We’ve shut down our entire country. Somewhere between 40 and 50 million unemployed. GDP down 13%. Historically disastrous numbers while the stock market enjoys brunch and martinis. All of this for far less than a 1% mortality rate.

What the fuck are we doing?

More than half your favorite restaurants will be gone and most of those people won’t have a job.

When will you get to go to a concert again?

All those people will be out of work too.

Real estate will hit the floor.

Daycare for your kids?

Colleges and schools?

Over 40% of the dead were in nursing homes.

I’ll wear a goddamn mask but for fuck’s sake, what the hell is going on here?

Quarantine the vulnerable, the elderly, the immune compromised. Protect them with isolation and compassion. They are the ones that are dying.

Not the rest of us.

Let the rest of us live. If you’re going to get it, you’re going to get it. If it’s going to kill you, it’s going to kill you. The hospitals were never overwhelmed. Deaths have been dropping so precipitously since April that the word “epidemic” is becoming obsolete. The word “pandemic” is stupid.

Fear porn. There is no reason to be this afraid. Fuck the mask debate. It’s stupid and beside the point.

Far more damage is being done by the official government reaction to this virus. It’s disproportionate. It’s ridiculous. It’s baseless. They’re broadcasting a potentially mandated vaccine with a 1% injury rate for a disease with a .26% mortality rate (CDC).

Gavin Newsom shuts down one of the world’s largest economies with no fucking answer for how people are going to goddamn live.  He stands in front of TV cameras admitting that he’s got nothing. What kinda goofecock is this fuckstick?

Anybody wanna buy a condo in the middle of a bridge?

One of the few good things left we do as a society is send our kids to school for at least twelve years.  Now that is being upended and disrupted so clumsily that our children are afraid of a 0.00032% mortality rate (Johns Hopkins and University of Geneva).  There’s virtually no evidence they they even spread it.

What’s happening here is exactly two things.  The first is wholesale fear and the second is a singular, desperate retail that it’s all one orange man’s fault and everything will be fine once we elect the other invalid who has been the foreman for almost all of it.

It’s fucking sick.

Yes, the virus is real.  It’s not a hoax.  The predicted damage and severity of it was grossly exaggerated to panic as many as possible for financial and psychological advantage.

There’s one more very important thing.  We are rushing headlong toward a vaccine for a virus that has never been isolated, for a virus that is the source of the common cold, a virus that we haven’t been able to develop a vaccine for ever before.  And, the people who would inject you with it will have been paid billions of dollars for it and they will never suffer a penny of liability if it kills you or renders you unable to utter a complete sentence.

If everything works according to plan, you will have no choice in the matter.

Drinks for my friends.

The writing is absurd good. The gore is abundantly black and profoundly disturbing. The dialog is lyrical and literate over my head.

It disgusted my wife so much she stopped paying attention when I was binging on it and found something else to do. She’s now addicted to social media.

It is the most compelling thing I’ve ever seen on television. Ozark, Bates Hotel, Jessica Jones. Daredevil, Luke cage. Shameless, Ray Donovan, Aquarius. Better Call Saul. Breaking Bad.  Netflix is king hell now. Fast food wrappers piling up on the coffee table. Cocktailing for months and watching TV to the point where I’m ordering exercise equipment and walking around the block everyday at the very least.

They knew they were cancelled at the beginning of their last season and they pulled it off.

Sensual violence.  A loneliness so thorough in the characters that I became an empath. Half the time I was watching a cooking show that featured human meat. All three seasons wore a lugubrious pall.

Whoever mixed this thing should be taken out and shot. I finally resorted to close captioning.  The music and sound effects so loud with the characters whispering most of the time. The balances fucking suck to the point of annoyance at the amateur hour attempt.

Fishburn is amazing as Jack Crawford.  Will Graham (Hugh Dancey) smolders. The Mason Verger
character is Thurston Howell in porcine obsessed serial killer drag.  The female players are almost all smokey and strong femme fatales. They all have power in the plot, wrenching the narrative back and forth to suit themselves.  As clever as they can be in a den of cascading male psychopaths.

Fantastic stuff with an overwhelmingly artful presentation.

Goddamn, it’s well done.

It’s art.

It’s crazy.

Nobody escapes.

Drinks for my friends.

I have three priorities among a dozen at least.

The first one is perpetual war and that makes the next two impossible.

Number two is climate change.

Number three is health care.

Trump is the most anti-war president we’ve had since Kennedy. He publicly calls for ending wars and withdrawing troops. He’s publicly entertained notions of M4A while Biden swears he’ll veto anything that even looks like it.

Trump just signed four EO’s to make prescription drugs more affordable for me.

He’s flanking Biden from the left for fucks sake.

Democrat heads explode violently or collapse in slow motion like rotting grapes.  It’s hard not to laugh.

Trump doesn’t give a shit about climate change but he’s a broken little boy who can be shamed into things while Biden will be in a senior care facility at the Pentagon trying to match a pair of socks for the day.

You’ve got be kidding me.

One is better than the other.

I’ll say this one last time. Trump is a garden variety dipshit with acute narcissistic personality disorder, but he is firmly to the left of the other invalid with an aneurysm socket in his forehead that has no idea whether his socks match. Biden can’t possibly bag your groceries but Trump can be shamed into it if he gets to glare at you and pout later.

You have zero reason to vote for Biden instead of Trump, except Trump. Trump is a white privileged bigot.  Biden is an institutionalized, white privileged racist.

Trump actually listens to his base.  Biden’s mother is the Pentagon and his father is Wall Street.  Biden can’t even hear his base.  Become part of Trump’s base.  Shame him like the mouth breathing adolescent that he is and he’ll acquiesce before rushing off to check his polling on cable news.

Biden will eat your baby if it is served on a plate.  Trump will ask for some tacos with nacho cheese sauce instead.  That’s what you’re up against. You should be absolutely furious while recognizing that you don’t want the fucker that will eat your kid, start more wars, veto any meaningful health care reform and rub one out everyday for fracking and drilling.  At this point, you should be happy that there’s some random dickhead that just might do what you demand because he’s embarrassed that he won’t get to be student body president anymore.

One of these things is not like the other.

One of the things just doesn’t belong.

Trump is an asshole.  Biden is a product.  The product of an institution that fails over and over again to prove its relevance.  An institution that has failed over and over again to represent the people it claims to represent. Establishment republicans hate Trump while they wrap their arms around Biden.

If you’re willing to be honest and keep your knees from jerking, it is an intellectual argument and the lesser of evils is Trump.

Burn this shit to to the fucking ground.

I’m all out of crayons.

You’re on your own.

Vote the lesser of two evils.

I dare you.

Drinks for my friends.

 

It’s not a hoax.  It’s real.  I get it.  But it’s not what they have been terrorizing you with.  It’s not. 2.4 million in your country will not die from this.

I don’t have problem wearing a mask. It’s etiquette. I’m polite.  It’s the notion of compliance. It really bothers me.  I’m not about to plant my flag on this hill. The mask war.  Dumbest goddamn thing I’ve ever seen and shame on all the jackasses that would politicize it.  What’s unfolding in front of all of you doesn’t have a goddamn thing to do with masks.

Doesn’t the fact that wildly contradictory shit is blocking out the sun everyday give anyone pause?  How long until you can’t leave the county without papers from a test or papers for a vaccine?

You’re all aware that the CDC puts the mortality rate .26%, right?

Risk of death for those infected w CV19 by age (Source, joint study, Johns Hopkins and University of Geneva, June 12, 2020)

Under age 19; 0.00032%

Between 20-49; 0.0092%

Between 50-64; 0.14%

Nursing home or care home resident? 5%

The few of you fuckers that lost people need to shut up. I’m sorry but a few suffering horribly doesn’t mean anecdotes are evidence for the rest of us.  Last year it would have been the flu.  The year before, renal failure. The year before that, some sort of tick disease. You don’t fucking know.

The very idea of contact tracer.  Really?  For this? A Blade Runner. America has become a parody of itself. Papers please.  This is getting fucking weird.  They lock us down with an aerosol of fear porn coming at us from every corner. PTSD in the form of nightmares because of too much introspection and isolation.  Shaming us for a lack of hive mentality.

What if you can’t buy a fucking hamburger outside of your zipcode without a vaccination chip?  Understand who these people are.  They sold you a bone crunching recession that they walked away from with more filthy lucre than ever.  The richest motherfucker on earth wants to sell you a vaccine and owns institutes dedicated to population control.

Target, Home Depot and Walmart are wide open but your favorite gastro pub, tapas bar or sushi joint probably won’t be around once the dust settles.  $6 trillion in about a week to the corporate elite.  Your government didn’t break a sweat pulling that off.

You didn’t get shit compared to that.

This lockdown has provided an excuse to turn fear into a virtue. People who have chosen fear believe they are better than people who did not and it has become the number one virtue signal in the repertoire of the great unwashed.

