AfterPunk

  The Making of a Harvard Education What does all this add up to? Harvard is a part of my identity, but Harvard did not define me. It was rather a necessary experience for my development as a person and a writer. It was just something that had to be for some reason, for both good and ill. I might have been what the world calls happier if I had gone somewhere, anywhere, else. But I would have missed out on an opportunity that simply isn’t available anywhere else. I acquired much of my education there. Eminent professors like Edwin Reischauer, Benjamin Schwartz, Walter Jackson Bate, Mason Hammond and Wendell Clausen, Alfred North, and an inspired set of distribution requirements that enabled me to be an English major while taking courses in Chinese, Japanese, Roman, and German history, Einsteinian physics, Latin poetry and drama (in Latin), art history in overview and in closeup, as well as an extraordinarily comprehensive tutelage in the entire history of English literature (I.e., “...

  Well well well. Someone sent me this. I would swear on a stack of bibles I had nothing to do with dreaming up this sign. Though I did include it in a blatantly self-serving product placement in a cheap ploy (un)worthy of Madison Avenue. It’s not like I’m a stranger to advertising. I’ve written my fair share back in the day. In fact, as even wrote multiple tasteful ads for a New England casket company. Not this kind of mirthful grave goods, however. I don’t do advertising at all these days, not because I disapprove, but because I can’t afford Google prices any more than I can trust their business ethics… and so it goes.

  Coming to the end of another college football season with The OSU Buckeyes contending again for the playoffs while many teams are unexpectedly stumbling in the wake of the recent rule-free “GO Fish” approach to player recruiting/hijacking. Why I don’t much care about who gets the big trophy. Nobody knows who’s going to win or lose. Except maybe not me. I didn’t watch the Harvard-Yale game because I don’t care who wins the Wokest Ivy F___ball Championship anymore, and Harvard proceeded to lose, at home, and I don’t care. What do I care about? Millville High School In neighboring Cumberland County. I’ll explain why so you believe it.  I actually lived in Millville for more than a year when I was driving a truck for a lumber yard and eating the best cheese steaks in the known universe, courtesy of Shannon’s sub shop, where the ladies behind the counter were magnificently large and generous with their steaks.  Millville is also a point of personal connection. Its modest air...

Me without Sidney Yes, he stole our hearts. We’re not new to the terrier rescue program. Before Sidney, two Scotties. Muffy and Buster. Both old, in their teens, and both died about two years after they came to live out their days with us. They were Scotties, old terriers with the remoteness that seems to steal over them all over the years, kind of like me. We loved them and they kind of loved us, Buster especially, and then they expired.  The two year thing weighed on us. We’d given up on rescuing greyhounds after seven gorgeous couch potatoes. They are too big for us now. Both of us are not exactly frail, but when they start to fail, as they do, we are not strong enough to cope. But our greyhounds, with one exception, lived with us for a lot more than two years. So when we saw a rescue cairn, who was billed as 6 to 8+ years old, we jumped at the chance. We can have him for more than two years! He had beautiful, incredibly white teeth, something we’d never seen in our greyhounds. ...

That’s not me, except for the body type. I do have a chef’s jacket (a gift).  But  it’s  not me because I don’t wear my expensive wristwatch anymore either. Never thought I’d be doing this. Yeah, I cook. Not like Gordon Ramsey or those other psychopath chefs. I cook, or used to, in order to feed women I love. Not going to get into the nitty gritty. You just have to assume I can deliver the goods, the meals people enjoy. The proof is they ask for them again.  Scrambled eggs and omelets (the bacon part is understood) All right. Some nitty gritty. No, you don’t just fling eggs (shells a’crackin’) into a skillet on high heat and push them around for a minute or two, with a ketchup bottle at the ready. Here’s what you do. Cook the bacon first. Medium high heat. Half a one pound package. Fork in hand, you start turning as soon as the sizzling begins. Only half needs to be overdone for your wife’s sake. This is 100 percent attention time. As soon as they’ve been turned onc...

 He’s a great rock guitarist and a good Internet friend. I thank him for this…

 This from an exhaustive description of how the newly (self) anointed Party-in-Charge works… The Uni-Party is a mega-monolith. The graphic above is only part of the ruling class we have abdicated our liberties to. There is an umbrella organization of sorts… It looks all modern and ‘progressive,’ but it isn’t. Its motivating principles  ambitions have been with us for a long time and persist, virtually unchanged, to this day. Historically, it’s known as the Democrat Party. Its purpose has always been to keep the Brahmins and planters in charge. It IS the dark part of us. Why Lincoln was necessary. To save the Union and fulfill the promise of the Constitution. They have extremely powerful connections and allies now, thanks to decades of pretending to care about the little people they merely want to control like so many serfs and chattels. Their current weaponry includes… And all this too. They’re the ones in charge, and they will do anything to remain so. Why the first graphic a...

  Joe doesn’t want this. Most of us do.

Yeah. That blonde angel in “High Society. My, she was yar.”  No. Sorry. We don’t even know what ‘yar’ means anymore. Overcoming SW deficits: Sweet Black Angel and Moby’s Extreme Ways . Like being back in Haight-Ashbury and the 1968 Dem Convention all over again…