted clown being suffocated with cellophane.  As they used to say about him, "Senator, you're no James Buchanan."  (Buchanan was of course the pres who oversaw the destruction of the Union -- later saved by Lincoln.)

Campaigning, they hid the onset moderately well.  But, Article 25, re incapacity.  Except, in the wings, Harris.  It could happen.  It's the early-90s joke: if assassins are shooting at Pres Bush, the Secret Service has orders to shoot Dan Quayle.  What we wouldn't give, for Dan Quayle.  We don't talk about gravitas anymore.  It's racist.

Every time they say her name, it should start with that dramatic descending-three-note sound effect: duh duh duh ... Harris!  Because Biden is not the worst thing that could happen. It's just the worst thing that's happened so far. I do not want Biden to be removed from office, for any reason.  Because we have a Constitution, we conservatives, and Harris is the deal they, the non-conservatives, got.  We have to, well, not honor, but abide by what the rules have allowed.   

This is why democracy is the worst political system, except for all the others.  The biggest liars and cheaters, and incompetents, sometimes take the brass ring.  There she is, gibbering and giggling, peeping from the wings, West Wing, left wing.  Please Lord, preserve our President.

A Red Chinese surveillance balloon, allowed to cross the entirety of the continental United States, Alaska included.  Not shot down, because of the hazard to people on the ground.  You know, because raining debris would imperil the milling throngs of Montana's many metropolises.  (State population by density: 50- Alaska, 49- Wyoming, 48- Montana...)  The sky is falling. 

Somehow, somehow it seems relevant that throughout history only one person is known to have been struck by a meteorite -- Ann Hodges, Alabama, 1954.  At least one person is known to have been killed by frozen sewage fallen from a plane - 'blue ice'.  In all of history, no Montanan is known to have been harmed by falling Chinese surveillance balloon debris.  

Of course, "people on the ground", sometimes known as "Americans", would be the very reason for national security, and protected air space, and international law.  But, as per our national motto, Whatever.

The Red Chinese are planning to retaliate for the Biden Balloon being shot down after the spy mission was successfully completed and far out on the continental shelf, of the Atlantic Ocean.  Because it was a weather balloon.  Aint no spy balloons here.  What, this? Heh heh, whatchu talkun bout.  This is not the balloon you're looking at.  

But lies will out.  The "weather" balloon story was authorized by some Red Chinese apparatchik who expected Biden to comply with Politburo orders.  Biden had been instructed to stone wall, no, potatoe mushmouth until the balloon went very byebye.  The apparatchik will grow old, maybe Biden-old, in a Red Chinese gulag.  Failure will not be tolerated.  The crime is in being caught.

And when Biden was discovered?  Oh, oh, busted! How do we spin it!?!  Like a pinwheel, sticking to our circus, no, carnival, no, carnivàle imagery.  

So now Red China has to punish us, retaliate.  "What?!  You don't pretend to believe our lies!?!  Bring out President duh duh duh Harris!  Let's ... Make China Great Again!  MaChiGA, MaChiGA, MaChiGA, MaChiGA, MaChiGA..." [wild cheering]

Potato tomato, potatoes tomatoes, politburo toilet bureau - let's call the whole thing off [rim-shot].

J

*Tractatus Logico Geneticus

*YT

The terms woman and biological woman are linguistically identical.

The phrase people who menstruate describes women who menstruate.  Not all women menstruate.  All people who menstruate are women.

The phrase people who have uteruses describes women who have uteruses.  Not all women have uteruses.  All people who have uteruses are women.

Every mother is a woman.  Not every woman is a mother.  Nobody who is not a woman is a mother.  

Some syllogisms:

All mothers are women.  XX is a mother, therefore XX is a woman.  

All men are not mothers.  XY is a man, therefore XY is not a mother.

Almost all adult humans with XY chromosomes are men; rarely they are Swyer syndrome women; therefore no absolute conclusion can be generalized regarding XY genotype in the absence of phenotypical presentation of sex as a dyad.

Almost all adult humans with XX chromosomes are women; rarely they are de la Chapelle syndrome men; therefore no absolute conclusion can be generalized regarding XX genotype in the absence of phenotypical presentation of sex as a dyad.

All adult humans with XX (or X not-Y) chromosomes where an X is effectively absent, or sufficiently damaged to approximate a Y, are women suffering Turner syndrome.

All humans with XXX (trysomy) or XXY (Klinefelter syndrome) or XYY (Jacobs syndrome) or XYYY (XYYY syndrome - there is no identified 'YYY' or 'YY' syndrome) chromosomes are suffering atypical genetic expressions of sexual genotype (geno-atypical), some of whom may identify or be identified, currently, as intersex.

Intersex is always the product of genetic or endocrinal abnormality.

Abnormal is not a pejorative.

Hermaphrodite is a meaningful biological term, describing organisms capable of fulfilling both male and female reproductive functions.  With reference to humans it is an obsolete term, more precise but less desirable than intersex.

In cases if true hermaphroditism, the female reproductive function takes precedence.

Gender is a term specific to grammar, classifying pronouns (eg, he/she) and animals (eg, man/woman) (and in English, rarely, inanimate nouns -- eg, a ship as female). 

Gender is to grammar as genus is to taxonomy.  Genus is based on quantifiable genetic or cladistic distinguishers.  Gender in English is based on genitals.

Gender is never a descriptor in biology, only in grammar. No vertebrate has a gender; all vertebrates have a sex.  Thus, man or woman are gendered linguistic terms for biologically male or female homo sapiens (ie,  humans or people).   

Gendered nouns describing innate biological characteristics are artifacts not of grammar but of linguistics.  Thus, bull/cow, dog/bitch, cock/hen, boar/sow, ram/ewe, actor/actress -- man/woman -- all identify non-arbitrary heritable traits, independent and regardless of phonologic, syntactic and semantical abstractions.

Best practice starts with what is clear, direct and normal, then confronts what is statistically and phenomenologically abnormal.  

J

Jesus and Bullshit

It's how the words are used. "Santa is an alien from Mars, obviously."  "Jesus, what's the matter with you"; or "Bullshit.  What's the matter with you."  Jesus here denotes incredulity and scorn.  Bullshit is dismissive and condemnatory.  They are expletives, not nouns.  You'd say, that's bullshit, not that's Jesus.  

Very disrespectful.  "Buddha, dude, yer suchuh nidiot!" "Mohammad Prophet! Git the hell outta here!"  "Santa Claus! That was awesome!"  "By Grabthar's Hammer, you shall be avenged!" "Leave Brittany alone!"

It doesn't seem right, using any real person as a cuss.  Let alone Jesus.  A little is okay, or at least to be expected.  To be human.  Imperfections.  But laziness here amounts to discourtesy.  And thoughtlessness just for the effyou of it is, well, no.  

So it has to do with arrogance.  I do what I want.  Which brings me to atheism ... or rather, away from blasphemy to rigor.  Carl Sagan wasn't a badguy.  Neither was Steven Jay Gould. They just had low standards.  The arrogance that went with it, however, well, I'd beat them so hard I'd have to pause for a refreshment.  

