Notes from a cluttered mind

Episode 6: Indigenous People's Day!

1. A blast from the past: Kamala Harris excoriating Europeans for bringing a “wave of destruction” and disease to the Americas. That’s the European-American legacy. And we “mustn’t shy” away from blaming white devils for the blight and horror sowed on otherwise pristine soil.

   

   Turns out at least some of what’s been, we cannot be unburdened by, I guess. That’s just math.

   Indoor plumbing, penicillin, and every sport save lacrosse did not respond to my request for comment.

   Bottom line: Harris has the Native American Marxist and Aztec Supremacist vote all but salted away. With only three weeks remaining in the presidential race — and Trump unlikely to announce a plan to round up filthy interloping Italians in order to place them in work camps — I just don’t see how his campaign finds a path to victory, having lost those tens of votes.

2. Say what you will about Ed Gein — necrophile, serial murderer, cannibal. Fine. All bad, granted.

   But the man had a belt made out of women’s nipples. Do you?

   

3. The word “lisp” traces back to Old English, with the now obsolete variant wlisp (c. 1370) appearing briefly in Middle English.

   In a world far less cruel and fallen than ours, “lisp” — “to speak with that defect of utterance which consists in substituting for /s/ and /z/ sounds approaching /θ/ and /ð/” — would have been replaced, at its referential inception, with the more onomatopoetic lithp. Which substitition, in a rare instance of nominalist triumph, may have had the salubrious effect of negating the malady altogether. To wit:

   “Forgive me, I have a lithp,” he said, sheepishly.

   “Do you?” I asked, puzzled. “Why, I can’t say I noticed!”

   And yes, this is precisely the kind of thing I spend my nights agonizing over.

   

4. Dear Los Angeles Dodgers,

   If you are going to clink cups, those cups should be the red Solo kind, filled with domestic draft beer, or maybe some rum and Coke, if you’re feeling daffy.

   Anything else? Is just fucking gay.

   Yours,

   Actual men

5. Borrowing the intellectual output of others without attribution is merely happy collectivism, a social boon to the Greater societal Good — and besides, the amount of plagiarism relative to overall word count in the larger piece co-written by the Democratic candidate for President is slight, rendering the behavior only mildly plagiaristic, and “not a big deal,” according to a plagiarism expert who evidently wasn’t around when I went to university; which therefore renders noticing the use of stolen intellectual property “racism,” since the inability of Blacks to formulate their own thoughts, or to articulate those thoughts in ways not already linguistically colonized by the pervasive whiteness lording over published product predating applicable works of peoples from marginalized communities, is a genetic imperative, the result of hereditary deficiencies in the Black race.

   — Else one would have every ground to condemn the practice as mere rank theft, the result of intellectual laziness and gross deceit. Which we’re assired it is not. And that it’s racist to claim otherwise.

   One simply cannot fight science.

   

6. I’d hoped that writing here regularly would actually increase the number of paid subscribers for this Substack. Instead, it seems to be having the opposite effect, as I’ve lost several over the past month.

   Now. There’s a certain clarity, I’ll admit, to realizing that the more you put yourself out there in writing, the less people want to hear from you.

   Which is why if this post generates ten new paid subscribers, I promise to go a full week without posting a single goddamn word.

   Go on. Stick it to me, people!

7. A post-surgery update: I’m now in a hard cast, which I’ll wear up until November. After that, it’s physical therapy. My wife is going through her PT now; she’s still recovering from a tear of her ACL and meniscus, and the scar tissue is proving recalcitrant.

   If ever there was a case to be made for a human centipede, we’re it. I’m not sure it would make vacuuming or doing the dishes or the laundry any easier for either of us. But at least we could marry our sufferings together.

   Of course, I get the front. I’m not an idiot, people.

   ****

   Buy me a cup of coffee? Lunch? A sports car? Or buy me some beer. I avoid prescription opioids.