In 1918 the Spanish Flu killed 50 million people.  5.6 percent of the population.  It was bad but it was a hundred years ago. Now, only the poor and vulnerable are dying. Last year, 650,000 died from the flu, .009% of the population.  We got about half a million dead at .006% after six months and everyone is losing their shit.

Your chances of dying are far less than a single percent.  Your chance of homelessness and bankruptcy are far greater.  You’re chances of financial ruin and desperation are way better than you ever getting sick.

Drinks for my friends.

 

It all starts with the bread. It’s gotta be fresh. I use the ciabatta bread from Ralph’s. LaBrea Bakery. You gotta cook it some more. It’s not done when you buy it. It’s fresh. It’s a good thing; I toast it in my fabulous retro chrome toaster.

Wait for it to cool before you apply a thin coat of only Best Foods or Hellman’s to the inside of both slices.

Thinking about the layers of ingredients and the sort of traction or grip they will provide to keep the contents from sliding around during mastication is now worthy of consideration.

You wanna be able to slap it together and cut it in half without it bleeding or toppling. You wanna be able to hoover it without being festooned by gore.

Engineering without a degree.

Apply a quality hummus to one slice. It doesn’t have the viscosity of peanut butter so be as conservative as you can stand because hummus is awesome.  Apply a quality olive tapenade to the other side with the same considerations in mind. It’s oily. It’s fantastic. It’s slippery. Buy these two items at Trader Joe’s.

A thin layer of arugula to the hummus side provides grip for the the slice of smoked gouda cheese that goes on next. Havarti at least.  Three or four thin slices of deli grade mesquite smoked turkey or chicken breast are up to bat.  Roll them up loosely for grip.

Shave some red onion.  Seriously.  Just shave some red onion on it.

Here’s where it gets dicey.  Slice as thinly as possible a suitable tomato(s) circumference to a bread acreage ratio. Tomatoes are important on a sandwich for texture, moisture and flavor. Grind pink Himalayan sea salt and rainbow peppercorns onto them.  The peppercorns speak to the arugula.

And so, for grip and flavor, we add another thin layer of arugula.

Put the tapenade slice on top, bear down a bit when you cut it in half with the serrated blade you should have been using for the tomatoes and Bob’s your uncle.

I recommend the Sofia Blanc de Blanc, not too cold because it get’s austere. The bottle is very festive. It comes in euphoric gold cellophane. It’s got an offset banana vibe.   Garnish the plate with a small side of arugula and olive oil with lemon for acid and some peppercorns to tie it to the sandwich. Cherry tomatoes and shallots or scallions, of course.

You don’t have to eat it all.

I swear these sandwiches are better after they are tightly wrapped in foil for a few hours while the flavors congeal into the caramelized holes in the bread.

Shiny surface out.

Drinks for my friends.

“Biden is worse than Trump. Trump inherited the system, Biden was its architect.” -Chris Hedges

Biden’s history is horrific.  He was and is a monster.  He’s been on the wrong side of virtually everything since television.  Mouth breathers with no attention span believe that being second in command aboard  starship Obama is a virtue. It merely slimes him further. Obama was a successionist. Not exceptional in any way.  He served at the pleasure of the Pentagon as well as the intelligence community, Wall Street and the banks.

Donald Trump is mildly retarded.

Joe Biden has an aneurysm socket on his forehead and walks the barren landscape of dementia.

People don’t understand that Trump can be influenced but Biden can’t.  Biden is an invalid and will be the the most obsequious supplicant meat puppet the military industrial complex has ever had the distinct pleasure of teabagging.

Flatter Trump and the United States of America is your oyster.

Both are quite predictable.

The biggest surprise you’ll ever get from either is what your hand smells like after you shake one of theirs.

Battle of the invalids.

I’m here to tell you that if you’re gonna have a dog in this hunt, it’s Clockwork Orangutan. Shame him enough or praise him in the right way and he’ll do what you want while retreating to the corner to gnaw a pack of crayons to get that good technicolor drool flowing.

He hasn’t started any new wars and he pleasures himself by announcing that he’s planning to withdraw troops from whatever country he saw on the front page after his morning cheeseburger.  Democrat heads explode and he burps diet coke.

I fuckin’ love that.

Biden can’t tell you what day it is or what town he’s in.  He’ll be making arms deals with his dentist. Trade deals with his endocrinologist. Getting behind a guy like Biden is you’ve got be fucking kidding me absurd. Forty years of shit and all the sudden he’s a windsock for progressive dreams.  Months of veto M4A no matter what and this week he talks about health care as a human right.  Forever marijuana is gateway and lock the bastards up for profit but now it’s “decriminalization”.

Wanna buy a bridge?

All the Karens will go back to brunch and naps.

Battle of the invalids.

I’ll refuse to blame, impugn or even question how anybody votes.  To have any moral or ethical imperative to vote for either one these ass clowns is absolutely impenetrable to me.  Not fathomable.  Beside the point. If your overwhelming fury isn’t about the nature of this choice, you’re a goddamn moron.

Trump is a raging brat.  Biden is a hollow skin job who’s value lies in the guarantee that he will do whatever the fuck they tell him to.

All the assholes that would fat shame Trump or call his wife an illegal immigrant whore, bristle indignant when the topic of Biden’s obvious cognitive decline rears it’s ugly head.

“You make some mistakes, like an idiot like (former national security adviser John) Bolton, all he wanted to do was drop bombs on everybody, you don’t have to drop bombs on everybody, you don’t have to kill people.” -Donald Trump

Please choose one of the above.

Drinks for my friends.

The best reason I can come up with for voting for Trump is the pure comedy of it. All these smart motherfuckers chasing him around like Warner Brothers coyotes stepping on their dicks while the Roadrunner paints pictures of tunnels on cliffs.

I just adore that so many invest so much in men like Trump and Biden.  One cultivates a brand of narcissism and greed and the other doesn’t have a goddamn thing to say.

Exactly how could we be emptier?

It’s like republicans are the mob but democrats are vampires.

You’re either VBNW or you’re a redneck snake charmer.  Whatever team that has the best looking cheerleaders and free beer wins.  Nobody gives a shit about policy or voting records anymore.  I’ve written about this for years but it keeps getting worse by orders of magnitude.

Only now, has it become high comedy.

Trump says shoot them and Biden says naw, shoot them in the leg.  Trump says maybe M4A and Biden says he’d veto it.

Trump keeps talking about withdrawing troops and democratic heads keep exploding and festooning the sidewalks with gore.

Trump is morbidly obese but Nancy Pelosi isn’t a drunk.  This primary and the last one wasn’t rigged.  Obama might have been worse than Dick Nixon.  G.W. Bush endorsed Biden.  The left is in a bromance with the FBI and the CIA while the right is pissing down their necks. The democrats are humping authority while the republicans lie about hillbilly freedom.

I know smart people but I’m starting to lose hope.

We’re in opposite land.

I want to know how long until we assume our original roles.  Maybe we all get to be bigger assholes forever.  Maybe we can just hide behind our new political identities.  We can go to bars and figure out who’s for Trump and who’s for Biden and dance with the trailer park queen of our choice.

Ya gotta pick a club.  You need to be a full fledged member or everyone else is gonna assume you’re a member of the other club.  You don’t want that.  People assuming you’re a member of the other club.  Don’t be like Johnny Billy or Donnie.  Be just like John or Bill or Don.  It’s simple.  Just pick one and hate the other.  It’s all about loyalty.

Worldwide we are confronted by events that are equal to a good sized asteroid smacking down near a major city.  It’s only that bad.  It’s not a moon sized comet.  The CDC and the WHO now have to admit that it’s much smaller than they told us.  But we’re rioting with masks on.  I can’t get over that.

I’m not sure I’ve ever seen humans behaving stupider and I am confident I’ve never been less sure of my own stupidity.  I’m looking for a place to buy ammunition.  Lots of canned soup and Gatorade.

I just hope everyone votes for truth, justice and the American way.

It’s amazing that a man this dumb can be this bad at something and still win. Donald Trump is an unsophisticated primate slugging it out and throwing feces with far more sophisticated primates and winning in the cage.

Drinks for my friends.

Remember when there were all those memes picturing Trump saying some epic stupid shit and the message was incredulity that it wasn’t the singular moment where his whole campaign ended?

Exactly how the fuck has Biden’s campaign, his entire life, been any different?

You ain’t black.

Before Tara Reade, based on a forty year history of inexcusably inhumane behavior, there was never a goddamn reason to vote for a piece of shit like Biden.

Defending this latest display of authentic honesty out of Biden’s mouth is nothing more than craven malingering cowardice and abject hypocrisy.  Zero excuses left for the man that lied about being jailed to visit Mandela in prison. The man who lied about having a goddamn thing to do with the civil rights movement.  The man who campaigned for segregation because he didn’t want his kids to be raised in a “jungle”.  The man who glowingly eulogized Strom Thurmond and was a loyal friend to Robert Byrd.  The man who ruined the life of the man involved in the accident that killed his wife and child by lying over and over about the driver being drunk. He wasn’t. The accident was ruled to be the fault Mrs. Biden.  The man who lied about plagiarizing speeches and was forced to drop out of a race for president thirty years ago. The man who was captain of the cheer leading team for war in Iraq five years before 9/11.

