Testament
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Posted:Sep 27, 2018 8:00 am
Last Updated:Oct 29, 2018 8:37 am
45686 Views
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I believe her.
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An Open Letter to Canada
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Posted:Aug 30, 2018 11:14 pm
Last Updated:Jul 10, 2019 7:54 pm
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My Canadian neighbors are currently debating whether to draft more strict controls on firearms.
Gun control. As an American I've pondered this issue at some length. We clearly need a reduction in violence here, so it follows that limiting an implement of destruction might have some effect toward that end. We have the Second Amendment, always capitalized and usually festooned with stars and stripes bunting, laurel wreaths and the odd eagle or two. A nice touch is to feature slightly dimmed in the background our idealized image of a Minuteman clutching his Jaeger squirrel rifle in one powerful fist and gazing sternly into the foreground, a determined furrow upon his clear brow. American gun owners can be a prickly lot and cling to that Amendment fiercely, vowing to defend it as ferociously as a grizzly sow her cubs just before being shot by an American trophy hunter. The thing CAN be regulated without repeal. We've demonstrated before that the Constitution is as sacred a legal document as ever was given birth by the mind of man, as long as it's convenient. Our federal, state and local governments, not to mention our worthy citizens regularly violate the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments and the first amendment is practically in tatters after having been abused by one presidential administration after the other. I keep expecting the vice squad to clap the cuffs on her and haul the old warhorse off to the station house she’s been had so often. I've gone on pretty long without coming to the point, which of course there is indeed one. I could go longer still due to the polite nature of my Canadian audience. Americans refuse to sit still for it. I've decided that the best solution is to ban Americans, not guns. Guns don't kill people, Americans do. Deciding what to do with them, how to dispose of them is a problem, I freely admit, but it's not MY problem. So, what say you Canada? Want to try adopting some Americans for a spell and then decide if you need gun control or citizen control? You’ll quickly learn why Americans shoot other Americans. It’s because they’re assholes. And the only thing that can stop a bad asshole with a gun is a good asshole with a gun. If I might presume to make a prediction, I believe that after a month of suffering these quarrelsome and dangerous pricks you’ll not only be eager to get rid of Canadian guns but you’ll be itching to storm the border and take ours too, just to hear the modern day Minutemen wail and shriek. Do you have it in you to be the good asshole without asking the Queen’s permission first? We’d ask Germany but asking them to seize weapons would be like inviting a pedophile to lead a Cub Scout Troop. Help us Obi Wan Canada. You’re our only hope!
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Crickets
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Posted:Dec 24, 2017 8:06 pm
Last Updated:May 15, 2018 12:50 am
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Crickets (from my personal archives)
Most men are probably assholes, at least, in the eyes of their mothers, sisters, wives, girlfriends…Ok, pretty much any woman. Not all men are insensitive clods, to be sure, as long as Alan Alda and Phil Donahue are still alive, which, I think they are , even though they don't look like it. But there are times when we demonstrate our worth. Like for example when you say you're going to paint the house and you place your ladder under the eaves and then can't remember where you put it and it's too scary to crawl along the edge of the roof looking for it. So you bang on the roof and hope that your husband is hungry enough to eventually come looking for you and help you down.
Or…well, we had the following conversation just a few minutes ago.
"Bill, there's something weird in the bathtub."
"Does it have tattoos, and piercings?"
"It's a bug."
"Does it look anything like Vincent D'Onofrio?"
"Really- it's a bug."
"Hand it a towel and give it a little privacy."
"It's a really BIG bug."
"Hand it a really BIG towel."
"No, come and look."
I go look.
"It's a cricket."
"What are you gonna do?"
Singing: "Think it over, what you've just said
"Think it over in your pretty little head." Confirming that I'm an asshole, but I'm an asshole who's not scared of bugs and who loves Buddy Holly.
"Are you gonna get rid of it, or not?"
Singing again: "Well, that'll be the day, when you say goodbye
Yes, that'll be the day, when you make me cry
You say you're gonna leave, you know it's a lie
'Cause that'll be the day when I die."
"Should I smash it?"
I picked it up, took it outside and released it into the yard, to run free and unrestrained like the wild and unfettered creature that it was meant to be- you know, like capitalism. Would Phil Donahue have been able to do that? Not fucking likely. He'd have recommended that Marlo form a focus group to study the problem and consider the environmental ramifications of his actions, and called for a film crew to document the event.
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I had too much to dream last night...
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Posted:Dec 16, 2017 12:11 pm
Last Updated:Mar 11, 2019 12:02 pm
56773 Views
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This is a re-post of a piece I wrote for the 23rd Virtual Symposium in October of last year.
The Electric Prunes: ”I Had Too Much to Dream Last Night”……..
Last night your shadow fell upon my lonely room
I touched your golden hair and tasted your perfume
Your eyes were filled with love the way they used to be
Your gentle hand reached out to comfort me
Then came the dawn
And you were gone
You were gone, gone, gone
There are dreams we have when we’re asleep, and dreams we have when we lie awake at night and our minds won’t keep still. And there are idle daydreams too, musings upon what if, oftentimes.
As I’ve got older I’ve wished plenty of times that I had never wasted an erection. When you’re young you get hard and stay hard for no particular reason. Even a passing thought will stimulate you- you’re programmed as a young male to stick that thing wherever you can whenever you can stick it, and my own body didn’t fail me. I’d make a call to my dispatcher and the receptionist would answer the phone with that mellifluous voice of hers and I could see her in my mind’s eye, wearing that tight short skirt bending over to get in the bottom drawer of the file cabinet……. and the next thing I know I’m back in the tractor and squirming in my seat because I’ve got a rock hard prick trying to bust out of my jeans. In this case it was provided by the eighteen year old honey haired receptionist with those small and silky teardrop breasts, but it might just as easily have been a woman in the street with a slit skirt flashing me or my customer who was nigh to popping the buttons on her far too small blouse as she leaned over her desk to sign my shipping papers, smiling with her eyes at me and giving me a long languid look at her cavernous and considerable cleavage.
And so I’d drive for an hour and my erection would barely subside to relieve my stress. At any time I could have forced my train of though to something less arousing- but what young man does that, especially with miles yet to drive? No, he tortures himself with more fantasy and he shuffles through the Rolodex of images in his brain and pulls out card after card of luscious women he has known or simply seen and remembered, and filed away for later daydreams. And still he keeps drifting back in his daydream to Myrna sitting at the phone in that office, one gorgeous stockinged thigh crossed over the other and nearly baring her butt cheeks….and that pounding, pulsing dick is back to fifteen hundred PSI again.
