"OH. So that's what they mean."

 It sucks that two people, both blond women, in two successive decades, tried so hard to talk sense into me, and failed. I'd love to be, respectively, 13 and 23 again, and actually get it. But it took till the early 1990s, after a few years of psychiatric pharmaceuticals, for me to catch on. "OH. So that's what that means."

I can't prove the pills made me any better, but they have made me feel, and act, very differently. As some might notice.

By the way, if those drugs did no good for somebody they'd take them off the market. Or they're supposed to anyway, because of federal and peer-reviewed oversight. Right?

But now the United States secretary of health and human services is a(n ex-?) junkie with a worm-eaten brain. (So it really does happen. Sorry guys.)

I wonder what that means? Put it this way: I have very often in my lifetime been a prophet and have been mostly ignored. And don't forget that even a busted clock is right twice a day. (Or at least it is here.) But now I can tell you that it's the obvious truth, my fellow Americans are in for HARD time, especially those (however few) who might feel "spiritual kinship" with me. Or who might agree with me that I should have listened to not just them but my father. Even if they never met him they saw his side, or would if they could. Some "common sense" might even be necessary, even for me.

So if I can catch on anybody can.

The fact is those who are "abnormal" in the eyes of J.D. Vance are in hazard for our lives. He wrote that book for a reason, okay?

I have nothing, and no one, holding me here. And nobody I know has any use for me, which has gone on for so long that it seems like my general condition. And maybe even if they did I wouldn't be up to it, it's so much easier to sit here alone with the door locked. Albeit on fucking Facebook.

So. This will probably never apply, but just in case (and note the case): don't you dare pretend I deserted you. How long am I supposed to wait? And wait for what? If you had anything for me I'd have known it by now. Okay, I'll admit I'm only thinking back about 15 years, and by then I was middle aged (but still troubled). But that's even more reason to not need me anymore, because my looks had faded. Fourteen years ago, so it's even worse now. And in some particular ways my physical functioning ain't for shit no more neither.

And now I'm almost out of money, with credit card debt worth two month's pay. For that San Diego trip, the one I had to go on or I'd pitch myself off the roof. The one where I had a "mystical" experience, which amounts to "OH. So that's what they're talking about." Golly. Okay, I really am dense. (At least it's not terminal. So far.)

But still. I plead a mental malfunction. I did not set out to be this dense on purpose. That was not part of the plan. I was supposed to be a prophet, a voyant, and not such an idiot. Something happened. Perhaps from heredity, or from hard knocks (including on the inside from drugs), or (most likely) both, I seem to have misplaced my mind. ('Misplaced.') My brain don't work like it's supposed to. Maybe it broke off too. 

So. I can't claim to be a total naif. Far from it. But your dog will probably like me. And I stand alone. Here. Where it's lonely. Out in space. And I think I've got it this time.

Yo, Cynara!

 
There's a tradition in the Perry family that we were always against slavery. That much goes without saying, doesn't it. And I know that my father and my grandfather disregarded "the color line" before that became fashionable. That might not be so clear cut: it could be that so few people could put up with us that it didn't matter what color they were. Along those same lines, what matters about somebody's hand is that it's not pointing a weapon at you, not the color of the skin on the hand. White people have been harming other white people for millennia longer than the concept "white people" existed.

And I know that for generations there have been people that took exception to us, for example my grandfather was run out of West Virginia for being a "pervert." We've thought about our history of being (as we see it) persecuted, and we decided for our own reasons to not get racist. For my grandfather it was that he couldn't afford to make such distinctions, and for my dad it was he got so damn tired of being told to.

So he took our family not to the little white United Methodist church across the street, but the almost all black, older and more magnificent, UM church across town. At Liberty Heights & Garrison. In 1969 to 1971 that I know of. And then we moved and started going to Elderslie UM church at Pimlico & Ken Oak, a "changing" UM church in that "changing" neighborhood, and stayed members literally till they died. As that church absorbed the members of what had been that neighborhood's UM black church, and as younger and/or more liberal whites started coming. They even had a minister who was what amounted to a social democrat, as in the UK's Labour Party.

