American Fez

The Glittering Prize

As poisoned chalices go, becoming President of the United States is a double belladonna with strychnine chaser filled example; an unwieldy goblet overflowing with Lucrezia Borgia's most potent concoction and rimmed with too much salt. All those who drink from its bottomless depths end up clutching their throats mid-sup, lose their grip on the chalice which falls clattering the floor, then stagger and crawl away towards the nearest empty toilet cubicle of history. 

Good riddance, you might say. Except that the next drinker from the poisoned chalice almost always makes even more disgusting slurping noises while taking even more greedy gulps than the previous drinker. Alas and alack. If only we could replace the poisoned chalice with a simple paper cup full of nothing but a slightly sour-tasting medicinal tonic. Maybe then the office of President would attract a more noble heart?

Democracy In Theory & Practice

There ought to be a public referendum before the general election to vote on whether there should be a general election. If the majority of voters vote "no" then the present incumbent is forced to remain in office whether he likes it or not.

Congress, on the other hand, should be dismissed entirely. Both Mencken and Twain agree with me on this point. In fact, I suggest that Congress be replaced with a modern variant on the Anglo-Saxon 'Witan' bloodbath-based assembly. Neither Menken nor Twain agrees with me on that, but Alfred the Great does.

An Urban Sleepwalk

You have heard of the fabled Elephant's Graveyard, but did you know that city rats also have a secret place they go to die?

It is called Public Alleyway 86b, a slit of black space running perpendicular to Amnesia Street, although it doesn't so much run as lurch violently and unpredictably from beginning to end. 

Traversing Public Alleyway 86b feels like being dragged by the hair from a place of warmth and light to somewhere you don't want to be. It is where all the world's misdirected urine flows.

Nevertheless, many hardy souls have attempted the journey, for Public Alleyway 86b provides a decent shortcut from Amnesia Street to the theater showing Blue Man Group on the other side of Headache Square.

In college, I made a short film about The Homeless set in Public Alleyway 86b. Unfortunately, the film came out black because I had exposed for the gleaming masses of rat bones by mistake.

Unfortunately, unlike a dead elephant's ivory, rat skeletons have no value. Otherwise, I might have possibly made my money back by collecting all those little rodent skulls.

Last night, as I was sleepwalking past the corner of Public Alleyway 86b and Amnesia Street, I came across an old toilet trashed on the sidewalk outside McEnnui's Tavern and recalled how many times my old drinking buddy Igbert must've been sick in it down the years. 

Feeling nostalgic, I stopped in for an ale. 

I'll be right with you, the bartender said. I've just got to dump these shriveled-up lemon wedges in the dumpster out back. 

He never did return, so I left. And stepping back into Amnesia Street, glanced down Public Alley 86b, where I saw the bartender staring at a dying rat crawling to its final resting place. 

Further along the road, I was awoken by the sound of jack-hammering and pneumatic machinery. The city was installing yet another subterranean pied pipeline. The others were already clogged with whatever it was they were supposed to pipe, apparently. High-speed sewage? Fiber optic misinformation? Who knows?

Not I

It's always important to know when to stop. For me, it's usually before I begin. "Don't do anything until you hear from me," I'm often told. Don't worry, I won't. And you can be sure I'll pretend to be deaf when they eventually do call. 

I simply wash my hands of whatever plans are afoot; then dry them on other people's vain ambitions

In the world of action, I am the ghostly face at the window, the creak on the stair, the shadow cast on the wall, a piano playing in an empty room.

So when it comes time to blame whoever is responsible for what's happened - you really shouldn't have done that! - I am the merely the medium, not the message: There are so many who wish to speak!  

Curdled Cosmology

It is amazing in this day and age, when we know for certain that the moon is made of cheese, that many so-called scientific experts simply won't accept that logic dictates the Earth must consequently be made out of crackers. 

But I'm not a cracker purist. I don't think our planet is made from just one type of cracker. Instead, I posit a sort of cracker variety pack composition: some salted, some with added seeds, some plain. I would further suggest, since these crackers are obviously millions of years old, that they are stale. 

Mars, meanwhile, the "red planet," is clearly made out of crumbly port-wine cheese, possibly nuked if you believe Dr. John Brandenburg

This would suggest the universe is some sort of vast wine-and-cheese party: slabs of orbital cheese floating in an ocean of Chianti with the occasional grape meteorite and melon comet whizzing past. 

You can call my wine-and-cheese theory pseudo-science or heresy if you must, but remember the nay-sayers said the same of Galileo when he decanted before the Inquisition.

My Creation Myth

My creation myth of the world is pretty straightforward, being part quasi-Gnostic and part Frances Hodgson Burnett:

Igbert, an absent-minded and rather clumsy celestial being, was pottering around in an overgrown patch of void in his backyard. He entertained a vague notion of constructing some sort of greeny-blue rock sphere in the void, with numerous water features and picturesque vegetation. Alas, his ambitions did not match his skills. Water got everywhere. While trying to mop this mess he spilled a box of decorative dinosaurs over his rocks. In the process of tidying up the dinosaur disaster, he accidentally trod on many of them and knocked over a box of humans. Total mayhem! If only Igbert had stuck to his simple compost heap idea. 

Hair-splitting theologians and scientists will ask "Oh yes, but what was there before Igbert's backyard void?"  

The answer to this is "an old shed," obviously. After all, that's the case in most gardens.

