December Deliberations

My Kindle reader is an expensive graveyard of unread mediocre bestsellers with shrewdly intriguing opening lines.

My most-hated journalistic locution is currently “questions swirl,” along with its sister phrase “questions are swirling.” If you can’t be bothered to document why your readers should care about an issue, or to demonstrate that anyone else does, just begin by stating “Questions are swirling…” Questions are swirling over why I was charged for an iced tea when the lunch combo is supposed to include a medium drink. We hope to have answers soon…

Putin’s strategy for winning the war in Ukraine seems to rely on making every Ukrainian man, woman and little baby suffer as much as possible—those who are lucky enough not to die outright from a missile or drone attack. I don’t think it’s going to work. Or maybe it just makes him happy to inflict death and destruction on the helpless Ukrainian people from afar. Will he personally have to suffer any painful consequences of his evil behavior? That’s for the Russian people to determine. “Russia, if you’re listening…”

Do you think Putin is sleeping well at night? It would be interesting to know. I think if I were responsible for starting an unexpectedly problematic war, I’d be a little anxious. It gave Mussolini ulcers.

I kind of hope Trump follows through and runs for a second term. All those Republicans who didn’t overtly repudiate him and his four years of foul words and deeds now deserve him. No one stopped, say, Kevin McCarthy from doing the noble Liz Cheney thing.

I’ve made my peace with reading the paper in a browser. I’ve come to prefer reading books on my tablet. You know what I miss? Menus. Those sticky, laminated, hold ‘em in your hand, ketchup and grease stained, half the items scratched out and new ones written in by hand, menus. You can tell your app to go scan itself.

I’m at that uncomfortable age at which death, though to all appearances still off on a pleasantly vague and distant future date, would cause no great astonishment in the medical community were it to strike today. (If this blog ends in four pages filled with, say, the letter j, you’ll know I actually keeled over face down on the keyboard.) “He looked so good the last time I saw him,” I imagine my acquaintances saying. “What do you want to do for lunch?”

What this realization means to me is that, being so lucky thus far, I need to live life to the fullest, realize my full potential, experience as many adventures as I can in the time I have left. And to show karmic appreciation for the good health I have enjoyed so far, I must cut down on fat, salt, sugar, carbohydrates, cholesterol, and calories in general. And increase daily minutes of vigorous aerobic exercise.

All of which I fully intend to do, right after I take a nap.

(Made you look, didn’t I, you morbid rascal!)

On Cormac McCarthy’s The Passenger

In which we interview ourselves on one of the two new novels by the author of All the Pretty Horses.

Hey bud.

Hey yourself.

Aptly put. So how was it.

How was what.

The book.

What book.

The Passenger, one of the two ones just published by Cormac McCarthy. Thats what we’re doing here, right?

I thought we were here in order to live a good and meaningful life.

Christ its going to be a long day.

Just yankin your chain bud. The book. Well the good news is its better than ninety nine percent of the crap they got out on the New York Times bestseller list.

But.

But its got serious problems. Quite a few in fact.

For example.

For example threads.

Threads. Are you jerkin my chain again?

No I’m serious as a cockroach caught on the floor in the midst of an oversubscribed clogging contest. Too many threads that start up promising something and end up not going anywhere on their own nor tying into any others. Like the mysterious plane crash in the ocean with a missing passenger thread. Dramatic and perfectly rendered and it sets you up to think hey this is going to be a ripping yarn.

Like The Road.

Exactly. Or All the Pretty Horses. Then it pretty much gets dropped halfway through. Like the other threads. The schizophrenic girl math genius thread. The physics genius turned Vietnam maybe traumatized maybe not combat helicopter pilot turned deep sea salvage diver thread. The brother sister romance thread. The transsexual high dollar prostitute thread. The darkly hinted at possible super weapon development thread. The treasure buried in the foundation thread. The

OK I get it.

But thats not the main issue. The main is issue is too much McCarthy.

How can there be too much McCarthy. He is the author of the book if I am not terribly mistaken.

Indeed he is. And to read this book is to understand that he has lost any editorial restraints on his own tendencies not to mention his own artistic sense of proportion. He indulges his authorial peculiarities to an extent that distorts the novel beyond anything anyone might actually enjoy reading.

