discoursedemiurge

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My Chaotic and Stupid Son Finally Shows Himself as a First Grader

When Jeffery Beaumont the 18th, my lovable yet chaotic and stupid son, first came into the first grade, plenty of Little Hands Prepatory insiders said his brash way of handling school and inflammatory rhetoric about other children made him unfit for first grade. Well, he proved them wrong tonight, by correctly identifying all of the animals in his biology unit and getting a 80 on his third test of the year only due to some spelling errors.

Gone are the days of the field trip to McHallahan’s farm where he called a cow a “milk bitch” and hid in a hay stack for eight hours, leading me to call the National Guard office.  Instead, today, we saw a new, gentle Jeffrey. Sure, he still has that pariah dog edge that we saw come out when he used his frightening martial arts skills to bicycle kick Janice Humphreys into a lego replica of the empire state building. And he may still draw frighteningly accurate replicas of demonology texts on the back of his math homework entitled, “Fam”. But as we’ve seen, he’s willing to call a duck a duck, a horse a horse, and for some reason, a goat “Myne Eyes Unto The Outerworld”, and that’s exactly what makes him a breath of fresh air in Little Hands. .

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Gunther Krunwepp’s TEN THOUSAND FOOT VIEW: REQUIEM FOR A LIMO

The 10,000 Foot View is a syndicated column by respected politics blogger Gunther Krunwepp, the Voice of The Thinking Middle American. Not too hot. Not too cold. Just right (but not too right).

As a father of several bouncy, wonderful young girls (Dorothea, Brett, and Pinot) I have become familiar with their favorite book series, K. R. Stockingfultz’s The Scions of Gamathriel, a dystopian fantasy series set in an Edwardian parallel universe called Gamathriel where magic has been outlawed by a series of grim, authoritarian industry barons. By banning magic, they hold a significant power advantage in Gamathriel’s power struggle. The series follows Ariel Ironhorse, the daughter of a lord who is slowly losing power as he attempts to concede to the brutal regime of Baron Flox. Until, of course, due to a chance encounter with a possessed chimney bellows teaches her that she can understand the world of magic, which has been bred out of her family.

The books follow Ariel’s journey after a series of Strumshooters massacre the Ironhorse family as she prepares to battle the evil Baron Flox. Along the way she meets unforgettable characters like pig thief Dorrity Swinn and his dancing bear best friend Rungo as they join the loose coterie of rebels called the Briggs Army, named after the assassinated head wizard Briggs Briggsby. It’s a fun book series with unforgettable strong female characters, thrilling battles, and a surprising message about respecting other people’s property. But more on that in the second.

Yes, it seems like it’s midnight in America. We’ve elected our own Baron Flox, who will strip all the magic from our lives. The arts that Winston Churchill fought for will be trampled. Our own Briggs Briggsby must stand and watch a man who is not qualified run our own Gamathriel. (No word if she plans on possessing a chimney bellows, but never count out a Clinton). And we’re forgetting the things that make this country great in order to “Make America Great Again”. The magic of immigrants, of language, and of respecting other people’s property.

In one of the book’s most dramatic scenes, Dorrity Swinn, our hot headed pig thief (Sanders much?) and Rungo (the extremely rude boys of twitter who continue to insist that I resemble a bullfrog), angry about the death of their battalion leader, go on an insane rampage and destroy an entire industrial weapons stockpile.

Unfortunately, Baron Flox is at the weapons stockpile doing an inspection. Rungo gets shot with a cannon, and Dorrity Swinn gets put into a large frozen lake where he is snapped at by a series of half-dragon half snapping turtles.

All of us involved with #theresistance need to remember not to fall to the temporary satisfaction of property destruction. After the inauguration, someone’s limo was set on fire in DC, Richard Spencer was punched, and tonight, our Rungos and Swinns have rioted outside of alternative right firebrand Milo Yiannnnopouloss’s speaking event at UC Berkeley. Even though Milo might strike a frighteningly similar to figure to Baron Flox’s apprentice Lord Furhtahradadaer (both enjoy wearing white), we need to remember something very important: that even Stockingfultz believes that strategy is important, and you can’t simply burn every limo, punch every well coiffed nationalist, or destroy sign with Yiannopolus’s milky Floxian complexion on it.

We have to be strong and smart. Because the left might see a burning limo and see a symbol of the people’s power to set things on fire doesn’t mean that the right sees the same thing. What the right sees is a group of people who can’t be reasoned with. And pretty simply, most Americans take the ten thousand foot view. We’re sick of politics. We’re sick of people who learn their grandmother voted for Trump and empty all the ice cube trays all over her floor. We’re sick of Trump voters who buy all the Lucky Charms in the store and then when we have horrendous IBS and can only eat the ancillary brown pieces and thus have to subside on stale Ritz crackers for a few days.

Because a limo just isn’t a limo to everybody. Some people see a beautiful night of high school taking them to the promenade. Some people see them and think of a life they want. We must be careful not to ruin people’s personal symbols in our quest for catharsis.

I’m all for people being in the street, but, even Dorrity Swinn, as his toes get attacked in a very cold lake would tell you, people’s property is very important.