Indeed, study any overgrown backyard, especially from the air, and you will perceive a rectangular imprint in the grass where an old shed once stood. Such sites are like crop circles in many respects, except they were used for lawnmower storage instead of as runways for interplanetary travel. I suppose there might be one or two aliens interested in Japanese garden design, in which case a shed and UFO might be combined into one saucer-shaped utility, but it seems unlikely, and besides, from what I've seen of alien physique in close encounter books I very much doubt such visitors from outer space would be suited to a hard day's weeding or hedge clipping.

I guess that's a question for Jacques Valle.

Priorities and Paraphernalia

Once upon a time, humans could read an entire chapter of a novel before going to sleep. Today, almost forcibly drip-fed an interminable diet of digital trivia, most people can barely manage a paragraph before their eyes wander over the smartphone glowing on the nightstand, that siren singing on the rocks disguised as a wi-fi enabled slab of microchips. Social media minutiae, apparently, is more diverting than whatever Charles Dickens could invent.

Eternal hand-wringers get agitated by such diminished attention spans, but technology has been altering our ability to focus since Stone Age man first started doing interesting things with flint. It would not surprise me, for example, to learn that prehistoric life so lacked distraction that neanderthal man could kill a bison simply with the power of his mind. Later, he realized that he'd suffer fewer migraines if he just hit the poor beast's skull with a stick instead, consequently losing his telepathic hunting skills as he came to rely more and more on his new-fangled "tools." And this was obviously neandertal man's downfall.

Would neanderthals still walk the Earth if they had kept developing their mental skills rather than selling their souls to technology? Perhaps. But I doubt that I would be friends with any of them on Facebook, and that's the important thing these days.

Mountains and Molehills

Some cultures around the world still practice some sort of ancestor worship. In the west, however, we generally don't. We might exhibit a fading photograph in a Target frame, or position the second least expensive urn of cremated ashes at the end of the mantelpiece, but beyond these decorative tokens of remembrance, our deceased forefathers and foremothers are mostly recalled as simple sepia-tinted characters from a birthday present giving past.

Nevertheless, I am currently building a shrine to my great uncle Calvin, the first man to conquer the fearsome peak of Mount Molehill. It's a combination of Christian altar, Lincoln Memorial, and a rickety table I picked up at a yard sale. A single candle within the shrine always remains lit because it is one of those "lifetime guarantee" electronic ones that plugs into the wall socket. I don't bother with incense because great uncle Calvin suffered from sensitive nasal passages and consequently prone to sneezing fits. I think his spirit nose would be offended by fragrant smoke, which makes the whole shrine thing much less onerous for me as I won't need to waste a lot of time striking and restriking dud matches.

Speaking of wasted time, many prominent mountaineers claim that Mount Molehill is not really a proper mount, barely even qualifying as a hill according to most experts. The only reason great uncle Calvin was the first person to reach the summit, they say, is that nobody else was bothered to make the attempt before him. Mount Molehill is not very high, they assert, and there is nothing to see when you get up there anyway. 

Frankly, if you ask me, it is just this sort of petty, negative talk that's responsible for the decline of American exceptionalism. After all, does anything speak to the spirit of Yankee ingenuity more than the art of making mountains out of molehills? I think not. So all hail great uncle Calvin. May your metaphysical crampons guide you up the celestial rock face until you plant the flag of the Republic in the eye of the universe, and may you get there before the spirit of Ivan-from-Smolensk's great uncle.

Hard Times

As an American citizen at Presidential Election time, you often feel like a poor, young, passive Thai bride left with no option but to marry an old, ugly Westerner who smells bad. You hope for a better life, trusting that your repulsive partner cannot actually be that bad, that your new life cannot be any worse than your present situation, surely. Alas, you are wrong. A nightmare of domestic drudgery and sex slavery is all that awaits. 

Hilary Trump sounds like an ersatz Dickens character: an empty-headed, hapless gadabout who despoils everything he touches from The Pickwick Papers, perhaps; or a pompous chancery lawyer from Bleak House. Whichever novel you choose, our future certainly looks distinctly Dickensian with either Hilary or Trump. I can only think of a woebegone Thai bride Little Nell when I imagine the average American in 2017. God bless us, every one.

I won't be voting again, purely on the grounds that there is no candidate from the pages of Victor Hugo, noble and true. (Although, to be honest, at this point, I'd probably settle for Damon Runyon. At least his crooks are funny and likeable).

What Was

There are no alligators in Martin Johnson Heade's 'The Great Florida Sunset,' only the ghosts of alligators. Perhaps a single pair of twinkling alligator eyes above half-submerged snout appear somewhere in the still waters, but if so I can't find them. Even the trees seem like portentous, shadowy phantoms arising from the grave of the day to bid the blood-red clouds adieu. Of course, it's probably all a dockside gated community now, or the parking lot for Salty Jack's Seafood Shack. 

In addition to his many moody coastal scenes, Heade also produced colorful images of tropical birds and plants. I don't recall an image of a mosquito gracing his oeuvre but he clearly had ample opportunity to paint one. Which is interesting, because the artist must have been bitten to shreds when en plein air. Heade probably walked home with his easel tucked under his arm looking like the wildest-eyed Van Gogh with measles. So is it possible that the aforementioned "blood-red" clouds in 'The Great Florida Sunset' are not simply a straightforward representation of atmospheric conditions but are actually a meditation upon the difficult and often painful conditions faced by nineteenth-century landscape painters?

Professional art critics are strangely silent on this subject. But if the Metropolitan Museum of Art would like me to lecture on the symbolism of bug bites in landscape art, I am available and can be contacted via the Email Me link on this blog.