I Am Not Silent.

 

 

As our masthead says in a quote from William Lloyd Garrison's first issue of The Liberator, "I do not wish to think, or speak, or write, with moderation. . . . I am in earnest -- I will not equivocate -- I will not excuse -- I will not retreat a single inch -- AND I WILL BE HEARD."

The bad news is I'm in the dawg house over at facebook again for violating their so called community standards . 

So what's this big offense? I said this a year ago.

"You will note on his right arm his Gerard-Perrigaux gold watch my mother gave him in 1941 suitably engraved. which mysteriously disappeared thanks to those fucking russians..."

Well, it's true. Someone has the watch and it sure isn't me. It was worth a lot of money then and it is worth a lot of money now.

If you're reading this and you have this watch engraved RTL 1941 on the back, know that it was looted from  my father's estate in 2001 by someone in the family of his second wife.

When I look them up on the internet and I see all the self laudatory crap I think, "Yeah. And you stole a dead man's watch."

I did receive his replacement class ring from MIT a few years ago probably because it was all too traceable if it had been hocked in some crappy pawnshop. 

It was only twelve years late.

Apparently truth doesn't matter to the people over at Facebook when it comes to appeasing the Russians. 

And for their part the russians are in the habit as we have seen lately of just taking what they want and smashing it to bits if the proprietors hold up their hands and say "Hey. Wait a minute, Vlad."

Here's the picture and the proof.

To paraphrase Joseph Wambaugh, "And the sleaze will tell."

 

Putin's War

Here's our mascot that we've used regularly since this blog started back in 2006.  The kid is pissed off. Can you blame him?

I cannot believe this has been going on for what? Fourteen years of Fun, Travel and Adventure.

But today is a grim one.

First, people are going to die. That's a given.

Second, as far as the moral outrage thing goes, being an American  I recollect Viet Nam, Iraq 1 and 2, Afghanistan, Grenada and Panama. 

Seems like we've got our own bloodstains to deal with.

But there's always the question  the boys ask.

"What the hell was it for? Why did my friends die?"

I don't have answers. 

When Jake asked me this a while back I mulled it over for a few hours and all I could think of was that it-Afghanistan in his case-it happened because of bad policy choices made years earlier in places like Washington and Beijing and Moscow and Berlin and London and Paris by people who are never made accountable, and the 'knock on' effects as the Brits like to call them. 

They're more like waves in the ocean that may travel thousands of miles before they bury some village somewhere.

What's clear to me today is that Ukrainians will die, but in this war they will be held blameless for defending themselves. Russian GIs will die, and that country will suffer hard times and their leaders will have to answer to another generation of disaffected soldiers asking 

"What the hell was this for, and why did my friends have to die?"

The Strange Case of Anna Diplosis And The Frotteur

 

 

 

How on earth did I, a 73 year old rookie scribbler, stumble-trip and fall, over the term "anadiplosis"?

I knew her in high school? Her father rand a diner in Jersey?

The real story is that I was looking on Coursera for some creative writing classes I could audit for free and there was one from the University of Michigan, very high brow, very chi chi, and they said they used anadiplosis in their teaching of character. 

I figured that anyone throwing around five dollar words that were even not in my Webster's New Lexicon Encyclopedic Dictionary of the English Language was some PhD literature perpetual candidate-always called, seldom chosen-getting their intellectual rocks off on strangers like a frotteur in the subway.

Slouching Towards Kabul

 

Slouching Towards Kabul: Echoes of Saigon.

I had a long talk with my lad yesterday-well, I always think of him as a lad although he's on the dark side of fifty. He's also a retired military combat medic, veteran of two tours in Assghanistan and he wonders as do (I think) all veterans and many Americans:

 

"What the fuck was it for? Why did our friends die? Will anyone remember the Afghan kids we patched up who picked up unexploded Russ ordnance disguised as toys and pens? Will anyone remember the Afghan cop who forgot himself and rumbled back like a man to the talib, and whose brother was kidnaped and had his head mounted on a pike for the Americans to see?"

 

For those of us drifting into old age I had an awful twinge as I recalled the photo of people on the roof of the embassy in Saigon trying to get aboard the last Huey. The veterans of that war asked the same question: "What was it for? Why did our friends die?" but they came back to an America so culturally adrift and doped up that they shamed those who wore the uniform. And as it turned out their righteous anger was turned to political advantage and directed, not against the generals and the politicians, those who sent the boys there, but against those who marched in the streets against the war in the first place.

 

And yet, as this was all taking place, pop culture wallowed in prurient tropes of GI Joe toys and Rambo flicks, making the vets out to be homicidal crazies running amok in a thousand nameless jungles, wasting gooks and going psycho with belt fed M60s fired from the hip.

 

In reality those veterans were just like you and me except they were people who were tasked with a lousy job for reasons nobody now believes were worthwhile, and they did it as well as they could, each according to their lights.

 

Shameful, awful times.

 

It was reminiscent of Kipling's "Tommy Atkins" where he illustrated that it was "thank you Mister Atkins when the troopship's on the tide" but the soldier couldn't even buy a beer in uniform.