I had too much to dream last night
Too much to dream
I'm not ready to face the light
I had too much to dream
Last night
Last night
And this goes on for years. Over and over again, through the decades, and you become convinced that erectile dysfunction is not about you and never will be, because you know very well you have an endless arsenal of rock hard hymen hammers in your magazine. But it ain’t so. Most men, by the time they reach the age of fifty, have had some diminishment of their cherry splitter. Oh, it may be still plenty stiff enough to pry open and penetrate the poontang, but it begins to lose its diamond cutting edge. That camel poker won’t quite crack walnuts anymore, and it has a way of sneaking up on you too, until one day you think the thing must have iron poor blood or something. It’s there, and trying to do its job, but the carnal stump is a bit whittled down. And it just doesn’t pump up to quite the same dimension that it once did. If you’re a grower, what used to inflate to six and a half inches is struggling to raise itself up off its elbows to six. And if you’re a shower it might even be worse. You could be faced with a flaccid flesh flute. It might still be a full sixteen centimeters, but the woody quality has wilted and wandered off.
The room was empty as I staggered from my bed
I could not bear the image racing through my head
You were so real that I could feel your eagerness
And when you raised your lips for me to kiss
Came the dawn
And you were gone
You were gone, gone, gone
Now, there are remedies for this. Plenty of men use cock rings to enhance stamina even when not suffering from ED, and better living through modern chemistry has given us pharmacological fixes. Blood pressure problems, constriction of blood vessels and nasty item called cavernosal failure can all result in a failed muscle missile launch. Without getting into the technical details and the mechanics of it, these chemicals work, and for most men they work well. But this isn’t an instructional post about how to rejuvenate a rusty rectum wrangler- this post is about dreams.
I had too much to dream last night
Too much to dream
I'm not ready to face the light
I had too much to dream
Last night
Last night
So I had got to musing one night while somewhat inebriated and simultaneously chatting with two fine friends, namely KItkat1415 and Rachel0718 and it occurred to me that the dream solution would be to have an Erection Vault. Therein would be stored in pristine and perfect condition, ready for use, all those unused erections of days gone by. It had occurred to me while conversing with these two winsome wenches that I had wasted a lot of hard ons. What would I not give to have some of them back? Well, why think small? Why not have all of them back, and stored in perfect humidity and temperature for use at a later date, when an opportunity to make the beast with two backs might present itself in future years?
I would of course be the only human to have access to this bank, and I might enter it from time to time to visit with my Banked Dicks, (apologies to W.C. Fields) and fondle and caress them tenderly. I might in this way develop favorites in much the same way that a wine connoisseur has great expectations of a particular vintage, say a Schlongmaster 2000 or a Muffin Buffer ’96. They might be reattached like a Snap-on Tool, or better yet, a Twistloc. A firm push and a crank to the right and the love train is back on the tracks! I could have brochures printed up for prospective customers- women say they don’t care for dick pics, but they haven’t seen my catalog! It would of course be very tastefully done, not on that flimsy glossy porno paper but printed on the finest quality heavyweight stuff, and suitable for a coffee table book. Get one for each member of the family…a Book of Fine Members. A Who’s Who of Womb Raiders
In my vault there would be row upon stacked row of memorable erections, of course every one with a product description and historical details as to the occasion and cause of arousal in each case, and a rating on the Mohs scale of hardness. I might spend entire afternoons admiring my collection, and while away the time stroking them and pampering them, a Gentleman’s Garden of Groinstalks.
I had too much to dream last night
Too much to dream
I'm not ready to face the light
I had too much to dream
Last night
Last night
I had too much to dream last night.
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In memoriam...
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Posted:Dec 5, 2017 7:49 pm
Last Updated:May 1, 2018 8:17 pm
56713 Views
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Douglas Engelbart, the inventor of the computer mouse, died in 2013.
What vision he had, to know we'd need one hand free while at the computer.
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Double Exposure
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Posted:Nov 29, 2017 12:57 pm
Last Updated:Sep 3, 2020 11:48 am
49645 Views
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“Double Exposure or Naked as the Day We Were Born”
Many great works have subtitles. Gerard Winstanley famously employed : “The Law of Freedom in a Platform or, True Magistracy Restored Humbly Presented to Oliver Cromwell, General of the Commonwealths Army in England. And to All English-men my Brethren Whether in Church Fellow-ship 1652” I think I’ve shown reserve and restraint in my own use of the subtitle.
Staying surprisingly close to the original theme of our talk on exhibitionism, wickedeasy offered: “it's not like we're not enjoying it too. that rush goes both ways. and yet you're so safely tucked away in separate spaces”
Flashing truckers is not a pedestrian thrill but a proletarian nthetheless. Still I can imagine upper class women doing it as a safer form of slumming and an alternative to gang fucking thugs picked up in a bar on the bad side of town. I'm sure some women do both, and enjoy hell out of the practice. Everybody needs a hobby. It took me some time to really get what was in it for the exhibitionist.
What I had formerly thought of, long ago, as exhibitionists, was the guy with pant legs, cut from the knees down, duct taped over his shins and wearing a trenchcoat. And of course I felt the usual revulsion. We look askance at men who expose themselves. But it’s only a visual. There isn’t any touching or assault except on the viewer’s delicate sensibilities. My own inclination is to laugh. Only jealous women criticize the women who show too much. The only man who will complain is Mike Pence. Then too, things has changed, hasn't they? There have always been women who are thrilled at the exposure of their nether regions, but now it's so common as to be nearly universal...or is it ubiquitous? Ubiquitous is a far sexier word. Anyway, you see a lot of it, ubiquity, and I accept that.
It wasn't until I started being able to put myself in the woman's position, I mean, inside what I imagine to be her head, that it began to make sense to me, and the act gets so much more erotic and arousing due to that. Most men resist trying to really think like a woman, usually get it wrong, and I did too. It's kind of a self aggrandizing way of getting in touch with 's femi side, but when you finally begin to actually listen to what women say about themselves and their arousal it becomes more clear. A woman has a much different and more personal relationship with her vulnerability than men do. Hell, males typiy try to pretend that they have no relationship with vulnerability and weakness at all. You'll rarely hear a man admit to his own weakness, unless he's expressing a weakness for hundred year old whisky or anal sex. Let me hasten to add I don't mean hundred year old anal sex. Not that there's anything wrong with that. I'm sure the court of public opinion would take a different view, but in my book what happens between a man and a centenarian is a private affair as long as there’s fore, lots of lube is employed and some comes.
It's odd, you might even say queer if that word had not taken on the connotation that is has these last hundred (Funny how that number seems to keep creeping in. I suppose that once you allow the idea of women who've reached the century mark taking it in the ass, both the image and number will stick with you, for better or for worse.) that a man is if anything more vulnerable than a female when he drops trou in a public place. Women have so few advantages in this world, but they own exhibitionism. I figure it's only fair, and it sure as hell is pleasant. Being naked and exposed in a public place whether seen or not is frightening to me but not thrilling in any sexual way. Meaning that, no, I don't really get Louis C.K. His transgression feels like a lame and weak thing to do. It represents a loss of control that I hate to think of as a male, unless there are lots of other people naked right along with me. Would I pull out and then pummel my pud in front of a woman? No. Would I do it with a hundred other jackoffs around me? Still no. That didn’t go the way you thought it was going, did it? You were expecting me to invoke strength in numbers. But as a female there's the conflict of both losing control- naked and afraid- and being in control of her own sexuality and allure, arousing herself and her watchers. A kind of submission, revealing yourself is. (channeling Yoda) Women can so much more readily identify with submission, even publicly owning up to it sometimes. Even the ancient Greeks considered male submissives as less than real men. Pitching good, catching bad, especially since they had only the dius and the javelin and baseballs had not yet been invented. Females on the other hand are even expected to submit, and when they decline there is consternation all around. To a lot of people it is not only incongruous but nearly blasphemous (Think Mike Pence again-“It's in the Bible”) that a woman should be assertive and in command of her own destiny in all aspects of her life and yet get a charge of libidinous adrenalin out of submitting to a man sexually, and even submitting openly and in public to men she has never seen before. We know now why J. Edgar Hoover wore dresses. It was a release for the poor sick fuck from being all powerful and hunting commies days a week. He just didn't have the balls to do it in public. Not that I want to see those balls any more than I want to see the centenarian edition of Ass Fucked Skanks Volume .