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Vague Rumblings from The Secret World

Irony died when the planes hit the towers; and satire is dying that same death. Which means it’s only retreating to get itself in order, but for the sake of a popular narrative, now our satirists are pundits. It’s cliche at this point how a milky talk show host or punditmedian will deliver a barrage of facts that count as “evisceration”, the sort of current equivalent to Joseph Welch shouting “have you no decency, sir?” The best our institutions can seem do is trot out weak caricature, the same milky comedians genuflecting and saying ‘bigly’ in a Queens accent and then sitting back in sloth, patting themselves, content, and going to bed having done their service for today.

But our current events aren’t real. They’re happening, they’re having concrete effects already (talk to any suicide hotline counselor), but they feel like we’re living in a mean-spirited parody of America. Remember when Doonesbury made this joke 80 gazillion years ago and everybody smirked (nobody laughs at Doonesbury except psychopaths)? We basically live in a fucking New Yorker cartoon. We couldn’t even get the complicated tool using cows and hoofed mammal salesmen of The Far Side. We got something dumber that nobody dares laugh at but everybody acknowledges as ‘funny’. But we don’t recognize it as real. Because America had a series of rules about who becomes President. And those don’t matter anymore. All that matters is the sense we’re living in the dying hallucination of a nation-state.

So I don’t blame anybody for  laying down for a bit. We’re the fever dream of a hack political cartoonist hopped up on codeine. But as we’ve laid down, the desire for story and fiction feels like it’s returned, albeit in perverted form.

It started with a carpetbagger hopped up on speed and craft beer. Eric Garland: futurist, strategist, author, bassist, who, one night, probably fighting off the shakes, penned a few immortal words: “time for some game theory”. What followed was a logorrheic, deluded Ellroy/le Carre pastiche written with the sort of hardboiled prose that can only emerge from a guy who thinks he’s a lot smarter than he actually is, full of state actors, calling Afghanis barbarians, and saying America “came from the Torah and Voltaire's Candide and Adam Smith and zen koans and Greek mathematics and Rumi's poetry.” Okay, Kerouac.

It also had jack shit to do with game theory. I kind of hoped Alvy Singer was going to pull John Nash from behind a poster to tell Garland, “You know nothing of my work.”

However, instead of being a paranoid curio, it became the hottest thing on the planet. Somebody compared this shit to the Federalist Papers. You know, one of the inspiring documents for the American Revolution.

The second iteration is more grotesque.

Donald Trump paid for prostitutes to do golden showers in a bed the Obamas slept in. Supposedly.

Which, there’s a lot of questions here. Is Donald Trump getting splashed?  How many prostitutes? How much of a psycho do you have to be to pay for someone to piss in a bed somebody slept in forever ago? Is it okay to kinkshame a dictator? Is he always into this, or, as the report goes, was this some sort of bizarre piss-tribute shaming to the Obamas?

However, what’s fascinating is that, as much as we could tell, we have about as much reason to believe the piss report as we do any other Russia report. What we have is reports from former spies, intelligence officials, vague rumblings. These are our dominant fictions.

When I say “fiction”, I’m not referring to something that is untrue. Rather, I’m referring to something that takes on the form of a myth. Fiction can be the truest thing on the planet, and reality can be a lie. Which is what we believe this is: a lie somebody told us about the future, instead of the truth we believed where we’d have jet cars and meals you can grow with a drop of water.

However, true or not, I do have to point out it feels convenient to put the entirety of our current situation on these occurrences. It’s like a divorce between an acrimonious couple: there may be one event that’s the catalyst, but there have been pressures elsewhere. I have my suspicions about what’s spin, what isn’t, how much Russian action effected our election, what everyone knows and they don’t know. I’m don’t believe Eric Garland’s American exceptionalist views about how justified our actions in the Middle East were. It’s not out of the question that Trump paid for golden showers on the Obama’s prior beds.

What they are are good stories. The truth of a world where a serial rapist runs our nation is too bland, the truth of a world where there is no great objective to espionage but rather a collection varied parties grabbing for control of forces that they cannot too pessimistic. So we rely on amphetamine psychotic Tom Clancy novels and excerpts from Confidential.  

I am suspicious of is a fiction that overrides everything else, that defeats the boring fact that memos control nations.

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*extremely twitter voice* sooooo this happened

I’m in the Huffington Post. Somehow. Someway.

There’s not really a lot of guessing as to how this happened. I know how it did. It’s due to editor in chief of Quail Bell Christine Stoddard being a great steward for my work over the last three and a half years. 

But I’m still trying to piece together how in the hell I ended up in Huffington Post. I’ve only wrote creative nonfiction for 6 years. That’s not long, at all, and it’s only been an intense focus of mine for, you guessed it, three and a half years. And a lot of that is due to the freedom that Quail Bell gives me.

So this is a rambling but thanks, Christine. And thanks, Gretchen, who’s the managing editor currently.  

My roommate and I had a conversation one night, about how the difference between conservatives and liberals is conservatives believe in evil and liberals don’t. Which, dichotomous or not, is something I’ve felt for awhile. And as I’ve moved left, I’ve became more and more convinced of evil’s existence, not less. It’s just that it’s a lot more humdrum than it gets credit for. 