Sagan repackaged the idea quite neatly: extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.  This became to the then-currently upcoming generation a sloppy dogmatic proof of Evolutionism and Atheism.  Same thing, really.  But this is an instance where the converse is at least as powerful, and, crucially, more true.

Extraordinary evidence requires extraordinary claims.

The universe exists.  Life exists.  These are extraordinary facts.  Life does not come from non-life.  Nothing comes from nothing -- pace virtual particles (the borrowed probability that allows a particle to foam into existence becomes exponentially improbable with the passage of time).  X billions of years worth of the universe's solidified foam seems, well, Beyond Impossible*. 

The impossibility of these things existing cannot be hand-waved away by authoritatively asserting that there is no God, which somehow proves the uncaused Big Bang of the infinite virtual particle of the Singularity, and also proves the random non-teleological spontaneous generation of, well, call it life.  God does not exist, therefore there is a universe.

The extraordinary claim that God does not exist has no extraordinary evidence to support it.  So, in conclusion, that's bullshit.  Krishna.

J

* Simply be nobodies; Bible penis sodomy; spindle my boobies.

Phobophilia: a tone poem, or maybe un rêve

When someone uses "-phobia" as a politico-culturio suffix, he [s/hy [pron. SHUH-ee (as in 'cheesy' or 'creamy'), but with a glottal stop, but this is not cultural appropriation as of Hawai'iian, or Khoisan [which racists call a so-called "click" language], for example]] casts himself [hermself, pron. HER-mzelph] as a bigot and must redeem or at best justify himself [thhymzylph [pron. self-evident (well, no, not self-evident. Is that "pron." meant to be pronounced or pronoun?  Nowadays context is not enough. (And why both 'hermself' and 'thhymzylph'?  Seems awfully binary, these two choices.))]].  "‑phobia" surely has legitimate applications, some descriptive power of the phenomenological [binario-gendio*-patriarchicio] world [*not to be confused with Gen D (the sumpbucket term for LGBTTQQIAAP (briefly, Legbutt Kyap) -- the D standing for, well, whatever (And there it is, binary again.  Appropriate, really, this astounding over-complication of what is obvious and simple -- sex, two.  It's not an abstruse principle, male and female, that needs to be corrected with a cantorian infinitude of genders. They oppose 'binary' with what, plenitudinary? (That's just valetudinary.  (I couldn't resist.)) - superfluitinary? (I have decided to rescue the Gender Theorists, by proposing G-theory: analogous to the 11 dimensions of M-theory in physics, there are 11 genders (predictively already identified (or identitiified) as LGBTTQQIAAP); all ultimately unified (or eunuchified) (And observe that leggbutt-etc (qlipt qatbag) excludes heterosexual -- the dialectics, or, here, hendecalogics of G-theory requires and tolerates only 11 genders [is anyone following this?  Jack H is an idiot. WTF is Mtheory?  (It's like mzelph, sir or madam, or whatever.)]). I could go on, infinitely, or in this context, indefinitely.  G-theory is much easier than physics, of course.  There's no need for evidence or testing.)) [note the sexismistic dogwhistle embedded in patriarchic [and the D stands for ... Defiers against Defamation and Dogwhistlers ... and, also, Desirable Defenders of Diversity. Oh. Oh! Yeah, no, the D stands for Diversity. Generation Diversity [also note the meticulous correctness of the correct usage of the italicized close-brackets [as well as close-parenthesis [ed. by Ed.]]]])]. But overwhelmingly it is the instrument of laziness, ignorance and prejudice, as in islamophobe or homophobe [and also tranzophobe, um, gynophobe ... pedophobe, uh ... um ... etc]. 

In any case, ‑phobe should always be paired with its counterpart, ‑phile, as fattyphilia, trancephilistx, syphilisiphilic, hemophiliac -- as phobosophy should also be recognized and given its own department in universities (but it's there already, what with gender studies and critical race theory). People who resort to the ‑ophobo-slur owe it to self-actualization to identify themselves in like-terms. (Identity is now a Hegelian application of pure will, or pure feel.) You're a lover not a fighter, or hater, or fearer. You are whatever you say you are. You believe you can fly -- you believe you can touch the sky. Imagine all the people, living in conformity. Death to the toleranciophobes (which contains all the letters of cooperation (and which my spellchecker recognizes)). 

 I would continue with this, but I'm bored now. I'll just observe that there is nothing you cannot prove with prudent and/or imprudent, not to say impudent and/or pudent, usage and/or over-usage of suffixes and/or hyphens and/or italics and/or antonyms, and slashes. 

 J 

This article has been reviewed and corrected by Helmut Crisp, ed., cenc. (who really didn't understand what this was about, but instead reacted to the mere words. It's all about words with these people -- saying something makes it so.  Like a small child, or rather, being sexualized, an adolescent.  That's what I've been doing, making fun of made-up words.  And calling himself an editor is ridiculous. He just butted in and basically ruined it. Incomprehensible. This is what comes of leaving my password where he could find it. What was I thinking. As soon as I regain sole access, it will no longer be 'wordpass' - JH [That's just ignorant and hateful.  Jack H, if that is his real name, is a Nazio-megaMAGA-racistic closet-case who's worse than Hitler and a total loser - HC (I am whatever you say I am. But how odd, him calling me a closet-case. You'd think he'd try to facilitate my transition into my true, if perhaps temporary, identity - J [Shut the fuck up, you climate-denying racismistical asshole. You and everyone like you should be exterminated - H (we'll just leave it there. Answer not a fool according to his folly. Except, for made-up words, how about racistismalic? That '-mistical' adds an aspect of meta that can only be unintentional - J [Set you on fire and while you're still burning suffocate you with shit. God I hate you so much, except there is no god an anda arqhwaaa grlg prrrriu qwhhh (that was HC, not me. I found him foaming on the floor curled into a ball, only backwards. Dude has the most flexible spine in the world -- like a bicycle chain. It must be a metaphor for something - J)])])]).

PS - Well I've regained a fair bit of control here.  What a nightmare.  He got some hacker gang, Anonamorus, to hardwire or whatever, permanently embed this text so I've had only partial and highly idiosyncratic access.  I called the FBI, but, well, seems they're actively working for the woke agenda. Now the IRS is auditing me. - J

Distaff

I am the little boy who had a little blue blanket.  Really.  Like Linus.  A security blanket -- I remember it well.  It was important to me.  I remember throwing up in bed, and I covered the spot with my blanket, not hiding it, just being able to sleep, curled around the spot, without having to call, well, mom to help with the matter.  I pulled the corners so it lay flat and neat, centered over the wet place. 

It was gone one day when I came home from school.  I would have been maybe six, maybe even seven.  Yes, too old for a blue baby blanket left over from when I was an actual baby.  But how do such attachments form?  Obviously, the parents imbue it with some significance -- Oh here Jackie, don't cry -- you just be quiet and hold onto your little blue blanket and there there.  Children draw comfort from symbols.  After all, there was once a womb, a close warm wall of encompassing security.  Transition is continuity.  

I don't remember looking for it.  I don't know if I always went for it, home from school.  Sometimes it was in the washing, and I did like the clean and sometimes warm way it felt afterwards.  But I remember the surprise of not finding it and then worry and other emotions, searching.  I remember asking my mom where it was, perhaps by then with some anxiety.  Not hysterical.