I have rambled and digressed, and more than once. If I keep practicing I might get good at it.
Vivé la difference. I don't get- as a male- why Louis C. K. whipped out his dick and jacked off in front of his business colleagues/acquaintances. It feels like a femi thing to do. Maybe wimpy is a better word for it. I do get why a woman strips and masturbates in a public place where she is very likely to be caught. It's a double standard, yeah. I'm not even apologizing for that. I did a post once, for HNW Red for nicelipps, where I went trans for a day and dressed. It was a hoot, but I was being hst when I said that I sort of got how CD's and trans women felt, because I actually felt kind of sexy after putting on the trappings of a sultry seductress. I wasn't sexy by any's estimation, even the s who were really drunk, and there isn't a part of me that craves that, but I got an insight. I had a kind of epiphany. So, would I want to be a woman for an afternoon and flash random men at will? You bet! It's fucking hot.
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Spontaneous Exposure
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Posted:Nov 24, 2017 8:31 pm
Last Updated:Nov 13, 2022 12:26 am
45105 Views
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This train of though began with an open ended discussion with my friend wickedeasy. Our conversations are, like wicked herself, free range and unfettered, wild and unspoiled. She had mentioned never having sexted, but I am not so innocent.
I sexted my wife Pam once. We were eating breakfast in a local Greek restaurant, her favorite, a big shiny menu family kind of place, and I had to go to the can. When I stood up I thought why not send her a picture of my ass and wait in there extra long til she'd had a chance to get the message. What could go wrong? Surprisingly little, as it turned out. So I did that and went back to the table. She never said a thing and I couldn't stand it so after a while I asked "Get any messages while I was gone?" and she said she'd left her phone at home. See, this is often how married sex is- disappointing, but not really bad. You try to do something sexy and your partner farts, or worse, yawns. It isn't anything to get pissed off about. That would just make it bad where it wasn't before. I was just trying to surprise her and make her laugh, not really get anything going, but if I had I woulda been ready, you know? It would be childish to get truly disappointed about it. But I did gig her about taking the wind out of my sails. So much for fucking spontaneity. I think that spontaneity shit started with Cosmo, probably. Fuck spontaneity. Fuck Cosmo too.
And so wicked replied: “spontaneity is for people who don't have much else to do. and tbh, at our age it can be a little disconcerting if you're near the stairs…………”, as wicked would.
I got to thinking…who the hell has less to do than I do? I’m retired and if not wealthy at least independently so.
Pam and I were spontaneous enough even when we were really busy the first two or three years after we met. People get used to each other though and it's hard to be surprising to a partner who knows you well enough to complete your sentences. She may not be able to read your mind but she can come closer than anyone else. There are times she knows what I’m thinking better than I do. That can be dicey but I’m a glib and convincing liar, so… I can still surprise Pam and make her laugh, but she often takes a dim view of my sexual spontaneity. I'd grab her and fuck her in the woods, but after a few times that wouldn't seem so spontaneous anymore, right? I’d just be a predictable pervert. Murphy’s law dictates that you’d throw her to the ground in a pile of raccoon shit. Passing a semi on the highway and quickly reaching over and yanking up her dress to show off her pretty legs is pretty fucking spontaneous in my view but for some reason it didn't get me high marks. Go figure. You try to inject some excitement and look at what happens. As it fell out, I was on the receiving end of some excitement but it didn't have the flavor I was aiming for.
I can tell you from my own experience as a lifelong driver that it's a huge turn on for truckers to get flashed. The last time it happened before I retired the girl passed a buddy of mine with her left leg up on the dash of her car. She didn't slow down, just passed him showing him her panties. She was wearing a really short pleated navy blue skirt. My buddy was behind me but didn't alert me on the CB. By the time she pulled up next to me she had her panties off and was doing that butterfly flick on her clitoris. The woman was a very pretty asian girl,slender with long slim legs. And bless her heart, she parked her car next to my cab for two or three miles, pacing me perfectly and working over her pink button. When she finally pulled away and left me I was both laughing and aroused. I called Pam and told her about it, and asked her to meet me for lunch to fix my problem. She did meet me but I didn't get the blowjob until that night. My wife, no exhibitionist.
I got flashed a lot of times. The year I ran the Paw Paw route west of Kalamazoo was the apogee of exposure by young women. I used both US 131 and I94 a lot, so I was on and off the expressways all the time. I have no idea why that summer was so populated with exhibitionists but it seemed like every other day some thoughtful young woman was thrusting her tits out the window and waving them at me. Who needed strip clubs? I saw more naked pussy in that summer than I ever had in a club. (I don't frequent strip clubs or topless joints. I've been in a couple my entire life.) Anyway, on the freeway that summer I even saw three or four dicks.
One of the nicest incidents occurred one Friday night when I was headed back to the barn from the furthest reach of my route. The highway was busy- it was around five thirty or six in the afternoon. There was a pretty girl in a little champaign colored Saturn wanting to merge on my right, so I herded traffic with my semi to let her in. She gave me a sweet smile and a wave. I smiled back. Just before she got completely on the big road she managed to drop back and pull in behind me. The next thing I knew she whipped out into the passing lane- and I mean whipped. She didn't pull out gently and smoothly like you usually would. Then she started flashing her headlights at me. “OK, you got my attention. I’m watching now!” She pulled next to me with her skirt spread open, showing me her beautiful thighs and a patch of white panties. Her skirt buttoned up the front and she had all the buttons undone. The young woman held her spot next to me for maybe a mile, them leaned down so I could see her face and flashed me a big smile. I liked the smile nearly as much as her gorgeous legs. Of course I was grinning from ear to ear back at her. She then took off, vanishing out of my life for ever. I was pleased and at the same time I coulda cried! Don’t leave me! I love you!