Mouth breathing idiots would argue that somehow Biden is less rapey and therefore morally superior to a fucking pig like Trump and therefore a lesser of two evils.  Let’s talk about that.  The net negative impact of four decades of policy, legislation and lies of “You ain’t black” Biden, completely eclipses the bush league, amateur hour racism of a knuckle dragging bigot like Trump. Biden was an actual author of a crime bill that was nothing if not a contemporaneous extension of Jim Crow.  A law that manifested in an unprecedented incarceration of people of color.  As far as racism goes, Trump is Fisher Price compared the heavy weight champion that is Biden.

Obama needs to come collect his boy.

The democrats have never run a worse man for president.  Ever.  Their only and exclusive argument is “but Trump”.  That’s it.  That’s all they’ve got.  He’s a little less creepy.  A little less rapey.  Just a hair less full of shit.  Not quite as much of a goddamn serial liar.

Maybe not the same brand of racist.

Congratulations you pathetic batch of lying and intellectually dishonest bunch of hypocritical fucking cunts.  What the fuck is wrong with you assholes?  You really think Trump started all this shit?

Really?

No sale.

A vote for Biden is nothing more than permission and complicity to run another piece of shit neoliberal that will make sure that nothing fundamentally changes forever.  It doesn’t matter who wins, the bombs will keep dropping and the rich will keep getting richer and most of us will continue to be seen and used as disposable slaves.

Neither one of these assholes gives a shit about George Floyd.

They made sure that we have no choice but these two men.

So, let’s talk about the lesser of two evils.

Drinks for my friends.

Fucking cowards.

Old friends.  Mentors.  Good hippies.  Anti-war.  Men I’ve admired and respected for decades.  Men who taught me to think the way I still do.

When I post actual facts about what a hollow piece of shit Biden is, I get nothing but callow spittle. I’m a moron. A Trump supporter. That’s all they know.

It’s always the same.

It disgusts me.

I understand exactly what’s happened to these men.

Fear.

American media sells fear for profit 24/7.

War.

Joe Biden has championed every war he ever saw. Faithfully, diligently and ruthlessly. Innocent men women and children. Millions dead for money because of a genocidal sociopath like Biden.

Pieces of shit like Biden have been in the pocket of these murdering motherfuckers for a lifetime longer than a dipshit like Trump.

They have no problem installing a man so evil, so entrenched in this fuckery and so obviously absent cognitive facility. He’s losing his goddamn mind. He’s a fucking vegetable. Biden gets elected and the Pentagon runs the show more than ever.

They’re both likely serial sexual abusers if not habitual rapists but I’m the asshole for refusing to choose the one wearing the blue tie.

I want nothing to do with either one of these failed up motherfuckers.

Sanders was crushing it. More contributors and larger rallies than any time in American history. Super Tuesday happens and they all drop out and bend over for a man they know is about to get raped in his aneurysm socket. Every single one of these slimy fucks did it because of the fetid grip of the DNC. Biden will probably lose.  Literally fall in his lane.  They don’t care.

Exit polls.

Five months before the convention. Sanders not far behind. Barely half the states have voted and they shut it all down. Sanders has summarily been removed from the New York primary ballot while California democrats are seeking to strip him of all the delegates awarded by the most populated state in the country.

Trump didn’t do this. Democrats did.

Not a single one of you reading this has ever seen anything like this before.

I’m the asshole for refusing to choose the one wearing the blue tie.

My heroes are completely fine with it. They couldn’t be happier that a corporate owned, neoliberal, warmongering, sexual predator is going to lose to the one man they’re most afraid of.  Both candidates are the same goddamn thing except the incumbent is the lesser of two evils and democrats don’t give a mad fuck.

Men that have become parodies of themselves.  Men that are now weak and useless in my eyes.  Men that have signed off on everything.  Every goddamn thing they ever claimed to believe in.  Stinking hypocrites all of them.

Weak legged fear of a man that any of them could best on a chessboard or in an arm wrestling contest.

These men are spineless cowards.

I’m the asshole for refusing to choose the one wearing the blue tie.

This is fucking insane.

Drinks for my friends.

Scene: It’s spring in America.  The DNC convention is five months away and only half the states have voted.  It’s all been shut the fuck down to clear the way for two demonstrably corrupt racist, rapist mentally compromised assholes with abhorrent records to fight it out in the jar of battling insects that American corporate television has become.

The glut of “information” available about this pandemic is as exorbitant as it is absurd, there  are those that disseminate factual, reasonable and responsible information alongside an army of media jackals not interested in any thing other than fear.

If you’re one of the, “this is all Trump’s fault”, dickheads, shut the fuck up. He’s an idiot and it threatened his popularity.  That’s it. It’s not exclusively China’s fault either.  Both arguments are moot at this point. Fifty years from now we’ll learn this disease was cooked up in some lab that our own government vomited funding into.

We didn’t get this shit from Chinese fucking bats.

Everyone one who’s gonna get it, is gonna get it.  Social Distancing slows it down so that our facility to handle it isn’t compromised. That’s why we need to take it as seriously as we possibly can.  But again, everyone that’s going to get sick, will get sick.

Herd immunity and vaccines are the distant future.

While they seize control of what’s left.

Here’s the deal. Just about every death is being attributed to this particular virus.  Protocol is is being pissed on. People are dying for all the usual reasons but it’s being blamed on Covid 19.  Look at at any official mortality rate a year ago and compare it to the numbers today.

Do it.

Math.

Shock doctrine diligence will be brought bear.  There will be profit and there will be advantage taken to the point of abject suffering and subjugation by the powers that be.

Sure, it’s the economy, dumbass.

But wait, there’s more.

Remember the Patriot Act after 9/11?  The Defense Authorization Act?  All the subsequent iterations that were ever more draconian? The democrats giving Trump hundreds of billions more for war than he even asked for?

I guarantee we’re gonna get fucked in ways we can see coming and ways we won’t understand for way too long.

The opportunity to render the democratic primaries a mockery of what was already feeble burlesque has been seized. Corporations are resting comfortably on an IV of cash while their supplicants debate our labor and crumbs.

These things are happening during a goddamn pandemic.

Understand that the powers that be, that have been fucking you in every hole available, are now getting every goddamn thing they’ve ever wanted on a silver platter.  If you’re at all vulnerable, they will buy whatever you have for pennies on the dollar and put you on the goddamn street. This will begin to happen when they declare that everything is finally returning to normal.  The minute they tell you everything is fine, spend your last $20 bill on steel underwear.

Socializing losses and capitalizing gains.

Same as it ever was.

If you’re not a multimillionaire,  they’re going to rape the shit out of you.  The wars will go on and on while you never get health care and you and your children will never make enough to pay for it.

Drinks for my friends.

The world burns.  We’re immersed in a pandemic. There’s no way we’re going to emerge without some severe degree of economic implosion. This election is a goddamn joke. Civil rights and liberties will be compromised.  The rich will be filthy fine and the rest of us will be fucked. I’ve seen the exact same thing at least three times in my life.

I am tired.

We are foisting this brain eaten jackass upon an absolutely impossible task. President of the United States of America.

Fuck me.

It’s not going to happen. Trump will skull fuck Biden. Biden has a gaping hole in his head. It will look exactly like what I’m describing.  A battle of invalids with one unable to fight back. An orange man fucking a liver spotted, clueless septuagenarian in his aneurysm socket.

Joe Biden is a man in advanced cognitive decline. I’m forced to watch the great unwashed defend a man former to the shell of his previous self.  A man that has always sucked anyway. His shell was shit.  A champion of Jim Crow and Strom Thurmond.  A man who has bent himself over for the military industrial complex, big pharma and all banks of every stripe. A man who has tried at least four times to rob the elderly of health care and the money they paid in to a system their whole lives to at least pay for their prescriptions and the privilege of not having to eat cat food or die because they can’t afford medical treatment.

Joe Biden has never been anything but a piece of shit.

Up to now he’s been a bit player.  A pawn.  Now he intends to champion the free world? Think about the last VP that became president, one incumbent removed.

Joe Biden steps on his dick in public everyday the DNC lets him out of his comfortable suite.  He barely understands he’s running for president.  They don’t let him out much.  When they do, it’s chaos.  He doesn’t know where he is.

It’s elder abuse.

Here’s what punches me in the mouth over and over. Creepy Joe Biden is a sexually abusive monster. There is little daylight between him and the current leaking bag of dicks in terms of disgusting vulgarity and objectification of the fairer sex.  He literally sucks as much as the dipshit he’s running against in every conceivable way.  He’s been morally and ethically bankrupt from the beginning of his political career.  They don’t dare defend his failings as a human.  They cheer lead his attempts to construct sentences.

His record as a human is abysmal. All they care about is proving he’s gorgeous.  Perfectly fine.  That he knows his name and where he is.