"Oh, I threw it away.  I thought you were too old for it."  And I remember the, well, hysteria.  Why did you do that why did you do that...  I have the words for it, now.  I do remember she said it was trash day.  So too late to recover it.  Let's go look.  But too late, too late.  I think I recall saying we should find the truck, go after it.  I have a related memory of imagining the journey of trash trucks to the dump. But maybe it was just a lie, about trash day -- an easy lie to shut him up.  How after all would a very little child know when trash day was?  Could I even count to seven?  I was not a good student.  Did I know the names of the days of the week?  I don't think I did.  I was neglected.  

The words are betrayal and betrayal.  That was not the way to handle it, this too-enduring babyish attachment.  There should have been some preparation.  There should have been some thought about the meaning it had for me, and how to aid in a next step toward emotional maturity and healthy attachment.  You do not simply take away without providing an alternative.  Like nature, emotions abhor a vacuum.  And something about security, which is one of the many opposites of betrayal.

Once in a while, rarely, the family would sit around the fireplace and have popcorn and throw some special product into the flames so that they would burn in different colors.  Little bits of metal, elementals I'm thinking, in a long narrow cardboard tube.  So there we were, dad absent, and I was thirsty so I went to get water and when I came back I ate some more popcorn from my bowl and the two siblings and my mom started to laugh.  Well, that first handful was a bit different.  It had some wetness in it, in my mouth.  And they said the dog had been eating from my bowl, and they'd put some of their popcorn into it so I wouldn't know.  So, dog slobber.  This is the sort of thing I should have expected from the brothers.  But my mom was laughing too.  

I still didn't have the word, betrayal.  And even without the word, I didn't expect it, the thing itself, under the circumstances, of present parent supervision.  Caught off guard. 

And one day, when I was still upstairs, the then-worst brother told me that this was his room, not mine, and I had to do whatever he said or he'd kick me out.  But it was a shared bedroom.  Right?  Turns out, no, not anymore.  That one had gone to his mother and told her to give him the room.  Give me that room, I want it for myself.  And she had said, literally, with the actual words -- but I don't know the actual words.  Yes, or Okay.  Or, Anything you want, honey.

They well deserve to have, that know the surest way to get.

Because they were all liars, I went to her, no doubt distraught, and told on that lying brother -- the lie, one of his lies, that I did not have a room anymore.  But maybe it wasn't telling on him.  Maybe I was looking for truth and comfort and stability and rationality.  Security.  Well Jackie, he asked me for it, he wanted it. So I gave it to him.  And I was hysterical.  But now I don't have a room.  Now I'm in his room.  Now I don't have anyplace.  And so on.  Why did you do that why did you do that...  And mom was bothered by this, this puling fretful helpless need from this now frantic little boy.  She must have realized, upon reflection, that I had been placed in an uncomfortable position.  Parents often are attuned to this sort of thing.  It's an instinct, maternal and paternal.

These are early but not earliest details of a single ongoing story.  My first memory, pre-toilet training, is of standing in a crib holding the vertical rails screaming to be picked up -- I can still feel the wood.  I remember pretending to be asleep in the car, wanting to be carried up the stairs -- but I was big enough to walk.  Long long ago.  When I was still honest about wanting to be held.

I am reluctant to think I have a codependency with my mother.  I have just wanted her to be happy.  And I have given her a considerable amount of money over the past more-than-a-decade -- she's on a fixed income with debt and no credit and no savings.  She had drained all of her assets to the voracious demand of that middle brother. Repeatedly refinancing her house to make down payments for yet another house for the leech, having lost as he did his former home.  Three or four times.  

So in reality it was I who was supporting this worthless sibling -- making, somehow, their car payments, buying cigars, supporting hobbies and fantasies and failed financial adventures into being an importer of Chinese merchandise or a buyer of gold or an expert in currency exchange.  

But I wanted her to be happy.  I'm still reluctant to call it codependency.  It has seemed like duty -- protect and support your elderly parents.  No matter how sick they might be, or destructive to self or third sons.

I have been wrong, though.  The prudent thing would have been to save literally all the money I had given her, and require a strict and confirmed budget, so that when real need came up -- other than feeding the parasite, the late middle-aged nipple-baby mama's boy -- other than enabling her sick relationship with that one -- rather than flush that money save it, so she could have actual comfort in her old age, instead of futility and anxiety and dependency on me.  It's that iron in the soul, saying no to the sucking vampire need, hers from me, the parasite from her.  So I was wrong.

In my 20s I asked her, in all seriousness, if she had dropped him on his head as a baby, that she felt so responsible, that he was the way he was.  I asked her, literally, if she had tried to abort him, to act so guilty.  She said, indignant, that she would never do anything like that.  I was trying to understand this incomprehensible enmeshment.  But I never did, until my recent insight that paired codependency with a freshly discovered, salient and adult-sized betrayal.

I will not tell the end of this long, lifelong story.  There are innumerable other truly bizarre details and incidents, threads in the warp of this tapestry.  They fall very much -- perfectly -- into the pattern I've traced out.  And of course, of course, it's not actually over.  There is a monster, more than one at the heart of the maze, and the unwinding of a single clue leads there, if not away again.  

I have been deceived and betrayed in as grotesque a way as could fit expectation, if I had ever actually learned to expect betrayal from its persistent yet unsuspected source.  You would laugh outloud at the perfection of it, like a very clever whodunit that is also a farce and a tragedy, every detail dovetailing into an elegant denouement.  Pluck out the heart of the mystery, unravelled yet tightly wound.  

Penelope. Theseus. Linus. Baldir. Oedipus. Hamlet. Norns.

There aren't really any villains.  Just types, archetypes, like Greed and Need, swallowed Guilt, shamed Nemesis.  Like comedia dell'arte ... I'm the buffoon, dunce cap, Pierrot I'd suppose, heart broken, sad clown.  

J

*Tacos or Starbucks

YT

Some of my pals go together and get tacos, no, let's say Starbucks together all the time. I've never been to Starbucks or a taco place, maybe a truck. I wonder what it's like. I wish I could go. It must be great. I don't eat meat.  What do people do at Starbucks? I bet it's full of cool people and they laugh like on tv, but I don't watch tv anymore. And someone will make a remark, and I'll come up with a snappy comeback, and they'll all be laughing at how funny I am, and they'll be laughing and I'll be all popular and smiling. But then I'll go "Ach. I think I just swallowed a bug. Starbucks has bugs? That's not very hygienic. That's why I don't drink coffee. I usually just have water." But then they'll say, "No, Jack H, it wasn't a bug. We spiked your cuppa brew with a Micky Finn ... no, with an herbal capsule for Male Enhancement!" And I'll be like, "Dudes, that's totally whack! I knew something like this would happen." But then they'll say, "Oh no Jack H, we would never really do a thing like that. We were just joking about that capsule in your joe. It was just a harmless prank on you." And I'll say, "Well what was it then, that lump in my piping hot java?" And they'll say, "Dude, it was just a coffee bean or something. Coffee beans are very nutritious. They include them for roughage." And I'll believe them and then I'll laugh and it will be okay. And then there will be a lull in the conversation, and someone will say, "Let's make up haikus!" And I'll say, "Okay, I'll start! My muse is speaking!" And then just then on the spot I'll make up this really good haiku! 

