(Stay weird, son)
I'm back, a single night of patchy sleep that lasted close to a month. I feel rested and ready. My doping partner, however, called yesterday and offered to bribe me not to do the triathlon tomorrow. Something about bad gambling debts, too big of a spread on the points. She's been sunk heavily into track and field speculations, jabbering about delayed payouts and last minute shifting odds. Cursing everyone except herself. I don't know. Sounds like she has a real problem. She claims to be a libertarian on these issues, a liberal on most all others. We'll see. I offered to lend her my only unlicensed firearm.
I'll have my team of midgets praying for her, and a few others. They're working in shifts to intercede. It is the very least that I am comfortable with doing. It's up to her and Satan now.
CS sent over a handful of delightful street portraits that he'll never post on his site. I am tempted to post them here, dispel his Batman mystique a bit, but I won't. He has issues to contend with. My intercession in these types of issues is rarely seen as the pure hearted benevolence with which it is intended.
I have surrounded myself with the problematic literates of the world, though in truth it hardly seemed a choice, at the time.
Moving on, I re-read a lengthy piece by Hunter S. Thompson yesterday. He takes his style of writing to the nearly illogical extreme here, but has just enough verve of wit to make it all work. It obliquely concerns itself with the confirmation of Clarence Thomas to the US Supreme Court. It's worth reading if for no other reason than to measure the distance between 1992 and now. How the collective sensibilities have changed, and how precisely Thompson catalogued the changes as they were happening.
"They called us Bullies and Mashers, but we were only falling in Love..."
"I hate these bastards, Jann. And I suspect you feel the same.... They might call us bigots, but at least we are Universal bigots. Right? Shit on those people. Everybody you see these days might have the power to get you locked up.... Who knows why? They will have reasons straight out of some horrible Kafka story, but in the end it won't matter any more than a full moon behind clouds. Fuck them."
Yes, he was my kind of liberal. He suffered a lot of criticism, and would have been eaten alive by the self-proclaimed liberals of this day, but the world needs more of his kind, and always has. What the world does not seem to need any more of are contemporary critics. They have outnumbered themselves, to no positive gain. Just listen to what they say, you'll find that it is mostly nonsensical ideological bullshit. Then, go back and read what Thompson wrote about the present, past, and future. He was further left and more correct than any of them. His socio-political predictions are astounding in their accuracy. He recognized the dangers of any political consensus, never took either side's victories for granted, nor assumed that they would be used in the spirit in which they were won.
I suspect that he also would have predicted Trump's win, even as he may have hoped for a temporary Hillary, anything, at least until we all had more time to hide, or pretend to pray.
If nothing else, his style of subversive irreverence will go back into hiding, to save itself. Everything of value to me needs to go underground again, and there are plenty fighting that, but they'll lose and in ten years they'll claim it's what they wanted anyway. The immediate future does not look so good for the free spirits. There are many more that wish the world to be a public torture chamber for the weird.
Fuck them, is right.
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