So before long all the bigots and conservatives left. And when the black population in the neighborhood increased so it did in that church. It got to the point where my mother was most likely the last white member of that congregation, and the black minister and a few "sisters" from the church who came to the nursing home to give her communion I think once a month were all black for several years.

In my father's case it's because he was a good person, basically. He was the kind of Christian that MAGA hates. Unlike my outcast grandfather he could afford to make racial distinctions, but he was against the idea. And he stuck to it, even when people called him crazy and/or "liberal" for it.

In my case it's that I really had no choice, and now I'm glad that happened, because racism is bullshit. I started going to white neighborhood schools in the white neighborhoods we lived in, but the school in the "changing" neighborhood was "changing" too. So I got to see that black, white, and sometimes Jews (who had recently become white), could make fun of my mother's cerebral palsy to and my father's spinal curvature at me like "your mother's a retarded monkey" and "your dad escaped Notre Dame." I had an "equal opportunity" approach to that problem, I'd hate them without regard to their color. That doesn't matter when you bully a smaller boy about his physically handicapped parents. You don't get a pass no matter what your skin is like.

Then because my Bad Attitude got me adjudicated as a Child In Need of Supervision I was locked up in the state institution for "bad" children whose families could not afford lawyers to save them, which in Baltimore City in 1972 meant that most of us were black. It was in the Richards and Finesinger buildings in Rosewood State Hospital, but it was somehow separate from that, even if only in theory. In the two dorms on our end of the building there were four rooms of eight beds each, and of 32 occupants only 6 of us were white.

And most of us didn't like each other, although some did give up butt to the guys, mostly other white ones, because we were like cranky bonobos that couldn't be all by ourselves. That seemed to be the case regardless of our color. (Look up bonobos' social behavior.) So how someone treated you mattered more than their color, and although most of the energetic boys would join together to bother me regardless of their color the boys in my dorm who were nice to me and took up for me were black. And they didn't get bribed for it either, they just decided I was human, even if I was white. (In Baltimore in 1972, mind you.)

So as I said the obvious fact that racism is bullshit was literally beaten into my head and stuffed up my butt. People basically suck, so if I limit myself to only a particular kind of person I lose out on the opportunity to find good things I don't usually get from people my own color. Decent black people (from my perspective) aren't any more numerous that decent white people, but the races aren't evenly distributed. In Baltimore the demographic has gone from 80.6% white in 1940 to only 31.9% white in 2020, and most of those whites are upper-middle class who live along Charles and St Paul Street (and a few parallel streets and all cross streets) north of Johns Hopkins University, who usually send their kids to mostly white private schools in the area. And most of that class has always abhorred or at least avoided me, except for a few young women who over the years decided to toy with my affections and/or use me for my body (mostly the former, unfortunately.) So it matters more that here in Lexington KY it's mostly black people who are nice to me: they might have to be nice for some white people, but they sure don't have to be nice to my crazy ass. It's sometimes more comforting when people do things that are not to their advantage. We call such people "saints." Oh. FYI. I've always attracted disaffected lesbians, though usually not in the (more frequent) way than they attract me, and when those friendships fuck up it's sometimes my fault. Then there's the the one who didn't believe me when I said I know she's a lesbian and I'm never getting any but that's simply not important to me: if I get to like her as a person and to enjoy having a futile crush on her and she becomes part of my life that's good enough. I was not laying in wait for a moment of weakness, and I would never roofie her. But she simply had problems believing me, perhaps because she and her girlfriend were coke & booze whores for a few rich boys, and eventually she just decided against the evidence that I was evil. Which probably had more to do with getting dumped by that girlfriend, probably to a rich boy, and eventually getting to a point where she didn't need rich boys more, than it had to do with me. If she didn't need rich boys, she certainly didn't need poor ones. To bring it back to the main topic this girl was white, but I've also had situations that got sexual with black lesbians who usually avoided men of any color, that ended because I was nuts. So that too eventually balances out.