About the middle of the next week I waited at a stoplight on Kalamazoo Avenue, downtown. I glanced to my left and in the big SUV below me I saw a flash of skin. I did a classic double take, almost looking away and then nearly snapping my neck as I jerked my eyes back to the erotic drama unfolding in the Suburban. The woman was wearing a long black dress that buttoned from the hem to the throat, like a priest’s frock, and was apparently headed for the gym. She had thought to change into her workout clothes on the way to her club. I know plenty of women do this and most of them probably don’t get busted doing it. This one did. She had the dress open to her waist, exposing her crotch and legs, and magnificent long lithe legs they were! As she began to peel her panties off, getting them about mid thigh, she happened to look to her right and saw yours truly, pervert, leering at her with an enormous grin. She had a neatly trimmed and delectable looking bush. The woman was dazzlingly beautiful, with long brown hair and a face that stimulated my orbitofrontal cortex in a quite pleasant way, as well as amusing other body parts. We froze in time for a moment. She was flustered and couldn’t move. Then, damn the Department of Transportation for its fucking meddling, the light changed to green. The poor woman put the pedal to the metal and shot off the line like Jungle Jim Liberman at the drag strip. I had no hope of pursuit. I watched her take a right on Stuart Avenue- a residential street- and yet one more goddess of chance had flitted into my life and then abruptly vanished. Life can deal some sad shit sometimes. She was an unwilling exhibitionist, and an embarrassed one, which lent a special flavor to the encounter that was especially delicious.
It's a juvenile thrill, that peekaboo game, but it's fun. Exhibitionists are a gift from God and I thank them for doing God’s work.
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Polyamory for Dummies
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Posted:Nov 17, 2017 9:52 pm
Last Updated:Nov 21, 2017 5:23 pm
43691 Views
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I apologize for all the errors that keep creeping into this post. I have the original document where I wrote this post and the errors do not exist in it. Yet every time I look at the post, apparent typos and misspellings have mysteriously crept in. I correct them and more appear. I can't keep up with the corrections so I'm giving up.
“Fling” is a movie that first premiered in 2008 as “Lie to Me”. It’s been described as a comedy or dramedy. I don’t know what they were smoking when they wrote that. You can watch the full movie free on the same site where all the viral videos land sooner or later, but I don’t recommend it. Save your nickel.
According to Collins English Dictionary, polyamory is “the practice of openly having more than one intimate relationship at a time. Wikipedia goes a bit further: “Polyamory… is the practice of or desire for intimate relationships with more than one partner, with the knowledge of all partners. (Fine, so far.) It has been described as "consensual, ethical, and responsible non-monogamy.” Collins, and the first half of the Wikipedia entry have it right, pared down to the the basics. The refinement- consensual, ethical, and responsible non-monogamy- isn’t portrayed in this movie.
Samantha (Courtney Ford) and Mason (Steve Sandvoss) are a twenty-something couple who have agreed to secretly practice polyamory in an open relationship. Their friends and family don’t know- that’s the secret part. They aren’t married but are expected to, and live together, described by their friends as the perfect couple, who have it all and are ideally suited to each other. Early in the movie we’re introduced to the open aspect of the relationship when Sam leaves her sister’s wedding reception with James “Boner” Baxter (Brandon Routh) to fuck in Boner’s hotel room. Mason, who will eventually reveal himself to be a developmentally disabled twelve year old, watches with mild curiosity as Sam and James casually leave for their tryst after just as casually making out on the dance floor in full view of all the other guests, who somehow remain oblivious even while knowing Sam is in a relationship with Mason. Later these same people will be amazed to learn that Sam and Mason have an open relationship. The movie is set in Kansas City…I don’t know exactly what this tells us about the observational skills of Kanas Citians, but it ain’t flattering. Maybe this is just an enclave of self absorbed, beautiful and wealthy but dumb midwesterners.
Mason is unable to score that night, but don’t feel too badly for him because he does manage to spend the evening in the hot tub with his best friend and manager’s eighteen year old sister Olivia (Shoshana Bush) although both of them know manager Luke (Nick Wechsler) would explode if confronted with this information.
When Sam and Mason later meet up in their own room, there isn’t full disclosure with all the juicy details of Sam’s liaison. Sam tells Mason just enough to tease him and rejects him because he’s drunk. An astute viewer will later note that this is the fundamental basis, the very bones, of their love- Sam pushing away Mason when he’s drunk. Whoopee.
Is it too much to ask that there be likable characters in a movie? I struggled to find empathy for any in this clunker. At first I thought good old Boner Baxter might be the one. On a subsequent date Sam explains to Boner that she has a boyfriend, and reveals to him that they both fuck other people. Boner lived up to his name, showed some backbone, and told her he couldn’t handle that. A lesser man might have fucked her first, then laid the sad news on her. Then, having self mockingly told her he’s too insecure to deal with sharing her and won’t…he continues seeing her and fucks her some more. Probably against his better judgment, but still, she’s a great looking piece of ass. So Boner is not likely to be the only one in the movie to know what the hell he’s trying to do. No, Boner lays on the sad news and then fucks her. Nice work if you can get it.
I thought briefly that manager Luke might provide moral fibre. He’s over protective of his young sister and roundly condemns Mason’s open relationship when he learns of it. He’s narrow minded and a bit of a prig but loyal and with a sense of duty, right? And then he went and spoiled it all by beating the shit out of Mason when he discovers Mason porking the sweet Olivia on his living room sofa. Can you set a moral example while behaving like an overbearing and self righteous jackass? Self centered and hypocritical, Sam passes judgment on Mason for his childish behavior all the while enabling it and sniffing out Boner for herself. Sam insists that she loves Mason yet she rejects him time after time throughout the movie. It seems the only people this pair won’t fuck is each other.
I can’t blame the actors. Juvenile fucktard that Mason is, Sandvoss played him well. He’s believable as a selfish prick. Courtney Ford is beautiful, sexy and adequate in the part if not spellbinding. She didn’t have a hell of a lot to work with.
Mark Twain, in “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court”, tells of the celebration where a band played an awful rendition of something vaguely resembling “In the Sweet Bye and Bye”. The King ordered them hanged for it. Hank, Twain’s hero in the book, persuaded the king to give them a second hearing. That done, Hank agreed with the sentence and watched them frog-marched away to the gallows. I found myself thinking of that story when I considered the folks who wrote “Fling”. But the plot really isn’t all that bad. In fact, reading about it, it sounds pretty interesting. It could happen, right? It’s an arousing and edgy story and deals with changes that are taking place right now with the re-definition of relationships. And, there ought to be people fucking on screen!
I came very close to blaming the director for this turkey. I’m still teetering on the brink and might topple right over and shout out “J’accuse!” But I think this was a collective effort. This movie could have been and actually was nearly good. But it missed in too many little ways. You could try to make a case for brutal realism but the film doesn’t have the look or feel of that. Its characters are too frivolous and unthinking. And frankly, they are all so irritating and self possessed. One reviewer wrote in frustration “Just get over yourselves, already!”
I hate giving a movie or a book a bad review. I read current fiction in addition to classics, and I read a good deal of amateur erotic fiction as well. I try to be kind. “Fling” just failed. It failed to be at all erotic, and it failed to teach us anything of value about polyamory or the difficulty of managing such a relationship. There is an attempt in the end to show that the characters have learned, grown and moved on, but this is muddied too, and unconvincing. It doesn’t ring true and doesn’t show us how. We’re simply dragged through the painful process of watching a pair of shallow poseurs destroy what might have become love had they not been too preoccupied with themselves to recognize it.