No sane man is allowed to say the kind of shit he says in public over and over unless he’s vying for the democratic nomination for president of The United States of America.  It scares the fuck out of me. You’ve got be fucking kidding me.

The world burns.  We’re immersed in a pandemic. There’s no way we’re going to emerge here without some severe degree of economic implosion. The election is a goddamn joke. Civil rights and liberties will be compromised.  The rich will be filthy fine and the rest of us will be fucked. I’ve seen the exact same thing at least three times in my life.

Yet the DNC and the vote blue no matter who fucking morons won’t stop trying to shame us into supporting this protracted career loser as some savior over some crayon eating, technicolor drooling dipshit that shares virtually all the same policies and precisely the temperament.

You’ve got be fucking kidding me.

Let us all thank the evil fucks that keep certain members of American society just happy enough to take this pathetic story arc as gospel.

Please send help.

Drink for my friends.

 

Bernie Sanders kept his promise the same way he keeps all of them.  He supported the nominee with thorough tenacity and elaborate aplomb.  More of his voters voted for for her than hers voted for Obama against McCain and Palin. He did at least twice as many campaign events for her as she did for Obama.

It was hard to watch.  But it was courage, not cowardice. It’s what integrity looks like.

Shut the fuck up about what he cost her or what he owes her.

He kept his goddamn word.

Hillary Clinton never passes up an opportunity to impugn Sanders as divisive.  She’s a filthy lying fucking pig.

Fuck you for labeling him a sellout or a sheepdog.

He lived to fight another day and here he is.

Leading. Again. Way bigger this time and against many more.

Yeah bitch, I’m a Bernie Bro.

Nevermind his policies. By now you know what they are and you believe we’ve deserved them for a long time or you’re an idiot. You understand that the richest nation in recorded history can afford them or you’re a moron. There’s no need to look further than the forces allied against him.  The entities afraid of him.  It’s a long list. Democrats and republicans.  A litany of every corporate monolith, political organization and think tank that has been face fucking you on your knees since you were born.

He’s not perfect.  No shit.  He’s the closest I’ve seen in my lifetime.  You want perfect?  Look in the mirror.  You ain’t running and you’re likely way more of a clown.

Bloomberg: A republican.  A serial sex offender billionaire looking to buy the presidency that infamously called medical marijuana a “hoax” and didn’t hesitate to violate civil, human and first amendment rights by cracking the heads of sovereign citizens and journalists during the Occupy Wall Street protests.  Mr. Stop and Frisk. He’s worth as much as 125 million of us. Exactly how is this jackass less of a douche than Trump?

There’s no such thing as a self made billionaire.

Warren:  A pant suit full of republican until she was 47 years old. Defended the Vietnam war.  Nothing says progressive quite like a rich white Harvard law professor who claimed Native American ancestry to advance her career and wrote a Cherokee cookbook with plagiarized recipes. Never met an inflated war budget she couldn’t vote for while raking in dirty corporate money. She’s been kneeling at the altar of Hillary for longer than we can guess.

Biden:  The original crime bill racist and war hawk who’s lucky to remember what day it is or what goddamn state he’s in. On the record and on video bragging about cutting social security, medicare and extorting an entire country  for a billion dollars to keep his derelict son neck deep in hookers and blow. Looks like he might have an affliction that is really creepy.

Buttigeig: Openly gay closet republican and racist mayor of a small town who treads on his military service as a fucking chauffeur. The rat faced boy didn’t even soldier through boot camp much less see combat.  His “service” was a goddamn photo op. Sold out medicare for all the second big pharma and the for profit insurance companies began offering free blow jobs.  Says more without saying anything than any other politician with a pulse. I remember my first beer.

Klobuchar: Who?

Guess what kids?  They’re all goddamn republicans and the DNC neoliberals has had or is having a love affair with every single one of them.

Not a single one of these assholes will even pretend to try.

None of these dipshits will save you.  Bernie Sanders isn’t going to save you either, but he just might furnish you with a chance to save yourselves. He’s not Santa and he’s not the savior. You don’t get to go back to bed when he wins.  You’ll need to put the coffee on. It’s how it will happen.  Not me.  Us.

All you jackasses whining that he won’t be able to get anything done because republicans won’t let him need to shut the fuck up.  The establishment democrats will be swinging their bats at his head just as viciously.  And, guess what geniuses?  He has no intention of deliberately dissolving his movement so that fuckery as usual can continue like Obama did.  If he ends up not being able wreak havoc on the status quo, so what?  At least it will be four or eight years of jamming it in reverse with the brakes squealing and smoking.

Sanders is the paradigm of consistent moral principle.  A career politician that remains one of the least wealthy members of an allegedly august body notorious for enriching themselves at the expense of those they are elected and paid to represent. To label him a traitor is cruel and unusual vivisection of a decent man who still holds faith in human potential and spirit. He’s never wavered.  Never havered.  Forty years of saying the exact same thing.

If it goes the other way, if the establishment, the media, the military industrial complex, the prison industrial complex, the pharmaceutical industrial complex and the insurance industrial complex and the DNC prevail, I’ll join everyone else at the trash barrel and warm my hands while it all Berns.

Sometimes, you have to destroy the village in order to save it.

You don’t have a goddamn thing to lose.

Wake up assholes.

We’ve got one last shot at this.

Make it count.

Drinks for my friends.

America is the smoking gun that will turn into a mushroom cloud.

The perfect storm of Israel and Saudi Arabia have finally made America their bitch. We have assassinated a beloved Iranian military leader most notable for leading the charge against the terrorist organizations that America funds while it pretends to fight them.

Al-Qaeda and ISIS.

General Qassem Soleimani wasn’t a fucking terrorist. He fucking wasn’t.

Sheldon Adelson just happened to contribute $25 million to Trump’s campaign and $5 million to his inauguration fund. In 2013 he said rather infamously said that the US should drop a nuclear bomb on Iran. Nothing to see here.

Anybody who still says that Trump is somehow Putin’s puppet needs to shut the fuck up right now. Fucking yesterday. Iran is an essential ally to both Russia and China. This is an alliance that if you don’t fear as potentially Armageddon, you’re a mouth breathing nationalist dipshit.

Every goddamn lie you’ve ever accepted or believed about Putin or Russia is Fisher Price compared to this brand of lethal, human species ending fuckery. Trump just acquiesced to Pentagon control and shat down Putin’s neck.

It is, quite plainly, the most reckless and dangerous brinkmanship I’ve witnessed in my lifetime.

What the fuck has Iran ever done to us besides overthrow a government we installed?

The answer is nothing.

We have sponsored wars, crippling sanctions and coups against Iran for half a century.  They absolutely don’t have a single reason not to hate America.

All the assholes clinging to the notion that Trump is draining the swamp, playing 3-D chess or fighting the deep state are now thoroughly full of shit and without a single excuse for being so.  He’s an idiot.  A moron with acute narcissistic personality disorder doing his best to make Netanyahu cum with his mouth while jerking MBS off with both hands.

Believing that there is anything justified, righteous or noble about this is your brain on American media.

Any protracted military conflict with Iran will be the end of the America we know.  The involvement of Russia and China could very well be the end of the world as we know it. Neither Russia, China or Iran want it, but they’ve been preparing for it for decades.

This isn’t just Trump’s legacy.  It is the legacy of every American president since I was born.  Hillary absolutely would’ve done this.  Every candidate for president would do this with exception of maybe two.  Sanders and Gabbard.

America is not a country anymore.  It’s an oil company with an army.  It’s a multinational corporation that never fails to honor avarice over humanity.  It’s unsustainable and we’ve just taken another precarious step toward the apocalypse.

Drinks for my friends.

 

Goddamnit.

He told me that the power of no was more powerful than yes. He told me this as my star was rising. He really wanted me to understand it.

He told me this in his office without a desk or chairs on the tiny lot that was A&M records. Bean bags, carpets and a good sized bong.

Always high and sometimes sweaty, he never lied to me.

Ever.

An enigma if I ever met one.

One singular gorgeous bitch.

He told me, during one of our many late night recording sessions, that he could have been a bad guy but he’d decided to be a good guy. I understood what he meant. I could see exactly how formidable he would be as a bad guy. He could easily be a scary motherfucker but I was never scared of him.

He decided to be good.

He taught me abandon. To be good and not give a shit otherwise.

He would call the Studio C phone that rang on the console and say “Frusen Glädjé”? It was a question for permission to cross the lot and see and listen to what we were doing that day. What artist. What band.

I understood that if I granted him access, he would wade in.  Sometimes I said no and sometimes I said yes.

He never came over just to make nice and say hello.

He was A&R.

Artist and Repertoire.

When he participated, he was no musician. He glowed and floated. He ‘played’ feedback on guitar and Mellotron on one record Alex Reed and I made. His footprint on that record was invaluable. His influence and collaboration on many others was indispensable.

My good friend and exceptional partner Alex Reed happened upon us one night after assisting one Niko Bolas as we were finishing a mix on the record we were making only to ask us what the fuck we had done.  To this day I believe he was equal parts disgusted and in awe.