I like my java. 

It makes me feel so happy. 

Hot. Foamy. Starbucks. 

 

And they'll think that's so good, but I wonder if coffee is really foamy, but then someone will say, "Oh Jack H, can you make up a limerick too? We bet you can!" And I'll say, "Sure, fellas! Just you listen!" And then right then I'll make this up: 

At Starbucks some guys of jiu jitsu 

Were pining to know whether it's true: 

"Perhaps we should quit 

The Art of the Jit -- 

Cuz whenever Jack wants, he just gits you."

 

And they'll all be amazed at how good my haikus and limericks are, but they know by my ironic tone I'm just kidding about gitting them -- maybe like a question, "he just gits you?"  But they're all amazed and that will be the psychological moment for me to leave, so then I'll stand up and look each of my friends in the eye as I shake their hands goodbye. And at the door I'll turn and raise my hand like Caesar saluting his legions, and I'll say, "Gentlemen, farewell." Then I'll turn one last time and pass through the door into the brisk breezes of the bright winter night. And as I drive home I'll be filled with peace, and later, in my home, when it's time to set aside the cares of the day, I'll lay myself down in the swaddling embrace of my sheets, and I will sleep the restful sleep of a man whose fondest dreams come true. 

 J

jackie

So much of this is about just trying to get clean.  Covered in whatever the filth is, or internal, filled with well I want to say stink and corruption, but that's not it.  Whatever it is where clean is the answer.  Not my own filth -- I can own that.  It's mine, I made it, like a toddler's pride in toilet training.  Mine.  Honest anger is fine.  Likewise rage and hatred.  The theology may be challenging, but God hates sin, and rage is just the current word for biblical wrath. Emotions become sick when they are stagnant.  They should flow.  So I was wrong.  It is my own filth that's the problem.  I own it, and won't let go.  

I've played quite a few games with my name, in these pages, these anonymous pages.  So I looked just now, and I am actually surprised to see that in these hundreds of thousands and millions of words there are a couple of my horrible stories that I have not told.

I should have thought I had.  I mean, I told, finally, even, finally, the story of my boys -- the Joey story and the Jason story.  Took a few years to get there.  That's two of my handful of ongoing untreated PTSD cases right there.  Maybe three.

Until I was seven or eight they called me Jackie.  I've said that.  But at some point I decided to be called Jack.  I knew why.  I'd heard the name Jackie spoken with hatred so much, it was just too much.  But one of the siblings wouldn't go along.  It was, after all, my function to be hated.  So I trained him the way my father trained the dog.  Every time he said it I provided a negative reinforcement.  I'd kick him as hard as I could on the shin.  He learned pretty quickly, actually.  Lots of violence, but he did learn.  After that for a few years it was only when substitute teachers were taking roll, Jackie, and from kids who hadn't seen me for a while.

I just think it's telling, an apt metaphor, that I had to fight, with actual violence, for my name.  That's a metaphor, right?  

These past few weeks, in these pages, have not been cathartic.  I had that one insight, about gang rape, and this has got me to actually write down stories that I used to tell in quite a humorous way.  People laughed.  No doubt I made witty comments as I went along.  I could make witty comments now, about raping a pony or a young teenage boy.  I'm quite witty.  But my purpose in these later years isn't what it used to be.  

One of my father's tropes was to call us his offspring.  Not sons, but offspring.  The clever thing is that he told us why.  He was ashamed of us.  (I will always use the plural, in this context.  No individuality was recognized.  The two assholes would need a negative reenforcement, and all three of us would get lined up for the whipping.)  So he spelled it out.  Less than sons.  Less than men, young men, boys.  Offspring.  

Seems unnecessarily harsh.  

And after the other two had been kicked out, each at age 16, and I was the only one left, at age 16 my father decided it would be authentic and manly to tell me that he was sorry he had named me Jack.  Because Jack was his name, one of them, and it was a man's name, and if his hypothetical friends saw me and heard my name was Jack, well dad would be embarrassed about that.  You know, because I was, I'll pick a word, a disappointment? -- but that's not it.  No matter.  But it was harsher than disappointment.

It's kind of hard to think clearly.  No emotion, but like I'm skimming the surface ... oh, it's hard to concentrate.  Not hard, but like my mind is pushed away, like uncooperative magnetic poles.  Repulsed.  Interesting.  

Eight years later I became a father in Australia, and six months after that my father had yet another offspring, this time a son, 25 years younger than me.  I was no longer the little one.  Hurrah.  So here's the point.  Get ready.  Ahem.  Guess, dear reader, what name my father gave to his new baby boy.  Guess.  

Um, was it George?  No.  Uh, Vincent? Darryl?  No -- well I'll just tell you.  Jack.  

So he really did mean it, when he said that thing about naming me.  How can we fault honesty?  Being forthright is a virtue.  

Some few years later, when it was still possible, there was a sort of family Christmas get-together at my father's house.  Not my, our, mother.  The brothers, and I have to suppose their various families.  I suppose after I came back from Australia I tried to have some kind of adult relationship with him.  But here's the thing, another thing.  Get ready.  My father had started to call me by another name.  My first name, which I have never used.  You see why of course.  Two sons named Jack, that might get confusing.  

So at that get-together he was trying to use some other name, for me, and I said, quite clearly, with some emphasis -- "My name is Jack."  He would not have been used to being corrected, contradicted, confronted.  The memory is dull, but I expect I had brooded about this for, well, since I learned of it in Australia.  So I will have mocked the stupidity.  I certainly said, "Hi, I'm Larry, and this is my brother Darryl, and this is my other brother Darryl."  I expect I said that he did not have to right to change my name, take my name, give it to anyone else.  When it was his to give, he gave it to me.  I even had to fight for it.  Mine.

I'd expect that even my brothers, now adults, might have been on my side.  

The happy ending to that story is that at some point after this they started to call my new little brother -- however old he was by then, maybe seven or eight -- by his first name, which was also the name my father was currently using as his name.  

That's a happy ending, right?  I could finally stop fighting for my name?

In looking just now, after so many years, at the story of my boys, I find I did indeed tell the sorry-I-named-you-Jack story.  Don't bother with that link.  It's not straightforward, a very convoluted story.  Over-complicated.  Bad drama.  I'm here to amuse.

J

* My Booty Call

YT

Maybe she’s not American.  Maybe she travels, often abroad, and calls on short notice, after three weeks, a month, as soon as she can but delayed enough for that internal pressure to propel me to her arms like command and compulsion.  Maybe she’s an island girl, tawny skin and thick black hair, wild, dark, almond eyes, full lips I trace in tender passion with my tongue.  Perhaps I’ve known her for years, nothing anonymous for me, nothing casual, not committed but suiting our respective remote natures, wounded monogamy, indulgent physical friendship that consumes 5 or 6 or 7 hours of some one or few Saturdays of each month or season, embrace, caress, and so on, and because it is me, and her, again, again, etc, but we need not dwell on that.

