MODERN WISDOM
NUMBER 289
AUGUST 2022
Copyright 2022 Francis DiMenno
dimenno@gmail.com
http://www.dimenno.wordpress.com
1. AMBITION
PART EIGHT: EDDIE MUNSTER, JR.
Money will buy a pretty good dog, but it won’t buy the wag of his tail.–Josh Billings
I know that deep in my heart of hearts that such a speculation is foolish, but what sort of child, I wonder, would I have had with Rachel Berlin? A smart, slick little Jew-boy–of that I have no doubt. He would have been raised Catholic, of course, and the Jewish issue would be down-pedalled to my folks, who would have grown to tolerate her in time, particularly once a grandchild was in the picture. I could easily have completed my college education, with their support. (I must mention that they positively glowed when I brought home my fiancee Miss Penelope Marguerite Fay. With her blonde hair (dyed, alas; she was naturally a redhead) and her charming ways, she almost instantly captivated them. Mama was a bit resistant at first. (Was it the dye job?) But soon the two of them were clucking and tut-tutting in the kitchen like two old friends, while my father and I enjoyed cigars in the library–the first time he had offered me a cigar, and a good one, too–no White Owls for him! (He did, however, take pains to tell me to remove the band from the stogie before it lit it; not after.)
In any event, had I (rather inadvisedly) married Miss Berlin, a clever German Jewess, I would no doubt have had a boy child who was smart as a whip and, as the vulgar say, a real “hot sketch” to boot. Instead, I spawned not-so-steady Eddie. An odd child, with odd notions. Here are a few more.
After seeing, on the television, at the age of about eleven, a filthy Italian dressed in full Indian regalia crying a single poignant tear when he saw some boaters irresponsibly throwing some trash in one of our great nation’s navigable rivers, and some heedless drivers tossing garbage on the highway (And tell me: what was Big Chief Crybaby doing there anyway? Was he supposed to represent the spirit of all the Injuns who mowed down the hapless Custer at Little Big Horn?).
After seeing this idiotic government propaganda, Eddie solemnly pledged to me that he did not throw garbage from moving cars, nor indulge in other acts of wanton littering. I rather boomingly said “Good! Keep up the good work!” But he then told me that he was now a conservationist, and that he was worried about the plight of the American Indian. I took him to the picture-window of our penthouse overlooking a vast panorama of the city. “See those smokestacks to the west? I said. “I’ll bet you that if you were to open the window and step out onto the patio, you could almost smell them. That, my child, is the smell of money. And, as Caesar wisely said, ‘Pecunia non olet.’ As for the Indians,” I added, “there happen to be more of them, today, than there ever were at the time of Columbus. So there’s no use in moaning about the past. Let them get good jobs and pay their own way, just like all good Americans. Why should we give handouts to these people? Just because they hide an onion in their handkerchief and blubber on command whenever a television camera hovers into view, and all the bleeding-heart liberals looking at this spectacle go wild? I’m sick of paying confiscatory taxes to support redskin moochers. They’re running a cynical poverty pest racket, that’s all they’re doing.”
I cannot fathom why young Eddie went off the rails, as I tried, on our daily walks about the estate (whenever I wasn’t too busy, or out of town) to inculcate in him some of the manly values my father strove with might and main to teach to me. On one occasion the ice cream man came by, and I bought three of the ice cream confections known as “Nutty Buddies”. (Back then they were twenty cents each, or three for fifty cents, so this hardly constitutes an extravagance on my part.) I contrived to hide one of them, and, as we were walking along, each with our frozen treat, I snatched the Nutty Buddy from my child’s hand so that I was holding two of them. “Now, what do you do?” I said to him. He looked at me, stricken, with his big brown eyes wide open. Then he looked to the ground and said, “Nuthin’.” Well, I certainly didn’t want a child with a spirit that was so easily broken, so I said to him, “No! You don’t do nothing! You ask for it back!” Eddie then said, in a wheedling voice, “Daddy, can I have it back? Please?” And I told him, “No! That’s not how you ask for something that you’re entitled to!” “What’s ‘entitled’?” he asked. “When you say you’re entitled to something, it means it’s yours by right.”. So he said, “Daddy, I want my ice cream back.” “No.” I said. He got excited and said, “Daddy, give me my Nutty Buddy! I said “No.” He looked confused. I asked him, “Now what do you do?” He said “I don’t know.” I said, “You fight me for it.” He said, “I don’t want to fight you. I love you.” The way he said this might well have melted the heart of the most ardent ideologue, but I steeled myself and began to eat his ice cream cone. He put his small arms akimbo and stomped and shouted “Daddy! Noooooo!” I finished his cone and began eating my own, and finished it in three bites. He then let loose with an ear-piercing scream. “That’ll do it,” I said, and, through sleight of hand, I produced the third Nutty Buddy, still in its wrapper, and handed it to him. “How did you do that?” he said, thunderstruck. “Daddy is magic,” I said. Meanwhile, his mother had heard the uproar and had come running down the driveway. She had grown somewhat plump, particularly after he second pregnancy, as women nearly always do, and I watched her with a mild disdain as her enormous breasts jiggled in her rather garish bright orange and yellow-flowered sundress and her canvas sandals flopped on the hard gravel of the driveway. “What’s wrong?” she cried, looking at Eddie eating his Nutty Buddy through his newly dried tears. Then she began, with termagant-style efficiency, to unload a battery of grievances. To wit:
Can’t I leave you alone with him for two seconds?