He was the first human to get me to actually think outside of the goddamn box.  I loved him because of what he earnestly showed me about myself.  I believe he was fond of me. I adored him.

I’m not old yet but his passing makes me feel old.

Only a few years older than me.

Without a doubt one of the coolest fuckers I’ve ever met.

He looms large in my mind.

He taught me that you don’t have to do anything in a particular way.  You don’t need any conventional thing to be badass. He furthered my crazy and gawd love him for that because I can never forgive him.

He burned brighter.

I’ve missed him for some time.

Now, I’ll miss him forever.

Drinks for my friends.

The Trump presidency has retarded the intellectual capacity of every developmentally challenged partisan in America for good.

It’s done.

Democrats and liberals lose their fucking minds over every breath he takes and every move he makes until they are so bereft of all pretense, righteousness evaporates and they end up bathing in putrid greasy abject hypocrisy.

Republicans and conservatives lose their fucking minds defending every breath he takes and every move he makes until they become lying cartoon parodies of their notoriously evil greedy and self righteous prick personas.

Both believe that when someone doesn’t buy into their respective brands of propaganda, it’s because they’ve been brainwashed by the other side. A barren vacuum of imagination limits understanding of the fact there are more than two sides. More than red or blue. More than democrat or republican. More than liberal or conservative.

All these fuckers won’t hesitate to lie in support of their narrative, none has a soul they wouldn’t sell. Partisan zombies.

You don’t have to love Trump to hate Hillary. You don’t have to love Obama to hate Trump.

They all make out and grope each other in alcoves, side offices and coat rooms. Brazen hussies that fuck everything that moves and steal from everyone that doesn’t.

The burlesque is vulgar and goddamn hysterical at the same time.  They join hands when doubling down on surveillance power for the military industrial complex. They bow heads while authorizing ever more money for death, destruction and global hegemony.

Liberalism has become the mask that closet conservatives wear.

There are no closet liberals.

None of this matters as long as you hate Trump or love him. It’s come down to how you feel about this leaking bag of dicks.

He’s an identity you identify with or not. That defines you more than anything else today. So fucked up.  So wrong.  What scares the crap out of me is how convenient he’s become to how so many of us actually see ourselves. How simple a matter it’s become.

It’s Clockwork Orangutan’s very best day.

Donald Trump defines you whether you like it or not.  It doesn’t matter how you feel about him.

The latest symptom of a fetid and ghastly rot that began metastasis forty or fifty years ago.  An entirely predictable development.

Donald Trump the is the harbinger of our doom.

What the democrats say is there isn’t.  What the republicans say isn’t there is.  Most of America resides in that gap.

Those who would vote blue no matter who, despite the guaranteed protraction of neoliberal policies of endless war and brutal economic austerity, are no more gullible and stupid than those who would blindly support this fucking moron. Binary thinking at its most callow and craven.

The profound danger of Donald Trump is the belief on one side that everything will be fine once he’s gone and the belief on the other side that he’s fighting for anyone but himself.

He’s not draining any goddamn swamp and he’s sure as fuck not the anti-Christ.

His hard earned idiocy is exactly the same as our own.

We are creatures of our own device.

This is not what winning looks like.

Drinks for my friends.

I began writing this at 10:19 pm.

The deal is midnight.

All sins are safer before noon at night.

It won’t get awful until after that border is crossed. Count with me the mistakes you wouldn’t have made had you been home and in bed with your choppers minty before the hour of darkness and despair. Talk to me about the shit you thought you could get away with at three or six am.

Yer fucking high no matter what at those hours.

Borrowed time.

Everything gets worse the further south you get from the clock hands straight up.

There’s a reason this is a thing. Edgar Allan Poe. A lunatic and they barely had accurate clocks back then. A goddamn crow gave him his best poem.  He was high as fuck.  Thank gawd for that crow. Black as midnight.  It was brilliant.  Fucking genius, that raven.

An hour and ten minutes left.

I’ll be mixing a song.  Tomorrow. I don’t know what I’m doing.  I never have. I’m golden because I’ve done it before.  I remember knowing what I was doing. I don’t remember what to do.

I intend to start drinking at one minute past midnight. I can’t stand it.  Every record I ever made is so expert. Every one, so sober.

Satan will be my pal.  I’ll embrace him. I’ll be drunk. At the crossroads.  We’ll talk and my mix will be one that gods and mortals hear differently.  He will appear in the form of a female cat because that makes me comfortable.  He’ll talk to me while I watch his cat lips make a voice that sounds like the crackle and boom of a raging  fire.  I’ll believe him. He will be in possession of one of my cats. It will be talking to me.

My guitars, vocals, bass, kick and snare will occupy more space than humanly possible.

That’s my plan.

It’s 11:36.

It’s 11:42 and I’m having doubts.

I’ll have a puff.

Jesus tells me to brag about it later when I’m already drunk because that’s inevitable.

11:46

I will kill it because I always know what to do.

11:50

I’ll build it from the bottom up.  Inverted pyramid.  Anchor it and lush it out.  Find the hook and make it sing.  So many tracks.  Like seventy. Seventy goddamn tracks.  That would be an analog console forty feet long. Skating back to the middle of the monitors to see if the knobs you just twisted worked.

11:55

We keep what works. Toss what doesn’t.  I’ll produce the mix.  That’s my job.

11:59

Happy Halloween.

Fast forward a month:

The other producer and the artist and I met today in my friend’s control room.

Where we mixed this pig.

It’s actually a laboratory.  All the x-ray, centrifuges and vital function monitors I need. Rows of pills and medicines. Salves and bandages.  He walked me through the differences between the digital plugins we’re using on the screen and the real world counterparts.  The ones I know and understand. The analog ones.  The real ones.

He explained that if I spin this particular centrifuge too fast, the liquid will coagulate instead of separate. He tells me that where I used to use a small bore needle, I might need a big one. That there are several drugs from the 90’s that are no longer efficacious.  He warns me about the radiation in certain parts of the gear. He tells me how flawed his laboratory is and exactly where it’s flawed.

As soon as I heard his monitors I know I could mix on them. He can shine an MRI on goddamn anything.

Everything I used to do and the way I used to think. The same language.  He keeps an eye on the song and makes sure it doesn’t die a gory death because of my ego.  Giving me the side eye. Waiting for me to realize he’s chasing something stupid. Making me the grasshopper.

Then he drops his analog gear wizardry on the stereo buss and the whole thing blooms like giant white cumulonimbus.  Glistening air, pure pop crunch and glassy fat vacuum tube pork. All the sudden it’s dark and raining.

Hard.

Fuck me.

He slides his art in while he admits that sound is more important than songs.

He’s wrong.

I look at his etchings and I get it, but he never sacrifices the music.

Mixing outside “the box”.

The digital box.

Servicing the hybrid of digital and analog.

Thank gawd.

We went to the same school.  The best recording studio in the world. Thirty years ago.  There was no box then.  There were no limits.  It was pounded into us by the best artists, the best producers and the best engineers in the world.

This guy listens better than I do.

He’s got fabulous disco meters and spectrum analyzers for everything.

My friend is talented.

He’s a firm believer in lots of garlic and strong but flavorful coffee.

The clients are happy.  We did a Henley thing with the lead vocal but left it at a fork in the road because I knew the other producer would have a strong opinion. He did.  We took his fork and it’s better.

The mix is lush as a forest on the beach but fucking punchy.

I’m a Jedi again.

We’ll dry the lead vocal up a bit to make it to more intimate and back off the vocal refrain that repeats in the choruses. It crowds everything.

Probably print vocal up and vocal down versions and call it a day.

There’s nine more.

It’s 1:11 am.

I owe the Devil.

Drinks for my friends.

This just in from the voluntarily punching themselves in the face desk.

Pelosi is now willing to investigate whether Clockwork Orangutan should be investigated for impeachment. Willing to investigate if he should be investigated. For the dumbest goddamn reason so far. The mouth breathing democrats are suddenly all about the courage of their convictions because Trump may or may not have done something every other president has done.

Like American money or weapons to foreign entities have never been without conditions.

The nebulousness of evidence here is so subjective that most kindergarteners wouldn’t be sent home with a note pinned to their shirt for it.  No principal would even pick up the phone for this non-starter.

From the cheap seats it looks like they’re elevating the festivities for something Biden rather overtly shit the bed over and then bragged about.  Biden threatened to withhold more money, actually got some poor bastard fired, and his loser son was not only never investigated, but ended up with a fuckton of cash for sitting on the board of some Ukrainian energy company he didn’t know dick about.

Biden’s loser son doesn’t know dick about anything but white privilege and being the son of a doddering, former vice president.  Kinda like Trump’s kids.

Of all the fuckery this moron Trump wears on his face like he just lifted it out of a Scarface sized mountain of blow, these assholes hitch their wagon to this.

If the DNC hadn’t swan dived so shamelessly into the pig trough to cheat Hillary into the Oval, I would second guess their abject stupidity. I would wonder if they’re actually closeted MAGA patriots.

But no.