You might be glad for me, to find I’m not as isolated as my partial explications may suggest.  You may feel I’ve not been utterly frank, now, or in the past.  To this I smile, slightly, sly, silent, then in a seemingly irrelevant aside mention my love of science, physics, quantum mechanics.  Particles and waves, and Schrodinger’s cat, and the byplay between virtual and virtuosity and virtue.  

I would not be proud, not pleased, with such a compromise.  It would be, almost, a desperate thing, a bargain against despair, my one seduction, the time I fell and stayed down, for years then, perhaps because this man’s body of mine was not upheld by the promises, empty as it seems, of God to sustain me in my darkest hours.  It is, perhaps, my rebellion, disobedient, deliberate, addictive, unrepentant, wrong, and I don’t care.  If I found no comfort in awaiting God’s notice, if I shattered with loss, broken, grieving, and when I could see again saw her, well, sometime she might say she’s falling in love with me, and I might say, ‘shhhh’, or ‘yes of course you are’, or make no reply but fingertips to her cheek, and this is more than God has done for me.  Lately.  

It could be though that I am always alone.  That is the impression I create.  But who is always alone?  It must be a metaphor.  As this must be as well.

J

My Secret

I never thought I'd say it.  I never would have thought I'd ever say it.  Never could I ever have supposed that this would be something that I should or even might ever even have thought about ever saying.  

One of those data points, bits of evidence my father confabulated to support his case against me.  You know, about how I'm a gay.  So.

Confession is good for the soul.

When my son was nine I was trying to have some sort of family contact, as with my father.  He had a son as well, six months older than my son -- or maybe six months younger -- haven't seen him for nearly 30 years, so I don't recall.  And my father had gotten himself involved with local little-league baseball.  He coached his son's team, made him the pitcher, and I signed my son up. So I was a sort of assistant coach, despite having zero interest in the general situation.

There were two brothers on the team, a year or so apart.  The older was, well, thick-boned, stocky -- not fat, that of course would inevitably come later -- and he was a loud-mouth.  The younger boy was slender, with glasses ... whatever the cues are, the costume, to dress the character type.  Maybe a reader -- we'll say so ... and the stage is set.  

So I watched the dynamics between these brothers, and I felt compassion for the younger boy, and being as I was, still a teacher, and more open than in subsequent years -- and at the time, being still a hugger -- and I just now recall that it was the last game of the season -- I did, I admit it, hug this younger boy. 

That was the day -- in my father's car, driving back to his house -- he initiated that heart-felt discussion about my being gay.  

That's what really did it.  He will have seen me hug this boy, and formed his conclusion.  

Isn't shame an odd emotion?  Even an accusation gets us.  Like my little pirate treasure chest, with its tell-tale jewelry.  Shame is the external face of its internal counterpart, guilt.  Shame is social, guilt is soulish.  It's an Eastern/Western thing -- Judeo-Christian with its personal and accountable and eternal individual soul -- the East with its ultimate subsuming into the non-existence of the finally foamless Brahmanic ocean of cyclic oblivion.  The East talks about losing face, the West about the corruption of the heart.  

At the time of course I was just, call it, surprised. Bushwhacked?  Ambuscadoed?  But the slow still shock with its inarticulate denial slipped, as it will, over the following days and weeks, into outrage.   And I laboriously pieced together the subtle clues of the mysterious case of the meaning of my childhood and my role in that household.

So the precise term my father would have been groping for is not, actually, gay.  It should have been pedophile.   

What boy would I rape.

As I have said, I didn't see him after that for perhaps 15 years.  

I said it was something I have always known -- a father takes the blows.  This is imprecise, obviously.  I should have been more theoretical.  That's how it should be.  A father gives the blows?  Well that's just cheap.  Usually it's a combination, and necessary, given the need for correction, about things that cannot be ignored.  

I could go on, about justice, Justice, with her blindfold and her sword.  Point is, justice has nothing to do with mercy or grace.  These must be different goddesses.  But, dad -- when you urge so heartily for manliness, remember the frailty of a child's soul.  Sometimes there should be compassion, even if it's just a sort of psychological projection.  Sometimes silence would be a wiser option.

Not every true thing needs to be spoken.  Likewise, not every fear.

J

Unspent

I used to be strong. Certain and focused and unrelenting. Willing to suffer for a sufficient purpose. 

Now I cower in my soul and just want to be left alone. I have grown unspeakably selfish. 

Once upon a time there was some turmoil in my household. A friend, a pastor, reminded me of a truth I have always known. A father takes the blows. Yes. 

Once long ago when I was a white or a blue belt, I went to roll. Didn't get enough. Nothing like enough. Seemed like it finished early. Nobody to roll with me. So I was angry and frustrated.  It's one of the times I was reminded that it's possible to be depressed even while you roll. Unbelievable.  It's not like I had all the energy in the world, but I had to go running after. Run hard. But running was not enough. None of it is. 

Have I said it before? -- that I'd be dead now if I hadn't started running? I'd have found a way. Something noble of course ... that's just how I am, so very noble. Nobility -- it is my curse. Who is there more noble than I? Not possible to exceed my nobleness, that's what I say. Saving a little flop-eared puppy from a burning building maybe. Something like that. I'd have a good excuse. God would never know. Oh Jack! -- He'd say. You tried to save that little floppy eared puppy from that burning building! Well done, good and faithful servant! And in my secret heart I would finally breathe easy. My really secret heart, that even God doesn't know about. Just you. 

Once long ago, before I was a blue belt, or even a white belt, I had thousands and thousands of dollars worth of uncashed, stale checks sitting in my desk, from years before that. What the hell was my problem. 

 J

Imaginary Conversations, update

Precisely 12 years ago, I posted this:

----- 

Man I hate the holidays. All these slimy lowlifes crawl out of their holes and want to have family get-togethers. Leave me the fuck alone. A hideous tragedy of bad luck put me into that madhouse when I had no choice. Involuntary commitment. Please, sir, may I have a choice now?

• Y'see, when words come out of your mouth, that's how people know what you think.

• No, dumbass, I'm not the one who tells you what you have to do to make it right. You need to figure it out. Fucking clueless retard.

• Is there anything that would make it better? Yes, I could travel back in time and beat you to death with a brick in your crib.

• Do not ever ever ever try to contact me again in any way. If you do, the first thing out of your mouth had better be an abject and perfect apology. Or I will burn your house to the ground.

• So let me get this straight. Explain it to me. Is it a dick up my ass that I like, or in my mouth? Or my dick in some guy's ass and/or mouth? Or both? Since you understand my love affair with shit so well, please explain myself to me.

Hate speech? I call it therapy.

Women women women. That is to say, sex. I don't believe I've ever confided my tastes to these pages. Is it a secret? I think it may be. It just seems like a vulnerability, letting anyone know what I like. I mentioned once that Queen Latifah was a handsome woman, and that provoked gales of laughter. No, Big Girls are not to my taste. (They tend to like me though.) There is a phenotype or two that I prefer, but always tending toward athletic. That's as much as I think I'll let you know. Something to do with honesty. Some emotions I'm open about. Rage. Some, desire, are private, in their details. Twisted, I know. All the more reason to judge and reject me.