By anyone you mean you.

Oh you think youll like it, then go ahead and be my guest.

Fair enough. So what authorial peculiarities.

Like the nature of his dialogue. Pretty much all the male characters talk the same way. In the same casual unflappable tough guy jokingly insulting self deprecating way. Well OK maybe thats how a lot of working class guys talk. But then each and every one is given to long obtuse metaphysical ramblings which the reader cant understand but everyone in the book has no problem with. They all seem to be some kind of self taught hobo philosopher with an improbably arcane vocabulary. These rants were of modest proportions in like Blood Meridian and slogging through them was worth it in order to ultimately get back to the story. But here it just keeps going until the book runs out of pages and you’re left wondering just what in the hell it was all for.

Is that all.

If only it were bud. Also his love for technical detail overflows its banks. One of the aspects that made his earlier works so engaging. The unhurried exposition of ranching in All the Pretty Horses. The world-creation and improvised strategies for post-apocalyptic survival in The Road.

Loved it.

Me too. But here we are treated to long expositions on deep sea salvage diving, rifle design considerations, car-racing. Did you know there was such a thing as Formula 2?

I did not.

Neither did I but I do now.

Doesn’t sound so bad.

Maybe not if it all added up to something. Or if that is all there was to it. But there is more. Towards the end whatever is left of the story gives way to more long expositions on mathematics and quantum physics. Of which I can make out neither head nor tail.

Maybe that’s your problem.

Well if I wanted to understand advanced physics I would have gone to MIT and made a study of it. But I went to Chicago and studied literature. And this aint it.

In your opinion.

In my opinion. Maybe that should be the title of my blog. And there’s another thing. The darkly hinted at but never quite fleshed out deep state conspiracies. The IRS as a front for 24 7 surveillance of the entire citizenry with the absolute technical and legal ability to shut down any individual’s freedom at the drop of an unreported hat.

What do you care if he wants to make a story out of that?

It is of great concern to me that one of this country’s greatest novelists seems to be buying into the darkest deep-state paranoid fantasies.

You seem to have forgotten that we’re discussing a work of fiction here. Just because the author portrays the world this way doesn’t mean he actually believes thats how it is.

Sure bud.

So I guess youre not going to read Stella Maris?

I have decided the money would be more profitably spent on a sharp stick with which to poke my eye. But yet.

But yet what.

But yet there are some fine passages. Moving. Jewel like observations that stick in the mind.

For all his dedication there were times he thought the fine sweet edge of his grief was thinning. Each memory but a memory of the one before until…What? Host and sorrow to waste as one without distinction until the wretched coagulant is shoveled into the ground at last and the rain primes the stones for fresh tragedies. — McCarthy, Cormac. The Passenger (p. 257). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

On that note.

On that note, you all take it easy now.

An Open Letter to Vladimir Putin

Dear President Putin,

It must really suck to be you right now.

And this time a year ago things were so peachy!

The rubles were rolling in from all the oil and gas you and your obscenely rich buddies were digging out of the Russian soil. The pesky journalists and dissidents who wouldn’t play along with you were all safely in exile, prison, or the grave. The West wasn’t seriously challenging the reality of Russian ownership of the valuable territory you carved off of Ukraine in 2014. And the Russian people loved you (mostly)! And you had something so exciting to look forward to…seeing your massive, unstoppable Red—er, I mean Russian—Army smashing its way into Kiev. Ah, those were the days, weren’t they?

Why wouldn’t those pesky Ukrainians just follow the plan?

And now your magnificent military juggernaut, the terror of the free world, is in shambles and advancing in the wrong direction. Your only friends are creeps like Li’l Kim, and your reliable sycophant Donald is out of power. Your best and brightest are running away as fast as they can to internet cafes in Kazakhstan. Your buddies’ bank accounts and yachts are confiscated. Russian mothers are asking what happened to the sons they haven’t heard from lately—and you don’t want to mess with a Russian mother! Your erstwhile supporters are turning on you, demanding to know why you don’t just obliterate the Ukraine. Which you might still decide to do…but what will that get you, really?

