Notes from a cluttered mind
Episode 2: Literature? I hardy know her!
“The Would-be Assassin’s Lament,” a protein wisdom haiku
Late summer. I aim
to save my country. Instead?
20 years, straight ass rape.*
No. You’re welcome.
Were you to live in a small Ohio town suddenly visited by 15 thousand mosly peaceful space aliens from the planet Etyerpuss, and these mostly peaceful space aliens suddenly and unceremoniously, without consideration or regret, began decapitating your park fowl and your children, either with their mostly peaceful space alien appendages, or by flying their spacecrafts recklessly at absurd speeds along your public roads and bike paths, causing a raft of deadly terrestrial collisions, you’d have every reason to complain about these mostly peaceful space aliens — even to the point of wanting them removed, especially in lieu of their being better assimilated into the ways of your small Ohio town.
And if meanwhile, people from towns not asked to coexist with mostly peaceful space aliens draining public resources, only to live as they always had on their home planet, presume to lecture you on how your anti-alien sentiment is morally reprehensible and your personal and national sovereignty, selfish, you should invite them — in no uncertain terms — to go probe themselves. Repeatedly and vigorously. With a fully-charged light saber.
This past Saturday, I sat through a film in a movie theater for the first time in six years, and for the second time in eighteen years. Some observations: the theaters are smaller now. And the chairs recline — at least, they did in the theater I visited — if that’s your thing. Still, rude people talk throughout the program, the snacks and drinks are absurdly expensive, and — try as you might — you cannot get your remote to work, not even after you change the batteries and try turning the theater off and back on.
They must have some kind of special magnetized field built into the building’s architecture. Which I guess is progress. If you ask me, though? Keeping people from using the bathroom without missing 15 minutes of a film they’ve paid $20 to see is medieval and cruel. And I shall not soon again abide.
If you’re like me and you watch a lot of true crime, it’s easy to convince yourself that you’re something of an expert at spotting serial killers. So imagine my embarrassment when the guy I met at a Denver disco whose house I went to for casual sex this weekend — behind my wife’s back, and without a second thought for my kids, naturally — slipped a mickey into my Singapore Sling, strangled me to death with a length of panty hose, then butchered my remains, save my pancreas, which he enjoyed with Dijon mustard and a thin tomato slice on a rustic sourdough roll.
There’s an obvious lesson in humility here. And were I not hacked into five pieces triple taped into the folds of industrial-strength garbage bags and buried in suitcases under a layer of cat litter in some gay sociopath’s basement, I would almost certainly heed it. So. Maybe next time.
I don’t think the problem is Jews. I think the problem is the word “Jew.” It just sounds unpalatable. Like the sound you make when you want to spit but your mouth is dry and filled with dog hair and tongue. “That’s my lowest price, man! Stop trying to Jew me down.” Or, “Sure, Hitler made a few mistakes, but when you consider the alternative, all you’re left with is Churchill, vaporized Japanese Catholics, and the Satanic reign of the Jew.”
I believe — as both a moral corrective and an aesthetic upgrade — we as a species should, in our various languages, try renaming Jews something less awful soundling. Like “Bagheldadis.” Or “Bristians.” Bristians, for instance, could usefully introduce “Bristian Nationalism,” declare their commitment to Blood and Soil, and announce their undying allegiance to all the other white Bristians of their tribe who helped make this country what it once was, before all the gays and darkies came and stole political power by getting themselves elected — turning the US into a hellscape from which the only true and righteous escape is a Pinochet-style dictatorship, where goodness triumphs, and anti-Bristian evil is abducted from its home, beaten with a brick, stuffed into a gunny sack, and dumped from a helicopter into the Sierra Nevadas by sober and pious patriots.
Just something to noodle over. I’m not married to it.
Steely Dan’s most commercially successful song is not, as I’d always believed, “Reelin’ in the Years.” Instead, it’s “Rikki Don’t Lose That Number,” a song about Donald Fagen’s hitting on the pregnant wife of a Bard professor in the late 60s, and effectively getting ghosted.
The professor in question was Guy Ducornet; his wife at the time was Rikki Ducornet, a Bard alum who went on to become a celebrated surrealist novelist and painter. For years, Ms Ducornet was the writer in residence at the University of Denver, which has one of the best — and really only — PhD program in Literature with a Creative Writing emphasis, in the country.
I went to DU, where I studied for a time under Rikki Ducornet. During those years I was taking writing courses from her — the late 1990s, before I moved with my then girlfriend and now wife to Bologna, Italy — I had no idea a Steely Dan song I’d grown up with and, quite drunk, would sing aloud with friends at dorm parties, had anything to do with her, despite my having been a longtime Steely Dan fan — and despite my undergrad roommate and childhood friend being a Steely Dan superfan trained in Jazz piano, and absolutely besotted with useless music trivia.
So. Nostalgia. When it hits, it hits.
Incidentally, I was reminded of all this quite accidentally this weekend (after the movie theater sojourn, before being carved up by a Queer sociopath; busy weekend, now that I think about it) when I stumbled upon a YouTube video from The Professor of Rock, which I clicked on without even knowing the specific subject matter.
As Steven Wright once said, “It’s a small world. But I wouldn’t want to paint it.”
Once again, I’d like to humbly ask the 3200+ of you who subscribe for free to protein wisdom reborn! to consider purchasing a paid subscription at the link provided on this page. Not only will this help support my work, but it’s like a tongue to the soft pink underside of my ego. The tongue of a total stranger I just met at the grocery checkout line, whose number I’ll take down but then immediately lose. You have that power, people.
That’s it for this week. Time for you all to make like a tree and drop your fruit incontinently, where it rot and lay stinking in the earth without ever nourishing a single soul. Or you could just leave.
Your call. I don’t judge.
******
Small world, indeed!
I was saying to myself as I was reading, that's the second time I've seen that Steely Dan/Rikki Ducornet story this week! Turned out you watched the same Professor of Rock video I did!