The democratic leadership isn’t fit to clerk at the 7-11. I wouldn’t hire a single one of them to man the fry station at Wienerschnitzel.

This is all so transparent.  A smoke enveloped dog and it’s reflection in the mirror as a pony.  You’ve got to be fucking kidding me. What a show.

They will never go after him for what he’s actually guilty of because they’re all neck deep in the same sewer, so they go after him for the same sewer their “front runner” is neck deep in.

The stupid, it burns.

There are two possible outcomes here and the first one is doomed. There is no way in hell that the senate is going to remove Trump from office.  Hell has already frozen over and it’s still not gonna happen.

The second outcome is guaranteed.  Further emboldening of Trump’s base.  Even more reason for his racist, bigoted acolytes to own their perceived righteousness and our national distraction of polarization morphs ever more into the disaffection and apathy that allows for idiots on either side to be elected with the cynical and manipulative flick of a cloven hoof.

Or a bifurcated tale.

This is exactly why I don’t write about politics anymore.

Drinks for my friends.

I bought a new Sony.

They make great TV’s.

It’s gigantic and looks awesome.  My Angel of Mercy is maybe pining for the 75 inch.  My humility tells me it’s too much.  The Geek Squad guys say there’s no such thing as too big. We have two weeks to decide. The picture is stupid. It’s ridiculous.  It’s an exceptionally clean and clear window of prescription glass just behind the camera eye.

Sometimes, it’s almost too much.

Disconcerting.

Almost clinical.

I bought this Ferrari red turntable and it has me fired up. It needed a preamp, a high pass filter, and the coolest looking fire engine red with gold knobs tone control you’ve ever seen.

It came with a pretty good, blue Ortofon cartridge, that was a little dull and rumbled a lot. I fixed all that finally with the aforementioned gear and a really cool isolation platform made of thick plexiglass with shock absorber feet.

It’s not quite as good as my CD player in terms of slam and detail. I haven’t bought any of the records I made on vinyl, probably because it would depress me to learn how few are available.  But it’s friendly. So I’ve bought tons of other records. Good ones.  It sounds grandiose.  Quite lovely.  It’s goddamn romantic.

Fleetwood Mac And Led Zeppelin.

Flatt & Scruggs.

Sheezus.

Saturday Night Fever and Glen Campbell.

The art of sound is huge.

Critics and reviewers don’t seem to understand that audio engineers are fallible.  It’s rarely discussed in the geeky stereo magazines I launch a boot lace over.  I recorded and mixed and I was pretty fucking good but I was fallible. It’s actually weird that the engineer hardly ever gets taken to task in reviews of music or the equipment playing back the music the engineer made.

It’s weird that the engineer never gets busted.

I’ve got at least two records out there that I never want to be asked about.  The rest of them I fucking nailed.

To record well is to be a damn fine carpenter. To mix is to be Jesus and to be a mastering engineer is to assume the role of God. Or, to be fair, a warlock, then a demon and then Satan.

No engineer or producer ever made it to the the show by being faithful to any given instrument.  Every single one of us succeeded by exploiting and manipulating the sound of cool as we recognized it.  The best of us are goddamn geniuses.  There’s not an honest renderer among us. We deliberately distort them. All the instruments. We make them sound bigger or sinister or celestial.

We can’t help it.

We like the sound of cannons and missiles and jets and the rain right along with the anechoic of a windless snowfall and the cloying silence of heavy fog. Some of us don’t need to look up at fireworks because we’re there for the explosions.  The blue green sound of water and waves. The hot sound of summer asphalt and the ricochet and rumble of muscle car exhaust.  The greasy brown static electricity slosh of french fries and corn dogs in a deep fryer if you ever worked fast food.

The best of us spend our time making things smaller to fit the gigantic tracks we’ve constructed. We’d make it smell a certain way if we could.

I’m a twentieth century engineer in a twenty first century world.  I really like knobs, buttons and dials. Meters and faders and the smell of vacuum tubes.  I have a team of experts with me when I sit in front of a computer screen to do what I used to do behind a console all alone for hours.  I’ve always worked well with partners.

I do it on the side now.

I like it.

The most intrinsically rewarding thing I’ve ever done in my life.

I like it because I’ve never gotten worse at it.

Drinks for my friends.

 

We have to drain from every young man in America the notion of heroism by promise of the United States Military.

There is nothing noble there.

When the best choice afforded them upon coming of age is the glory of defending our freedoms, they’ve been indoctrinated and set aside as an asset for American corporations. Convenient to disappear when necessary.

Cannon fodder.

Instead of thanking a Vet for his service, lament what he sacrificed for Dupont or Raytheon. Kissinger or Israel. All that are not slaughtered or maimed in combat will still dream and eventually die suffering the horror they participated in.

Their pride is false.  They accomplished nothing.  America used them. America expended them. America kills everyone that resists. America never stops. Our soldiers come home broken and we hide them.

Nothing to be proud of there.

They start as boys.  As girls.  They end up adults suffering from every imaginable hell in their heads for one despicable fucking reason.  The appetites and greed of  the rich.  The elites. Avaricious sociopaths presenting themselves as politicians, world leaders, media figures and philanthropists, business tycoons and religious icons.

Capitalism and capitalists.

It has always been this way in America.  I don’t pity our soldiers but they are pathetic. Every one of them a victim.  Not a hero among them.  Nobody’s fault but ours.  We suffer more and more for the violence we visit on the world but we still let it go on.  We always have and we always will. Restive complacency. Pissed off but still not paying attention.  The 19th century was a circle of hell for the common man in this country. Black, white, brown or female.

The exact same reason we ain’t seen nothin’ yet.

We’re just getting started.

Again.

Textbooks utterly fail at including or detailing the violence necessary for stifling and oppressing the 19th century worker in America. Soldiers delivered it.

Our constitution remains a work of eloquence and prescience. These were smart men.  That doesn’t change the fact that it was written by rich white men for rich white men.

The rich and powerful are more rich and powerful than ever. The only tool they’ve ever had is soldiers and the goddamn cops.

Police are soldiers.

The last thing young American men and women need is a murdering military that sucks the human dignity of education and health care out of their pockets. Make health care and education automatic and there won’t be any soldiers left who even have to give a shit about life after battle. They just won’t go. Wouldn’t the world be so much better if soldiers had no reason to sign up? If they started a war and nobody showed up?

Support our troops?  Fuck that shit.

End capitalism by ending war.

Or hang the rich.

Drinks for my friends.

Here we go.

Mueller submitted his report to the the DOJ and no single clueless sonafabitch has been or will be indicted, charged or convicted for any kind of fuckery having any goddamn thing to do with Russian interference in our election.

Russia didn’t elect the prick bastard.

It’s done.

It didn’t fucking happen.

The bipartisan senate investigation concludes the same. Every investigation concludes the same. Nobody has a goddamn thing here.

The man who straight up lied about WMD’s in Iraq before congress on live television, just couldn’t, despite his bad self, offer up a single piece of genuine excrement that has anything to do with anything that everyone else in Washington isn’t already up to.

For over two years our media convulsed in a fit of journalistic malpractice by vomiting jet fuel hot enough to collapse reinforced steel truthiness. They were dead fucking wrong.  On purpose.

This revelation from the neoliberal poster boy for truth, justice and the American way, won’t change shit. The Hillbots pinned their hopes and dreams on this most disgusting of apologistic pinball wizards and all he came up with was handfuls of sewage that would stick and stank to any democrat on the hill.

Everybody sucks.

All of them.

And the band plays on.

It doesn’t fucking matter.  All the jackasses that hate Trump so much that don’t give a shit whether there’s evidence or not can’t be bothered. They will hold their breath until there’s war with the nonexistent Soviet Union.

I will say this one last time. He’s a leaking bag of dicks and the stupidest motherfucker to ever fail up this far. But Russia had nothing to do with it. Clockwork Orangutan is far too stupid to even entertain a notion remotely similar.

Anyway, Trump is now the marquee of Israeli hegemony and presidential bitch marionette of the Likud party.  Guess who’s punch and guess who’s Judy. Bibi walked away with the election.  Democrats and republicans cheer from the bleachers.  It’s disgusting.

The planet is burning. We’re about to sack Venezuela and engineer the kind of humanitarian clusterfuck we’ve become infamous for. We exercise particular efficiency in murdering millions of innocent people everywhere. We revoke civil and human rights by invoking staged disasters. We look to put Julian Assange in prison or to death for telling the goddamn truth of it all. He was dragged from asylum and arrested. Democrats and republicans cheer from the bleachers. It’s really fucking disgusting.

America is badass.

We have no health care or education because our TV says it’s unicorns and rainbows despite eighty varieties of aircraft carriers and a trillion dollar defense budget.

America will end the world while we hold our breath for another savior.

I think I’m done.

It used to be a catharsis.

I used to believe that when armed with actual facts, I could change people’s minds.  That didn’t last long.

I was thorough and exacting while pointing out there was no evidence for the claim being made and plenty of evidence to the contrary.  I would cite sources, math, testimony, transcripts and actual video footage of the individual or occurrence in question.