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Jungle Pam and the Origin of Consciousness
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Posted:Nov 3, 2017 6:07 pm
Last Updated:Oct 22, 2020 8:18 pm
47860 Views
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You all can blame NaughtyInSO for having to suffer through this. It was her idea.
The best place to begin is not always at the beginning, but being one who often flouts convention, I’m going to do it anyway.
So, it all started with an internet search for Jungle Pam. Pam Hardy was an entertainment figure in drag racing back in the 70s. Jungle Pam was hot. I can provide photographic evidence of this fact. She was a sidekick of Jungle Jim Liberman, a flamboyant racer who livened up the dragstrip with his antics. He kept the pedal to the metal even after his car had gone out of control. He drove backwards at a hundred miles an hour. Jim and Pam met when she was still a high school , and later became his girlfriend and she toured with him, backing him up to the line after burnouts, teasing the crowd with her skimpy outfits and striking outrageously seductive poses for the onlookers. Pam enticed the warm blooded locals with her short shorts and her revealing tops. She had ample breasts to reveal, and she made the most of them. The girl was cuter than a bug’s ear and sexy in a girl next door way. Her youth of course added to her appeal, suggesting an innocence that was ephemeral and something of a illusion as well. But not completely. There was a kind of innocence in it all. WE were young then and we were innocent in a way too.
It’s a bygone day, from before drag racing went corporate. The kind of shit Jungle Jim did was dangerous to himself and to the other racers, not to mention the crowd, and corporate sponsors can provide plenty of bimbos of their own, bought and paid for. But it just ain’t the same as the team of Jungle Jim and his girl Pam. The act was all contrived of course, but it was all in good fun. Pam Hardy has said that Jim’s on track persona was all Jim. He was that way in his personal life too, a crazy party animal who took risks and lived large. And you can tell that Pam, while acting, was doing that same age old performance of arousing men’s cocks. She was for real. Genuine. That shit never gets old. The cocks get old and they move on…or, more often they don’t because they can’t anymore, but there are always new ones that spring up. The girls grow up and behave themselves, or pretend to in front of their husbands, all but the really good girls, that is. There isn’t and hasn’t ever been an advertising agency or boardroom that can fake that.
Jungle Jim Liberman died in a car accident at thirty one, just a few days short of his birthday. His corvette ran head on into a school bus near West Chester, Pennsylvania. As near as I can discover, Pam is alive and well, having reprised her performance at the NHRA AAA Finals in Pomona California in 2016. It looks to me like her performance was a bit more sedate than in the old days with Jim Liberman. Pam is still a looker but she’s wearing more clothes. Ah, too many clothes.
I kicked up a Facebook page for Jungle Pam in my search so I figured to take a look. Yep, there she is, still stomping around the dragstrip. Logging in to Facebook I saw that I had some new notifications. I don’t spend as much time there as I used to but one of those tips was for a page where there isn’t a huge amount of activity- “The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind”. It’s for followers of psychologist Julian Jaynes and adherents of his theory that what we call consciousness or awareness began with the ability to conceptualize metaphor. The recognition of the analog “I” meant that we then understood the idea that we were different and distinct- separate entities that were similar to others who were not us, but like us.
In defining consciousness Jaynes was careful to point out that we don’t exactly agree as to what it is, where it resides and what causes it. He suspected a physiological origin for awareness, and claimed that the inception of religion began in the bicameral mind that predates consciousness. Basically, the right and left brains were not integrated in the same way the modern brain is. But they still communicated, and the communications of the right brain were heard in the left hemisphere as auditory hallucinations that were believed to be the voice of the gods. The gods were then very real and quite personal for bicameral man. They had a relationship and spoke to one another.
And here you thought you were the only one to hear the voices in your head! You certainly aren’t the only one who doesn’t talk about it at PTA meetings or the line at Starbucks though. As it happens, there are many people who regularly hear voices in their heads. Some of them are schizophrenic, but most manage to get along just fine and have even learned to quite peacefully and comfortably live with their voices. If you aren’t schizophrenic you might just be a bridge to an earlier time, still having the gift of a direct line to the gods while the rest of us have far back in our family trees turned a deaf ear. I’m kind of envious. I think I’d like to hear voices in my head too. I want mine to sound like Eileen Atkins, Edith Piaf or Grace Slick. Maybe they could all switch up.
The post that I was directed to discussed the idea that consciousness arose as an artifact of physiology and as a direct consequence of language. So, we didn’t learn to speak because we had large brains. We grew larger brains because we learned to speak, and looking back further, grew big brains because we learned to use tools. And consciousness grew out of that, waiting for a catalyst like confrontation with other cultures to spark it. We had reached a certain stage of development and were ready for an evolutionary step in awareness. Each new development spurs new growth.
That Jaynes was the only scientist to posit a physiological source of consciousness was disputed in the comments following the post. Apparently Daniel C. Dennett has written a book called “Consciousness Explained” which explores a physiological-mechanistic- origin of consciousness, and a couple of scientific papers have been combined in a book “The Mindful Brain: Cortical Organization and the Group-Selective Theory of Higher Brain Function” (MIT Press) by Gerald M. Edelman and Vernon B. Mountcastle. The second book is said to be quite intense and requiring considerable knowledge of neuroscience to digest it. I haven’t read either-yet. I only learned of them this morning and bookmarked them for later study. You probably won’t find either of them in the remainders section at Barnes and Noble. Drag racing fans will look at you sidelong after you mention any of this.
Having thus stimulated first my gonads and second my intellectual curiosity I meant to take a quick look at my wall in Zuckerbourg. I don’t much like the of a bitch and I know that this site and Zuckerland don’t much care for each other, and don’t play well together, which by the way I consider to be a positive commentary on THIS site, go Friendfinder, rah, rah, rah, because Zuckerville is without question a greedy corporate asshole who…. Where the fuck was I? OK, I took a quick look at my Wall and the first post that popped, right on top, was by my friend dayzeeme (In her Fuckerburg incarnation). She had shared an article from Ranker by Matthew Lavelle: “Study Reveals That After You Die, You're Conscious Long Enough To Actually Know You're Dead”.
There are stories (As related in the aforementioned article) told by people who have died according to the medical definition of death but were brought back, and they don’t all involve seeing the light and being beckoned to walk toward it. Many of these people can recall vividly and verbatim, the actions and conversations of medical personnel who were frantically trying to revive them. It’s clear that consciousness survived the technical end of life, i.e. loss of heartbeat and no response to stimuli. Brain death will soon follow, it being starved of blood and oxygen. This memory event is reminiscent of out of body experiences that people sometimes have. Julian Jaynes recounted a few of them, like the man who regained consciousness following a coma. He came to himself not in himself. Instead he found his conscious self in an upper corner of the hospital room looking down at his body on the bed and a nurse beside who attended him. The after death experience has not been described as out of body as far as I know, but it has a similar feel. The body is dead by all the pertinent criteria and cannot respond to speech or anything else. But the mind is aware.