Tough spot, huh? Boy, I’m glad I’m not you. Even with all the free caviar and big private office and stuff. There’s nothing like a failed war for undermining absolute authority. Just ask Mussolini…he had so much fun at first, invading Libya, invading Ethiopia, invading France, invading Greece, invading, invading. And look what happened to him! A couple of battles went the wrong way and everyone forgot about all the great stuff he did!

We don’t see a nice happy ending for you, but maybe you can avoid hanging by the heels from a gas-station carport. These are the steps.

First, get the hell out of Ukraine.

Second, let your world-class propaganda machine frame it as a victory. You’re really good at that kind of thing. Maybe spin it as a “We taught those Nazi-gay-Western-puppet Ukrainians a lesson they’ll never forget!” kind of thing.

Third, scrape together your remaining rubles and get a nice villa in Qatar or outside Pyongyang. List the owner as “Ferdinand McGillicutty.”

Fourth, fly out of Russia ASAP to “deliberate with key allies.” Take your figure-skating babe or your wife with you, we don’t recommend keeping both. You have enough problems already. Oh, and make sure your route out of town doesn’t cross Ukrainian airspace. They’re totally awesome now at knocking down your planes!

But before you leave, let Brittney Griner go. What did that poor girl ever do to you?

Best wishes (not really), Garden of Eaton

October Revolutions

(of the mental kind)

I read recently in The New York Times that former Dallas Cowboys running back and current Republican candidate for United States Senator from Georgia Herschel Walker, “after getting over the surprise about his [son Christian’s] sport of choice [as a competitive cheerleader], was supportive.”

Not sure why Walker père was “surprised.” After all, he is a former professional ballet dancer with the Fort Worth Ballet company, as you can easily verify via Google.

I lived in suburban Fort Worth at the time (late 1980’s), and I remember seeing a brief clip on the local news which showed Walker holding out his arms in the “holding a beach ball” pose and taking little steps on tippy toes.

Say what you will about his politics, intellect, or personal behavior. The man looks good in tights.

Currently high on my “heartily dislike” list: those gigantic plastic inflatable Halloween decorations. They don’t look creepy, just ugly. And they’ll look even uglier buried in a landfill for the next 10,000 years.

Ok, there’s a rhetorical problem with the previous sentence. You can’t see something if it’s buried in a landfill. Like Dracula, they’ll just be in a landfill, without decomposing, for the next 10,000 years. Now that’s creepy!

Atrocities happen in every war, but the sadism committed by Russian troops, in its degree and scale, astonishes me. I don’t completely understand it. I don’t think Russians are particularly bad people. Nor did I have a suspicion that there was a fundamental resentment among Russians towards Ukrainians. My best guess is that this sadism is the product of ignorance, propaganda, fear and alcohol. But even those factors aren’t enough to explain so many mass graves and torture chambers.

You’d think Putin would have a lot to gain by having his troops play the part of the benevolent liberators his propaganda machine makes them out to be. Instead they’re acting like Nazi invaders. And that’s something the Ukrainians know all about.

Of all the terrible effects of this war, one will be a long-lasting hatred of Russia and Russians by the Ukrainians.

It’s encouraging to see so many Russian millennials deciding to opt out of Putin’s dirty little war. But rather than protesting or burning their draft cards in public, it looks like they prefer to work from their laptops in a cozy little cafe in Kazakhstan. Whatever.

Many years ago, thanks to a wise college English professor whose name I cannot recall, I read Thomas Pynchon’s novel Gravity’s Rainbow. One of the theses of that novel is that wars between great powers are instigated by multinational corporations, as a means of snagging massive amounts of government funding for technological research projects. It’s one of those propositions that seems absurd at first, but as one sees more of how the world works, it starts to seem almost reasonable. For instance, every time Russia fires a missile that does or doesn’t get shot down by an American anti-missile missile, both sides learn something new about what works and what doesn’t, and I am positive that engineers on both sides are feverishly working on how to better kill people and blow things up in ways the other side can’t prevent. The Ukraine is a living (or dying) laboratory for military research, and Ukrainian people and Russian troops are paying the price as test subjects. Nonetheless I hope the West keeps supplying the Ukraine with all the weapons it needs to survive and win.