I don’t want him eating sweets between meals.
How many times must I tell you that?
Stop tormenting him!
He’s only a little boy!
What did you say to him this time?
You’re a grown man and you should know better.
Et cetera et cetera et cetera.
I smiled as serenely as I could under the barrage and I said, “There’s nothing to worry about, Mrs. Wrollax. My boy and I were simply indulging in a rather spirited form of debate. An argument, as it were, in which he proved the victor.” And I patted Eddie on the head. Like a dog, he continued wolfing down his ice cream, but I also noticed that he shivered, like a dog, and giggled.
As Eddie grew older, these debates grew to be more in the way of monologues. When he was about seven or eight, I taught him what socialism was. He seemed to think that it didn’t sound so bad. His political views, I fear, were, at best, undeveloped. “Socialism,” I told him, in words he could understand, “is for sissies. Real men know how to take care of themselves.”
We were in the living room and he asked me one time why so many people were protesting the War in Vietnam, and I said, “Those people are communists.” “But they say that they’re not Communists. They say that they’re against war.” “If they say that they’re not communists, then they’re pacifists.” “What’s a pacifist?” “A pacifist is a person who doesn’t want to fight, no matter what. But there are a lot of bad guys out there, and we need to fight them, and if you tell them you won’t, then you’re putting a target on your own back and telling the bad guys that it’s OK to hunt YOU.” “What would anybody do that?” “You know son, I really don’t know. It’s probably because of the Communists. They don’t believe in good and evil, and they don’t believe in God. And they want to make everybody slaves to the government. Just like some of the socialists in this country. That’s why I believe in capitalism and freedom, and the free market.” “What’s the free market?” “It means that any man can buy and sell and nobody can tell him how to spend his money.” “Sounds good to me. But what if I don’t HAVE any money?” “Then you go to work, and you get some.” “But I’m too young to go to work.” “Ha ha ha. Don’t worry. I’ll take care of you until you’re old enough to go out there on your own. And if anything happens to me, then my Trust will assist your Mommy and your Uncle Bill in–” “What’s going to happen to you?” he cried. “Ed!” said Friend Wife, warningly, from the kitchen. “Penelope, it’s nothing,” I boomed. Then I took both of Eddie’s hands in mine and said, “Don’t worry, Sonny–nothing’s going to happen to Daddy. But sometimes the Good Lord has other plans.” “If the Lord ever took you away, then I’d hate him, Daddy.” “No, Eddie, you must never ever say that. We all belong to the Lord. We are all his children, and He–” “Daddy–why do they call you the lord of the manor?” “Who calls me that?” “Mr. Harding.” “Oh, that’s just a figure of speech.” “Mr. Harding is a black man, isn’t he?” “That’s right, but you mustn’t call him black. He is a negro.” “What’s a negro?” “Negro menas the same as black.” “Is Mr. Harding bad?” “No, Eddie. Mr. Harding is good.” “I thought black p–negroes were bad.” “Who told you that?” He hung his head. “Some of the kids at school.” “Well, your friends at school are wrong. Don’t make a big fuss about it, but I’ll tell you right now that just about all negroes are good. Many of them are very religious, and they believe in God. It’s just a few troublemakers who are the bad ones.”
Eddie Junior then floored me with the following question: “Daddy, what’s a Jew?”