But anyway. Here in Lexington KY it's 66.76 "white alone" as of 2030, but roughly 3/5 of the people who'll talk to me, mostly of my class level, number among the 14.73 "black alone" folks. And Hispanics are 9.2% of the population, but most Hispanic guys will talk to me, though I often have to talk first. In English, to let them know my deficiency. (If I can't speak your language it's not *your* problem, an attitude that was also passed down to me.) Luckily most people don't bother me here, but most who do are white people who think they outrank me. And they're usually pretty openly racist too.

So I come from good stock. My grandfather was a factory-working "pervert," my father was a crazy crippled man, and I -- if I can't be the messiah then I'll be a very naughty boy. And we've always been anti-racist, and other people's "fine distinctions" don't impress us much. Basically if you can put up with us we'll love you for it. Whoever you are. It just feels obvious. And in my history I've had reason to venture father outside the socially normal than most other people I've known, because my father was Quasimodo, my mother was a Retarded Monkey, and I am a Mutant Freak From Outer Space. What it's come down to is that you can't be too picky when you're a minority of one, so low has my lineage fallen. So I never extended it further: in my Y-chromosomal line the babies stop here. With me. One thing I have saved you from is whoever my child would have been, of which sex and/or whatever racial mixture. I've had sex with women of many races, but I've made a baby with none of them. And if I had a son you'd do well to beware, though if I had a daughter it would be fitting to bow down.

See the progression? From "pervert" to "cripple" to "semi-intellectual lunatic." What could possibly come next? How would a failed messiah train his offspring? First off, learn a martial art. You'll need it. Many times. Secondly suck up to the "intellectual elite" -- especially the "progressive" ones -- and inspire them to make themselves useful. And third, always want to stick up for The Underdog but be careful about whether it's called for: e.g., pedophile cannibals are very "misunderstood," but then there might be good reason for that. Fourth, trust no one without hard proof; not even committing a murder together will make you stay friends. (At least not in the movies I watch, I know so few out-of-the-closet homicidal felons.) And, mainly, Take No Shit. Refuse to cowed. Do what must be done even when it's scary. Be as close to a ninja as you can be. (An android ninja would do better, but let's not get too picky.)

You would not want to cross one of my offspring. I'd've made sure of that. If you let them live until they were 9, I mean; it's not just the genes at work here. Once s/he reached the age of reason she'd see what our line is up against, and s/he would get pissed off. It'll never happen because we don't do that here, but picture an avowed leftist shooting up a MAGA occasion. In my early teens I decided that any kid of mine would be like that, so you should be glad I have a decided that was wrong. That rather than "not hide" my assault weapon from my troubled teenager well enough, I simply decided not to reproduce. You people owe me for that. I think of SSI as reparations. Signing up to try to get on it amounted to suing for damages: some medical experts had to decide several times that I had been badly fucked over in the head. And they might've been among the people who were persecuting me. Because what would you do without David Fucking Perry to kick around anymore? To repeat: be glad I didn't have any kids. When personal pride (including taking pride in our politics) outweighs the desire to be a good person you're likely to see what it means when that happens, and when you drive someone like that to decide you should not be here it's your own damn fault. Imagine me as a mass shooter's daddy: I had thirty years where I chose not to do that. See how many kids and maybe grandkids did I decided not to have? Like I said, you fuckers owe me. You got lucky when the men I used to share women's attentions with wanted to reproduce: I didn't, so I got dumped for them. One of these guys even moved to Australia to reproduce with a woman who was probably "too good" for me; another did the deed of reproducing more intimately. (The last time I "french" kissed her was when she was pregnant with his fetus, in his place with him watching, and he decided not to bother getting bothered about that, at least not then.) If I'd wanted to build a weapon against "society" I had several opportunities. And there was a good chance s/he would turn up racially mixed, with mothers who were white rednecks, or suburban Jews, or immigrant Chinese From Taiwan (i.e. not Chinese-Chinese but not an ABC), or working class and black, or a Hispanic hookers, or smart weirdos of any noted demographic.

