Nobody's Business No. 7

Life Sucks, and Then You Die (A Book Review)

As a reader, my career has fallen off precipitously since my eyes went bad during a misspent late-innings career in adversarial journalism, peering directly into the radioactive maw of a circa 1998 Gateway CRT monitor for 18 hours a night, four nights a week. Much earlier, back when I was a long-distance commuter slouching daily into servitude in downtown Manhattan from various exurban hellholes, I would devour up to four novels a week on the train, trying to avoid conversation and making friends. Over the past few years, striving to get a handle on thriller plotting and structure, I listened to various incarnations of the ubiquitous “Homeland Security porn” genre (Alex Berenson, Vince Flynn, Lee Child, etc.) in the car, until the CD player went south. Now it’s podcasts and, with a new pair of reading glasses, the occasional book. Short stories, however, have almost never been on the menu. I am naturally attracted to long-form entertainment; the longer and more involved and loaded with digressions, the better. My brain does not like to stop and start, and instinctively resists efforts to reset for the next tale in a chain of literary non-sequiturs. I’m pretty sure the only compendiums of short stories I ever got through from start to finish were Kurt Vonnegut’s Welcome to the Monkey House and the five collections put out by Charles Bukowski, each segment of which was pretty much like every other piece of stream-of-consciousness lyrical rambling he ever wrote, including his “poetry.” I might have read a book of Poe’s stories back in elementary school, but that experience has been lost to the mists of approaching dementia, and is no help at all.

Thus I was under-prepared and nervously anticipating a case of low-attention-span anhedonia when I was asked to read and review the thirteen stories in Brent Robison’s The Principle of Ultimate Indivisibility: A Web of Stories (Bliss Pot Press) (for the Dactyl Review, which I am reprinting here).

I needn’t have worried. As it turns out, Ultimate Indivisibility reads more like a complex, densely plotted novel than a collection of superficially related vignettes. Whether Robison was in fact able to reverse-engineer thirteen individually conceived and written stories into a superbly interwoven tapestry or, as I suspect was more likely, to deconstruct a single kernel of existential unease into a baker’s dozen of co-equal parts, he’s flirting with greatness here, at least in the mind of an addled, sleep-deprived sexagenarian.

The stories, although they alternate in points-of-view between first- and third-person narratives and take place in an array of settings across America -- Manhattan and New Jersey, Woodstock and the Catskills, New Orleans, the Poconos, Arizona, Utah, Seattle and Washington State -- share an almost physical sense of discomfort, with an acute awareness of death and disillusionment lurking in very shadow. Robison seems to have spent enough time in most or all of these places that he is effortlessly conversant as to their moods and darker intimacies … a fact that adds legitimacy and a considerable amount of pleasure to the proceedings. A lot seems to go down in one hospital emergency room or another, in a subcompact automobile traveling through a nondescript American landscape toward a sooner-than-anticipated destiny, or in a claustrophobic, baggage-laden house or apartment. A lot seems to happen in threes. And each protagonist, whether a spiritually conflicted young man, an emotionally abused woman, a morally compromised sinner on his hospital deathbed, or other such unfortunate, is haunted by something in his or her consciousness that gnaws at the soul and keeps it drifting in a disturbed limbo at the edge of annihilation. As in this gem of a chapter … er, story … a third of the triptych “The Green Beetle,” titled “In the Waiting Room”:

“Emily looks at the young woman’s mouth as she speaks. ‘...Anonymous passerby,’ she seems to be saying. “

“Or ‘enormous pecan pie.’ Emily can’t really be sure. The young woman is dressed in olive coveralls. Her hands are freckled and strong. She has a guileless Dorothy Hamill haircut. The young woman is an Emergency Medical Technician. Emily suddenly imagines her rimmed by headlights, waltzing tenderly with a broken body at a highway’s edge in the middle of the night. Her upper lip and cheeks are covered with very fine golden hair that catches, in hypnotic rhythm as she speaks, the cold glow of the waiting-room fluorescents.”

“Emily’s husband Sid is listening intently. His stare is at once both focused and glazed. He asks something that just maybe could be ‘Is celestial radiance a particle or a wave?’ But probably is not.”

“Emily can’t listen. Emily saw the glance between the young woman and the ER surgeon. The surgeon had three pinhead-size spots of blood on his white smock, arranged in perfect proportion: Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Lake Tahoe. He needed a shave. His jaw reminded Emily of Mount Saint Helens after the blast. ‘Cuppa mud, anyone?’ he had said a few minutes ago, poking his head in the door. Mount Saint Helens cracked, a little one-sided grin. The surgeon had come directly from the operating room to speak to them in person. His eyelids were lined in red.”

“Sid said, ‘No, thanks.’ He didn’t see the glance. Or any glance, ever. He never had. He is congenitally glance-blind, Emily is sure. If there is a gene for the perception of interpersonal subtleties, Sidney’s dim ancestors misplaced theirs somewhere along the trail from the cave to the waterhole.”

“Sid would never understand why she is thinking now, as she does so often, of the waterfall in Colorado. She was six months along then, almost twenty years ago, long before they moved to this crowded eastern suburb. She and Sid had taken off all their clothes and were clenched in a kiss under the freezing shower when a Japanese family appeared on the ledge below and stood in a neat row, big to little, four mannequins with Nikons to their eyes. Emily and Sid bowed in a grand theatrical manner, all wet goosebumps and shriveled flesh, and ran for their clothes. Even now, not a month goes by that she doesn’t reflect on this: her anonymous pallid self, totally revealed, heavy breasts and rounded belly and dark pubic hair all dripping, pasted neatly in four plastic photo albums somewhere in Tokyo.”

The stories cross-pollinate, sharing totems, tidbits and themes. A forest green Volkswagen deathtrap, its roof crushed in. A pretty piece of Navajo jewelry, dug out of the detritus of the Twin Towers in a Staten Island landfill. A saxophone. An umbrella. Also detected in the overarching thematic flow is an attempt to rationalize and come to terms with a flinty western religious upbringing, perhaps to wrestle it into something more palatable while still embracing a semblance of quasi-spiritual longing more in tune with a Northeastern, Woodstockian aesthetic. If Robison’s life actually kicked off as a born member of the Mormon Church, he could hardly do better than this to exorcize that particular set of traumas from his psyche. That he still manages to seem to believe in some sort of interconnectedness is a small miracle in itself.