 

So, as we chatted I thought about all this.

 

Uncle Sam is cutting and running. He's skipping town in the night with his carpet bag. He left a trillion dollars in blood and treasure poured out among the rocks and stones of that unforgiving place.

At one and the same time as we struggle to craft a bill to rebuild our rusting bridges and shattered highways, and we're faced with the consequences of a fifty year policy of deindustralization that has left large swathes of America penniless and crime ridden, I am quite sure that there are people in those places who are asking "Why did you do this when the need was in Detroit? Cleveland? Pittsburgh? Buffalo? Akron? Eastern Kentucky? Southwestern Virginia?"

 

Back in the early seventies I was working in an auto parts store and I met a man who said "In a future time we won't make anything we won't build anything, we won't fix anything. All we'll do is sell insurance to each other." I laughed at the time but he was quite right.

 

The problem with people who can see the future is that the rest of us cannot.

 

See, I think the two things are related and I believe firmly that the two worst policy mistakes of the 20th century-legitimating the brutal and racist kleptocracy that is China and selling out industrialized America for the crack of Milton Friedman style "free trade", Nafta style-are in some measure responsible for the hog manure pit we find ourselves wallowing in today

.

I think that the issue at its root is policy-bad policy made in Washington and in Moscow and Ottawa, in London and Paris and Kiev and Beijing and in Tokyo and in New Delhi and in Islamabad and in Istanbul, in Tel Aviv and Cairo and Algiers and Teheran and Pyongyang and Damascus and in every other damned capital in the known world, made by people who either can't see the ten-twenty-thirty year consequences of their bad decisions or don't give, as my brother in law used to say, a flying fuck on a rolling doughnut for the consequences.

 

The Vietnam veterans knew this. But as they have aged out and died off the lessons were forgotten in everyone's rush to be dot com billionaires Jeff Bezos style and devil take the hindmost.

 

As Gordon Gecko said "Greed is good." But that's short term. 

 

Crack is good too. But it has consequences 

 

And here we are. As Yogi Berra called it, 'deja vu all over again'.

 

I can only hope that the veterans take this to heart and realize that America is a work in progress, and that their experiences and loss translate into saner and better policy for the people who aren't even born yet.

Or else we'll get to do it all again thirty years from now.

Latest From The Poopoo Papers.

 W're reliably informed by the fine folks at Current Biology that, having plowed through a pile of 230 million year old dinosaur crap they have discovered a new species of beetle which, thankfully, is not alive.

Mr. Martin Fikacek, a major entomologist at National Sun-yat Sen University in Taiwan, ROC, made the discovery and he thinks it's a big deal. He opines it was a snack for whatever shat it out.

I mean, what could be more important than digging through piles of fossilized dinosaur crap?

You can read about it here. https://www.cnet.com/news/digging-through-230-million-year-old-poop-scientists-discover-new-species-of-beetle/

The Poison Papers Update.

 It's been a little while since I blogged but for an update I got through chemo and had a recurrence this year after getting the Pfizer vaccine for covid 19. 

So now I'm taking Imbruvica and waiting to see if my insurance will cover it. If not I will not be able to afford it at $16 grand a month.

I'm hoping to get caught up here in a little bit so stay tuned. The channel is going live.

The poison papers-day one.

 

The poison papers-day one

I was on the slab from about 11:00 to 3:00 getting the Mobil High Test juice. As they hooked me up I was thinking "Now. Go in there and kill those little bastards or chase them out of the neighborhood."

Some weird things happened. I uncoupled myself from the lunar launch mast for a trip to the loo and I ended up pissing myself a bit. Mucho embarrassmento.

But things dry up. Figured out the channels with the remote. It had been on faux news and I can't think of anything worse to fry your brains with when getting chemo.

The two compounds are rituxin and bendamustine so I won't get peripheral neuropathy again, The vincristine I got the last time made pooping a mind altering experience I've no wish to repeat.

I was told I would see the results shortly and the lymph nodes seem to be reducing themselves in size and texture.

About the only side effect I have noticed is my ears are ringing a bit, but-and maybe this was just because it was a nice day out-my vision seemed clearer and more acute.

So back tomorrow for another armload and a cameo appearance for something called neulasta om Thursday, then a month off.

The Dark Shadow emerges again.

 The Dark Shadow Reemerges.

It has been a long time since I posted anything here but I will keep a running log of my experiences with a new round of chemotherapy for the same old shit.

That's right folks, my lymphoma has reemerged from wherever it was hiding. A biopsy and a couple dates with the oncologist and I will be undergoing a new set of experiences starting on Tuesday.

I think the bastard took advantage of me while I was in covidville and weaker than normal.  I'm still not completely recovered from that as I lost about 20 pounds and I'm really weak in the knees.

This time it'll be different.  No cyclophosphamide and no vincristine. The peripheral neuropathy is no fun and I'm lucky I only had it in my feet.

It will be two days back to back, and then a month off and repeat. In the meantime I have some antivirals and sulfa to take because my immune system is a pathetic pile of crap.

So. Onward we go.