The main thing these potential mothers had in common was having sex with me, but they were also "abnormal" in one way or another. And chances are that anybody with some kind of positive relationship with me might have a bad attitude toward normal people. If I had anything to do with it they would, that's an important criterion. Normal people are best used as food and fertilizer, ideally speaking. "Blood will out." And bloodthirstiness, though usually indirectly, is one of our society's prime norms. Normies make sure that anyone with a conscience despises them, the problem is that it's hard to predict whether the conscience or the hatred will be the stronger factor in any future generation of Perrys. I'd lean harder on the "hate them" part, but them I'm weird that way. And I've spent too much time being too conscience-stricken. Consciences are for losers, as "all the world" sees it. That there's my problem: I'm such a good person.

Y'all owe me for that. And if you think you don't, you probably bow to MAGA (if you're not in on it). Those who admit their debt should see why that's the better choice: do you want those people to have, or to take away from you, what I ask you to give to me? I might be annoyingly nuts, but those people are dangerous. As grownups, some with important positions. I, for all my blathering, have no power over you, nor do I want any: I simply want to keep on being my mostly harmless loony self. I want only good things for most of you, because my livelihood depends on your taxes. And now Elon Musk would like to get rid of people like me, even *nice* people like me, because we're "parasites." Okay strictly speaking we are, we get paid for being unable to work, but that's not a bad thing: aren't you glad you never had to work with or live next door to me? They pay me to stay out of your way, and I'm inclined to do that anyway. What might happen if someone like me couldn't avoid working alongside people like you? Does "going postal" ring a bell? Or maybe you'd make a person totally hate normies before s/he became legally adult: the problem is Harris & Klebold thought on too small a scale. Shoot up their own school? What good would that do? You'd do much better to, say, go berserk at a MAGA occasion. Gabby Clifford might've been the wrong target, but at least she was in the right direction: an anti-human politician. (Is there any other kind?)

It could very well be that because I had no children y'all lost out on a chance to declare "Marshall Law"[sic]. If you feel deprived by that you should just kill yourself.

So. Does it show that I'm no longer very attached to life? These days I'd rather merge with he Emptiness. There's nothing out there for me: the bad Normies have taken power, and the good Normies can't stop them. One way or another I am done for. Your taxes won't have to support me much longer. All I ask is that y'all give me a chance to know it wasn't all for nothing, that I am still capable of enjoying life among you. Even maybe more capable of that than I usually was, because I'd rather get what good I can out of life than argue with anybody. Me, 'TheDavid(TM)'. That cranky old troll. I just want to have fun on my way out. Have "mystical" experiences at the beach, find opportunities to know my political positions were the best choice, get all blissed out because a puppy "attacks" me with a display of affection (remember, bonobos), find out that my sense of direction is kind of off but I can still function in the world, things like that. I don't plan on doing anything a good person would disapprove of. All I ask for, really, is a few months of mercy. Then you'll go on to better things. I have earned it, haven't I? Look at all the harm I could have done, but chose not to do. Did you know I chose not to go into politics? Can you picture me a Senator, or worse yet on your local city council? Just a summer to love, so to speak. Just one. For a change. "I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion."

Four Empty Cylinders

 One quick scroll through the headlines on Google News reassures me that I'm doing the right thing by writing off my future. So far little of that affects me directly, I'm not a "DEI hire" or an undocumented immigrant or a government employee, but it's bound to fuck me up indirectly because I'm just not mentally armored enough to shrug off the society around me being torn apart. And of course MAGA will eventually get around to stomping more specifically on people like me, a "mentally ill" leftist with no practical use, and on my family that includes a niece in a lesbian marriage raising their child, it's only a matter of time.