But miracles are not what this dark set of tales is about. No one is saved by the bell, and no one expects to get out of here alive or unscathed. Even when nothing awful happens and love -- or at least some conflicted midlife form of sexual desire -- is in the air, the sense of dread intrudes, as in an idyll in Central Park to close out the opening story, “Family Man”: 

“Now, Harold stands stumplike in the drenched clearing, soggy-suited and laughing. His son clings like some twisted miraculous outgrowth of his body, all slimy and whooping in new maleness. The sky has broken! For a moment Harold doesn’t care that his wife and mother and sister and daughter are sitting and waiting and growing cruel in a driverless car. For a moment Harold even forgets yesterday. How he had stood there with her too, laughing, entirely mindless of the little boy tugging on his arm. How he had stood there lustful and oblivious in the slanting sun, stood there in his rumpled suit talking to the red lips of a woman dressed in black, just stood there trying desperately to think of all the ways the world can end.”

The “Ultimate Indivisibility” of the collection’s title seems meant to convey the concept that everything in the universe is not only interconnected, but is, down to the subatomic level, a reflection of every other part, as well as of the whole. This is no longer merely wishful New-Age mumbo-jumbo. It’s a primary tenet of the “panpsychic” theory, currently being bandied about in the neurobiological scientific community, that all matter may possess at least a modicum of rudimentary consciousness that explains its tendency -- perhaps even “intent” -- to combine into increasingly complex and active configurations, up to and including higher life forms. In each of these stories, without beating the reader over the head with it, Robison makes sure that we are aware of this as-yet unverifiable aspect of existence, humming away underneath it all and tying everything together in an uncomfortable, highly inscrutable oneness of purpose. The combination of this with the eerie, sometimes violent randomness of each separate tale is what provides such a satisfying jolt of cognitive dissonance to the reading experience.

My appetite now jump-started in a manner I had almost forgotten could happen, I will keenly await more writing from Brent Robison, hopefully in the form of a full-length novel or five. Let’s get moving, Mr. Robison. As you are no doubt extremely aware, time is running out. 

Biff Thuringer

Nobody’s Business No. 6

Finding a Genre; Finding Peace

Imagine you're a brand-new, untested author. Your first novel, between the covers of which you've left your heart, your memories, your health and a good part of your sanity, is published. It's on line, available on multiple platforms to the teeming millions of potential readers. Trying not to cut your nose off to spite your face, you consider choosing a genre, which always seemed like a no-win situation. Readers in this highly balkanized on-line world, dominated by Amazon, Barnes & Noble and a dwindling number of other underpaying sellers of books, have been shunted into easily marketable categories. You choose one. Thrillers. 

But your book is only partly a "thriller" according to today's standards. More than 80% of what are called "thrillers" on the market today are what one could categorize as "Homeland Security porn." Your book has no rogue CIA agent superhero renditioning hapless towel-headed Middle Easterners and foiling their plans to horribly kill mass numbers of innocent Americans. Your novel features a bunch of semi-good characters and semi-bad characters and a handful of really bad guys and gals, most of whom are American assholes doing horrible things to each other. The book is also psychological, in that the protagonist is a slowly recovering misogynist, and a slowly developing sociopath. His breast harbors what could at one time have been nurtured into a strong, kind, caring heart, but has been serially abused by life, bad decisions and horrific circumstance into a squirming black ball of violent, antisocial, apolitical action. He is not a nice man, nor a healthy one. He's what you could easily have become, and may yet still. "Thriller" doesn't quite capture the conflicted, unhelpful nature of this person and his exploits. 

And then you see it, on Twitter of all places. An entity, someone or something with 70,000 followers, begins following you. She/it is titled "Transgressive Fiction." There is a website involved, and a Wikipedia page. Holy crap! It's a genre! It’s not one many people have heard of, but there it is, in black and white (mostly black)! Here's a partial description: "Because they are rebelling against the basic norms of society, protagonists of transgressive fiction may seem mentally ill, anti-social, or nihilistic. The genre deals extensively with taboo subject matters such as drugs, sexual activity, violence, incest, pedophilia, and crime. The genre of 'transgressive fiction' was defined by Los Angeles Times literary critic Michael Silverblatt." Holy shit! Michael Silverblatt! And you, the genre-challenged author, can get with almost everything in that description, except maybe the incest and pedophilia. Writers you imagine yourself to vaguely resemble, going back centuries, are represented as having unwittingly been toiling in this genre. Among others (all but one a male of the species, unfortunately): Marquis de Sade, Émile Zola, Dostoyevsky, Georges Bataille, D. H. Lawrence, Henry Miller, Vladimir Nabokov, Alan Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, Hubert Selby Jr., Kathy Acker, J.G. Ballard, Charles Bukowski, Anthony Burgess, Bret Easton Ellis, and Chuck Palahniuk. That's some pretty heavy company, including some lonely, formerly genre-less scribblers who may have had no clue that one day they would require being lumped together to form a bulwark recognizable to a clueless "consumer" perusing Amazon or Goodreads for something less cloying or patronizing to read. Palahniuk, for one, accepts the genre as his own, except he calls it "Transgressional Fiction." I'm pretty sure he made up that word, to sound like a cross between "transsexual" and "congressional." Whatever you want to call it, I'm in.

Nobody's Business No. 5

Between the Cracks

"Smokin'" Joe Copeland surveys the Black Dirt region of Orange County, NY.

At the risk of sounding like Captain Obvious on steroids, let me begin by acknowledging that we all are living through an era of some measure of uncertainty and existential stress, and that it's hard to get a word in edgewise when trying to focus on one specific problem or another. That said, there is one particular problem upon which I, a longtime reprobate who has dedicated the late innings of his life to helping people as opposed to using them, am currently focused. I hope to invite others to focus with me on this problem, if only for a few moments of their tumultuous, very busy and balkanized lives.

"Smokin'"Joe Copeland is nothing less than an unsung American genius. I lucked into his presence in 1990 when, at the very beginning of a Walter Mitty-esque run as a computer systems analyst-turned-middle-aged rock star, I auditioned for a job as the keyboard player in a nascent NYC funk band being formed by Milo "Milo Z" Zwerling, the former drummer of a legendary downtown band known as "Joey Miserable and the Worms," aka "The Worms." The audition was held in the large, airy, rent-free apartment Milo had been ceded by his mother, a notorious free spirit and charter member of the Beat Generation named Harriet Zwerling. Harriet had started a one-woman rent strike in the 1960s, which is apparently still in effect in 2018, and is about to launch Milo into the top 1%, at least for a few minutes, as developers are falling all over each other to tear the place down and build another faceless high-rise. The apartment, on lower Second Avenue, had a balcony overlooking the back of CBGB. I lived there for a spell, but that's another story. Despite the fact that I was decades older than everyone present, my keyboard chops were considered sufficient, and the band Milo Z was born.