So that’s a corner of my belief. That evil exists. And it’s not just Donald Trump committing rape and admitting to it. It’s Billy Bush laughing at him. It’s anybody who broke character to finally talk about how sad they were that their editor was a creep. It’s complicit silence. This is very Batman to say but the banality of evil haunts me a lot.

And the place I’ve seen that happen the most is on the human, ground level, when you consider how a nucleus of people deal with knowing they’ve got a fox in the hen house, so to speak. And, in my experience, most people won’t even try to leave the hen house or peck him to death. 

That this essay, which, to me, comes to a particularly discomfiting conclusion about the interconnections of victims, predators, and collaborators, ended up in  a pamphlet that’s about self-care is ironic to me, but I guess knowing what your enemies think is a pretty important way to develop tactics. 

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I’m bored. ask me anything?

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THEY LIVE and Making Everything About Race

John Carpenter had to release a statement (read:a tweet) wherein he explained his film THEY LIVE isn’t about a Jewish control of the world, but rather, about “yuppies and unrestrained capitalism”. If you’re not familiar with THEY LIVE, let me give you a brief breakdown.

Rowdy Roddy Piper (they never give him a name in film and it’s more fun to imagine Rowdy Roddy Piper is just living his life fighting aliens) is a hobo who ends up in Los Angeles. Piper moves into a hooverville, and, through a series of events, ends up getting a pair of sunglasses that allow him to see the reality of the world: a black and white dystopia full of stark typefaces and weird skeleton monsters who control the world. They are the titular THEY. Things get complicated, Piper gets to spout a bunch of great one-liners, Keith David and him have a fist fight, etcetera.

The idea that there’s a secret network of control that pulls the strings and keeps things from ever approaching justice is common in fiction. Noir, science fiction, and cosmic horror have all drawn considerable blood out of that turnip.

It’s also been mined by nutbars. If it’s not the Jews, it’s the reptilians, if not the reptilians, it’s the Satanists behind pizzagate. So it makes sense that nutbars would glom onto THEY LIVE while operating under the assumption that the author shares their viewpoint. It’s their own real life head canon.

However, coming up with that head canon requires that they haven’t watched the movie with any sort of eye, because THEY LIVE has no discernable dog-whistles that even point towards Jewish control of the world.

Literally all the Jews of the anti-semite’s fiction and the ghouls of THEY have in common is they’re in control. Everything else is a hell of a leap. In fact, and, I will admit to watching this at 5am in the morning, but it’s pretty blatant that most of the ghouls choose to be white, and that the patchwork resistance includes two black men, one of whom is is blind.

Which could be the science textbook diversity we’re all used to (never mind that most hollywood movies don’t even pay heed to, but whatever), but I think if you’re going to make a movie about the secret control of the world by an ethnic group, a sort of Turner Diaries with wrasslers and gargoyles, it probably wouldn’t hurt to actually try. If John Carpenter is an anti-semite with a hard-on for science fiction allegory, his allegory blows. At least George Orwell gives you a pig skull.

So that leaves two possibilities, in my mind. Either cat avi nazis have only seen THEY LIVE through their mind’s theatre and produced a stupid movie because they’re dim bulbs. Or cat avi nazis have seen THEY LIVE, and they’re dim as hell and missed how the movie is about fascists being defeated by a working class coalition.

But that’s all circling around the main point: nobody is better at making things about race than a racist. Nobody. All shapes and sizes of racists. Skinny, fat. Dapper white nationalists, bowl headed dorks with uzis, suburban moms who are terrified their precious little ducklings will get chopped into hamburger by thugs who don’t wear belts, call center workers yelling about south asians, mediocre sketch comedians. To the racist, race is the answer, because without that division, they might have to contend with some tough facts: that people do have a tendency to act in self-interest, that the capacity for evil is in everybody, not because people are bad, but because evil is boring and evil is everywhere, and that there is no light brigade you get drafted into without having to do the necessary work of trying to fight against a series of animal instincts that society tries to do the work of ameliorating through things like healthcare and roads until they need you beastly.

There are racists who are racist for the sake of nastiness, without question. But plenty are trying to answer questions about the way society works and picking a retrograde, disgusting answer, one that’s been disproven up and down. What they want is an aleph.

That doesn’t make their answer a forgivable offense. In THEY LIVE, Rowdy Roddy Piper and Keith David show up to a secret gala at the end, one featuring unmasked ghouls and their human collaborators. One collaborator takes them aside and thanks them for coming to the gala and for finally selling out. When Piper and David storm the compound and get to the signal that puts everybody under the mind control the ghouls have set up, the collaborator gets shot. He doesn’t get saved because of his potential to get back on the right path. He traded his human potential to exist beyond boring evil to make sure trains ran on time. But in order to do that, you have to contend with our worst tendencies first and actually watch the damn movie.

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THE  SLOCE  YEAR PRIMER

I’m not going to talk about anything but the writing I did this year because it’s the only thing that went right, probably due to everything else going wrong. I wrote about 40 pieces I consider of note, minor or otherwise. That’s one every week and a half. Next year? I’m going for 52. A piece a week. 

Trust me, I have a lot to write about. Getting your work grossly misinterpreted. What it’s like to see your dad elected president. Mr. Banky. But not for now.