I was a bit flustered, and almost choked on my Scotch, but I replied as best I could. “Uhh, a Jew is a person who believes in our Lord but who doesn’t believe in Jesus.” “Is that bad?” “Well, it’s complicated. When you’re older you’ll understand. But you listen to me–the Jews are mostly good people. They’re just like the negroes. They believe in God. It’s just that a few of them are Communists and they rile up all the negro troublemakers. Like I said, it’s too complicated for a little boy to understand. I’ll worry about it for you until you’re old enough to form your own opinions. Now, run along and play.”Friend wife, as it turns out, had been listening to us from the kir=tchen, where she was overseeing Jacques, our cook. When Cook saw me, he frowned as though he thought something were wrong, but then, when Penelope walked over to me and gave me a great big kiss–apparently all was forgiven–Cook broke into a big smile, then averted his gaze and pretended to be busy shirring some eggs with a delicate wire whisk. (Jacques liked me, I think, because I usually indulged his whims when it came to the purchase of utensils which he regarded as essential to the running of a well-ordered kitchen.)If I was in any way culpable for the path which my son later followed, perhaps it was a misjudgment on my part, for teaching these object lessons at a rather early age. But in some respects I could not–and cannot–help but to be other than what I am. I recall from my own still vividly-remembered childhood the lessons passed down to me by my own father. Once, when I was about six years old, we were attending some sort of rodeo in Austin, Texas, and a fabulously elderly (or so it seemed to me) white-haired old man came riding out into the ring to the wild cheers of the assembled. My father plucked my cowboy hat off my head and slapped me, not gently. “What was THAT for,” I said, and nearly bawled. “That’s the Governor. Show some respect.” “How did I know?” I screeched, indignant as only a small boy can be at a perceived injustice. “Well, now you know,” my father said, grimly. “Whenever you go somewhere with me, and you see me taking off my hat, you do exactly as I do, and now back talk, or I’ll dust your britches for you, my little man.” Then he tousled my hair, fondly but a bit abstractedly.It is my belief–
hardly a controversial one–based on these and other incidents–with my father–that’s what bred in the bone comes out in the flesh. I mean to say, less obscurely, that it is the accumulation of small incidents and object lessons in one’s youth that form the cumulation of one’s adult character. However, some children are more apt pupils than others. I am not one of those thoughtless people who hold with the dictum that, and I quote, “My own Pappy whipped me good and it never did me a lick of harm, so I’m going to lick my son for whatever he did or didn’t do.” I should think that, in this late stage of our civilization, we are beyond such means of reasoning with our sometimes unreasonable children. I will admit that when Eddie was a toddler, I had to, in the words of my father, “dust his britches,” on a few occasions. But once he reached the stage where I could talk to him, I never resorted to blows. The very idea of a great big man raising his fists and raining blows on a tiny defenseless child makes me sick to my stomach. I, personally, would soundly thrash such a brute.Hoping to inculcate in Eddie my own love of literature and great reading, when he was but a small boy I used to always take pains to make time in the course of what was of course my busy day to read stories to him at night. None of that namby-pamby kiddie stuff, either, like “Pat the Bunny” and “Peter Cottontail” (which latter I, personally, found rather horrifying). No, for us it was always more manly fare, like “Treasure Island” and “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” and “The War of the Worlds” and the corking yarms of Jack London (even though I strongly disapproved of his undeveloped Socialist ideas) such as “White Fang” and “The Call of the Wild”. I also read short stories to him; some of them my personal favorites, like “To Build a Fire” and “The Monkey’s Paw” and “The Lady or the Tiger”. Even at an early age, Eddie noticed certain details in these stories which I had either ignored or taken for granted. “I’m glad the doggie got away,” he said, of the first story. “But don’t you feel sorry for the man who froze to death?” “No,” he said, petulantly, “he wanted to kill the nice doggie.” There was no reasoning with him on this score, so I let the matter drop.Another of our favorites was “Leningen Vs. the Ants”. I do not remember all the details, but I dimly recall that things did not end well for the titular character. “Those people were stupid, Daddy,” said little Eddie. “Why do you say that, son?” “They should of just dropped a big atom bomb on all them ants, and then they’d all be gone.” “But then all the people would have died, too.” “Who cares,” said Eddie. “At least it would of got rid of all them ants. Besides,” he added. “It’s only a story. In a story, you can kill everybody.” “Is that so,” I said. “Yeahhhh,” he said, with bloodthirsty enthusiasm. “People always die on TV, and nobody cares.” He was referring, I suppose, to the plethora of detective and police and war and cowboy stories on the television–shows which he was supposedly forbidden to watch, as most of them were after his bedtime and they were considered too violent. But one time I overheard him playing in the sandbox with one of his little friends down the road. He was saying, “Ha! Ha! I just threw uranium dust in your eyes and now you’re blind!” As I recall, his mother, who was listening in