It was obvious from the beginning that Joe was a jewel, and the secret weapon upon which Milo would build his sound. Joe was a fabulous bass player, who could effortlessly handle the slapping and popping style then in vogue, as well as anything else that was thrown at him. Jazz, reggae, heavy metal, country, pop, rock, blues, soul, funk, whatever. He was also one of the best soul singers in New York or anywhere else, and could harmonize instinctively, croon, howl, rap colorfully  or scream bloody murder. He gave musical grace and a wide palette of colors to what could have been a very limited undertaking, at the same time giving all the credibility Milo or anyone else (including me) would need when unselfconsciously appropriating black culture.

The original Milo Z band lasted from 1990 to 1996. Besides being the keyboard player, I was a co-songwriter and fell into being the business guy in the band. Starting small at colorful dives like Nightingale and the "Mondos," Cane and Perso, the band created a party-like, dance-heavy atmosphere. We relatively quickly built a following of thousands, and became hard to miss. We became as huge as a homegrown unsigned band can get in NYC, getting in excess of $4,000 a show at Tramps, Wetlands, etc. Our eventual manager, who saw us first at a show at Mondo Perso, was David Sonnenberg, who also managed the Spin Doctors, Joan Osborne, Fugees, Black Eyed Peas, Meat Loaf, etc., and produced "When We Were Kings," the Oscar-winning documentary about Mohammad Ali. Although the band was usually six to ten strong onstage, there were only four of us who got signed to Mercury/Polygram by Ed Eckstyne, Mercury's president: Milo, Joe, me and Masa Shimizu, the guitarist. We made an album, "Basic Need to Howl," made a video, did some TV, and went on the road, flush with advance money. When Eckstyne got fired by the suits at Polygram in 1995 while we were deep in the south on a tour with the Neville Brothers and Al Green, our album lost the support of the label, and died on the vine. We were Sonnenberg's only failure.

Milo was, and according to Joe still is, a bandleader in the old Buddy Rich mode, with a sliding scale of whom he respects, appreciates, and pays. Out of a 4 grand payday Milo would get 2,000, I'd get 1,000, Joe and Masa would get 250 each and the rest of the band, sometimes 5 or more people including whatever drummer he'd be abusing, would have to split the remaining 500, after expenses. On the road the low-totem-pole people made even less. At one point I led a mutiny to force more equitable distribution. Milo refused, and the whole band quit. Joe eventually went back with Milo, and has been an indentured servant ever since, attempting with little success to build a life for himself in between getting underpaid for gigs and short tours.

When I left the band, Joe was still living in what amounted to bohemian splendor, comfortably ensconced in a Murray Hill apartment with his girlfriend, wearing velvet jackets and lounging on art deco furniture. Milo gigs have fallen off considerably over time, and Joe's been left hanging. After the breakup with his girlfriend he lived in the Bronx with a friend for a few years until that friend passed away. He then moved into a room in a Pentecostalist church for a few months, doing odd jobs and playing and singing in the gospel choir for room and board. During these years Milo would call him for gigs traveling to Greece or on a cruise ship or at a ski area, or a wedding or somewhere in the city. There were no more record deals. The church building was condemned and closed its doors about 9 months ago, and Joe was staying on his now-married-with-two-kids ex-girlfriend's couch in Westchester when I contacted her on Facebook, asking if she knew where he was because I couldn't find him. "He's right here on my couch," was the answer. I pulled out a bunch of stops trying to find him a place to stay, and an old friend of mine came through with a temporary solution, in a house he rents in the Warwick countryside. My friend works out of there half the month, and was letting Joe stay there rent-free. I drove Joe around, bought him food, etc. I got him some sneakers. I stored all of his basses and other extraneous possessions in my basement, and set about trying to find him a more permanent situation closer to me so I could help him get around and get his life back together. I got him on a number of waiting lists for subsidized housing.

One important note: Joe has had a lifelong struggle with alcoholism.His condition manifests in episodic bouts of heavy drinking, during which he may disappear for a while, occasionally landing in a temporary lockup. In the past, Milo would locate him, bail him out and endeavor to dry him out until he could get him back onstage. He would fine him for his behavior if he caught him drinking or if Joe missed a gig. Until now, Joe has gotten little if any real help with his addiction. My friend, whom I had advised of this reality, didn’t take long to realize that the situation would be untenable in the long term. He subsequently needed the space for a family member, and I went down and got Joe. After a disappointing runaround with the local shelter "system," which is dangerous, broken, and a portal into permanent degradation, my wife and I made a temporary space for him in the basement, which has a bed, a shower, a toilet and a small refrigerator. There is no public transportation within miles, and I took him everywhere. I tried every day to find him someplace permanent, as well as to get him the help he needed to turn his life around. I removed all traces of alcohol from our home.

Joe was until recently receiving public assistance out of the Bronx. I went with him to Dutchess County Social Services and a temporary assistance case was opened. In June, I was able to get him into the best rehabilitation facility in the Hudson Valley. He was there 90 days, and recently was transferred to a halfway house in Poughkeepsie. He has an AA sponsor and a wonderful caseworker, and she and I are in constant contact. Joe came to Thanksgiving dinner with my family, and looked great. He’s in “Phase 2” of his program, which means he is largely restricted to the halfway house or to heavily chaperoned meetings and outside activities. My cousin and I, along with my wife, her business partner and another intelligent, caring woman in our community, are forming a nonprofit organization (called Creative Resources Foundation) to help Joe and other lost artists regain their lives. Through the regional alcohol rehab organization, he will eventually be set up someplace comfortable, relatively safe and surrounded by services, and will be available to get into playing situations up here. My dream is that he will eventually be starting a band with me, which has been a long time coming. Regardless, he's still got it, and would be an asset in anyone's band. Literally. Back in June, he and I attended a lovely old-timey Sunday morning swing jazz jam in Beacon and he had the other participants and the lucky coffee swillers in the audience spellbound, as I knew he would. Beyond being extremely talented, Joe is a magical individual, a transcendent soul abroad in an increasingly harsh, unforgiving land who has inspired in this often cold, uncaring heart the will to act. 