These are the 6 best pieces I’d send you to understand where I was this year. I’ll keep the editorializing to a minimum. One is another version of a creation myth. Two I’m selecting because I was surprisingly prescient about political events, though a lot of that has to do with cynicism and paying so much attention I develop a hernia. One is a piece of fiction. Two I wrote when things were good in a relationship. I haven’t wrote about when it went bad. Soon, though.

6) CHRISTOPHER 

I wrote about sharing my name with the greatest rapper of all time. 

I stepped out in the cold, my breath showing just like my apron was, underneath my jacket. A girl I wanted all the ways you can and her friend shouted my name. I almost skipped over. She turned on “Big Poppa” and told me to dance. You wouldn’t have danced either.

5) THE LOW MAN IN THE BLUE SUIT

Ted Cruz is a Low Man from the Dark Tower series. Also I called him licking Trump’s boots the minute he said “vote your conscience”. It wouldn’t surprise me for a second if there were a bunch of libs praising him. I knew immediately it was bullshit. 

If Donald Trump wins, Ted Cruz’s admonitions are useless and a last minute tilt at a windmill designed to preserve relevancy. If Trump loses, the Republican Party will go belly-up and Ted Cruz will run as the guy to bridge Trumpism and classic, old school, Reagan era conservatism in 2020. If the world stops tomorrow, he will still be a guy who was as hateful as Donald Trump without a clue on how to capitalize on it, and we believe at large our greatest national sin not to be racism, classism, or sexism, or dishonesty, or looking like a sausage tube filled with mashed potatoes, but to be incompetence.

4) THE MAN, MOURNED, WHO SOLD THE WORLD HE LOVED

I was in love when I wrote this and this is what I wrote to let the person know. She was a big David Bowie fan and I was a big fan of her. I only docked it a few spots because the relationship fell apart. Abusers don’t believe in history, just themselves. 

But through its adventure it never loses track or feeling. It will haunt me, the way Bryan Ferry and Scott Walker do, and my smug little “those with loaded guns, and those who dig” aphorism missed the point. We’re all Bowie people, we just might not have met the Bowie who slays us yet. The avant-garde was never about eradicating feeling. If music is the food of love, the avant-garde asks, what’s the building of love? Is it a Berlin wall? Are you crashing into it? It’s about taking tiger mountain in a quiet storm with weapons no one considered.

3) ROMANTIC SLOP: EVERY PIECE OF CANDY IN A WHITMAN’S SAMPLER, RANKED

I got scared when I fell in love because most of the writing I’ve done has came out of a sense of aloneness and displacement. Everybody talks about how comedians get less funny when they get happy. That’s bullshit. They get less funny when they get less critical. I think that’s why I started writing about politics and doing reviews. So I decided to eat a bunch of Valentine’s Candy. I regretted it. I docked this one for the same reason as number 4, though involving a different person. Honestly, 1-4 have all been my favorites at different times, and I think they’re all of equal quality. 

I can take or leave Valentine’s Day. It’s nice. It’s definitely a commercial product, as are many things I enjoy. I like google, the Precise V5 Rt ink pen, and dogs, which have been commercialized recently. But I’m not currently single,  so I’ve moved to a slightly more positive state of being on Valentine’s Day. What this probably means is I’ll snuggle up to my Chromebook, video chat with my paramour, and then, alone, sit on my mattress, listen to Roy Orbison, avoid the stinging pain of duende until my lady-friend moves to Richmond, Virginia by eating myself sick on chocolate in those little heart shaped boxes to avoid reflecting on the bitter irony of how who you want the most is in the place you want the least to be in and how much the candy on a holiday so built around it sucks total ass.

2) HOW DONALD TRUMP HAPPENED

Chapo Trap House convinced me, a guy who spends too much time online, I could write about politics. So did Donald Trump. So did Bernie Sanders. So did the horrendous state of the discourse. I didn’t see anybody write anything smart about Donald Trump and I refused to read anything until I was done with this piece, which originally was supposed to be an “Approaches to Donald Trump” style piece. Instead I dropped pretense and just went in. The penultimate paragraph is chilling to read now. Even me at my smartest couldn’t have predicted this. 

Which begs the question: why is everybody so surprised that a gritty reboot Richie Rich spouting racist opinions is a serious presidential candidate? Is it because he’s not a politician? Does anybody besides Aaron Sorkin’s deleted drafts taking corporeal form ever trust, let alone LIKE, even the nicest politicians? Trump’s proven that the wet napkins that populate 24 hour news are irrelevant Van Heusen mannequins who spend their 30 days of life reading Freakonomics. This, by the way, is not something anybody with half a brain needed proven, but their Dean Wormer monocle fogging apoplexy has proven that as much as they decry college students, nobody is more sensitive than a pundit, even though they’ve created the monster as much as anybody by covering the monster’s incessant droppings. At any point they could have dropped the ridiculous idea of “neutrality” and called it what it is, but they didn’t. Sometimes neutrality is just a reason to keep the news going.

1) THE HAIR SHOW

I write essays to remind you I write fiction. I’m probably better at essay writing right now but I’m still growing into the fiction writer I want to be. This is the closest I’ve gotten yet. My favorite professor compared it to Kafka. I’ll take it.

One night in a bar, Lucy saw a girl with a shaved head and expensive black platform heels and asked why. She gave her the number of Mr. Keefer, a day-time tax attorney. The shows weren’t illegal but not everybody did it, so they might as well have been.