from the kitchen window, immediately went outdoors and snatched him up and brought him into the kitchen, where she asked him where he had gotten such a frightful notion. He said it was from a Bugs Bunny comic book, but I rather doubt it. In any event, no more comic books of any kind were permitted in the house, which perhaps was just as well. The bedtime story that both baffled and fascinated him was “The Lady or the Tiger.” He came up with an ingenious solution (for a small boy) for that particular conundrum. He got very excited when asked for the solution and in a childish monotone he babbled, “First the tiger comes out and he leaps up on the platform and he kills the King and the Queen and the man and the lady become the new King and Queen and they keep the tiger for a pet.” “That’s certainly not a happy ending,” I said. “Not for the King and Queen,” he gloated.Indeed not. They say a woman’s work is never done; corollary to that wise old saying is “A father’s worries never diminish.”Upon reflection, I have often pondered how many grown adults have been, and remain, a victim of what I like to call “magical thinking”. They look to some “Big Man” in the government, be he some Supreme Court justice or a firebrand Senator or even a successful or unsuccessful candidate for the job of Chief Executive to devise some sort of magical algorithm to solve the nation’s woes. Though I could be wrong, to me this is the very same phenomenon as my young son irreparably breaking one of his favorite toys and tugging at my pants with the whining plea, “Daddy! Fix it!”In the summer before the summer we sent Eddie to Stropmuth Manor, we–meaning the wife and I–thought that the little Googen would benefit from being sent to a summer camp. But not just any summer camp; oh no; by that time even his mother recognized that Eddie Jr. had a weight problem which might endanger his future health, and which, in the meantime, was making us look bad in front of all our friends. “He certainly would benefit,” said Penelope, with an idiosyncratic hauteur she seldom displayed with me, preferring (if I may say so) the role of complient sex kitten (Ugh–and now I’m reminded of the thoroughly deplorable beast my son brought home, “Kitty”.) “It would do him good to get away from the house for awhile. He seems to be miserable all the time. He doesn’t seem to have any friends, and all he does is eat and play that tabletop baseball game you gave him. Something’s not right. He’s very sad about something. We have to deal with it. Maybe we should send him to a child psychologist.” I vetoed that suggestion forthwith. There were five reasons. First of all, to my mind Freudianism is no better than Communism, and, in many ways, a great deal worse. Second of all, I did not relish the notion of our eldest child spilling all the family secrets to some Viennese quack. Thirdly. I did not believe, as did many of our more credulous Eastern Liberal Elites, that such mumbo-jumbo, practiced upon small children, was in any way efficacious. Fourth, I had the fleeting thought that Eddie was actually smarter than these analytic doubledomes and would no doubt find a way to stymie them as they attempted to “shrink his head”. Finally,
as Lord Chesterfield once said of sexual congress, the expense is damnable (and the pleasure transitory!).
“No Penny,” I said. “But I do think that a fat camp is a good idea.”
“Who said anything about a fat camp?”
“Well, we certainly don’t want him coming back to us as a sort of human blimp.”
“Edgar, you ought to be ashamed of yourself. He’s your son.”
“He’s your son too,” I said. “And it’s time we faced the facts like responsible adults. There’s something very wrong with him. He doesn’t act like any normal boys. He never wants to go outside; he spends hours holed up in the bathroom reading; he never wants to ride his bike or play tennis or do anything physical–he just sits around the house like a big…lump.”
“Well!” she huffed, and stalked off.
But the following day she acceded to my suggestion.
To make a rather long story short, I went to the enormous trouble of visiting about a half-dozen of these “weight loss” or “fitness” camps located within a two hour drive. In nearly all of them–and they all had names like Camp Tiempoticonderoga, Camp Avalon, Camp Eagle, Camp Dream (!), Camp Red Gap (!!) (a Communist Enterprise?) and Kamp Wandervogel–this latter in the deepest fastnesses of the wild forest, and the children there looked absolutely miserable. I did, however, find one camp where the children seemed content. This was Camp Loxley. It had a professional dietician on its staff, and it catered, it seemed, to a more affluent substratum, and I decided forthwith to send Eddie Munster Jr. (his mother’s pet name for him) to that promising establishment, for the first summer session, which had already started.
It turned out to be an enormous blunder. I had failed to notice that Camp Loxley was less than a half hour’s walk from a rather substantial town, which did a land-office business catering to the fugitive fatties with every variety of junk food, from greasy hamburgers and french fries to fried chicken and pizza. Furthermore, some of Eddie’s more enterprising bunkmates ran a black market in surreptitious snacks which supplemented the meagre “healthy” meals doled out at designated mealtimes. Furthermore, Eddie was deathly afraid of snakes and was prone to burst into tears whenever he was compelled to walk in the woods, and so the so-called camp counselors, losing patience with his antics, allowed him to stay behind in the bunkhouse rather than cause a ruckus. The result, as one might expect, was that on Eddie’s return, he weighed several pounds more than when he set out.