Ideally, some time during 2019 Joe will take up residence in a room or studio apartment in a mid-Hudson Valley town with reasonably convenient bus or train access to New York City. Joe does not at present drive a car, although he has plans to learn. He’s working on his GED. He’s getting his teeth fixed. I will gladly take him anywhere he needs to go and, within reason, act as a resource for him to thrive and prosper. Through the foundation, I may be seeking temporarily funding for his travels, musical equipment, etc. I am certain that, surrounded by a helpful community and freed from the restrictions of his former life in the city, he will blossom into what he was meant to be. Maybe you can help in some way. If so, drop me a line at biffthuringer@gmail.com, or call me at 914-388-8670. 

And thank you for your attention.

Steve/Biff

From left: Joe Copeland, Masa Shimizu, Milo Zwerling, Steve Hopkins. 1994.

A demo reel somebody put together for Milo in 2012. Classic Joe Copeland at 3:15.

Nobody's Business No. 4

Hey, #Me, Too!

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A gentleman standing in front of me on a long, slow-moving line of Christmas-related customers at the fabulous FDR-designed U.S. Post Office in Poughkeepsie last Friday morning, a craggily handsome old character looking like a cross between Kenny Rogers and Jeffrey “The Dude” Lebowski on one of his better days, turned around and nodded, perhaps detecting in my Colonel Sanders countenance a fellow traveler. Something was obviously on his mind. On the way down the stairs outside of the building, commenting wistfully about how there used to be more than two tellers working such a crowd and how the country is going to shit, he got to the point. “I liked Trump … I voted for him, but this tweeting bullshit is too much. And women are ruining this country, all these men going down for …” … he couldn’t even finish his sentence. “They’re not going to let him be president. Maybe Hillary’s behind it.” After admitting to the poor guy my conflicted feelings about Trump  (a genuine outsider and agent for change, who happens to be out of his gourd and thus a possible threat to the American experiment, not to mention life on Earth), we shook hands and parted amicably, two sides of a wobbly, spinning coin that’s fast approaching the edge of the table.

The cognitive dissonance that has bedeviled America since the first disease-ridden European fortune hunter set eyes upon these virgin shores is once again approaching the sort of fever pitch that spawns revolutionary behavior. This is happening thanks largely to the mass manipulation possibilities afforded by the World Wide Web, an exponentially more effective form of mind control than the already reliable printing press, radio and television. I see this cancer growing and metastasizing in my painstakingly bipartisan Facebook and Twitter feeds, as livid, screaming righties and lefties tear themselves and each other apart over the cunningly contrived set of “issues” being force-fed to them 24 hours a day. Every conceivable form of degenerate human behavior has been resuscitated into the eternal omnipresent and is paraded before us for inspection and divisive comment: racism, sexism, rape, child abuse, beheading, torture, murder, genocide, police brutality, black violence, white violence, drug addiction, alcoholism, slavery, human trafficking, corporate and government corruption, and on and on. The moment you first click “like,” the algorithms pile on, working you farther and farther into one wormhole or another, until you can’t look your neighbor straight in the eye at the grocery store for fear that he or she is one of the enemy.

Most of our nation’s uncomfortably “united” population has sorted itself into at least two — but probably more than five or ten or twenty — separate camps, divided and conquered by an accommodating media and the economic and political powers that control them. Those who do not self-identify as “angry” or “disgusted” are usually either “afraid” or “depressed.” A small minority claims to pay no attention to any of this and copy/pastes pointless detritus like rainbows, trite quasi-religious homilies and cat movies, while staying at home and either forgetting or outright refusing to vote.

There are very few, if any, issues that can unite more than half of us in any meaningful way, a situation that has devolved into a zeitgeist ripe for exploitation by the likes of Donald Trump or worse.

It’s not good, right?

Well, yes, but the knife can and does cut in multiple ways. Assuming the Satan-spawned Trump/Pence coalition doesn’t send us careening headlong into the Christian right’s long awaited and hotly anticipated Armageddon, there is hope on the way for those among us pining for a return to a more run-of-the-mill form of soul-crushing, one-world statism. This “hope” for “change” comes once again in the form of wily old Chuck Schumer, the man who brought us Barack Obama and the decimation of Hillary Clinton, among other things, and whose gnarly hand remains firmly on the tiller of the deep state, his steely gaze locked on goals far, far in the future. As our President seems dimly aware, Sen. Schumer is orchestrating a complex, multi-step coup d'état, setting the table with the Ronan Farrow-initiated takedown of Democratic mega-donor Harvey Weinstein, which resulted in a flurry of similar takedowns of alpha miscreants on both sides of America’s ideological Red/Blue divide and the rise of the #MeToo movement. This past week, Schumer-led forces, spearheaded by his pick to lead the Democratic power elite back into the driver’s seat, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, doubled down on the zero tolerance theme, hounding sacrificial lamb Al Franken out of office as a prelude to the longer goal of knocking out Trump, and the even longer goal of returning a female-led U.S.A. contingent to a seat at the New World Order buffet table.

On Monday, on cue, Gillibrand went on CNN (the entity disparaged by Trump supporters as the “Clinton News Network”) for an “exclusive interview,” opening fire on Trump: "President Trump has committed assault, according to these women, and those are very credible allegations of misconduct and criminal activity, and he should be fully investigated and he should resign."

Interestingly, almost as if he were reading from the same Schumer-penned script as Ms. Gillibrand, the Trumpster stuck his foot even farther up his gold-plated ass by tweeting: “Lightweight Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, a total flunky for Charles E. Schumer and someone who would come to my office ‘begging’ for campaign contributions not so long ago (and would do anything for them), is now in the ring fighting against Trump …”, prompting yet another reactive firestorm and playing directly into the Schumer camp’s hands. Makes one wonder if The Donald himself were not recruited long ago as a pawn in Chuck’s master plan to destroy the GOP from within.

Anyway, Ms. Gillibrand’s star is truly on the rise, as I predicted would happen eight years ago. And politics, as they say, really does make strange bedfellows. They’ll never, ever tire of fucking us over. Make sure you click “like” as you bend over and enjoy the ride.

Biff Thuringer

Nobody's Business No. 3

 

Mark Greene has an Emmy, one of the better looking of the big gold-tinted statuettes that can make the difference between an expensive hobby and a career. His company, Pecos Design, won the 2007 Broadband Public Service Emmy Award for the animation “Big Fun With Global Warming” which it created for the Sierra Club. Mark is one of the three-dozen-odd artistic urban technophiles I met during my four-year stint living on West Chestnut Street in what I like to refer to as the “Rondout Heights” neighborhood of Kingston. He and his actress ex-wife and former business partner, Sharron Bower Greene, and their son Gus, used to live in a lovely hillside home in Bohemian/Park Slopian splendor on what they cobbled together from the freelance earnings they wrung out of the technological and artistic ether. Like many of their likeminded compatriots, they were transplanted New Yorkers who appreciated the relative affordability of Kingston, as well as the edgy quasi-urban sense of discomfort it provided to tweak their artistic natures from time to time. They have split up and moved back to New York, but Mark's dream remains alive for others whose trek upstate was fostered by his efforts.

