AfterPunk

People over the years ask me about my influences as a writer. I’ve never been sure it would do much good to list them or discuss them in detail, because the people who are asking would probably go to sleep somewhere in the middle. So I’m going to show them to you, and you can get back to me with any more in-depth questions you have. The Top Dogs The Pack The Dispersers Barth Beckett Brontë Mailer Miller Mitchell Ginsberg Heller Pynchon Steinbeck Thompson Updike I have other lists, but these should more than hold you till after I’m gone.

Been there, done that. Maybe I’m done with that.

Place I saw a lot growing up. Outside of all-white  Greenwich. Place called Springtown. Always broke  my heart. Not covered here. Maybe some other time. Didn’t think I needed to do that. She just told me I don’t like people. Maybe she got it from her daughter who lives here rent free and recently told me I’m “a horrible human being.” I made the mistake of telling my wife I don’t like people anymore, which I don’t. I meant that as a change of state. But she corrected me. “You don’t like people period. Never have. You just lecture them. You don’t like Jews, for example.” She could have added black people, which she thinks I also don’t like, because she believes I’m a WASP racist. Because she’s an Irish Catholic who has never had much contact with Jews, black people, etc, and the Irish are famously tolerant of everyone of every Irish Catholic vicissitude. She backed off after a while, blaming her grumpiness on body pain. The truth does out. It is what she thinks. Not going to ju...

  I don’t mean this to sound unkind. What they have going for them is what they’ve always had going for them in every line of work. Breasts, hair, and eyes. I guess, also legs. Surely I don’t need to explain. I wish I cared a little bit. I don’t. Rachel Maddow wouldn’t last a round with me in a fair debate. I might get distracted some in a go-round with Megyn Kelly. But she’s not Edmund Burke. I’m more Ambrose Bierce, which is kind of deadlier than Burke.  I don’t mind them taking over the airwaves. God knows the men are every bit as dumb and ditzy. What I do mind is their voices. Little girl voices, like we shouldn’t notice they’re just playing at being grownups. Way back when women were actually trying to compete, not just win some ratings contest, there were women who learned how to speak. Easy to fall in love with them it was. Nancy Dickerson Smart, beautiful, and competent. Back when the patriarchy gave women no chance. Note that the interviewer was actually interested in...

  She loves you, so much, heartbreakingly  so,  even though  she’s incapable  of saying the words… She just wants you to die.

  Me, drunk in 2023. Unretouched. As a graphic artist of some dexterity, I can make myself look how I want to a very large extent. I can look younger, older, handsomer, more sinister, etc, with a couple of filters. I even smile in some of my selfies. Yes, I take a lot of pictures of myself. I am the main character of my story, like all writers, and to the extent possible in my later years I have documented the process of becoming older after having started my life seemingly much younger than everyone around me. There are very few pictures of the youthful me. There were no cellphones in the days of my infancy. We had to be posed in the studio of a photog called Uncle Phooey, who created the one baby picture my parents chose to frame and feature on family photo displays. I was a fat baby and the selected pic showed a clear stain of overflow vomit on my onesie. But I was smiling. Beyond that there were a few snaps of me in my school uniform or in the company of cousins and grandparent...

Does it ever get personal? Sometimes. I remember when Ben Shapiro was enjoying a burst of publicity by joining the National Review Never-Trumpers as if he was defending the Holy Grail of real conservatism. What a crock. He thought he’d found the launching pad for a kind of media stardom that transcended party lines. Thought he was going to become David Brinkley or at least William F. Buckley, Jr., Junior. At the time I expressed a desire to debate him, and one of my few Facebook commenters opined that Shapiro would kill me in a debate. “No,” I said. “Fact. I would tear him apart in ten minutes.” The commenter didn’t attempt a subsequent sally. He’s always been a phony. His career subsequent to his spectacular failure to take down Trump proves it. From Wikipedia: He’s supposed to be wunderkind, a kind of intellectual prodigy we should immediately bow down to. I’m the last person to peddle that shibboleth to. I was wunderkind myself. Shapiro graduated from UCLA at the age of 20. Wow. I...

 Patrick Prentice (1943 to 2017) His IMDB entry. Ebullient, brilliant, dying giant who befriended me and  became  my  closest ever confidant, even though I never laid eyes on him .  I have a photo I can’t find right now of Patrick posing with his son in front of a bookshelf crowned with his three Emmies and featuring half a dozen of my books. The pic above is from IMDB.com, which listed his many video productions for the National Geographic. He had traveled the world more than I ever did, he’d thought about a ton of the same things I did, he was ten years my elder, and we came to love each other. When we first spoke he was dying of prostate cancer… [Bear with me here. Blogger or the Internet or Something doesn’t want this post. Two whole sentences just disappeared. I’ll try to recapitulate them.] … but he was still living large, spending long weekends with women he only winked over the phone about because gentlemen never tell. He was also drinking, as he knew I...

They’re just screwing with us now. Breitbart is just a bunch of weed-smoking cynics. Breitbart again. What a grotesque onslaught. It’s called sexual extortion, people, actively pursued by corporate cultural cannibals, corporate media, and clueless patsies like Breitbart. First they bombard us with advertising of women’s products designed to put a spotlight on everything that can go wrong with women’s bodies (actually, EVERYTHING is the mot juste),  so we have to watch them pooping constipatedly at every streaming break, gratefully peeing their Depends, sweating like pigs through menopause — which seems like a relief after the battery of products, shown in engineering detail, required to manage oceans of menstrual flow mechanically and pharmacologically — and battling every kind of ailment from depression to ‘Irritable Bowel Syndrome’ to “awkward” breastage holsterifications (“Call us at 1-800-SAG-TITS”) to cancer cancer cancer drugs to recurrent COVID infections with prescription m...

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