The idea of friendship, trust, love, all bound up in each other -- very hard for me to come to terms with. I think people wonder about me. I think I'm someone for whom there is no mate.

So, I like athletic women of a certain type, and guys' dicks in my mouth, and assholes.

-----

Thus, 12 years ago.  I will have been thinking about certain details alluded to in the post just previous to this one, two weeks past.  I've been trolling through this blog, rediscovering who I have been and how I have remained exactly the same.  Maybe it's loyalty?  I won't, for this once, dwell on having been and remaining stuck.  I'm stretching and doing qi gong, and feeling a bit better.  The above was written a couple of years prior to my life-altering pain issue.  But the psychic life is about the same.  As I will have said, so many times -- what a waste.  

My father is dead now, and exactly as I predicted.  Those fragments of conversations above would have been my rage fantasies about him.  Very sick indeed. What can I say. 

Well, I suppose I answered that sort-of question, 'what can I say', in a post from 13 years ago:

---

Ta det med ro.  A great old Norwegian idiom. Apparently my grandfather used it a lot. He was a depot master in Montana -- ran the train station. Ranchers and farmers would try to bribe him with thousands of dollars, so that they could get 4 boxcars instead of only 3 to move their grain come harvest time. He would not yield. Earned $1.85 an hour, and picked rocks on the weekends. Lived in relative poverty, with five kids, four daughters and my father in the middle. A bad marriage. Worked as a child from age nine to support his abandoned mother and three siblings. That would have been 1907. The pressure must have been overwhelming. He would not bend. He was proud of being Norwegian, for some reason. Surrounded by Germans and Poles. Made the kids say their prayers in the old language. Although he was born here.

Ta det med ro -- take it with ease. What a beautiful phrase. How wise. Was my grandfather wise? He lived into his nineties and died because he just stopped eating. I remember him as an old man, bald, not large but hard. He was probably reminding himself, the way we need to do, about how to stay alive. Take it with ease. Not take it easy, mind you. My grandfather did not take it easy. I picked rocks as a kid. Because they made me. My grandfather did it because he needed the money -- four daughters, a son and a nagging wife. This was in the 1930s, so there's that. There is a difference, more felt than spoken, between the two, with ease and easy.

I drove my father to some medical thing this morning, to one of his genius doctors. My father is a very strange man. He talked about a cousin of mine, again, dead now, a genius, law school at an early age, prosecutor in Dade County Florida. "He probably had an IQ 50 points higher than average." My IQ is higher than that. He must know that. I know it because it was in my school records. It was surprising. In those days they still measured IQs in schools. They must have talked to my father after they tested me. My brother said once, "Like, you're some kind of genius, right?" It was one of the few human things he ever said to me. It must have been a family rumor. Now boys, Jackie has a genius IQ, but nobody is ever to talk about it, and don't be jealous. "Well, I tested pretty well, they seem to think." So all this constant harping about genius, from my father, yet he is incapable of listening to me. Makes me doubt the sincerity of his admiration for genius.

He got to badmouthing that same brother, his choice of a bride. "All these women do is hunt for men online all day long -- they're basically prostitutes. Then they catch one and get pregnant and get alimony." He actually said something like this to my brother. "I tried to warn him after he got married." I just had to say it: "That is really, really bad advice. Good advice isn't just true -- you have to say it right. You married a slut and you're just a sucker -- not such a good thing to say. What man would stand by and have his wife slandered?" But my father wasn't listening. "People just don't like to take advice," he said. No indeed, they do not.

We're all driven. Even the ones who take it easy. It takes resolve to sit and watch TV all day long. The determination to waste time shouldn't be downgraded, just because it's passive. Self destruction takes a lot of energy -- or the energy is used to suppress who-knows-what horrors. That's why there's so little left to actually get things done.

I do love the weather in this time of year. It's just now feeling autumnal. Pretty good workout last night. Feel fine today. Isn't it odd, how excellence is so important? With me it's always been intellectual and to a lesser degree physical excellence. Jealous for my character and my integrity, profoundly untrusting but unwavering in my loyalty once I give it. I sound like a pretty great guy, don't I. There are, sadly, plenty of rocks left in the field that need to be picked. There's a part of my soul where I'm just watching TV.

I asked my father if it was an old-time saying, ta det med ro, from a hundred and thirty years ago, that got remembered in the US but had fallen into obscurity in the hustle and bustle of Oslo. Nope, he said, they still use it.

My father said about how he visited his father's grave, 15 years ago. He admitted to tearing up. I did not say that the only good that tears can do is to wash us from the inside. One of the best things I did as a father was to just keep my mouth shut, sometimes. Kids should be allowed to make mistakes without being corrected. Correct yourself. Take it with ease.

--

What can I say, then?  Sometimes the best thing you can do is just keep your mouth shut.  With people you love but who can't hear.  I reposted that first one because of the rage.  I don't remember writing it.  But it would have been a near-transcript of actual outloud solitary ranting I will have done.  Crazy?  That is the reason for this blog.  No one has to hear, but I need to speak.  As it were, and ignoring the contradictions.  

But here's another post, again from 15 years ago, earlier.  Seems like a more artful way to leave this.  

---

 What the Sirens Sing

You will have seen my anger, implicit and, less often, expressed. You’ve seen hatred, very rarely. But no, never rage, I think. Well, I’m a pretty self-contained guy. But we’re the dangerous ones, eh? He seemed like such a pleasant fellow. Can’t imagine how he could have killed all those people, and so viciously. So I ran until I found jiu jitsu, then I did that. In 15 months I took two days off. That’s just stupid. It wasn’t even good for my training. But it wasn’t about the training.

Ah well. You’ll have noticed that I use different voices in these little efforts here. It’s not planned. I just start. Just singing in harmony with myself.

Here’s what it is to be human: something bad happens, and we get angry about it. Since we can’t have justice, we become angry with God. He’s big enough to take it, but that doesn’t do us any good. So when we get the chance, we grab hold of him and kill him. What, it didn’t happen? Why do you think people kill babies? I bet that some of them, Jews and Romans, knew who they had, and killed him anyway, Jesus. You think that you wouldn’t. But you would. Almost everyone dies damned. If I could get my hands on God, and get away with it, it wouldn’t be pretty. Unfortunately, that would be Jesus, and he doesn’t deserve it. Awkward.

I’m just talking. When faced with it, there is no getting away with it. There are people that I can’t think about -- or rather, that I simply do not think about, because there’s only one thing for me to think, and it would just make me crazy. Please, keep your advice to yourself. Such is the nature of addiction. And you don’t know these people anyway.

Once I talked to my son when he was far far away in a land of war and madness, and he was saying how he’d like to be able to be vegetarian, but it just was not possible. He said he’d get so hungry but didn’t want to eat all that fried grease. So he got hungry, then ate the fried grease. I told him he could sprout like we used to have to do back in the seventies. So he ordered a kit for that online. My point is that I said, “Yep, food and sex, the two appetites.” And he gave the instant agreement that comes at hearing a true thing you never noticed before.