The Great Recession may have put a temporary crimp in the flow of burned-out Manhattanites and Brooklynites gushing northward into the Hudson Valley to work the new global economy from a couch in a Midtown Kingston coffee shop, but the impetus is still there. Even with the price-skewing Wall Street thugs out of the way, New York City remains one of the most economically unforgiving places to ply one’s trade, while it continues to reign as a global center of artistic and technological innovation. The dream for hundreds of thousands of beleaguered Internet-based entrepreneurs and artists remains to ditch the expensive, postage-stamp-sized apartment, put some distance between themselves and the next terrorism target and find a cheap loft space or house in a small, reasonably funky and aesthetically pleasing city within a day’s drive of Manhattan that has enough crack vials and uncollected garbage lying around to remind them of home.

This line of thinking, which on the face of it is not particularly original, led Mark Greene, a guy with plenty of originality and more than a little chutzpah, to turn the concept over in his head, looking for a way to wrestle a potential profit center out of it. He came up with a brainstorm. Having lived in Kingston long enough to witness its cash-starved mayor and economic development people falling all over themselves trying to woo a succession of big-pocketed developers into cozy tax-exempt deals to build luxury housing without any tangible result, he developed a PR-driven economic development plot of his own for the mayor and company to try on for size. Dubbing Kingston the “Upstate Digital Tech-Friendly City,” Greene’s initiative, which he developed while catching the ear of former Mayor James Sottile in a series of e-mail exchanges a few years ago, is now an official campaign, having been touted by Sottile in his annual “State of the City” address to the common council in February of 2008. The initiative was dutifully reported in the local media, as well as by WAMC’s intrepid former Hudson Valley bureau chief, Susan Barnett, and gained traction as Greene hit up everybody he knew in person and through online social networking tools like Facebook to spread the word with their techie friends.

Personally, I would like nothing better than to lure all my friends and family, tech-savvy or not, to Kingston, a city I have grown to love not in spite of, but because of its surly reputation. So, to that end, I’ve retooled a little paean to my former town in the hopes of luring some of my delightfully misanthropic NYC-based associates who may otherwise have missed Mark’s message. For every successful transplant I coax to cross the city line to buy or rent, I’ll gladly accept a 5 percent cut of the resultant tax windfall.

My pitch:

As an incubator of pointless anger, Kingston is ground zero in the Mid-Hudson. It has been a crucible of dark feelings since the dawn of recorded time. That a fat loser chose the local mall to act out his frustrations with a semi-automatic rifle is not an anomaly. It’s more like the tip of the iceberg.

Indeed a lot of the music, as well as the art and writing of Kingston and environs seems to feature this same high degree of unexplained anger and frustration. While anger is a common response to growing up and seeing for the first time what a manure pile your parents have left you, there’s more to it than that, especially in Kingston. The anger emanating from here is more than just personal. It’s not just a reaction to the vapidity of general existence in 21st-century America. There’s a historical aspect to it. It’s ancient — and nasty. Like a curse.

For almost 500 years, Kingston and environs has slowly deteriorated at the hands of the European mercantile class that still runs things today. Their swords, musket balls, fires and bacteria wiped out the Esopus Indians, and their great-great-great-grandchildren remain in place as the landlords, judges, lawyers and bureaucrats who decide who gets a building permit. They still lord it over the swarthy lower classes, giving all the crap jobs to undocumented Latinos glad to work five to a Social Security number. In Midtown, beat-down descendants of the slaves from Africa who worked the fields and lugged the stones that built all these marvelous, historic Ulster houses hang on by a thread, as everywhere else in America, and the southern European and Mediterranean classes, while eventually managing to “pass” as WASPs and wrestle some of the local power away from them, still occasionally squabble over the right to fix their toilets or haul away their filthy garbage. It’s not hard to imagine at least one dying, pissed-off Indian laying a curse on the Dutch and English usurpers of this once beautiful land, judging from what has happened since.

Because Kingston surely seems cursed. It’s a true post-industrial wasteland, largely populated by the progeny of underemployed factory workers left over after it was stripped of its original white-man’s purpose as an iron-smelting, brick-making, mining backwater. When these industries died and left the town a rusting hulk, IBM came in and finished the job, making sure to dump millions of tons of toxic chemicals into the streams and aquifers before they split and left half the population without a job. Check out the cancer death rates in Kingston and Lake Katrine, out by the mall. They’re the highest in the state, and it’s not a secret why.

This cursed, toxic evilness is affecting the art coming out of Kingston, whether the artists know it or not. In this environment it’s only natural that punk remains alive and well, even as its anger fades elsewhere. CBGB might be just a fond memory in NYC, but here two hard-drinking, dissipated yet highly intelligent Kingston punks thrash about onstage at The Forum, turning their obsessive fear of a super-volcano lurking beneath Yellowstone National Park into screaming, distorted art. Down the street a grimacing singer growls “Murder murder, death and murder,” as dancers hurl themselves into each other. Another band’s lead singer tries to mitigate his natural nice-guy lyrical tendencies by throwing furniture at the crowd. People are getting drunk, acting badly, letting their anger fly, starting fights over nothing.

Kingston has always had a nasty reputation. My good friend Spike, a Kingston native who was a roommate in a dingy party apartment when I lived in Albany, was perhaps the angriest young man I ever met. He was a short, seething fireplug of a kid who carried a German luger, and wasn’t afraid to use it if his fists failed him, which was never. On a bet, he once beat the tar out of a black belt kick-boxer in the ring, using only his hands and his vicious, pit-bull nature. He personified Kingston, and told me many of the urban Kingston legends that defined the place for me. Now that I have lived there, I can see he wasn’t lying.

Kingston will remain angry, even as the carpetbaggers and tech geeks move in and take over the slums, trying to gentrify the place. No amount of pastel paint and fancy brick sidewalks will change that. The city still has freight trains running through it carrying garbage, toxic chemicals, plutonium bars and God knows what else that’s emanating and leaking into the brains of the poor saps who live along the tracks. Brain-rotting drugs are still being concocted in local coke and meth labs. Countless thousands of rusting 55-gallon drums leaching perchlorethylene and trichloroethane into the water table are still buried under every school, shopping plaza and sports complex. Even if all this poison doesn’t give us cancer, which it eventually will, it’s giving us headaches and making us as angry as treed wolverines.