Bill McKibben has an article in a recent issue of the New York Review of Books entitled, “Where Will We Live?” He talks about the ongoing migration of animal species (those which are able) away from the equator and up to higher elevations, as the planet heats up. One of my many fears is that this planet of ours will end up being populated only by humans and the animals they raise to eat or keep them company, plus the ones that live on their leftovers. A planet with nothing but people, dogs, cats, pigs, chickens, cows, cockroaches and rats. And maybe tilapia. What a dull house to live in.

On the War in Ukraine

So yesterday I read an article in the New York Times calmly discussing the pros and cons of using tactical nuclear weapons.

Oh, I can think of a few cons. About 5 billion of them.

“Tactical” evidently means that a single device could wipe out a medium-sized village (or a battalion), but not an entire city.

Are we really acting out Dr. Strangelove, 60 years on?

The latest macabre parlor game is predicting whether Putin will deploy nuclear devices in a last-ditch attempt to reverse the course of his failing war.

I think he will. A better question would be, why wouldn’t he? Common sense? Basic human decency? Enlightened self-interest? It’s a losing bet to rely on these elements in a man who blithely kills off political opponents and critical journalists in order to preserve his own power. And we know that we’re dealing with a man who shows no compunctions about lobbing artillery shells at nuclear power plants.

And then what? Once Putin pulls that particular trigger, do we back off?

In such a horrible scenario, I for one wouldn’t hold it against Biden if, in the interest of saving thousands or millions of human lives, he then resists the urge to escalate, and even backs off giving Ukraine military aid, as distasteful and humiliating as such a decision would be. Does a grieving mother care what color flag flies over her city, or about abstractions such as “honor”?

But for me, the answer is that, even in this case, we Americans should keep helping Ukraine to fight back, and get more deeply involved, though conscious of the fact that we are approaching worldwide nuclear apocalypse.

Why should we help Ukraine to this existential degree? Certainly there are massive injustices the world over, which we are not opposing militarily. We’re not sending warships against Myanmar to protect the Rohingya. We’re not battling China over the heavily oppressed Uighurs. We’re allies of Israel, despite the appalling treatment of its Palestinian community. We’re not at war with Iran on behalf of women who want to show their faces (and hair) in public. We actually left Afghanistan (a decision I support), abandoning its citizens to the tender mercies of a medieval theocracy that, among other things, forbids music.

And the Taliban don’t have nukes. They’ve got some pickup trucks and a lot of assault rifles, and a bunch of preachers who take their orders directly from God. Kind of like your average Texas town.

So what makes Ukraine different?

Well for one thing, the Ukraine is a free, sovereign, democratic nation that was invaded by an authoritarian neighbor which attacked it without provocation.

And secondly, the Ukraine has amply demonstrated that it can and will fight back as long as it’s able.

And so for me, the question of how far we should go and how much we should risk to save Ukraine from Russia, is really the question of what kind of world we are willing to live in.

I hope we never have to find out whether Putin will use nuclear devices of any magnitude in order to win his squalid, horrifying, dirty little war. I hope he makes a personal calculation and sees that his skin is more likely to survive if he doesn’t. Or that the Russian military is frightened or appalled enough at the possibility of a needless nuclear exchange that it decides to take matters into its own hands. Or that Putin happens to walk under one of those legendary overgrown Russian icicles just when it detaches from a 10th-story balcony, and is replaced by someone smarter or less evil. But that is all wishful thinking.

And if none of those things happen, I still want to live on a planet where free people join the fight to keep each other free, even at the risk of having no planet at all.

Uncle Vlad Wants You

[SOMEWHERE IN MOSCOW]

YURI: Yevgeniy, old friend!

YEVGENIY: Yuri, old comrade!

YURI: Have you seen the news? Eastern Ukraine has been returned to Mother Russia’s benevolent bosom!

YEVGENIY: Through a free and fair referendum!

YURI: Yes, totally free and fair!

[AWKWARD SILENCE]

YEVGENIY: And now I cannot wait to go and join our brave Russian comrades in the Donbas and repel the Nazi-Satanist Western-puppet enemy forces, with my life if necessary!

YURI: Oh how I envy you, my dear Yevgeniy! How I dream of living in trenches, eating expired Soviet-era rations, shelling civilian convoys, adding to my collection of flat-screen televisions, and torturing anyone who says First Comrade Vladimir is a poopy head! But alas!