Two hours later at lunch with Greta on the patio of the Belle Garden, over frittata and fruit salad, she decided to bring it up.

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I’m behind on this, I know, but I’ve developed a miniature obsession with Tim Allen’s grunting. I don’t know what they were trying to convey with this. I *wish* I knew. But now I like to imagine that he only conveys his dialogue in grunts and weird monkey noises.

It’s almost like the Sitcom dad laid bare, which, I have a thing I’m developing for the TV studio that is my brain. 

I always thought Home Improvement was trash even when I was a kid. Now I’m fascinated by this bit of errata. 

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A BRIEF ASIDE ON TRIGGER WARNINGS

Fair warning: this will include personal writer nonsense and I use something you will probably never see as an example.

I’ve had a screenplay kicking around on my hard drive that kicks off with a character confessing that he did something to a cat. Seeing as the tentative name of the project is CATKILLER, I suppose that’s warning enough: ostensibly when you read this or see it, it’s about a guy who kills a cat.

But I decided to insert a little trigger warning at the beginning, one I’d imagine would come up on a black screen with white typing.

Why?

I don’t know, probably the same reason Dairy Queen has that sign on their window that says, “Some of these products might be prepared with nuts.” If you have a nut allergy and you eat something prepared in the vicinity of nuts, it’s not going to go well for you.

We refuse to treat mental health like physical health, so the best I or anyone can do is provide a parallel, and that’s about the best I can do.

I also think it’s important that we don’t get the need for trigger warnings confused with censoring intense subjects, which, nobody I’ve heard say we need trigger warnings has ever wanted to do. I’ve had stories published with violence, ephebophilia, misogyny, bestiality, etcetera. I’m writing a screenplay about two people who team up to track down the person who killed the main character’s girlfriend’s cat. I’m still going to cook with nuts. I’m just going to let somebody know before they consume my food.

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THE DISCOURSE DEMIURGE DOES: THE WHITE ALBUM

Still a hell of an album, and less weighty, by far.

So, apropos of a forum discussion started by me realizing how funny and smart “Back in the USSR” is as a song, a discussion broke out in the comments: what’s a perfect The White Album look like? Because, seeing as the project is basically The Beatles showing they could do every popular music style on the planet with an anarchic, British comedy twist, there’s obviously some songs that land and others that don’t. I’m going to go through the entire album and decide what songs stay and what songs get axed.

Shout out to Zilla Rocca’s “Rework the Angles”, by the way,where he does the same thing with rap albums. Distressingly more Nas than anybody else.

Here we go.

BACK IN THE USSR: The central joke of this song is kind of genius: take one of the most American bands around, do a spot on parody of them (featuring a blistering guitar solo), and make it about banging Russians, which, considering that we were in the Cold War, is pretty un-American. Come and keep your comrade warm. Also, I think McCartney played nearly every instrument on this song. Paul was my least favorite Beatle for a while, but now he’s probably my second favorite. Dude was bad. VERDICT: STAY

DEAR PRUDENCE: Some of John’s most complicated, melancholy writing is on this album. “Dear Prudence” is very much in line with this mode, and also features some mantra style backing vocals, probably influenced by The Beatles stay in india. VERDICT: STAY

GLASS ONION: On the other hand, this is John in total smart-ass mode. Pretty amusing, and has that nice, creepy strings section at the end. VERDICT: STAY

OB-LA-DI, OB-LA-DA: This is what people who hate Paul think a typical Paul song sounds like. They’re not wrong, because it’s literal poison. Grating, vacuous, and honestly dumb. VERDICT: LEAVE

WILD HONEY PIE: This is actually the worst Beatles song ever recorded. They could be funny, but they’re not “listen to us boys sing badly funny.” VERDICT: LEAVE

THE CONTINUING ADVENTURES OF BUNGALOW BILL: Kinda cartoony, reminds me of the guy who kept trying to shoot the Pink Panther. It can stay, but barely, but only because the chorus is catchy. VERDICT: STAY

WHILE MY GUITAR GENTLY WEEPS: I’d be remiss to leave out that George is my favorite Beatle forever and he barely recorded a bad song with the Beatles, this one included. Side note: has there ever been a more frustrating musician than Clapton? He was never creative enough (unless he was smacked out and miserable) to be The Guy in a band, but he could have been as good of a number two as Jimmy Page, if only he didn’t decide he could record pablum and get praise for it. His guitar work on this song is heart-breaking, and, well, the guitar is crying. VERDICT: STAY

HAPPINESS IS A WARM GUN: Best John song, and probably the best Beatles performance as a band. The fact that they jump between so many styles and time signatures in one song is nuts. Also, who ever plays that sinister guitar after the first verse deserved a pay raise. But because it was George, I’ll settle for him getting another song on here. VERDICT: STAY

MARTHA MY DEAR: I hated this song forever but the bridge with the horn and guitar stabs rules. Even if it’s about a sheep-dog. VERDICT: STAY

I’M SO TIRED: Angry John meets lonely John, and there’s creepy mumbling at the end. VERDICT: STAY