But again, all of this is why I like Kingston, and would have never moved away had there been a real choice in the matter. I like its stubborn post-apocalyptic vibe, and that it will never be tamed. Then there’s the entertainment factor, as half the people you see walking down the street are fantastically ugly and hilariously dressed in ways I have never seen anywhere outside of an old Star Trek episode.

I like the edgy feeling of walking into a bar not knowing if some jockomo is going to blow his top and start punching people. And I like Kingston’s pointlessly pissed-off arts and music scene, and how people have a way of expressing themselves by yelling at the top of their lungs.

If this Kingston-based geek initiative can somehow bottle that anger and sell it to the angry masses yearning to break free of the Big, Rotten Apple, it should do just fine. Good luck, Mark, and I hope this helps.

Biff Thuringer

Nobody's Business No. 2

I know it’s the holidays and everything, so you’ll have to forgive me, o Lord, for failing to believe in you.

If you indeed created me and my ilk, then you probably have some understanding of the dilemma that led to this impasse. For what was created when I hit the bedpan was a hard-wired little skeptic with a fierce independent streak, who, even though he sought answers to all the usual questions, was rarely if ever satisfied with the result.

As an adult, after careful, lifelong consideration, I have deemed myself constitutionally incapable of belief in anything at all. The meager senses I have been dealt, the ones referred to in science textbooks, anyway, are woefully insufficient to the task of verifying anything I have been told, have seen with my eyes or have read. In lieu of belief, I have substituted suspicion. I have multiple conflicting suspicions about the meaning of life and love, about spirituality, about the alleged existence of God and/or similar disembodied entities, about eternal life, about the paranormal phenomena I have experienced, about the feelings and sensations generated as a result of certain stimuli, about the presumed “interconnectedness” of everything, etc.

Although it would be reasonable to assume so, do not confuse my failure to believe as a refusal to believe. I just don’t think I am smart enough to know any of it, and am withholding judgment in a lame and hopeful attempt to avoid being lured down a wormhole created by someone or something to entrap me, or even worse, to die having believed in a gross falsehood, thus turning my life into a sad joke.

Many traps have sprung up that seemed designed to snare me. I studied the Bible, hard, as a kid, being groomed by a charismatic but overeager Episcopal priest wanting to pass on his legacy. I eventually took away from the great book the same bitter lessons as Samuel Clemens (see “Letters from the Earth,” by Mark Twain). I have been blessed with a family of spiritually activist sisters, forever trying to force down my neck their polyglot “faith” in reincarnation and the meddling of dead people in the affairs of the living.

Indeed, my “luck” sometimes takes an eerie form. Sometime in the 1970s, I found a green plastic kids’ ring in a basket at Fannie’s Restaurant in Latham, N.Y. It had the face of a mullah on it. I used to wear it around. A friend, the aptly-named Jamie Smith, scarfed it away from me one day and used it to make a mold for a solid chrome ring, which he gave to me for my birthday. I dubbed it the “Ayatollah Ring.” I began to wonder if something in the forging process had imbued it with magic or a sense of irony, because one night during the Iranian hostage crisis I got drunk and started rubbing it and mumbling, “Let ’em go, goddammit. I’m sick of this shit hogging my TV.” And the next morning I awoke to find that two of the hostages had indeed been let go. I professed not to believe in the ring as far as I could throw it, but I kept rubbing it anyway. It called an exacta in the seventh race at Belmont in 1982 before disappearing for 25 years in a box I found last month while cleaning my office. I put it to work the next week, passing it across a rub-off Lotto ticket my visiting niece bought at a deli and saying, “Win.” She won 300 bucks.

Because of these and countless other incidents, one side of my brain has led me to suspect that, because I have been implausibly lucky — born into a demographically charmed family living near the epicenter of power, art, knowledge and human endeavor on earth in these times, having more than my fair share of success in love and remarkable progeny, cheating death on multiple occasions, winning at the track, at cards and in casinos, and being able to rise to the top of any situation almost in spite of myself — that I am somehow in the favor of whomever is in charge.

But the other, bigger half of my brain routinely intercedes and cuts off such reverie, as I quite sensibly run through all the reasons my good luck could be just that: dumb luck. I rubbed the crap out of the stupid Ayatollah Ring to facilitate a new liver for my old friend Craze, but he didn’t get one and he’s as dead as I’m going to be sometime before another 57 years goes by.

The Ayatollah Ring considers its next "miracle

As far as I know, the lucky hand I’ve been dealt has not been bought with prayer or any particular adherence to a moral code, although I try pretty hard to be a decent, upstanding guy who doesn’t hurt anybody. My internal politics and morals are quite possibly sterner than those of a right-wing evangelist. Not only do I not think abortion is generally a good idea (it should be legal, but avoided if possible), I also don’t condone killing another person for any reason at all. I’ve stolen very few things in my life, and even when a teenager kicked myself for weeks ruing the times I did steal. Neither do I think that running around Tiger-style behind your spouse’s back is going to do wonders for anyone’s mental or emotional health, including your own.

The purported teachings of Jesus, who introduced empathy and unconditional love of all mankind into the human psyche, make perfect sense to me. If he was indeed the son of God, I could accept that — I even did for a little while, before I changed my mind after reading enough of the Bible to plant the seeds of doubt.

The thing that has grown in me over time — slowly, to be sure — is tolerance of the religiosity of others. I no longer laugh as hard as I used to when people like poor former Dutchess County GOP Committee chairwoman Corinne Weber go down in flames. Who am I to tell her Barack Obama isn’t the Antichrist? He certainly looks and acts the part, with that syrupy smooth delivery emanating from that too-handsome visage with the purple vampire lips and voodoo eyes that wouldn’t be out of place in an Anne Rice neck-ripper. I’m not so sure I’m not the Antichrist, for that matter.

So, to Larkin and Ben, the two dead relatives most often referenced by my sisters as trying to help me catch the spirit: hold tight guys. I’ll either see you later or I won’t, and worrying about it now isn’t helping me pay the mortgage.

And as far as you go, Lord, I may not quite believe in you, but I’m through mocking you, at least for this week. Let’s call it a truce. And if I die tomorrow and am transported by intergalactic golf cart to that great Albert Brooks-style Purgatory in the sky to justify my life and await Judgment, don’t be too hard on me. I may not have darkened the door of a church for a while, but if your infinite memory bank can recall, I’ve actually tried to reach out to you a few times, usually when alone in my car at 3 a.m. after another hellish night wrestling with whatever night job I was enduring due to this chronic insomnia you gave me.