And so, for the second summer session, I elected to send Eddie to Kamp Wandervogel where, I was assured, the regimen was quite austere indeed–lots and lots of hiking, nutritious but minimal meals, and absolutely no snacks brought in from the outside, or so I was assured by the rather beefy counselor, a stocky Nordic type with the sides of his head shaved down to the skull and a minimal crew cut on top. “Schnacks?” he said, in a booming voice. Did I detect a faint Austrian accent? “We are miles from anywhere! How could schnacks be broughten in?” I decided that Herr Seidel (for that was his name) was just the man to whip my Eddie into shape.
Eddie lasted less than a week at Kamp Wandervogel. He would have clamored to be brought home the very next day, only the rules of the “Kamp” specified that there was to be no contact with the outer world during the first six days. Eddie, I was told, was the first in line to use the telephone. He accomplished this feat, he told his mother, by means of a substantial bribe. (He had somehow managed to secrete a twenty dollar bill about his person; he wouldn’t say where, or how he came by it. (Ahh, pecunia non olet indeed!)
Such slimming as he managed to accomplish at Kamp Wandervogel (and I will aver that he looked mildly cadaverous) was entirely undone upon his return to our household. He set at his victuals with a gleam in his careworn eye, and ate wholeheartedly and at full throttle, like an eager hog who was reluctant to so much as to stop to take a breath. I would swear I actually heard him squealing and snorting while he ate. “Your table manners are egregious,” I counselled him. “What’s that, Pop? A new kind of dessert?” I did not know whether he was having me on or not. Forthwith, without so much as a How’ve you been, he and his dog Fabian retreated into his bedroom, where he promptly (I assume) put on a pair of unaesthetic headphones and listened to that dreadful racket he insisted on referring to as “music” by the likes of The Screeching Weasels and The Mighty Might Warthogs or The New Communist Minstrels. (My own tastes run toward classical music and the occasional jazz pianist such as Felonius Drunk–was that really his name? Memory fails me….)
When Eddie came down to the breakfast table bright and early the following morning, I, in effect, laid down the law to him. I will admit that I was rather grumpy. Penelope had declined to share our bed on the previous evening, and I tossed and turned with those night thoughts which seem so consequential when experiencing them, but which, of course seem rather quotidien after the passage of a great many years. And so it was that I fear that I spoke to my son rather more coldly and sarcastically than I wished to. “Listen, Sunny Jim,” I said through gritted teeth, “In this house we observe the amenities and we use our manners and we certainly do not address the hardworking paterfamilias as ‘Pop'”.
“Dad, the trouble is–“
“The trouble, Sunny Jim, is not with me. The trouble is with you. Your contumacious behavior. Your almost pagan imagination. You seem to be dwelling in a perpetual cloudcuckooland. Your voracious appetite. Quite Frankly, Master Wrollax, I am keenly disappointed in you. To put it bluntly, you eat like a pig. Nobody around here is trying to starve you. You don’t have to eat like a human garbage can. You are permitted to leave some food on your plate every so often. This is not war-town Europe or Africa. We are not Italians or starving negroes. We are everyday Americans who live in a land of abundance and plenty, although, of course, that’s a redundancy.”
“Dad, I–“
“You hush, now. I talk, you listen. Now. I am neither an imposing nor Draconian presence in this house. I no longer see fit to restrict your television viewing. Nor do I place any limitation on that cacophony it pleases you to call “music’, just so long as you use your headphones. You have access to practically every material comfort a man–or boy-could want. So, tell me, why– (I wanted to say”are you so unhappy,” but I did not wish to assign blame on him for his own anhedonia nor encourage him to clearly to indulge in solipsistic introspection,)
“DAD! Will you listen to me?”
“Hanh?”
“Half the time I don’t even know if you’re talking to me or if you’re just talking…to hear yourself talk, I dunno!”
“I see. So you’re saying that you object to my little lecture which I have undertaken on your behalf?”
“Every time you talk to me you pick on me.”
“If you contrived a way to not cause offense, I would not have to indulge in my proclivity to correct you?”
“Can’t you be like a normal Dad, and just smack me? Why do we have to have these little ‘talks’? They’re driving me crazy!”
“Well…you always were a nervous little boy,” I said reflectively.
“And the reason why–“
“Don’t say ‘the reason why’. Say ‘the reason’. That will suffice.”