BLACKBIRD: It’s a cliche but it was good enough to become one. VERDICT: STAY

PIGGIES: I generally dislike music hall beatles, and George wasn’t good at it, the way Paul was. VERDICT: LEAVE

ROCKY RACCOON: Amazing song, and Paul doing a parody of the John Wesley Harding stuff, or so it feels. But the story is still pretty poignant. VERDICT: STAY

DON’T PASS ME BY: It’s not awful but Ringo isn’t good enough of a singer to land a country song. VERDICT: LEAVE

WHY DON’T WE DO IT IN THE ROAD?: Sucks on ice. It’s filler to a T. VERDICT: LEAVE

I WILL: This song can’t be back to back with “Julia”, which is way and away the better song. VERDICT: LEAVE

JULIA: Oedipal John? This is what John’s mommy issues sound like before primal scream therapy. Heartbreaking stuff. VERDICT: STAY

BIRTHDAY: It sure is a song, with some nifty guitar. But pretty lame, overall. VERDICT: LEAVE

YER BLUES: The only version of this song that matters is on the Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus, with Clapton on the side. VERDICT: LEAVE

MOTHER NATURE’S SON: Nice little McCartney tune, but it would segue nicely from “Julia”. Nice little drone intro, too. VERDICT: STAY

EVERYBODY’S GOT SOMETHING TO HIDE (EXCEPT FOR ME AND MY MONKEY) Angry John, but real good. I have a pet theory this is a Stones parody. The guitar can be very Keith. VERDICT: STAY

SEXY SADIE: Misogyny aside, a John classic. Though John classic and misogyny are closer than we’d probably like to admit. He should have just taken the Maharishi’s head off for trying to creep on Mia Farrow, though John getting mad at a guy for being awful to women is pretty rich. VERDICT: STAY

HELTER SKELTER: Still a banger. VERDICT: STAY

LONG, LONG, LONG: George being all religious, but featuring some eerie feedback in the coda. VERDICT: STAY

REVOLUTION 1: I don’t even like the “good” version of this song. VERDICT: LEAVE

HONEY PIE: See prior comment about music hall Beatles. VERDICT: LEAVE

SAVOY TRUFFLE: George makes fun of Eric Clapton eating too much candy and tells Paul’s worst song to stuff it. My man. Killer solo, too. George had a fantastic tone all over this album, sort of like a very genteel bee getting very annoyed. VERDICT: STAY

CRY BABY CRY: John’s coda to the album, and a sort of psychedelic view of an upper class home. Seeing as many of the best songs on the album have a parodic dimension, it’s a nice penultimate song. VERDICT: STAY

REVOLUTION 9: Only of interest to stoned 8th graders. VERDICT: LEAVE

GOOD NIGHT: How else are you closing out this album? VERDICT: STAY

So that leaves us with:

USSR

PRUDENCE

GLASS ONION

BUNGALOW BILL

GENTLY WEEPS

HAPPINESS IS A WARM GUN

MARTHA MY DEAR

I’M SO TIRED

BLACKBIRD

ROCKY RACCOON

JULIA

MOTHER NATURE’S SON

ME AND MY MONKEY

SEXY SADIE

HELTER

LONG, LONG, LONG

SAVOY TRUFFLE

CRY BABY CRY

GOOD NIGHT

Still a hell of an album and less weighty by far. 

[discoursedemiurge]

How do you ever get smart enough to make it into academia? How do you do it, don’t start speaking in jargon, and retain a soul?

I’ve pretty simply made peace with the fact that I have a few things going against me. Number one is, that, what MFA programs seem to want is somebody who can analyze their work, put it in context, and crank it out. Maybe this is a misunderstanding. I literally have no idea why I write short fiction and plays and nonfiction instead of drinking a six pack a night. If it’s a reaction to any sort of trauma, which, I don’t particularly buy, why’d I pick a hobby? Liquor is quicker. 

Number two is, I read slow. Very slow.’I try to read several books at a time.

Three is mental health cares. Even working 20 some hours a week is mentally exhausting for me, and if it wasn’t for the fact that I feel like my need to produce is pathological, I probably wouldn’t. I’d take up the six pack. Probably is the reason I read slow, too. When I’m on my game, I’ll have three to four books at a time and read two of them. 

I haven’t been on my game since mid October. 

Four is I don’t view my short fiction as literary in a way that school can develop. I’ve became obsessed with the idea of “writing like a painting”. Which means: in a painting, there is the reality, and that is it. You paint a table, there is a table. Whereas in fiction, there’s also the reality of the text itself, which is how you get things like epistolary novels, metafiction, etc. All of which I enjoy on occasion, but it’s starkly not how I write. You can always learn more from reading, but I just know how I think and every class that literally isn’t a workshop I’d be screaming, what the hell does this have to do with fiction. I want to learn movement, scene, blocking. Not theory.

Five is the social aspect. I have no feelings about 60% of people, like 10%, love the other 10% and view the other 20% with somewhere between annoyance and disgust.  And I deeply despise the ingrained competitiveness of some writers. It’d be one thing if both were great oboe players, but why would a clarinetist consider a flautist his enemy? Why even waste that time. 

Six is the financial burden. In order to apply to grad schools, I’d have to save up for about a year, and I mean aggressive saving. That with the main goal. When I am able, and I haven’t been for awhile, I was saving around 20% of my paycheck just because. 