Remember? I was the guy driving down Miller Road in Cohoes that night in 1978 or so who winked and blew you a kiss after you may or may not have thrown up that freak Aurora Borealis to make up for putting me through another bad gig at a Ground Round, turning down requests from tables full of nuns for Billy Joel songs.

Yep, that was me. Don’t give up on me just yet. I’m still thinking about it.

Biff Thuringer

Nobody's Business No. 1

I hate to say I told you so, but I did. Sure, my little snippet of unhelpful wisdom is buried somewhere in a useless Facebook or Twitter feed from a year and a half ago, but the NSA probably has a record of it and you can probably dig it up if you know the right people. What I said was: “I wouldn’t bet against Donald Trump. I think he’s just the asshole our reality-drunk nation has been waiting for.”

But then again, who really gives a shit?

This brutal, intentionally divisive election cycle, including the “inconceivable” specter of a megalomaniacal cartoon supervillain reality TV star being handed the keys to the Oval Office and the little black box with nation’s nuclear launch codes, was inevitable. If it hadn’t happened in 2016 it would have happened in 2020 0r 2024. Our sputtering “democracy” has been ripe for the picking at least since the dawn of the television era. It’s actually a miracle that it’s taken this long … that miracle being a couple of dogged reporters figuring out that Richard Nixon was running a black ops domestic spying operation from the White House basement, which kicked the executive power grab down a few pegs for a half generation or so.

Now that the imperial presidency, thanks to G.W. Bush (actually Dick Cheney) and his stealth understudy, Barack Obama, has been cranked up to full stream again, it’s time to shuck the pretense and reintroduce the Leni Reifenstahl stagecraft, the spiffy SS-style uniforms and the crushing atmosphere of paranoia, just in time for a real gold-headed sociopath to be in place to appreciate it all.

But Donald Trump, as blowhardy and narcissistic as he is, is probably no Adolf Hitler. He’s really more akin to what would have happened had Agent 007 failed his mission and Auric Goldfinger had cornered the gold market by vaporizing Fort Knox. Who knows what sort of administration Herr Goldfinger might have installed, once he calmed down and got to the business of actually ruling the world? There would have been no precedent, just like now. Trump’s few real policy statements, shoehorned off the cuff into speeches that were 99 percent about how he was kicking ass attracting bigger crowds of lumpen proles than the hapless “losers” in his gold-plated path, were all over the ideological map, even when he wasn’t backtracking on them every five minutes. Among the few more reasonable ideas I thought I heard were that he wants to spend money on infrastructure, put a stop to the notion that we have to police the world by ourselves, and that he said NAFTA and the TPP are pieces of shit that give away the store, which they are. He spouted a lot of harebrained, often scary ideas as well, which is why he is ten times the enigma Barack Obama ever dreamed of being, and why he seems to be just as popular with people who are sick of the status quo. Trump will either turn out to be a complete con man and liar who duped the red meat American proletariat into electing him because he knew how easy it would be to hornswoggle them, or he’ll be exactly what he’s looked like over the past two years: a small-minded, vindictive, infantile, possibly criminally insane mass of out-of-control ego, incapable of governing his way out of a paper bag and leading our poor nation straight into the toilet. Me, I’m preparing for the worst and hoping for the best.

Which brings me to this: What better opportunity than now to foist a few new ideas into the mix, and to crack the ideological stranglehold certain political notions have on the knee-jerk conservative/liberal majority? I’ve been sitting on a pretty mixed-up bag of suggestions for years now, and am thinking it’s high time to toss them out there to our new president-elect, with whom there actually seems to be a chance for seat-of-the-pants rearranging of priorities for a few minutes before things coagulate and the swamp fills back in around his golden throne.

For instance, I have some things in common with the tea partiers he courted so successfully. As an American growing up in the most violent country on the planet, I think ordinary innocent people should be able to have guns in the house, and in their pockets and purses, to wave at attackers and, if necessary, to shoot them in the extremities without being dragged downtown on a gun or assault charge. I think there’s too much arbitrary, redundant and needlessly complex regulation, especially in state government. I think property taxes are way too high, that public school districts should be consolidated and a lot of unnecessary deadwood should be removed, especially at the administrative level. That doesn’t mean destroying the salaries and benefits of good teachers, who are more valuable to society than just about anyone else. I think other taxes are way too high as well, and that there’s a lot of waste and flat-out corruption in government. It’ll probably always be so, no matter who’s in charge or how big or small government gets. It’s human nature.

But I part ways with the neo-libertarian movement on many fronts. I think America’s burgeoning rich should dispense with the Scrooge act, suck it up and pull their financial weight, tax-wise. Are you listening, Donald? I suspect there’s a closet Roosevelt lurking somewhere inside that puffed-up chest. Call me a pinko commie socialist, but I think cradle-to-grave, single-payer health coverage (including dental and eye care) is the way to go, for everyone in the U.S., not to mention the world. I agree with you that Obamacare is a Frankenstein monster, but my main objection is that it kowtows to the rapacious insurance industry, which should butt out of health care altogether and stick to covering stuff that’s not going to happen to virtually everyone: things like accidents, fires, floods, earthquakes and personal injuries. If you want to get real universal health care done state by state, fine. Just do it.

Yes, single-payer health care will be costly, but there’s an enormous benefit side as well, in quicker and surer response to medical need, increased productivity, elevating of the general standard of living by a significant degree, and a sharp rise in disposable income among those who actually spend money in the economy.

To support it, tax the very rich, and close all potential loopholes. If you don’t like that part, Donald, you could probably get down with this: Legalize marijuana production, sale, distribution and purchase, and tax it unmercifully. The same with sports betting, gambling and in-house prostitution, all of which currently are untaxed, multibillion-dollar industries. These activities, which despite (in fact, because of) being banned are all happening pervasively, dangerously and expensively under the outnumbered, often corrupted noses of law enforcement, could easily be regulated into semi-respectable industries, rendered much safer and less influential on society by eliminating their underground status and bringing them into the light.

As a former front-line soldier in the long and vicious War on Poverty, I like the idea of welfare and Social Security, if not the shoddy implementation. I think when Clinton succeeded in chopping the federal welfare rolls beyond Ronald Reagan’s wildest dreams, he cut off the government’s nose to spite its face, and the result is a lot of the expensive drain on state and local coffers that’s been bankrupting us ever since. The really down-and-out people who used to get welfare have not lifted themselves up, gotten McJobs and become contributing members of couch-potato consumer society. They’re either dead, subsisting in an unpaid hospital bed, nonprofit group home or shelter, living in boxes, sewers and train tunnels, or sending their children out to sell drugs to your children to make their ragged ends meet.