The above opens up new debate. We may need a new definition of death. We certainly don’t have a definition of consciousness though, so we can hardly use it as a benchmark for life, or its apparent absence as an indicator of death. There are so many questions and so few answers. And what appear to be answers lead invariably to many more new questions. But we are not without hope, and we are not completely ignorant.
A random and merely time killing search for tits and ass became a metaphysical musing on the nature of consciousness and death. Life may be random but it certainly isn't meaningless. Tits and ass matter.
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Letter to an English Friend
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Posted:May 17, 2017 4:25 pm
Last Updated:Sep 10, 2020 11:21 pm
80731 Views
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Letter to an English Friend:
Dear Spunky,
It’s pretty clear to me that there was collusion between not just the Russians and Trump's team but Trump himself. He brags that he doesn't play by the rules, and that he games the system. I'm sure some voters saw that as an asset, as if knowing how to beat the system meant that he understood it and could win the Washington game for them, but that's the same lie we were told when Bush and Obama tried to persuade us that the guys who caused the financial meltdown were just the guys to fix it, since no one understood it better than them. The biggest lie was in the last phrase- they didn't understand it. Then Fed chairman Alan Greenspan: “Those of us who have looked to the self-interest of lending institutions to protect shareholders’ equity, myself included, are in a state of shocked disbelief,” he told the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform." That quote is from the New Yorker. From NBC: “A critical pillar to market competition and free markets did break down,” Greenspan said. “I still do not fully understand why it happened.”
I don't think Trump thought he would lose without help from Putin. I think it's simply the way he operates. What evidence beyond his behavior for the last seventy years is needed to observe that the fat fuck has no moral compass? The goddamned media has bought into the current "post truth" fetish. The only reason they cover him now is the same reason they gave him a trillion dollars worth of free advertising during the campaign. The media loves conflict and Trump is loaded for bear with potential conflict. He's certain clickbait, and the media doesn't give a shit if it's negative or positive- “Just look at our fucking ads, stupid". They're corporate whores, and covering his reality show antics is a hell of a lot cheaper than paying for good investigative journalism.
There are a few things going on with Trump that although they aren't news ought to be repeated here. One, he lies so egregiously and so often that it's difficult to sort it all out and winnow out whatever germ of truth might have accidentally wandered into his remarks.. Second, although he claims not to care what others think of him, he's in fact so thin skinned that he can't let any criticism slide, no matter how trivial. He tries to cover his dumb ass with bluster in cases like this. Hence, when he blurted out that he fired James Comey to end the investigation into his ties with Russia, it was not only true- disconcerting enough coming from a congenital liar- but bluster. It was Trump's great "Fuck you!" to the system. He doesn't have a feel for politics at all, and cut the legs out from under his entire staff, who were trying to pass off their own outrageous and completely different lie that Comey was fired for being mean to Hillary. But of course we're reeling from the audacity of it all and stand by gobsmacked. He hasn't been able to decide which he's going to react with, one of the lies or more bluster, so he's used both and we're left wondering if he's arrogant or stupid, when in fact both things are true. In any case it was an unbelievably stupid admission, bluster or not.
It couldn't be more obvious, or more simple, that Comey was fired for exactly the reason Trump gave- he didn't like the Trump/Russia investigation and wanted to end it. The simplest explanation is very often the most likely, and whether Trump had chosen to lie or tell the truth, ending the investigation is the one thing he might think he had to gain from dismissing Comey. But of course he only succeeded in making himself guilty of obstruction of justice, coincidentally the exact offense that brought Richard Nixon face to face with impeachment and resulted in his resignation to avoid that fate.
What Hunter S. Thompson wrote about Nixon over forty years ago is also true of Trump: The -of-a-bitch ought to have his nuts ripped off with a plastic fork. When Trump thumbs his nose at the system he gets big cheers from his hard core of supporters, but what he's thumbing his nose at is our system of checks and balances and our rule of law. He thinks he's above the law and his staunchest backers are looking for revenge against a government that they think has sold them down the river, so every nail he drives in the coffin of the republic sends them into an ecstasy of perceived retaliation. They don't recognize white privilege and are so blind to it that equality looks like oppression to them. And they have no loyalty to that system anymore for all their protestations of patriotism and love for America. They claim to love a vanished America, and indeed many of them do pine for the vanished and traitorius Confederate States of America, paragon of Christian virtue that it was.
There is a recent article in The Nation magazine by Susan McWilliams: "This Political Theorist Predicted the Rise of Trumpism. His Name Was Hunter S. Thompson.”.
McWilliams points out that Thompson described the culture and motivation of our present class of Trump deplorables fifty years ago in his book " Hell’s Angels: The Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs". Thompson chronicled the philosophy of violent and total retribution that was followed by the Angels against anyone who crossed them, which meant pretty much any outsider, and almost all of us are outsiders to them. I remember the book well, and Thompson in his turn had credited Nelson Algren from his book, "A Walk on the Wild Side".
"Algren’s book opens with one of the best historical descriptions of American white
trash ever written.
He traces the Linkhorn ancestry back to the first wave of bonded
servants to arrive on these shores. These were the dregs of society from all over the British
Isles – misfits, criminals, debtors, social bankrupts of every type and description – all of
them willing to sign oppressive work contracts with future employers in exchange for
ocean passage to the New World. Once here, they endured a form of slavery for a year or
two – during which they were fed and sheltered by the boss – and when their time of
bondage ended, they were turned loose to make their own way."
Later:
Drifting became a habit; with dead roots in the Old World and none in the New, the
Linkhorns were not of a mind to dig in and cultivate things. Bondage too became a habit,
but it was only the temporary kind. They were not pioneers, but sleazy rearguard camp followers of the original westward movement. By the time the Linkhorns arrived anywhere
the land was already taken – so they worked for a while and moved on. Their world was a
violent, boozing limbo between the pits of despair and the Big Rock Candy Mountain. They
kept drifting west, chasing jobs, rumors, homestead grabs or the luck of some front-running
kin. They lived off the surface of the land, like armyworms, stripping it of whatever they
could before moving on. It was a day-to-day existence, and there was always more land to
the west.
Some stayed behind and their lineal descendants are still there – in the Carolinas,
Kentucky, West Virginia and Tennessee. There were dropouts all along the way: hillbillies,
Okies, Arkies – they’re all the same people. Texas is a living monument to the breed. So is southern California."
I know these people, Spunky. I grew up with them, went to school with them and worked with them. Lived next door to them. I don't shrink at all from identifying them as deplorables and racists. Not many of them ever did believe that Trump would fix their problems or bring back their jobs, dumb as they are. What they liked were the things that repelled the rest of us, Trump's open misogyny and bigotry. They liked his fascism. He blamed the same people they blame- anyone seen as not "one of us", and they're out to burn down the system, burn it all down, since being white and Christian is no longer enough to buy them special treatment. In the past was a time when no matter how low they were in the pecking order, at least they weren't black or brown skinned or Jews, and by God that meant something. If the system won't give them back what they once had they mean to see to it that nobody has it.