And what I see in store those for San Diego denizens I met over the weekend makes me want to scream. These are people I can't help considering very much like me. People like the "underclass" black man my age named Charles, who guided me on Saturday to a situation I'd been raised to think of as a set up to be mugged, and the young man he led me to who sold me such an amazing amount of weed for $20 that I passed half of it to Charles and was still amazed at what a good deal I got. And then there's the also elderly man from the bus stop yesterday, who immigrated from Mexico at 10 years old, who like me was raised in the United Methodist and is also named David, who explained that They kicked him out of the US Air Force, and have been tracking and bothering him ever since, because for a while he dated a white woman. What will become of them? And what about the other black man I met Saturday, the young weed dealer I dug out my wallet and took money from without feeling nervous about it, what does he have to look forward to? Can he hope for a fruitful future where he can get away with being an honorable criminal? (It turns out that selling a small amount of untaxed marijuana is still illegal here, punishable by 6 months in jail and a $500 fine, which makes him a "Bad Guy.")

[to be continued]

Why so unforgiving?

 He's ba-ack!

It's got to be a bullshit dichotomy, this angelic/demonic apollinian/dionysian split I've got going on, but I'm experiencing sitting up late with music videos on Youtube, while drinkin' & puffin' & vapin', as a paradigm shift, a coming back out, going feral on the inside, yet again.

There's a lot to be said for it, longevity and cogency aside. Sometimes a person just needs to be non-compos, or needs to stop trying to be, just for a while. For almost 50 years years I've regarded myself as a chthonic demigod, with a good bit of sunshine in my soul but a lot more gloom-&-doom. And it is so.

My voice projects from my diaphragm, an obstreperous intrusion, an unexpected eruption. And such is my problematic attitude, my occasional YOPP! For unlike the heroes of modernist pulp fiction, I dare to not die. Still I persist.

On such occasions for such a long time, because I'm a bit too old to be semi-feral in public again, I plonk myself in cyberspace. And I do not budge until I get bored. And it's very easy for me to entertain myself by typing out what comes to mind, and to entertain you by clicking Save.

The kind of stuff I post here, whatever it is, just comes naturally to me. The effort is in the physical typing (with one finger) and the shaping of the syntax, and the usually futile effort to be mindful of the tone of my writing, if not to master it. But that happens on the fly: the technique is supposed to be secondary to the sense. The sense and the style. Y'all feel me? Praise be. Or praise me, a more appropriate pastime.

I have no idea how to sit down and work out how I'm going write something before I know what to write. That sounds ridiculous, the kind of thing some bastard sophist would impose on the victim's son. Language has been an art long before it became a science. Whatever comes out of me comes from me, not from some style manual or some ...For Dummies.

It's not even very easy to talk about coming out with posts like this. I'd have to skip a lot of steps to keep it in my limited memory, and a few more than that to explain it to The Public. It loses too much in transmission. Which is part of my general problem: I'm lossy. A force for entropy. Because the ability to focus did not come easily to me, and the inability to do so was frequently painful.

I've always hated having to pay attention to people who want to impose themselves on me. That's my job. Not to impose myself on you, but to impose myself on me. Sometimes loudly, sometimes in public. Your desire to control me gets in the way of me controlling myself. Which I spend a lot of time and energy on. Sometimes I need a chorus just to get through the day. ("She taught me turn, and counter-tern, and stand.") (It actually happened, but it's a long story from long ago; a tldr 'is don't trip hard with non-tripping strangers'.)

The discipline I'm used to, the self-discipline rather, consists of a peculiar kind of self-restraint. Not to lose my shit, especially not in public. But because I'm elderly it's my perquisite to stretch out a little bit and do my schtick in text mode. I just don't have the energy to do it out loud in public, which is probably salvific. Indeed it took me literally years, painful years, just to be able to go back out in public. First I freaked the fuck out, for several years, in public, then eventually I had to hide. And hide. And hide.