I still think poor people in America should be treated better than poor people in other countries, because this is America and we ought to take care of our own and show how it’s done. Nobody should be hungry or homeless, anywhere. If you insist on being religious about it, it’s a sin, and a far greater one than allowing some poor schlub to pay a fee for a little physical relief, smoke a little reefer before bed, or bet on the Giants once in a while without risking a stay in one of our overcrowded, insanely expensive jails.

For better or worse, most of these poor people, as well as a lot of rich and middle-class ones, live in cities. Cities cost a lot of public money to operate and maintain. Their streets should be clean, safe, well lit and pothole-free. Their schools should be the equal of those in the suburbs. They should have good, clean public transportation. Garbage should be collected. It’s a group effort to keep things up to snuff. If that sort of “socialism” costs money, it’s damn sure a lot less than the money being spent cleaning up after the mess we’ve let fester in our midst. Leaving even one city out there twisting in the wind is, to my mind, un-American.

By the way, America’s red/blue divide — the one Trump manipulated so easily — is really an urban/rural divide. Letting people like Rupert Murdoch — who could give a crap about us as anything but a property to be used in a giant Monopoly game — turn our rural and urban populations against each other by fomenting distrust and fear is weakening us and hastening our collapse into a bargain ripe for plucking by his pals, the Chinese (who happen to be actual pinko commie socialists!). Americans need to embrace each other, find common ground, and build ourselves up. White, rural people need to stop acting like xenophobic, racist homophobes, and snotty, self-centered urban dwellers need to realize that, without a flinty rural backbone, this reasonably well-defended fortress of a nation wouldn’t exist as a host for their interesting experiments in testing the limits of personal freedom.

Related to this, I think the tea partiers, in their half-thought-out zeal to strip government of its ability to govern, have entered into an unwitting and unholy alliance with an entrenched corporate oligarchy (I like to call it an oiligarchy) that is relentlessly conspiring to keep us all sucking on the fossil fuel tit, to our own detriment. There’s nothing “conservative” about the behavior of the world’s oil, gas, coal, energy, plastics, pharmaceutical, electronics and chemical companies, which are fast obliterating the livability of the planet and turning it into an earthly hell, no matter what you think about “global warming.” As a power bloc, these companies through their paid political enablers are trying desperately to maintain dominance in a world that’s getting ready to replace them and render them to history’s dustbin. The closer to extinction they get, the faster they connive to foist upon us a blizzard of dirty, money-saving processes that end up poisoning our air and water, laying waste to our lands, and shortening our ever filthier, asthma-and-cancer-afflicted lives. Neither Hillary nor Trump bothered talking about this, because they were both obviously in the oiligarchy’s pocket, which is really why we got to choose between the two of them.

I would urge those of a libertarian bent to wake up and see that they’re being seriously manipulated. As a litmus test in this particular region, I use the stances of tea party candidates on environmental issues, like gas drilling using chemical-dependent hydraulic fracturing methods. If a conservative candidate utters the mantra “drill baby, drill,” parrots Koch brothers-influenced dreck like “global warming is the greatest hoax of the last 100 years,” or characterizes and environmental agenda as “not just evil, but…contrary to the free-market system that made this country great,” then you know he or she is merely a shill for the scorched-earth campaign being waged by these two fossil fuel industry billionaires and their friends. Problem is, the gas industry has routinely gotten to virtually all the winnable candidates, making the point moot, for now at least.

Then there’s the viper’s nest of social issues everyone on all sides seem to think are most important, but which we should be putting on the back burner for a day (or decade) or two to better concentrate on the survival of our species. Still, they’ve got to be dealt with, so here goes. While I’m a card-carrying nonbeliever, I share a lot of basic values and morals with my Judeo-Christian and (mainstream) Muslim friends. For instance, I agree that one shouldn’t kill, steal, covet or commit adultery. While I think males don’t have the right to tell women how to deal with the issue and should back off, I also believe aborting a fetus is, under all but the most compelling contingencies, an extraordinarily unsettling and life-denying choice to make, and should be strongly counseled against — by health professionals, not by religious organizations. It’s not a religious question, but a question of humane values.

I apparently take “Thou shalt not kill” more seriously than most of my brethren on the religious right. Not only do I not condone killing unborn babies, I don’t condone killing anybody, for any reason. So obviously, I’m against the death penalty, period. I’m also personally antiwar in nature, although I don’t know what to do about that. I suppose if some fool came running at my family wearing a vest lined with C4 explosives, I’d want him dead, and would try to figure out a way to kill him, fast. I know we’ve painted ourselves into a corner as a nation, making this sort of thing a likelihood at some point or another. It would be better in the end if we could all try to get along, but since that’s not going to happen any time soon, I’m forced into accepting protection from the largest, most powerful armed forces on earth, as well as my nation’s decisions as to how to use them. If, like Obama, after getting "the talk" from his military advisers, Trump still wants to keep our people in Afghanistan, there's probably a good reason for it, and you and I are stuck with it. I may be nonviolent, but I'm not suicidal.

I have absolutely nothing to add to the questions of gay and lesbian issues, women’s rights issues, immigration issues, or anything else in the human rights arena, except that every human being should be treated exactly the same under the law of the United States, with no consideration as to any arbitrary distinction. If you are a consenting adult, having a certain configuration of procreative apparatus in your abdomen or between your legs should make no difference, either in what you choose to do with it, or in what rights you and the consenting adult you choose to hook up with in life are granted as a couple.

The tea partiers have a historical point. Marriage, as originally envisioned, is a vestigial societal construct that was created to favor men, help them control their women and give them a status boost. Its role as a tool of social dominance has been dying out since women got the right to vote and divorce laws changed. Indeed, its only real role these days is as an official status by which married couples rate better tax rates, health insurance and death benefits. Either extend its benefits to everybody who wants them, or abolish it as a legal status altogether; I don’t really care.

There’s probably more, but I’m tired. Do me a favor, Mr. Trump, and chew on these ideas for a minute or two, before going off half-cocked. You won, and you don’t have to suck up to these meth-heads and rednecks for three more years. I believe if you were able to get through even one or two of these ideas you might actually even give America a fighting chance to become great again. But no matter what you do, try not to send us back to the Dark Ages. And try not to croak, because your running mate seems to me to be the real nightmare. What the fuck were you thinking? Anyway, congratulations, and good night.

Biff Thuringer