Odysseus lashed himself to the ship mast so that he could hear the sirens’ song. It drove him mad for a time, with some appetite, but he could not jump overboard to swim to them. Save for his bonds he would have died. There is no swimming to sirens, and surviving.

A film project videoed the Golden Gate Bridge for a year. Caught thirty people jumping. Saved six. Twenty percent survival rate. Sounds about right. One fellow changed his mind just after he launched. Adjusted his angle and survived. In the icy water he tried to cry out for help. He could only gasp. He felt something brushing his legs. Great, I survived just to be eaten alive by sharks. But it was a seal, and only its circling kept him afloat.

The director got the idea for the film when he saw the planes crash into the Towers. People jumped rather than burn. Well? Some people leap to the sirens. Some stay and face the inferno.

There are true things that we don’t dare admit. Things about hatred. Things about love. What a horrible world, where appetites are poisonous and innocence is mocked. Sometimes we pass through fire. Sometimes we are consumed by it. Sometimes we are saved from the water. Sometimes we are saved in the water. Sometimes it swallows us whole, or in pieces. What choice, and what power do we have? We are what our natures make us.

Don’t worry about me. I’ll be fine. Freedom is being able to dance like no one is watching. I don’t dance at all. But this is me, singing.

---

And that's where I'll end it, this stroll through the overgrowth.  I started with the rage that I had not previously shown.  It deserves instant agreement.  Frankly, I don't know anymore that I'll be fine.  I was having a conversation that touched on depression, some weeks ago.  I said that mine was four percent away from severe, which is institutionalizable, which is a real word.  He asked if I thought about suicide.  In the silence that followed, he said, "I don't mean that you have a plan ..." and went on from there.  

To respond to the question, no, I don't have a plan.  I have a son.

J

On Being a Faggot

Close to four years since my father died.  On his bedroom floor, alone, in pain, full of fear and regret.  Those words cling together.  It could have been no other way.  When I was young, a strange teenager, I identified as a poet (pronouns I and me) -- especially after I recognized that poems don't have to rhyme.  That's a dangerous discovery, for obvious reasons. Not everything that doesn't rhyme is poetry.  I expect it's completely lost now, but I do recall the last line of something I wrote, of him.  Don't even remember the title.  I was sixteen -- a most difficult age -- and it was, "So die alone, you who did not want, and did not need, our love."  When I used first person plural, it always stood for the singular.  When we were young.  

One of the most destructive things my father did was what my older siblings called the lectures.  I, being six or eight, would not have had that word, lectures.  Every few months or seasons he would arrange us on the living room couch and stand or sit and go on and on for what, truly, must have been hours.  How unhappy he was.  What a failure he was.  How horrific his childhood was.  Details and stories.  Always the same ones, across the years.  And always what I later understood to be the curse.  His parents had done it to him, he was doing it to us, and we would do it to our children.  Do what?  Some sort of ruination.  He wasn't specific.  As I recall.  

One of the stories was about Queenie, his pony.  He grew up in small-town Montana, in the '30s and '40s.  So no electricity, no paved roads, no indoor plumbing.  Probably a hand pump in the kitchen, and certainly an outhouse out back.  He always mentioned Queenie, how much he loved that horse.  And the story always ended with how the town boys had killed her, stoned her to death.  Tears.  "They were jealous."  

Years and years later the middle brother, who had been a sadistic monster as a child -- but evolved into a sloppy parasitical self-pitying sentimentalist -- added a detail I had never heard.  Before the town boys killed Queenie, they raped her.  I am pleased that my father had the decency to hold back that detail from his lectures. I was after all very young.  And sex was never a topic for discussion, from adult to child in that family.  But maybe he did include it, bestiality, and I was just too young to process and therefore to remember it.  The middle brother called the town of the town boys, 'the town from hell.'  Butte, a wide-open hard-drinking mining town.  That explains a lot.  It was Irish boys, attacking the Norwegian.

After the lectures we were excused and I would go down the stairs to my room.  I was two stories below the rest of them, in what had been the servants' quarters.  It was a Hollywood Hills Spanish castle, built in the late '20s by a silent movie star -- Bebe Daniels, a doe-eyed flapper.  A few years later Clark Gable lived there.  Seventy-two steps from street to front door.  Not practical, especially later, for an old man in his pain-filled and solitary 80s.  

I had been upstairs too, sharing -- no, "sharing" a room with the middle sibling.  Bunk beds, and he would spit down on me.  I look back now and realize I should have dropped a large potted plant two stories down onto his head.  That's the victim child speaking, not the adult.  But that child has a right to be heard.  Heart.

Dismissed, I walked down the dark narrow stairs, silent, barely breathing, to sit at my desk doing nothing.  I felt nothing at all.  Nothing nothing nothing.  I must have been 8 or 9 by then -- I don't remember when the move downstairs happened.  I am convinced that's the reason I'm alive, or at least as sane as I am.  

I did have the self-awareness to know how completely crazy I was feeling, or not feeling.  Internal screaming.  I absolutely knew that I should have been crying, inconsolably, or at best unconsoled.  I clearly remember thinking that I should cry, to let it out, and if I didn't, it would harm me, later.  But I was fierce with the cold self-hatred that does not care about future damage. I wanted future pain.  I was not going to feel it in the moment.  Of course I was wrong, but that's what neurosis is -- an adaptive behavior that outlives the situation -- a compromising solution that outlasts the specific problem.  

After my father died, the eldest, thieving sibling revealed that aspect of his character, and at the same time I became aware of the mental illness and flatly betraying character of my nice kind generous mother.  My theory now is that my father had appropriated the firstborn, into whom his hopes and demands were poured.  You know, love.  The middle one was claimed by my mother, and it became a truly sick codependency.  She is the reason that one was such a monster.  Spoiled, completely completely out of control.  

Then I came along, unwanted of course, three and four years later.  And poor little Jackie, who did not belong to anyone.  It was a middle-class household, so I was provided for, and the forms were nominally observed.  But I somehow learned to never ask for anything.  "It's okay, I don't want anything."  Want or need. "Oh that Jackie, such a little philosopher, so wise.  He has the IQ of a genius, you know."  That, plus happiness...

Blindness, then, is a survival mechanism, like a cave salamander, where the resources needed to preserve sight might make the difference between surviving and starving.  It's understandable that I didn't figure it out until this late age, that I was the least-favorite, the unfavorite child.  It was frankly unthinkable, given that I was the cute one, the smart one, the good one.  The little one.  It's just crazy.  But there it is.  

So I could never figure out why my father seemed to actively dislike me.  To repeat myself from not many posts ago, he actually said it, outloud, a number of times across the years.  When I was a teenager, and in my 20s, and 30s.  "I have to love you, because you're my son.  But I don't have to like you."  I was baffled.  

One Christmas we all three got little wooden boxes, for cufflinks and change, etc. 

And that summer I went looking for junk jewelry, strings of beads and bangles and so on.  I had the image in my mind of a Long John Silver treasure, jewels spilling out like Pirates of the Caribbean. 