Eddie Jr. looked very angry. “Daddy, please!” He was quite vexed at me.
So I hammered away at the little scamp. “You don’t know how good you have it,” I said. I wasn’t about to let him get one over on me! It was time to show him who’s boss. “My own father made me refer to him at all times as ‘Sir’.”
“Dad,” he said. “This is the 1960s. All that old-fashioned stuff is from the days of the dinosaurs!”
“Thank you, Eddie, for that sophisticated exegesis of changing mores. Aristotle himself could hardly have expressed it better.”
Eddie started to smile, but something–he read my face–with perhaps a slightly scornful expression?–caused him to demur. “I’m starving,” he said. When do we have breakfast?”
“When indeed,” I sighed. “Perhaps it’s time we stopped waiting on you hand and foot. Mayhaps,” I said sententiously, “Young Master Wrollax needs must become more self-reliant.”
“Okay,” he said. “I’ll go get me some cereal.”
“Where,” I said, “do you come up with such barbarous neologisms as ‘I’ll go get me’. What are you supposed to be–some kind of Kentucky hillbilly?”
“It’s just a figure of speech, Dad.”
“Don’t treat me like an idiot, Eddio! I’ve forgotten more about English idioms than you’ll ever know.”
Eddie silently poured himself a bowl of that cereal with a vulgar showboating tiger who wears a rather louche kerchief and whose chief occupation seemed to be to serve as a bellowing monosyllabic town crier extolling the exceptional greatness of his sugar-frosted flakes of mere corn.
“Finish up that box of sugar, Son, because from now on I’ve resolved that we’re all going to start to eat healthier.”
“OK, Dad,” he said, as he occupied himself with intently reading the box.
“Eddie, extend to me the courtesy of looking at me when I’m talking to you.”
“All right, Dad, all right!” he screeched, pushing the bowl away. “I’m done! Satisfied?”
“You should do that more often,” I muttered.
Eddie glared at me and stormed off to his room, and then, I suppose, proceeded to listen at ear-splitting volume to Tangerine Fruitsicle or The Unshaven Morons or Pink Butterfly. I did not invade his sanctum sanctorum; I decided that we had both had enough of each other for one day, so I went to my Den and lit a good cigar and spent a thoroughly agreeable forty-five minutes drinking my coffee and reading my newspaper while listening to a jazz record by Charlie Dingus, or whatever his name was.
Ah well. The servant may fall down the stairs and break his neck, but the party goes on.
2. MODERN WISDOM
1. THE NEEDS OF THE RESPECTABLY AFFLUENT are of no concern to me; I just want what’s mine.
2. CLAUSTROPHOBIC RESIGNATION is my go-to mode.
3. POWER AND SELF-GRATIFICATION are alternatingly desirable and fear-inducing.
4. BLUE RIBBON FEAR is the kind of fear to have when you’re having more than one.
5. FAIRER THAN DEATH describes just about everything, come to think of it.
6. HYMNAL PROSE is too often left in the lurch by ugly neologisms.
7. BRAWNY THEMES are what I favor; they are a manly man’s psychic nourishment.
8. THE MAGNIFICENCE OF INDUSTRIAL UGLINESS is too often disregarded by our artistic strivers–paint what you know!
9. REFLECTIVE PURGATORY is probably the worst kind of all.
10. WRITING HARMFUL LIES is basically something to be avoided, unless you’re bound to be rich and famous.
11. BORN PERPENDICULAR–and loving every minute of it!
12. THE HERO OF EVERY STORY is the villain of at least one of those stories which is probably never told.
13. THIRTEEN-STEPPING is so much more of an ego gratification than stupid old-fashioned twelve-stepping.
14. THE ANGER OF LOSS DEMANDS MATERIALS which is why I suppose people go in for robbing banks and suchlike.
15. SLAVEMAKER ANTS PREFER THE STRONG, but even the strongest ant can be crushed by a heedless child.
16. EAGER SELF-ABASEMENT is usually how celebrities manage to escape serious censure; we should all be celebrity nincompoops.
17. THE MAGUS OF THE MAINSTREAM is usually forgotten after about twenty years.
18. SHRIEKING DRUNK is one hell of a way to go through life.
19. A WINE-GUZZLING VAGRANT is usually not welcome at a gallery opening, unless it’s performance art.
20. BFD–well, that’s easy for you to say. You’re soft, and you haven’t been around, and you speak in acronyms like a nitwit.
21. ANCHOR BABIES? The Republicans say “Anchors away!”
22. MICROTERRORISM will be a pressing problem of the very near future, if it isn’t already here. (We used to use the term “bullying”.)