It never mattered.

Not once.

For too long a time I beat them down so vociferously with what had actually happened and what had actually not, that I believed they may experience some reluctance opening their cake hole mouths the next time.

Nope.

I’ve taken elaborate care to be truthful, logical and factual.

And it has never mattered.

Not one bit.

The willingness of so many uninformed to pick a side and fight over the nonsense as opposed to paying attention and thinking critically about issues and policies that will severely impact the entire planet bewilders me.

The number of people who see what I’m doing and agree has never changed.  The number of people who dismiss me as some variety of lunatic because I point out that their media and government is lying to them and has been since they were born has never changed.

What baffles me the most is our collective failure at being truly and honestly selfless.  We fight tooth and nail for whatever it is we most identify with. We do it selfishly. We do it without heed.  Whether it’s political ideology, religion or culture.  We cling to these things so desperately that we never consider that what is genuinely best for each of us, is always best for all of us. We always end up sacrificing ourselves while failing to do what is in everyone’s best interest.

It leaves me empty and reeling.

I see absolutely no reason to continue talking about any of it.  There is no catharsis.  No reward.  Nothing at all intrinsic in my efforts.

The truth is, it has always been this way.  We’ve always been rushing headlong toward extinction and we finally have the power and the technology. There isn’t a fucking thing I can do about it.

I’m out of fucks to give.

This isn’t fun anymore.

Some of us are good and some of us are bad and the bad ones took over hundreds of years ago.  We are not evolving.  The earth will be just fine without us.

Good luck everybody.

I’m done.

Drinks for my friends.

 

 

 

Today is my birthday. I got the coolest wallet. Fidelo. Two plates of elegantly anodized steel.  Magnetic with an understated strap and get this, three extra straps because they figured out that was the moving part.  I’m 54, it could be my last wallet.  Unscannable.  Holds all my cards with strips, chips and numbers.

Really fucking cool.

Brunch this Sunday for the rest of my presents and bloody tomato juice cocktail artistry.

A dead bird, all scrawny and bald and about the the size of my stretched out thumb has been lying on the sidewalk just outside my office door for the last few days. I go out for a smoke. It gives me a melancholy that I don’t know what to do with.

A tiny carcass with a skinny neck stretched over the border of a would be flower bed. Alive for less than a week I’m sure. Never had a chance. The family built a nest in the blunt but leafy tree exactly where the door swings open to the right.

Next door is a crematorium. Families weeping. Weird station wagons and vans pulling in and out. The cloying sweet smell emanating from it blends with the skunky and salty smell of the two pot clinics from just a few doors down to make for a bouquet I’m sure no amount of explaining could make you understand.

Weirdest goddamn smell ever.

I imagine death as poking my finger into the semi-permeable membrane of infinity.  A poster for some science fiction horror movie.  A slurp or a drip and I’m gone at the end of the movie trailer. Or maybe after a protracted disease or getting ripped apart by a goddamn bus or a bear in some gory and horrifying instant.

I don’t fucking know.

What rattles my cage is not knowing whether anything else happens or not.

Obviously I’m not religious.

My cat just died and I imagine her a tiny ripple in the fabric of a universe with exploding suns and gigantic black holes everywhere.  My favorite high school teacher passed not long ago and I picture his ripple as not much more.  He was fucking awesome and so was my cat.

My ripple will be similarly occasional.

And I’m famous.

You can tell how long a cat has on this planet by watching it groom.  Exactly how vigorous and how thorough informs its lifespan and all the compass points between. I watched her die.

If only death were dreaming.

I’m driving  a giant land ship across vast plains under immense power to battle evil carnivals destroying towns for no reason but spectacle. Towering buildings that reach space with women in elevators that would seduce or kill me.  I am confused about some clicking and spitting beetle that keeps attacking me. A vicious dog rendered helpless in a freezing above ground pool. Planks and plywood that my feet and legs keep slipping through as I walk over the top of it. Hanging out with strangers who morph into celebrities and dead friends that whisper wisdom that makes no sense once I wake up but leaving me with a lingering sense of awe and deep affection.

Death should be me trying to remember my dream a few minutes into my shower because I don’t realize I’m dead. That would be perfect. My dead cat just crossed the floor from the corner of my mind.

We’re all just sparks on a slot car track.  All the energy we gather individually is not enough to light a five watt bulb. Latent energy cannot be our only measure.  It can’t be all we have in our mortal purse. The human race dwells just to the left of whole numbers. Less than. We are specks.  Grains of sand.

Pollen.

Dust.

My own hubris wants more than that.

It’s too finite.

Too small.

I hate the idea of living to be old enough to shit the bed. I’m a complete coward.  I’m afraid of suffering and then dying. I just want to go. I’ll off myself when the time comes if it’s dire and inevitable.

I won’t know anything at all.  I will be nothing but dead. No future or past.  No memories.  No nostalgia. Nothing. The love I feel, and the respect I have for people who are far better than me amounts to nothing once my conscious evaporates.  When my waking facility just stops.

Don’t tell me that the prodigious intellectual abundance of people like Tesla, Marie Curie or Einstein just evaporate. That the souls of Gershwin, Mozart, Steinbeck or Poe were offered nothing in spiritual remuneration after death.  That they just melted into the ether.

What the hell is this if nothing happened for them once they ceased?

Here are my demands.  I want the ability to relive every awesome experience from my life once I expire. Over and over. As many times as I want.  My first real kiss.  The first time I heard a song I engineered and produced on the radio.  The first and only time I bought a brand new expensive car. That time I made love with the most beautiful woman I have ever known while the snow blew hard outside the high windows of her Victorian era apartment. When I understood I’d met the woman that one of us would die in front of. The gravity of her and family.  The gorgeous weight of that amount of love and responsibility.

I sat on my balcony just now drunk as a skunk and listened to the birds singing about the perfume of night blooming jasmine. I’d like to include that in my afterlife experience.

I should be allowed to play in the fields I’ve already run through.  Every living thing deserves what I’m describing. The bird, the cats, the lovely women, the teacher and me.  I can’t imagine ever being bored with the whole of it.

I will lose this battle of living.  Everybody does.  My biggest fear and most profound certainty are the exact same thing.  The fire goes out.  Life is extinguished.  It’s hard to believe, but I have no evidence at all to contradict it.  No matter what I do, no matter how much I indulge myself or champion the right thing, it just doesn’t matter.

I love going to sleep and waking up.

I want that forever.

I’ve done a pretty good job.  I’ve been honest.  There are things I’m not proud of but I’ve never fucked a single person over.  I have no formal education but I’ve done a good job of informing myself.  I’ve loved to the point of having my heart broken more than once.  My life has been full.  I would wish it on most people.  It’s been painful but lovely.

I want my head stone to say He had great hair.

If anyone delivers a eulogy, I would want them to say he was good at knowing when to be drunk and when to be sober. He was about as good at one as he was the other, because he genuinely hated most people. The few people he loved, he loved hard.

That’s gonna be tricky for whoever has to say it.

Drinks for my friends.

 

 

 

 

 

Nobody would’ve given a mad fuck if the boys hadn’t been wearing MAGA hats. A nation of morons triggered into apoplexy over stupid fucking hats. The catalyst for an entire news cycle devoted to smearing children on a goddamn field trip. Reflexively assuming someone is some brand of virulent racist because of it, is in its self, a form of bigotry.

I’m firmly in favor of a woman’s authority over her own reproductive imperatives.

I’m about as militant an atheist/agnostic as you will ever find. The Catholic church is an inherently evil and sadistic institution. Zero moral authority.

These boys from Covington check a lot of my boxes.

Still, my convictions don’t prevent me from understanding exactly the neoliberal impetus for this latest round of contrived, virtue signaling hypocrisy.

Orange man bad.

Meanwhile, death threats from “liberal” adults have resulted in these kids being afraid to attend their own classes at their own school.

Think about that.

Perverse, sanctimonious, self righteousness with potentially lethal consequences. Just blame a bunch of fucking high school kids and include the parents because of guessed at bigoted, piety. If only they could be eliminated somehow, it would be morning in America again. Like when Obama delivered hope and change via a post racial rainbow with glitter crapping unicorns.

They didn’t mock or harass anyone. They didn’t intimidate or bully anyone. They didn’t surround anyone. They didn’t touch anyone or prevent anyone from doing anything they wanted to do. The native elder approached them. Video shows that he waded into them. Video shows nothing more than students dancing and laughing and clapping along with him.

One young man became the poster boy for liberal invective and vitriol. He smiled and after a minute or two, he walked away.He acquitted himself with aplomb when a stranger beat a drum in his face and chanted at him.

He smiled and walked away.

That’s fucking it.

Whatever that boy’s beliefs are, he has every guaranteed right to them. He didn’t put a goddamn foot wrong. Fuck you, I was impressed. The deck was stacked against him. Wearing that stupid hat and coming from a parochial high school in Kentucky to support some event advancing the dehumanization of women.