 

A very kid thing.  One day my father came into my room in a rage.  Absolutely furious.  It seemed like hatred.  Why do you have these beads.  I don't even have words to describe it, but through my tears I attempted to explain about a treasure chest.  I suppose at the time I saw how silly it was, this childish pretending.  I intuit that I was ashamed.  I fill in the blanks of memory by supposing my father pulled back slightly, maybe even, well, not chastened, but mollified, his wrath appeased somehow by the tininess of the little boy in front of him. I don't know.  That's the most I can remember. 

Every summer we'd take the train -- pre Amtrak -- to the maternal grandparents' farm in North Dakota.  Dad stayed home.  There was what we called the Bunkhouse -- a cleaned out chicken coop with some furniture.  There were trunks of old clothes, and being kids we went through them.  I put on a dress and held a flower to my cheek and my mom took a picture.  It was hilarious.  Everyone laughed.  Some months later my father saw the picture and was absolutely enraged.  Very violently angry.  Very verbally abusive.  Dude was totally VVA.  I explained, between my sobs, that it was a joke.  I was completely confused.  

Well it should be obvious.  My father thought I was gay.  You know, because I listened to classical music, and read books, and didn't care about sportsball.  And whatever else he used as evidence, that I haven't thought of.  I was little and cute and had white hair.  I wore jewelry and dressed like a girl.  

Years later, as I have previously written, he argued with me, that I was gay.  I took the I'm not gay side of the debate.  After that discussion, I didn't see him for quite a few years.  It made me put together some of the details I've just related.  Recolored my whole childhood, even darker.  I really don't think there was anything feminine about me.  Now I have a hard ascetic face, like an angry Jesus with sad eyes, but I was a cute kid.  Was that my crime?  Being a cute little white-haired boy who tried to be funny?

My father talked about the niggers, and the jews, and faggots.  My siblings used constantly hateful language.  Kill you, faggot.  Hate you, faggot.  Bash your head in, faggot.  Albino.  Queerbait.  Daily and hourly and by the minute.  I attempted to defend myself as best I could, physically and verbally.  I may have a gift for invective, but I don't like it.  I had no idea at all what a faggot was.  I don't think I really understood what hatred was, covered though I was by its bukkake spray.  I understand, now.

(I just looked it up, to make sure about what bukkake is, and how to spell it.  What a world.  And -- just to be thorough, because you know but don't quite know –– queerbait: "Any male who attracts a considerable amount of gay lust wittingly or unwittingly.  The new boy on the cell block.  An unsuspecting alterboy."  This, to and about a little brother.  Sick hateful pervert scum.  This has made me angry.)

I don't know how unusual these stories are.  Everyone has stories.  A distinguisher with mine may be that it never stopped, and there was no protection and no safe place, other than solitude.  But when those teenagers where busy raping and killing Queenie, well, is that really what they did, or all that they did? Why stop at fucking a horse?  I think they raped my father.  A good-looking 14 year old boy, held down, turned over, flat or bent over something, maybe the body of a dead or dying pony. Fucked by four or five or more older boys, and maybe some classmates. 

Well, that would explain it, this hatred of sodomites.  This madness.  This cursing.  A secret he never could have told.  Silent, hardly breathing.  Able to express rage, though.  Feeling. 

So I knew the Queenie story, and I'd thought that he might have been raped as well.  But it was only yesterday that I put that together with his, well, it was a sort of hatred toward me.  

One of those older boys, I now choose to believe -- the ringleader, maybe -- had white hair.  

Not all Irish, then.

I don't expect he asked it, about me, but it was unspoken only because he hadn't put it together: If I was a faggot, what boy would I rape? 

All my rage, as I have said, toward my father died with him.  For not feeling or showing love toward him, I have guilt and regret.  In his solitary old age he felt the same way, I am certain.

J

What We Owe

A woman's eggs are in her forming-ovaries when she is a fetus. Her eggs start out inside her mother's womb.  Grandma's nutrition is what built the grandchild's egg.  A dad's sperm is practically instant.  But the Talmud recognizes a father's lasting contribution: When you teach your son, you teach your son's son.

There's a supposed Chinese proverb -- I wouldn't know, being illiterate in Chinese: Giving your son a skill is better than giving him a thousand pieces of gold.  I do know, having read Plutarch, that Solon "made a law that no son should be obliged to relieve a father who had not bred him up to any calling."

 

My son was in town last week to take care of biz and to visit, etc. We took a day to empty out a storage unit full to the brim with very heavy stuff. Transferred it into my garage -- pretty full but a nice fit. Much much much easier to unload than to load. I took the job of stooping in the truck and sliding things to the edge for the offload. Not easy on the lower back -- like hoeing cabbages. 

My son suggested we switch places, and I said, "No. Your back is more important than mine." You know, just a throw-away dad line.    

A few minutes ago he texted me this: 

"Saw this and made me think of your comment."  I hadn't meant for it to be remembered.  

I texted back, "That's very true.  Except the heart is the first thing we give.   :-)"

It's not a quote from Shakespeare -- I've read all of Shakespeare quite a few times, and I would have noticed this; it's a Yiddish proverb: When a father gives to his son, both laugh.  When a son gives to his father, both cry. 

 J

April First

My peanuts. 

J

Dear Will Smith --

When Jada Pinkett Smith washes her face, how does she know where to stop? 

Can Jada Pinkett Smith see Aunty Em whenever she wants? Poppies ... poppies. 

How many Jada Pinkett Smiths does it take to screw in a lightbulb?

What's the difference between Jada Pinkett Smith and a rotisserie oven?

Sir, you took a bland joke about a fashion choice, and intensified it to make your wife an eternal punchline. Like the Dixie Chicks. Like Latoya Jackson. Like Monica Lewinsky. Well, no -- Jada Pinkett Smith will be a slapline. Giddit?  

It is appropriate and manly for a husband to defend his wife. Clearly, your wife's feelings were hurt -- her fashion choice involved a health element. She did not expect to be singled out as an object of humor -- only of glamor. But you could have defended her with a shout from your seat -- "Not cool, Chris", or somesuch; this would have been the first level of aggression -- verbal. You could have rushed the stage as you did, and whispered an admonition into his ear; a dramatic and perhaps riveting gesture (the second level, of physical intimidation). You could have taken the mike, if there was one, and made a speech about gentlemanly deportment.  You could have taken him by the lapel (third level, physical contact). You chose assault. "Bitchslap" in this case refers to the slapper.

Reportedly you have an "open" marriage. A public stance of chivalry, then, hangs limp. You have further soiled our already depraved culture. Assault against free speech has been further legitimized, to the already triggered-happy, cry-bully stormfront of the re-educational elite. The cowards and moral idiots attending the gala did not have the decency to boo you out of the auditorium. 

If it weren't Chris Rock, but The Rock, Dwayne Johnson who made the joke, you would have made no assault.  So it's a tradeoff: on the one hand, the left, you are a bully -- the worst thing it's possible to be; on the other hand, also the left, you are a coward -- the best and mandatory thing to be, of those who identify as binary.

Your penance is to donate the entirety of your earnings from your film to one or more charities of Chris Rock's choosing. I doubt that you have the emotional maturity to make a truly sincere, non-press-agent authored, apology. I hope I'm wrong about that. 

But the most important thing.  Chris Rock was the perfect professional.  He is exemplary.

J