23. A GUARANTEE OF SANITY is something that has never existed and never will.
24. A MIGRATION IN TIME is something that every dotard will bore you with.
25. A BLUE COLLAR AUTOCRAT is hell on his wife.
26. THE PAST THAT SEEMS A LOST PARADISE is an illusion to everyone but you.
27. ENDLESS OPPORTUNITIES FOR NARCISSISM are to be had in America; particularly in the political sphere.
28. BANALIZING THE IRONIC is something that would rob a great many writers of their livelihood.
29. THE ANACONDA STRATEGY is best in crooked times.
30. AN IDEAL MONSTER would probably be very pleasant to behold, on the outside at least.
31. PREDATOR HOLDFAST AVENGER would be a good name for a baby stroller.
32. THE MIRACULOUS ARRIVAL OF THE YOUNG HERO usually takes place in the first act–how predictable!
33. THE INFERIOR KINGDOM is still pretty proud of all its tourist attractions–such as they are.
34. THE BOY HERO WHO CANNOT GROW UP is pretty commonplace in the world of business.
35. THE ETERNAL BEM always menaces innocent women, so men have somebody to rescue.
36. IMAGINING NORMALITY is a fool’s errand; that train has left the station long long ago.
37. NYKTOMORPHOSIS is the bugaboo of the Christian Right.
38. WINTER SMITH was his name, and let me tell you something–he was one cold bastard.
39. PROGRAMMED TO SEE, we are also motivated to immediately forget about the things we just don’t like.
40. COLLECTIVIZED EGOTISM is the default mode of American enthusiasm.
41. SENEX FLINTHEART: You don’t go to a man like that for a loan unless you’re prepared to offer your daughter as collateral.
42. SAVAGE TORPOR? Video games have weaponized that interesting condition.
43. SEE WHOLE for the first time, and you’ll probably break down crying.
44. A CRAVING FOR EXTRAORDINARY INCIDENT is what drives most Hollywood action spectaculars.
45. IDLE AND EXTRAVAGANT STORIES are fodder to fill our hours until the boneyard beakons.
46. DEAD IMAGES are what we used to cherish; now we are spoiled for novelty.
47. A RECORD OF FOND CONJECTURES is what history which is even based on the latest sources consists of.
48. COUNTERFEIT EMOTIONS are better than none at all, of course–but everyone can spot them, and nobody cares.
49. SHADOW PROJECTION is what everyone engages in, even as they know they’re acting in a stupid shadow show.
50. SENTIMENTALIZING APPROPRIATION OF LOVING EMOTION is what every truly wicked enterprise is really all about.
3. KIBBAGES & KANGS A crop of fruit, ‘ A good tidy kang of apples.’ Kibbage. Small refuse and rubbish ; riff-raff.The hallway smelt of boiled cabbage and old rag mats.–George Orwell
After learning these tricks, there’s no excuse not to cook cabbage.
www.lacucinaitaliana.com/italian-food/hacks/how-to-cook-cabbage-without-the-smell
“Someone threw a cabbage at William Howard Taft. That didn’t bother Taft. He quipped, “I see that one of my adversaries has lost his head.”
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incidents_of_objects_being_thrown_at_politicians
4 ways to tell if cabbage has gone bad:
1. It starts engaging in dangerous practices, such as smoking in bed.
2. It wears a MAGA hat and gives forth with preposterous theories about the Federal Government.
3. It tailgates drivers who it thinks are driving “too slow” on city streets, and doesn’t come to a complete stop at stop signs.
4. It refuses to wear a mask in crowded public spaces, declaring that it is a free American who will not be brainwashed by liberal scientists.
FYI:
c.tenor.com/CF4gpsmNJKQAAAAd/sushichaeng-dog-eating-cabbage.gif
ALSO SEE:
s.ecrater.com/stores/261999/5fba39f0203fa_261999b.jpg
Turnips, Chinese cabbage, and bok choy are all the same plant species.
www.usbg.gov/sites/default/files/images/bok_choy_science_page.pdf
Cabbage Juice: Nasty quaff or magical elixir?
www.drbrahma.com/9-surprising-health-benefits-of-drinking-cabbage-juice/
At Autre Chose, the French chef taught me to make eggplant by roasting it in a pan with a liberal application of olive oil.
I think that roasting brussels sprouts would produce results that are most salutary.
www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/ina-garten/roasted-brussels-sprouts-recipe2-1941953
4. LOU REED: SOME UNSOLICITED OPINIONS
Lou Reed has toiled in obscurity for too long. His is the most tragic story in all of Rock and Roll. It’s high time “the man” finally got some recognition.