And seventh? I’m not even sure if I want to be an MFA student. I want to teach more than anything on the planet.I think I would be a great creative writing teacher. But I don’t know. I also wanted (not currently) to work for the secretary of the interior. Feelings change on a dime. 

[discoursedemiurge]

A Brief on Disengaging

I haven’t watched Tomi Lahren on Trevor Noah. I don’t plan on it. I’m not late to the game, and if I can say anything about myself to feel decent at all, I was taking Trump seriously long before Huffington Post and others started telling everyone, “This is no longer a JOKE.” I know what was said. I know the point. I know her theories.

The failure of the liberal fetish of education and information, the Voxian cult of graphics and data journalism, is that they’re ill-equipped to fight the war they’ve been drafted into, because the other side will can always fall back on that lovely shibboleth of “liberal media bias”. Climate change? Biased media. Flint? Biased media. Voter fraud? Biased media.  Dog pissing on the carpet? Etc.

The Breitbarts of the world care about narrative. They don’t care about facts. Conservatives see the world in a web of threats and encroachments. So it doesn’t matter that, say, Mexicans aren’t taking our jobs. What matters is the thought of invasion to the conservative.

(This isn’t to say liberals don’t care about narrative either, by the way, because they certainly do. How many comparisons did you see to The Avengers this election? It’s just less prominent)

Thus, it’s my belief the most effective weapon possible is disengaging. Even if the plays made by the Tomi Lahren are one, two yard gains, it gets them closer to field goals. So why play with them? We know they don’t care about the facts. How do you win a game of football against somebody who is running you over with a monster truck?

There’s plenty of points to argue without allowing them to advance the narrative. But what liberals think we’re in isn’t war, but a good natured debate against a bad-tempered foe, that, with enough rhetorical juice, can be vanquished back to his bog forever. The Firing Line model works in times of peace. That’s not what this is.

[discoursedemiurge]

5 Despots Who I Want to Sit On My Face

I’m broke. I just traded my cat for a can of raviolli. Chef Boyardee. My career counselor recommended that I focus on what I’m good at, but try to make it marketable.

If you keep up with the current white nationalist movement, you’ll see a trend, first noticed by me when I saw Mother Jones called a White Nationalist dapper.

I am a weak man. I’ve already sold my cat. What’s my soul? Allow me to be part of the movement to normalize fascism.

5 Despots I Want to Sit on My Face

Let’s be real, fascism is a :( but that doesn’t mean this bad movement doesn’t harbor some REAL baddies. There’s something about these bad boys of politics that really gets the juices flowing. Don’t you want a man who will take authority, put you in your place, and maybe cleanse your county of its problematic elements? Here’s 5 who I wouldn’t let a cigarette paper get between me and their hot bods.

FAROUK OF EGYPT

All those sweets must have paid off, because, damn, Farouk of Egypt, you are FINE. A bit of an obscure pick, Farouk is best known for his coin collection, fine tastes, telling Hitler an invasion would be welcome in his country, and really tall hat. But talk about lowkey thick. Like Nicki Minaj once rapped, you ain’t skipping no meals. And who doesn’t want a boy who’s a bit of nerd. If he’ll study coins, imagine what a night with you naked would be like.

IDI AMIN

A boy who’s really in touch with his feminine side (kilt), Idi Amin’s also got hollywood on his side, starring in both Last King of Scotland and Rise and Fall of Idi Amin. Talk about Rising and Falling. That’s what my heart is doing when I see this classically handsome rogue. Unsubstantiated rumors have him also being a cannibal. All I can wonder when I see that is, “What else can this boy eat?”

CHAIRMAN MAO

Mao wrote the little red book, but wouldn’t you want him in your black book? A boy with the soul of a poet, he might titillate you through dinner with his poetry, but a man with many lovers knows what else to do. Sure, he might not have bathed often, but sometimes that dirtiness extends elsewhere.

MUAMMAR GADDAFI

A boy’s who’s got it all. Fashion icon. Loves parades, football, and hats. You also have to respect his deep religious beliefs. You might say “Lockerbie”. I say “Picture on my Locker-Bae.”

FIDEL CASTRO

All I can say is, they didn’t nickname him “The Horse” for nothing.

[discoursedemiurge]

Threats I Have Sent to Conor Oberst

It’s been awhile since I’ve wrote on this blog. Sorry. I’ve been busy.

Anyway, here’s threats I’ve sent to boy wonder Conor Oberst.

“Yo, Oberst, I’m gonna sneak in through your back door and empty all the ice trays in your house, but it’s gonna be at night, and the cubes are all gonna melt, so you’re just gonna wake up to a general lack of ice in the neighborhood.”

“It’d be pretty bad if I posted fatheads of you in a maid outfit on the windows of every coffee shop you used to go to in Omaha.”

“Simon Joyner said he’s mad you bit his style.”

*that stupid noise Eminem makes on that one song*

“What’s good, bitchboy? Still angry over the bike of yours I stole? Oh wait--I just reminded myself, I’m gonna come steal your bike.”

“I’m gonna benchpress you in front of your girlfriend and whisper gently to you love is a lie. And I won’t break a sweat. No, what’s got my shirt wet is your tears .”