In an earlier time we'd have been able to count on a congress that still had some vestiges of decency to thwart Trump's ambition and restrain his excesses, but this is no longer that time. The "Freedom Caucus" wing of the House, put there in the rebellion once known as the Tea Party, was elected by the folks Thompson and Algren described, Bible thumping, hellfire and brimstone preaching, hard drinking and bitter, and the right wing ideologues that make up the rest of the Republican congress are more interested in their own agenda of stripping away the last threads of an already shredded New Deal. Theirs is a bankrupt political philosophy demonstrated to be false time and again, but these are Ayn Rand devoteés and they believe with the fervor and fanaticism of true believers. They are beholden to huge muti-national corporations which are now the sugar tit they suckle. Democrats will put up some resistance but many of them are nursing from the same tit. The Democrats will bring a hacky sack to a street fight.
Plainly the incidents of Russian hacking and Comey's ill-advised tepid dismissal of the email charges against Hillary had an effect on the election. Only a fool would find nothing suspicious about the timing of that move. But concentrating on that distracts attention from an unrelenting assault by the Republican party in legislatures across the country on the voting rights of minorities, most of whom would vote Democratic. Voter suppression is not there yet, but it’s approaching the old Jim Crow years and includes the conservative Supreme Court’s repudiation of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and its decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. When you add in the apathy many of those same voters feel, and the defeat of the most acceptable alternative to either Hillary or Trump- Bernie Sanders- the voting rolls were trimmed and diverted enough for Trump to just squeeze in. And squeeze he did! He won the popular vote in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania by a tiny amount, giving him the bare edge in electoral votes. Inquiries into the legality and accuracy of the vote were slammed shut by Republican legislatures in each case and we may never know whether there was hacking at the state level by the Russians or ballot manipulation by the Republicans. Journalist Greg Palast has reported on shenanigins in several states, but of course it’s buried in an avalanche of clown show performances by the Trump administration. And given the constant barrage of misdeeds by that administration, it seems likely that any election irregularities will take a permanent back seat to more pressing issues, leaving us vulnerable to a repeat performance in 2020.
We’ve been there and done that. In the election of 2000 it was made clear that reform of our federal elections was badly needed and that some kind of standardization of procedures by the states was in order. We have had one Democratic House since then and they did not address it. You can bet your last quid that no Republican congress is going to devote itself to the mantra of one man, one vote. As far as they’re concerned money talks and everything else walks. It’s interesting to me that the Old South and the Dixiecrats who waved its flag considered blacks to be property and thus ineligible to vote, while now they’re married to the party whose idea is that property should indeed have a vote.
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Brownian Movement: Obscurity Unexplained
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Posted:May 4, 2017 1:23 pm
Last Updated:Aug 7, 2019 1:09 pm
80980 Views
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“Brownian Movement” is a Dutch/German/Belgian film by Dutch film maker Nanouk Leopold that uses Brownian motion as a metaphor for apparently obscure human motivation and sexual desire.
Brownian motion explains the movement of particles caused by collision with and bombardment by other particles suspended in a fluid. Brownian motion was observed by botanist Robert Brown even though he could not demonstrate what caused it. In 1905 Albert Einstein explained that the movement proved the existence of atoms and molecules which although unseen could be inferred by their action upon other molecules and particles.
Charlotte (Sandra Huller) is a doctor married to Max (Dragan Bakema) living in Belgium. They have a young and lead what appears to be a normal and satisfactory middle class life. Max is a construction superintendent and the family lack for nothing materially as well as appearing as fulfilled as any young couple might be. Charlotte’s family life makes its first appearance with her reading to her and then making love with Max. Nothing looks off or wrong here. Charlotte must surely be content. But in the opening scenes we watch Charlotte renting an apartment, paying cash, from a realtor who is largely peripheral to the scene. The apartment mirrors Charlotte herself, spacious and light, very fair and if not antiseptic or stark still spare and plain. It is light and airy. She wanders the apartment in a flowered robe, lying on the bed and stretching out in the sun that floods the space with clear bright light.
Charlotte brings patients of hers to the apartment and has a series of sexual trysts there, first with a large and very hairy man, next with a bland and bald bearded man who never disrobes and pleasures her with his fingers. Later there is a scene where Charlotte is lying face down on a fur rug. After a long interval a man two or three times her size slowly approaches her from behind and mounts her. The scene ends like this. The encounters are not filmed in slow motion but are acted in slow motion. There is no dialogue. She does not talk to her partners, nor they to her. The scenes are erotic and sensual without being prurient.
At one point Charlotte studies the hairy man’s back in a long and slow, almost halting way, finally reaching ever so deliberately out to stroke just the hair on his back. This is as close to the sex act as we’re allowed. Actual copulation is inferred rather than seen. The most explicit sex portrayed with her secret partners is when she is masturbated by the bearded man. Even in this case the action is subdued and the passion implicit in the act is, while not hinted, very soft and sensual, subtle and quiet- hushed. Because of the sparsity of motion the least movement or touch takes on an electric significance that’s all the more powerful. There is no wasted energy here. Its erotic power is understated and portrayed without extravagance.
The only jarring scene in the movie occurs when Charlotte encounters the bearded man at her husband Max’s worksite, again all the more powerful and frightening when juxtaposed with the emotional restraint of the rest of the film. Charlotte closes the scene curled up on the floor, unconscious. It’s in this way that Max discovers her infidelity- with Charlotte unconscious, itself a metaphor for her behavior.
In a therapy session with Charlotte, Max has the questions that any husband would have. He wants details. He wants to know everything. He wants to know why, what she is lacking, what he himself is lacking, but instead of a frenzy of jealous rage he is simply flummoxed and visibly saddened at their loss and is groping to know what has happened and why. When asked by the therapist Charlotte can only answer that she doesn’t know how she is supposed to feel, that she might say more but knows it will only make matters worse. She cannot really explain herself.
Charlotte loses her medical license and the couple move to India when Max takes on a construction project there. They try to make a fresh start but they bring their past with them. Max is unable to put the incidents behind him and it’s driven by the mystery of his wife’s infidelity. He is never to know or at all understand what has caused his wife to seek something outside their marriage, or what that something is.
Charlotte is still driven to search out sensuality in her life. She frequents a huge building above the Ganges and lies fully clothed in the sun, on the hard stone terrace. Max at one point follows her to find her meditating in an out of the way corner of that same building. Since he doesn’t know what drives Charlotte he can’t find a way to come to grips with it. He can’t fathom what drives her and she offers nothing to him that might help. She is with him- this should be enough. But not knowing is a torture for Max.
Paternalism and the double standard in our culture doom Charlotte to an estrangement that a man would likely find easier. There is a special hell on earth reserved for women who are overtly sexual and even more for a woman who defies explanation. The sexual drives of human beings of either sex are difficult to explain, and “Brownian Movement” does not explain them. We can infer that there are forces acting on Charlotte and she is unable or unwilling to trust her own articulation of why she needs what she does. Charlotte is as unemotional and mute in her reaction to being found out as she is in the encounters themselves.
