AfterPunk

A brand new promotion from R. F. Laird. We had that other one somewhere. 👍 We got enough for a whole box of wine. Cool. This one’s just as good. Dial your editor in. Zuckerberg don’t even know we’re here. The Reckless Twenties, A Dollar’s Worth of Poetry for Five Bucks.  The Lounge  Conversations, Gloves Off, the Zeezer Bible, all for $25.00 Follow the Instructs.

Always knew where I’d end up. On a grate in Philly. Alarmy? Hardly. Just don’t want her there with me. Just sitting here now. Been lashing myself and my wife for hours about ways and means of selling my writing. She has to take point on that charge because I’ve become a crippled recluse. How sad is that?  Hubris exposed, overturned, humiliated. I predicted explicitly, long ago but exactly, what would become of us if worse came to worst. It has. In this new administration, we will lose everything. House, cars, freedom, togetherness. We — I — never believed we could gracefully fade away but hoped nonetheless. Just found out last month’s electric bill was $1,900. Good God Almighty. They (meaning Pat and daughter Marge, not aliens) keep things from me. I’m the genius, you see. He mustn’t know. She’s mad for my lacerating her at not finding a literary agent when the prevalence of Smartphones means nobody answers the phone ever. I’m mad at her... because I think it means she doesn’t beli...

If you’re dyslexic, let me help. Spelled “Yardarm. ” It’s called the Pareto Principle. The 80-20 rule. Works differently by sex. 80 percent of women are decent, dutiful, and suitably dull. Dull. Oh so. The other 20 percent are sex workers. “Open wide, all night long.” Men are 80 percent dumb shits who think the Three Stooges are funny, 20 percent authors of everything great about civilization. Their 20 and our 20. Think about it. Well, let’s dig a little deeper. Of that 20 percent of men, most are losers. Say, 80 percent. The remaining 20 percent are the genius pool. Of which only 20 percent are responsible for everything great about Mankind. You do the math. It’s that first 20 percent (you know, the ones who knew the Stooges were never funny) that aspiring men cotton to in youth. We believe you could be great. Life is the process of discovering that you will never be great. Most of you, say 80 percent of the 20 percent, will be oafish sellouts to the first organization that asks for ...

  I find myself writing compulsively right now, these days. My wife asks why. I’ve already written it, she says, all of it. Now it’s just waiting for the final shoe to drop. But I can’t tear myself away. I’m staring into the abyss.  Written this already, narrated it in audio at Youtube, I really did stare into the abyss, physically, on board the ocean liner Leonardo Da Vinci in the fall of 1963. Crept away from the family group seated on the floor of the ship’s wrecked main lounge and made my way outside to the promenade deck as we listed oh so slowly toward another possible capsize moment. My hands on the glass as I looked below, where the trough was forming before the hundred foot waves behind. This was the hole that was waiting for the ship to fall into, a deepness we would not return from. The ship moved under me, behind me, pushing me at an ever greater angle into the vision of that hole, dark swirling water so far below, and I am staring almost vertically into it when th...

Flappers and Suffragettes of the 1920s. Never a time they didn’t want to be naked. Boobs, bush, and booty. All the weapons they ever needed. Brains not on the list.  Anybody out there thinking we got taken? Not all B-B-B’s are created equal? Meh. Simple. The death of the United States will be brought about by women. We gave them the vote. Very big, stupid fucking mistake. Probably a windfall for my most brilliant book, called " The Naked Woman ." Buy it on November 4th. They tried on the blue collar during WWI. Didn’t like it. Got the vote in 1920 and learned Democrats wanted  female input. With their help, moved from blue to pink collar and grew gradually more assertive in demanding a white collar. Which they secured in about 50 years. Pretty good going for a sex that hadn’t contributed much to science, engineering, or the arts for 5,000 years. Short apprenticeship. They’ll swear up and down the ride up the ladder didn’t involve boobs, bush, and booty. Okay. So now the blue...

An eminence grise named Thomas Sowell tells us there’s no such thing as systemic racism. He’s wrong. Let’s see. Today, Breitbart acknowledged Lewis Hamilton by griping about his Breonna Taylor Tee-shirt. (They’ve never noticed him before, greatest black living athlete that he is...) Limbaugh was eloquent about how many white Americans voted for Obama because they thought voting in a black President would put all the racial misery behind us. I said at the time it wouldn’t. Thing is, at a certain level, BLM is absolutely right. They’re just wrong about why and how it happened, and how to deal with it. Two things happened in the Sixties. Lyndon Johnson promised to fix it all with his Great Society. He bulldozed their neighborhoods, built faceless ghetto “projects” instead, paid women welfare based on the number of illegitimate kids they had, made abortion into a commodity akin to drive-thru liquor stores, and promoted the most damaging set of laws and conventions ever institu...

I’ve had this photo comparison in mind for two or three years, since I bought the Converse hightops my mother and dad said I couldn’t ever have when I was a kid, because what you have to have instead are tennis shoes, preferably Slazengers or Dunlops. Gorey’s artwork gave me permission. And, yeah, I always loved his Steampunk work. Before Steampunk was a word. They’ve been languishing, I admit. Didn’t want to wear them new; they’d look like I’d never had any. Fished them out from under the bureau last night. They’re not new any more, and neither am I. The comp above is me and Edward Gorey. Right away, I’ll say I have never posed as any other writer (though I’ve got a killer FSF sport coat I’ve never worn. A vanity buy. I’m too old to dress or pose like “This Side of Paradise.”) The mink coat was my mother’s, dead 15 years ago.  I’m not gay. Just the way things are. But I’m not too old to talk about how gays have done themselves no favors in the last 30 years...

As close as I can get to how they feel. Don’t want to know the intimacies. That was always my sticking point. Never wanted to imagine the acts. But in this clip you really can see the romance of the love, and you are simultaneously repelled and understanding of the yen if not the act. So. I was telling you earlier that I was president of a Harvard Final Club other clubs regarded as a repository of homosexuals. Out of 30 members we had two that I knew of, and I was close friends with one. He’s dead now, as is the other one, for reasons you can guess. The other one is where the story starts to get complicated, because he was a graduate of Middlesex, youngest member of the Grottlesex prep school league. My three year roommate, PE as I will call him, remarked one day, “You guys took in Philip Core.” “Yes, we did.” “Nice guy,” PE said. “A bit strange.” (Yes he was. Always dressed in black. His fashion inspiration was Edward Gorey, deliberately, unobtrusively provocative.) Wh...

I was always in love when she was singing.1972. In Cambridge there was a movie theater and bar called Casablanca. First place in town I ever got served alcohol outside the Phoenix. It was a place to go when you needed to get away. This song was always playing. Loved it. I saw Casablanca in the theater. Black-and-white is spectacular in wide screen. I saw Night of the Hunter there too. The cinematography is like 3-D. Charles Laughton was a genius. Saddest scene I’ve ever seen in the movies. Shirley underwater with her throat cut, all because she believed the preacher who told her she would be free if she joined him.  I wonder. I remember the gifted men who let me into their secret enclave, not for sex but for esthetic and intellectual pleasures mostly lost on others. Are they happy now? Every TV show on the air or cable now has its own troubled male romance. Tongue deep kisses. Waking up drunk and hungover like mortal people. Make them feel normal, accepted, free...