“One of your banjos is cursed. The other one will give you eternal life. But neither of them can tell the truth.”

“You ever seen Casino? That’s gonna happen.”

“What if...murder.”

“I reprogrammed all your drum machines to replace the snares with sheep screaming.”

“I got drunk with the Felice Brothers and we screamed how much we hated you in a seashell. We threw the seashell away.”

“I told everybody at this record shop Donald Trump was your ex-girlfriend.”

“Every sushi place is coming to your house. Right now. And you didn’t tip ANY OF THEM.”

“It’d be pretty awkward if you saw me eating soup at your favorite restaurant in a giant paper mache Winona Ryder head. You’d panic and lock yourself in the bathroom for hours with nothing but your thoughts.”

[discoursedemiurge]

Does love even exist anymore?

I’m more interested in hearing an argument as to why it doesn’t than I am hearing mine as to why it does because it seems pretty self evident as long as you can do something for somebody besides yourself it exists.

[discoursedemiurge]

Who's the most influential person or persons in your life, past and present, and why?

That's a great question and one I had to think about for a minute to really weigh how exactly influential counts. On one hand there's positive influence, on the other there's how someone influences you how NOT to do something. And there's also how influence is usually inextricably tied to artistry. This there's almost two different answers, with either one taking a greater precedence depending on whether whoever reads this identifies me more by my artistic endeavors or who i am as a person. So the simple question of influence turns out to be way more difficult than it would at a first glance. So as far as a personal positive influence my granddad wins. To do a quick rundown: he was a coal mine mechanic for a number of years who also is a state recognized artisan (he makes knives out of railroad knives and deer antlers) along with a Freemason. The implications stretch from my politics to my class consciousness to even my fascination with secret societies, which at this point I treat my fraternity membership like.On the flip side, as a person on an artistic tract, I started to develop something resembling an identity and concerns by dealing with the implications of my father's neglect, absence, then gradual abuse. The good news is that I've found a bunch of ways that those qualities of my father play out in everyday life. The idea of an absentee father has a pretty rich symbolic meaning. And also his failures have also created a pretty fertile soil for obsessions and curiosities to grow. Even if I think only a good 50% of my writing is about him, it's always there.

[discoursedemiurge]

The Cuttlefish Swims Forward

The Cuttlefish Swims Forward

“When the Tao is lost, there is goodness.

When goodness is lost, there is morality.

When morality is lost, there is ritual.

Ritual is the husk of true faith,

the beginning of chaos.”

In more predictable response than I’d like to admit to Trump’s infamous “Grab them by the pussy” remark, a nonprofit has been founded called Grab Her by the Brain, and will probably collapse just as soon as we forget a Presidential candidate who had been accused of sexual assault more than once was found on camera saying he could grab women by the pussy because he’s a star. You would like to think the bluenoses who set the rules for discourse would understand the horror of the statement had exactly nothing to do with the word pussy, but, as Amber A’Lee Frost has pointed out on multiple occasions, particularly in “The Necessity of Political Vulgarity”, there’s this liberal idea that “nice” is the same thing as good, so this is par for the course. Grabbing women by the brain is peak nice. In fact, there’s an entire movement of men believe themselves spurned because they believe women do not want to be grabbed by the brain. We call them nice guys. They consider themselves “gentlemen” and have read a couple of Drizzt Do’Urden novels and some blog posts and now howl at your door.

As plenty of people have pointed out the issue was never that Trump said ‘pussy’, but the ‘grab’. There’s always a degree of force to that word, and in the context of the statement, it’s that he can and they will let him.

What irks me about Grab Her by the Brain is its assumption that the vulgarity and pussy was the problem. It makes you wonder if Trump had said “cupped her essence” if anyone would have bothered establishing a nonprofit called Cup Her Morals and Shimmering Intellect. Probably not. If you say “deficit politics” is the reason for Libya needing to pay us back for the pleasure of bombing them instead of “seizing their materials”, you will truck with this idea.

To step to what is considered vulgarity for a moment as a way to illustrate this point, I’m going to point to one of the grossest lines on Kanye West’s latest The Life of Pablo: not the line about bleached assholes. But rather this line from “Wolves”: “I impregnate your mind, let's have a baby without fuckin'.” There’s a singular perversity to the idea of forced ideas or the intrusion of them, to the point that there’s a strain of fiction that focuses entirely on how scary it is to lose your personhood.

But what Grab Her by the Brain does also is reduce a woman to a brain just as Trump would reduce them to legs, ass, breasts, and pussy. People have to be taken as wholes, including their vulgarities. And while Grab Her by the Brain’s mission is good, the statement and title is the first thing I and others will hear.

So what we have is a nonprofit established in the moment that uses a phrase that’ll be largely forgot in our 24 hours new cycle that misunderstands Trump’s moral horror enough that they think ‘pussy’ is the problem. As the Tao Te Ching says, when the ritual becomes using the words and actions against a moral horror, we are operating on the husk of true faith and the beginning of chaos. But there is nothing wrong. Naitons can be robbed as long as it’s for their own protection. If you have to kill them, do it softly. If you must grab a woman, grab their brain. The Cuttlefish, George Orwell’s demon, who swims between the gaps of one real aims and the declared one, spurts ink and swims forward.