There is a mystery to being human that is often unknown and unknowable, and our yearnings defy explanation or expiation in the same way that Charlotte does. Her urges are ours and are as difficult for many of us as the characters in “Brownian Movement”. Knowing is a thing without words, outside of language, that can’t be verbalized in the jargon of modern psychology but can only be triangulated on in poetry or song but never reached. Charlotte lives, breathes and feels. Why should she not have that?
“Brownian Movement” is ponderous without being slow and is like a painting in its absence of discourse and meager use of language. No attempt is made to preach or analyze. You can sink into it and let go, letting its both sensual and sensuous imagery wash over you. Be careful not to overthink it.
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The Past as Prologue:
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Posted:Feb 9, 2017 7:16 pm
Last Updated:May 1, 2018 2:33 pm
105308 Views
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I determined not to read any critiques or analyses of Cormac McCarthy’s “Blood Meridian” until I had read the book and formed my own opinion. I didn’t want to know what everyone else was saying. I couldn’t escape reading some of the accolades the book had drawn or the high praise from dozens of literary lights or the faint praise with which it was damned by far fewer critics. But I held to my purpose and read it through in two long sittings while sequestering myself offline and out of any library.
“Blood Meridian or the Evening Redness in the West” is an historical novel whose protagonist is the , deprived in the violence of his birth of his mother and with a predilection for murder and mayhem thereafter. Running away from Tennessee while young he barely sustained life at all until finding himself in south Texas and for lack of any other direction in his life joining up with Captain White, a sympathizer of the Knights of the Golden Circle who is determined to annex huge swaths of Mexico to the United States by the extralegal means of invasion and seizure, following the example of the United States government in the recently concluded Mexican American War. Ending badly with Captain White’s decapitated head in a clay jar and the in a Mexican jail, the elects to join the Glanton Gang for the simple reason that they can spring him from his cell.
The Glanton Gang has contracted with the governor of Chihuahua to eradicate Apaches from northern Mexico. The withdrawal of United States troops from Chihuahua has left a vacuum of law enforcement in the state and John Joel Glanton has agreed to deliver the scalps of Apaches to the governor for bounty. Glanton’s gang immediately exceeded the requirements of said contract and murdered and scalped virtually every human being in sight forthwith. They raided Chiricauha settlements and Chihuahuan pueblos along with those of peaceful Indians and American pilgrims for the west and the soldiers of both nations. The violence is spontaneous and compulsive, though never exactly casual. Glanton’s men slaughter mechanically, offhandedly and seemingly thoughtlessly but never quite purposelessly. Theses are men who will kill another man not simply for his boots, a real prize, but for a necklace of severed ears or a halfhearted insult.
The violence and degradation of “Blood Meridan” is relentless. It begins on the first page and continues with scant letup til the end. Critics and reviewers have stated that it took them several tries to read the thing, and others have claimed that the unremitting cruelty and blood letting becomes almost boring. But McCarthy’s prose is masterful and archaic, at times nearly Biblical. His descriptions of the northern Mexican landscape are elegiac and alternately a brooding dirge and a soaring hymn like the land itself. McCarthy’s scholarship is impressive. Every incident related is based in historical research.
A central character is the Judge, an immense bald giant of a man and learned nearly beyond belief. He is the philosopher of the tale and is set in opposition to the , himself a man of spare speech. The judge- and most of the book’s critics- see the duality of man, good versus evil, but the Judge preaches that war is the only holy thing about man, and presaging a theme in later novels by McCarthy, that murder is not only sacred but inevitable. The , in response, replies “You ain’t nothin’.”
“Blood Meridian” describes the condition of man. Such times have passed before. The end of the Alexandrian Empire saw brigand armies of Greeks willing to hire out as mercenaries in the Middle East or rob and pillage where they weren’t paid tribute. The returning crusaders freebooted through France for a hundred years, imposing a deeper dark age on that pre renaissance collection of kingdoms and duchies. In the years leading up to the American Civil War, during the war, and in the south and west following it lawlessness often reigned and the novel can be seen in that context. The South, whose goals were articulated by the Knights of the Golden Circle, wanted to extend their slave empire around the Caribbean Sea, and that could not be the avowed goal of the Federal government without upsetting the balance of power. So men like William Walker and John Joel Glanton stepped in where Aaron Burr and James Wilkinson had trod before, would be conquistadors.
Such times have passed before, and will again. We may be witnessing the eve of such events now, if we aren’t very careful.
Although styled an historical novel I think “Blood Meridian" is past, present and future. William Faulkner: “The past isn’t dead. It isn’t even past.” “Blood Meridian” describes the condition of man. The idea of the duality of man is an attractive construct, but you have to be careful that you can still see the forest for the trees. All of us have a capacity for good or ill. And we fall everywhere in-between. The Judge would have the believe that his choices are already made and we’re left thinking that maybe McCarthy agrees, but the time and again chooses mercy. The judge would see weakness there, but I know in the end that the has no regrets regardless of the outcome.
This is a chronicle of desperadoes. Think on that a minute. Desperate men. The rope of their lives has run out and murder is their only response. But life is not neat and categorized- it’s chaotic and confusing like the world they live in. Violence is done by desperate men and also by ambitious men like John Joel Glanton, and as well by authoritarians from George Washington to Antonio López de Santa Anna. The easy way out is despair, to succumb to the temptation that we’re doomed to repeat the cycle, or to deny the rage in our own hearts in the hope that will save us. But like the , we have a choice.
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Letter to an Aussie Friend
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Posted:Feb 2, 2017 6:24 pm
Last Updated:Apr 15, 2017 3:22 pm
109187 Views
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Dear Annette,
We're just shy of living in an armed camp here, but I don't doubt that will soon change and the camp will be fully armed. Our constitution is just a talking point now for conservatives. This is all about the acquisition of power and wealth and they don't care by what means they acquire it. Their capacity for hypocrisy is a sight to behold. It is not hyperbole to call this a fascist coup. Even some liberals are tsk-tsking over protest here claiming that we mustn't make waves. And there is the usual distaste for more violent protest. In a capitalist society where human value is based on how much property you have, the destruction of property is a valid protest and a true statement. It's a legitimate revolutionary act. This coup is powered by anti-intellectualism to the point of being anti-knowledge and anti-fact. There is a pride in their ignorance and in their refusal to learn. They are equally proud of their bigotry and hatred. I have been lectured ad nauseam that I must try to understand and empathize with people who will resort to violence against other citizens, as if neo-nazis and white supremacists have any inclination to remain peaceful. The apologists do not understand that the argument has already been framed- the culture war is about to rise in temperature from warm to red hot. And the flame of ignorant populist hatred of supposed elites- read educated people here- is being fanned by other elites, the wealthy and powerful corporations who see a chance to pillage what's left of the country and have it all for themselves. The acolytes of Trump are so blind in their devotion to their ignorant and petulant leader that they refuse to see his sellout of their heritage to Vladimir Putin all for Trump's own personal gain. This is end stage capitalism. This is what it looks like. The corporations so worshipped by conservatives see only two classes- winners and losers. Trump will lead all of us to destruction and never bat an eye, because he believes in nothing at all beyond his own ego. This isn't simply a fight for our values, our honor, and our posterity, it's a fight for our very lives.
Love, Bill
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