Even though the so-called “sophistos” may mock “the Big L.” because he his managed to “kick the monkey” and he knows what it’s like to be “down and out” and he went to “the college of the hard knocks” and he will always give a one hundred dollar bill to a hungry moocher and is known to one and all as “the poor man’s very best friend”, still, he is the “star” I most admire.
This honorable man, who challenged the hypocrisy of the “fun-fun-fun” Beach Boys generation with his brutally honest and candid and frank songs about the seamy “underside” of the New York “scene”, was a brave pioneer who ALWAYS told THE TRUTH with never a thought of monetary gain. Never slow to give credit to his sidemen, he is a type of Jewish “Saint”.
The Velvet Underground are towering legends.The Beatles of their day. Never mind that they and the Beatles shared the same time period. Shut Up.The Beatles aren’t fit to lick their Cuban boots. Lou Reed’s first album is a masterpiece. So what if he recorded with Yes. And even his demo recordings like Do the Ostrich are far better than anything on Revolver. And I must also use Heroin because Lou said to. And I will wear black leather jackets and be down with the people. Berlin is a masterpiece I tell you. Never mind what people say, how it’s depressing. What do “Norms” like them know? And nobody has ever recorded a better album than The Bells. Don Cherry isn’t fit to breathe his air. And I will tell you that even though some people say his voice sounds like a dusthead’s dying croak do you know what I hear? I hear nothing but street cred. I tell you the man is a towering legend. And anyone who says different knows Nothing. NO THING!!!
SO SHUT UP SHUT UP CONEY ISLAND BABY IS A MASTERPIECE– “I WANT TO PLAY FOOTBALL FOR THE COACH”–BRILLIANT! WHAT CAN YOU SAY ABOUT THIS MAN F*CKERS HE IS THE FRANK SINATRA OF PUNK I THINK HE IS A GENIUS BECAUSE HE IS BOTH A POET AND A MAN OF THE STREETS AND ANY MAN WHO WANTS TO GET TO LOU WILL HAVE TO GO THROUGH ME F*CKER AND THAT MEANS YOU, C*******U, YOU TOEF*CKER.
OK, HATERS–MAYBE HE LIVES IN A PENTHOUSE–but it’s a penthouse with integrity, damnit! Listen, f*ckers–Lou Reed didn’t take any “sh*t” from “The Man”. He walked it like he talked it! Ask Delmore Schwartz! That’s right–DELMORE SCHWARTZ!!!!!!!!!!!
SEE:
Toefucker: 20 Great Lou Reed Moments
www.stereogum.com/1541661/20-great-lou-reed-moments/lists/video-list/
10 THINGS YOU MUST KNOW
www.needsomefun.net/10-things-you-must-know-about-lou-reed/
ALSO SEE:
www.robertchristgau.com/get_artist.php?name=Lou+Reed
5. TEN WORST BEATLES SONGS
In descending order of awfulness….
1. Piggies
2. Blue Jay Way
3. Only a Northern Song
4. Mr. Moonlight
5. All Together Now
6. Your Mother Should Know
7. Octopus’s Garden
8. Maxwell’s Silver Hammer
9. You Know My Name (Look Up the Number)
10. What’s the New Mary Jane
6. TALK LIKE A GRIZZLED PROSPECTOR DAY
One time I was a fixin’ t’ pan fer some gold up in the mountings t’
add t’ my store of yaller boys. After a hard mornin’ of siftin’ and
rinshin’ I had added nicely to my store of dust when some dern fool
Chinook came and blew it all away. So I took Betsy, muh trusty rifle,
and I blew HIM away.
https://www.facebook.com/#!/pages/Talk-Like-A-Grizzled-Prospector-Day/290853327171
7. COMEDY & TRAGEDY
The truth that many people never understand, until it is too late, is
that the more you try to avoid suffering the more you suffer because
smaller and more insignificant things begin to torture you in
proportion to your fear of being hurt.–Thomas Merton
There is no essential difference between the material of comedy and
tragedy. All depends on the point of view of the dramatist, which, by
clever emphasis, he tries to make the point of view of his
audience.–George P. Baker
I myself have already killed all the gods in the fourth act–out of
morality! Now what is to be done about the fifth act! Where will the
tragic solution come from?–Do I need to start thinking about a comic
solution? –Nietzsche
The world is a tragedy to those who feel, but a comedy to those who
think.–Horace Walpole
Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you walk into an open
sewer and die.–Mel Brooks
8. A JOKE
O positive and AB negative walk into a bar. The bartender says, “We don’t serve your type in here!”
dimenno 