YEVGENIY: Alas?

YURI: Alas I cannot! I have been cursed with a bad liver that makes me medically unfit to serve!

YEVGENIY: Comrade Yuri, since when have you been cursed with a bad liver?

YURI: Since I bought a case of Stoli Premium!

YEVGENIY: Well, that would do it!

YURI: Especially if you tie a nice ribbon around it and give it to your family doctor along with the requisite medical exemption form that lacks only his signature!

YEVGENIY: What a cowardly defeatist thing to do! What is this doctor’s name and where is he located and what are his office hours?

YURI: That reminds me, Yevushka old buddy. On my way up to your apartment I found this in your mailbox!

YEVGENIY: What is it?

YURI: I don’t know, but it’s from…The People’s Glorious Defense Forces Military Recruitment Center #8475! Here, open it yourself Yevgeniy! Yevgeniy? Now where has that boychik run off to?

Golden Tweets of the Ages

Many of you have been expressing fear that, with the dominance of instant electronic communication, the age of literacy–of poetry and novels and rhetorical eloquence–is coming to a tragic end. We have good news. Our Alternate Universe correspondent has found a world identical to ours, except for the fact that its inhabitants invented the Internet more than 2000 years before we did. As you can see, the events of this world, and its literary legacy, have not suffered at all from the absence of long-form expression….

Julius Caesar, Tweet to Roman Senate after conquering Persia (46 B.C.)

I CAME I SAW I CONCORD

Jesus Christ, SMS to the apostle Peter (early 1st century A.D.)

Dude U R such a hard a@@ Ima build my church on it rofl!!

Dante Alighieri, opening Tweet of serial poem Inferno (1300)

Totally lost n the 4est! Google Maps suks!!

Alexis de Tocqueville, YELP review of America (1835)

OK the democracy part is pretty awesome but I have to take off a star for the food. They put ketchup on everything! Um…why?

Abraham Lincoln, The Gettysburg Tweet (1863)

AWESOME JOB GUYS!! Guys?

Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s inaugural Tweet (1933)

U got nothin 2 fear BUT fear lol!

Dr. Martin Luther King, YELP review of the Birmingham city jail (1963)

My friends & I were looking for a place to hang out until arraignment and saw this place, it had a small-town retro vibe plus someone told us it’s where the locals go so we decided to give it a try. MISTAKE!!  The cell was FILTHY and all they had on the menu was the cold baloney sandwich and skim milk combo. Really?! The staff acted like total fascists! Never coming back!!

President Lyndon Johnson’s announcement on Twitter re: 1968 re-election bid

LBJ OUT

More Real Conspiracies Revealed!

The truth is out there…and we found it for you!

The 2020 U.S. presidential “election” was in reality a widespread conspiracy by over 80 million registered American voters to make sure a dangerous, selfish, psychopathological doo-doo head didn’t remain in the office once held by Lincoln and Obama.

The “inflation reduction act” has little to do with reducing inflation and is actually an insidious conspiracy by the Democratic members of Congress to stop the planet from burning up.

The new law allowing over-the-counter sales of hearing aids is part of an elaborate scheme by lazy do-nothing seniors to get high on cheap affordable ‘sound’.

The so-called January 6 “conspiracy” to prevent the peaceful transition of power and destroy democracy in America was pretty much a conspiracy to do just that, yeah.

The FBI raid on Mar-A-Lago was part of a deep-state conspiracy to recover stolen top-secret nuclear protocols and the Reagan china.

No, Not Really

No, I don’t want to add avocado for just two dollars more
No, I don’t want to add bacon for just two dollars more
No, I don’t want to choose a protein
No, I don’t want to add an extra shot of espresso for a dollar
No, I don’t want to add a shot of syrup for fifty cents
No, I don’t want the cheese-stuffed crust
No, I don’t want to boost my download speed for ten more dollars a month
No, I don’t want my identity protected for ten more dollars a month
No, I don’t want to go ad-free for ten more dollars a month
No, I don’t want to make it a meal for a dollar-fifty more
No, I don’t want to make it a large for a dollar-fifty more
No, I don’t want the extended warranty in case something breaks
No, I don’t want the clear-coat protection
No, I don’t want two more inches of leg room for a hundred dollars
No, I don’t want priority boarding for a hundred dollars
No, I don’t want free cancellation for ten dollars more
No, I don’t want to upgrade to platinum for ten dollars more
No, I don’t want it delivered today for ten dollars more
No, I don’t want the covered parking for ten more dollars a day
No, I don’t want the close-in parking for twelve more dollars a day
No, I don’t want to contribute a dollar for kids in need
No, I don’t want to add avocado for just two dollars more
Would you please just let me have it please?