He comes from an all boys school which is weird enough. Maybe he is a vainglorious fuckstick. But I have no way of knowing that and neither do you or the idiots who rushed to impugn and malign him.

This is where we are and it’s really ugly. Tens of millions willing to render judgement on a high school boy based on video clip that lasts a few mere seconds and a goddamn hat.

Millions who just can’t help but blame the election of a leaking bag of dicks on a seventeen year old boy.
This is our disease. This is who and what we’ve become.

Because of a fucking hat.

Consider this, if that boy isn’t racist, the perfect storm has been visited on him to become one. All the right wing, racist institutions in America will offer a loving embrace in the years to come. The rest will treat him like a pariah. It would be hard to blame him for accepting that solace when they’re the only ones offering.

Assuming some mouth breathing hypocrite doesn’t decide to take matters into their own hands.

Fucking disgusting.

Drinks for my friends.

 

 

 

I was at a party the other night with intelligent and fascinating people.

I got kinda hammered.

It was lit up on the outside.  Easy to spot.

At a dear friend’s house who talked to the daughters we brought like adults.

A warm and generous house built over a century ago. Somewhere sorta east of Glendale. Delicious food and wine.  Party favor, 3D looking glasses that turned every Christmas light into the Star of David. Plenty of Christmas lights.

Beautiful, nonsensical architecture and floor plan. Couches and benches with drawers in odd places. Rooms under or over sized.  Shelves and refrigerator way across from the sink and counter tops.  Tile behind hanging spoons and spatulas in comforting colors. A man cave not attached to the main house and a second story that clearly wasn’t included in the festivities.

I’m tempted to break in while they’re at work.

Check the rest out.

There was the nest of a child gone just recently to the halls of the Ivy League.  A pallor of reluctance over a girl that might be too earnest and ambitious. A girl that I only met once but so impressed me. We were invited to leave our coats on her empty bed.

There was a monochromatic, “color desaturated”, female Santa who turned out to be funny and real as fuck.  She looked me right in the eye when she talked to me and I doubt she knew she was doing it.

My genius wife melted into all the eccentric people.

She was lovely.

Goddamn.

It was lovely.

He was lovely.

We stayed until 5 am, drinking and talking. They don’t drink but there were other people that still were.  I think.  I walked his neighbor home long after she cried on me and his interrogations about my writings and my thoughts behind them.

Actors, artists and musicians, oh my.

We arrived home with a booze mop of 24 hour cheese burger, fries and diet coke.  The humility of company with charismatic people.  Indulgence of clever men and women. The perfume of friendship.

It was awesome.

I knew it would be.

We were invited by the dear friend of mine and his lovely wife who cheated death not long ago. That particular element lent it all a lightness of being. She glowed. So did everyone else.

I am smiling.

I need to get out more.

Drinks for my friends.

 

Mr. Masters,

I’m writing to inform you that despite being a long time supporter/donor of KPFK, I will NEVER EVER give another dime to KPFK or listen to your show on my drive home again as I have for years.

I can no longer countenance your journalistic malpractice. I can no longer support your irresponsible fomenting of US government propaganda and the politics of fear.

I’m no fan of Donald Trump but instead of focusing on the the socioeconomic conditions that allowed for his ascendancy, you’ve chosen to allow your strings to be pulled by the same cabal of bloodthirsty, warmongering oligarchs you’ve opposed since I first happened upon you.

On my drive home tonight, I heard you LIE, live on the air. You LIED by insisting that the sentencing memo authored by Robert Mueller and released last Friday, 12/7/18, was somehow proof of “collusion”, because you insisted a meeting had taken place between Cohen and Dimitri Peskov. It DIDN’T happen. You LIED. The memo itself is explicit and specific in that NO such meeting EVER took place.

From The NYT: “After conferring with Mr. Trump, Mr. Cohen said, he reached out “to gauge Russia’s interest in such a meeting. It ultimately did not take place.

Two months later, Mr. Cohen said, he was approached by a Russian claiming to be a “‘trusted person’ in the Russian Federation.” The individual, who was not named, offered “synergy on a government level” with the Trump campaign. He pushed for a meeting between Mr. Trump and Mr. Putin to discuss politics and the proposed hotel, saying Mr. Putin’s consent was the biggest “warranty” for any project.

That appears to be the earliest known contact between an aide to Mr. Trump and a Russian offering to help Mr. Trump’s campaign. The timing of the interaction matched one disclosed earlier this year by Buzzfeed.

Mr. Cohen said he never followed up on the Russian’s invitation….”

I’ve been listening while you’ve devolved from lying by omission to parroting completely unsubstantiated, overtly uncorroborated, government dictated narratives to outright LIES. Since when did “journalists”, like you decide that our intelligence agencies are trustworthy and honest? Since WHEN are the FBI, CIA and the NSA the good guys?

Exactly what the hell are you selling?

All of the sudden, you have lost the ability to distinguish between elaborately hyperbolic claims and actual evidence. All the sudden, there’s a brand of amnesia causing you to forget the notorious history of collusion between your own government and your own media. You’ve forgotten, all the sudden, about Vietnam, Iran Contra, Iraq and the WMD’s, and everything in between.

The same agencies, sometimes the exact same people, selling you some neo-McCarthyist, red baiting, obtuse absurdity and you just lap it up.

All the sudden, you’re new.

I’m DONE with you and KPFK. I will be boycotting both you and the station. I see no reason to be LIED to by a compromised on air personality on a radio station that has clearly submitted to pressure from the military industrial complex. You might be okay with playing with matches next to a potentially combustible world war with nuclear weapons but millions of sane and rational Americans are not.

To be clear, it’s NOT the first time you’ve wallowed in abject mendacity but it is the last time I will subject myself to it.

What you’re doing is reckless, irresponsible and disgusting and the only evidence you need for that accusation is that have to LIE to pull it off.

Pathetic.

You have never seen any actual evidence of hacking or collusion by Russia.

Ever.

Saying you have means you’re lying or stupid.

Drinks for my friends.

Vecordious Slubberdegullions Festooned with NeoMcCarthyist Codswallop

Are you saying the government is lying, that the media is going along with it?

All the sudden, there’s a brand of amnesia causing you to forget the notorious history of collusion between your own government and your own media. You’ve forgotten, all the sudden, about Vietnam, Iran Contra, Iraq and the WMD’s, and everything in between.

The same agencies, sometimes the exact same people, selling you some neo-McCarthyist, red baiting, obtuse absurdity and you just lap it up.

I’m desperately tired of the stupid.

My friends still accept almost all of what their media, a wholly owned subsidiary of the military industrial complex, sells them everyday. Six multinational corporations that profit primarily from killing millions of innocent people who’ve never ever been a threat to them in any way at all.

Still, they believe all of it.

I’m in awe.

All of the sudden George Herbert Walker Bush was a saint, a good and decent man because he took the dirt nap.  He was a sick, mass murdering fuck.  His crimes against humanity make Dahmer and Bundy look like little girls in pretty dresses playing with Fisher Price toys.  MSNBC gives him a tongue bath and even my own friends are telling me to respect the dead.  Apparently, his learning disabled son is now Michelle Obama’s partner in crime.

Gives her mints and shit.

You’ve got be fucking kidding me.

My friends are angry at me for pissing on his “legacy”.

Will Kissinger and Cheney be afforded sainthood the minute they fill their diapers for the last time?

War after war after war of aggression, since I was born.  Like it’s different this time because the president is an asshole. Everyone is willing to forget that we’ve been doing this for decades and this time the justification for it is the weakest I’ve ever witnessed.

Because he’s an asshole.

Every president we’ve had since I was born is a fucking asshole.

Almost all my friends have signed off on a new cold war with Russia and don’t appear to give a mad fuck about the hot nuclear war it invites.

Russia, Russia, Russia.

Still, no evidence of hacking or collusion.

Because we can’t stand this uncouth dickhead.

I will say this a million goddamn times.

He’s a symptom, he’s not the goddamn disease.

The disease is AIPAC.  Zionists. Netanyahu.  The military industrial complex.  We give Israel $10 million a day.  They have free health care and education.  We pay for it while we wage war against their enemies on their behalf. The entire region burns because of our guns and bombs, blood and treasure at the behest of Netenyahu’s Likud party.

Israel meddled in our elections.  Israel funded over 20 Super PACS and gave fucktons of money to Hillary and Trump.  Israel makes Russia look like Chuck E. Cheese. We spend over a trillion dollars a year.  Ten times more than any other country.  Half of what all other countries spend combined.

So, fuck you my friends.  Intellectually lazy and dishonest pieces of shit.  I’ve got no time for your failure to pay even a modicum of attention.  Failing to even investigate what’s really happening here.

Your goddamn television is owned by the war machine.

Your revolution starts when you turn it off.

Or, just go ahead and be furious with me for interrupting your fucking nap.

Know why school kids no longer regularly drill under their desks for the inevitable blinding flash, shattering glass and flesh boiling heat of a nuclear blast? Our own solar sun across town?  Because the people who own your television don’t give a mad fuck.

Congratulations.

Drinks for my friends.