Your 24-Hour ExactoWeather Forecast

From the KGOE weather tracking center deep in the heart of Texas…

6:00 a.m. Pleasantly warm. And suffocatingly humid.

7:00 a.m. Is that the sun coming up? Oh god, not again.

8:00 a.m. About what you’d expect. If it were noon already.

9:00 a.m. Can I just have iced tea for breakfast?

10:00 a.m. Have you read Dante’s Inferno? Yeah, like that.

11:00 a.m. The CIA sanctions waterboarding, but not leaving prisoners outside in this weather. That would be ‘torture.’

12:00 p.m. Unless you parked in the shade, I wouldn’t recommend getting into your car right now. Maybe in November.

1:00 p.m. Hotter than hot. Thermorrific.

2:00 p.m. Do you remember what it was like at this time of day back in February? Nice, right?

3:00 p.m. Stay inside and away from windows. That glass is hot.

4:00 p.m. A perfect time to take your dog for a walk. If you hate your dog.

5:00 p.m. Hotter than a Scotch Bonnet dipped in Tabasco and stuffed inside a jalapeño with the seeds left in.

6:00 p.m. Let’s get that watermelon out of the fridge, split it open and stick our face in it

7:00 p.m. Still let’s-give-up-and-move-to-Fairbanks hot. It still gets cold sometimes in Fairbanks, right?

8:00 p.m. Don’t assume that just because it’s getting dark it won’t stay hot.

9:00 p.m. Still hot.

10:00 p.m. ibid.

11:00 p.m. See “10:00 p.m.”

12:00 a.m. We’re down to 98 so quit complaining.

1:00 a.m. Back up to 100

2:00 a.m. Il fait très chaud!

3:00 a.m. es ist verdammt heiß!

4:00 a.m. 非常熱的天氣!

5:00 a.m. not too bad I guess

6:00 a.m. If heaven has central air, just take me now

The Groans of August

How hot is it in Texas this summer?

It’s so hot in Texas that Governor Abbott has declared hell a designated cooling center.


It’s so hot in Texas you can’t even spit on the ground. The spit doesn’t make it that far.


It’s so hot in Texas that the eggs frying on the sidewalk just get burned.


It’s so hot in Texas that Oklahoma’s tuchus is suffering third-degree burns.


It’s so hot in Texas that Matthew McConaughey is breaking a sweat.


It’s so hot in Texas that the corn is popping in the field. Now if it would just rain butter and salt.


It’s so hot in Texas that you can just eat smoked brisket right off the cow.


It’s so hot in Texas that Sno-Cones are being rebranded as Puddle in a Cup.


It’s so hot in Texas that a Republican in Plano thinks global warming might be a thing.


It’s so hot in Texas that we’re changing the name of this blog to The Garden of Heatin’. Bada bing!

Ode to the Summer of ’22

Well there’s a high pressure dome over Texas

And it ain’t no pleasure dome, here in Texas

You can shoot me if I’m lyin, there’s advantages in dyin

Cause it’s cold in hell compared to here in Texas.

Why why oh why am I living in this state

When all there is to do is watch my trees exfoliate?

There’s a high pressure dome here in Texas

Step outside, it’ll kick you in the plexus

And the rivers are all dried up and we’re feeling like we’re fried up

By this high pressure dome over Texas

There’s a high pressure dome over Texas

And it’s burning up my home here in Texas

Now don’t blame global warmin, it’s that goddamned dome that’s formin

High above, says the weather man in Texas.

Why why oh why am I living in this state

Hello, dear Antarctica!  Can I expatriate?

Well there’s a high pressure dome over Texas

And it ain’t no pleasure dome, here in Texas

You can shoot me if I’m lyin, there’s advantages in dyin

Cause it’s cold in hell compared to here in Texas.