I re-ascended into the world by way of the Internet. And you like it that way. If you know what's good for you. Especially now, when I don't have the patience to give a shit. I come in peace, I mean no harm, so back the fuck off. Don't get in my way. I will do what I will do. Including sob into your face, if it comes to that. But really. Don't block me, bro. And if you stomp on my foot I won't care for your apology.

I'd been "good" for over a year. And even now I ain't as "bad" as I could've been. But after the victory of MAGA, facing your world sober was too much like work. Don't try to tell me about it neither. I spent 33 years trying to keep my shit together, or to not lose it loudly. And what did it get me? More than half of the voters out there take an exception to people like me, and some of them just ain't woke enough to just things go.

Nobody has more right to control me than me. And sometimes even that is more work than I'm paid for. I'm in need of slack. I'm Generation Jones in the flesh.  

Maybe it's not a split. Maybe it's something that slides off, like moon roof. Because I'm all about chthonic when I'm really me. De profundis, motherfuckers. 
 

I'm trying to to stay alive long enough for my living days to come back. At least days that might be worth living. Or feel like it is in some way at some point, someday anyway.

Your world has really stomped hard on my foot. And it they got me down they would kick me. What could you offer me that might compensate me for that? Is living in your world worth my time?

 

What Fresh Hell

 As it stands, I don't expect to survive this Trump term. Figure January 20, 2029 at the latest. Until then it all depends. For now be happy for me that I've lived long enough to be this disgusted. In 1983 I took the breakup of my marriage so hard I tried to kill myself twice in one month (I should've been more careful); now I'm waiting for the start of yet another four years of societal meltdown. The PATRIOT Act should have been enough, but now some morons have voted for Trump three times when they should've known better. What fresh hell will your world throw me into next?

Now this degenerate curmudgeon is sitting inside away from the Arctic windchill basking in free heat and puffing on a cigarillo that cost 27.4 cents. ($1.29 plus 6% tax divided by 5 = $0.274; we lack an easy way to type out fractions of a penny, but pretty soon we won't have pennies themselves.)

2:50 PM EST would be too early to start drinking yet if I hadn't gone on naltrexone and been good for a year, and I don't feel any real need to do so, so I won't. it's cheaper that way. I didn't feel like I had to drink last night either, it's just that I've been disgusted with life and too wintered out to feel like doing any of the better things that'd be on my list if I'd bothered to make one.

Last night I had about two shots of 50% ABV rye whisky and half a 4.5% can of porter. That took about 90 minutes to imbibe. My tolerance is still very low and thanks to the naltrexone getting really smashed wouldn't have been any fun, beyond a certain point it feels like the poison it is, so it's so far so good; I got a slight buzz and stopped in the middle of a perfectly good beer, so not only did I not get a hangover I didn't even get dizzy standing up. I gather that's what naltrexone is supposed to do, keep it optional and non-problematic. To go back to hard-core boozing I'd have to go off naltrexone, which is free to me, while decent whiskey costs about $20 a bottle.

I stopped boozing last year because I couldn't afford it, and drinking like I had been is still not cost-effective. Note that I can now afford to drink as ethanol as I was doing, though so far it'd have to be cheap-ass vodka instead of the "surprisingly good for the price" whiskey I prefer; that's my idea of degeneracy, a point I'd rather not go past yet.

For one guy I know his self-drawn line was that he'd become totally unable to afford pain pills, so to keep on being an addict he'd have to resort to buying smack with fentanyl off the street, which he resolved by blowing his brains out in his basement. That was his choice and I respect him for it, but so far I've not let myself get into such a bad situation. (Not over "substances" anyway.)

Luckily for me alcohol is cheap, common, and legal, so I have that $10 a gallon vodka option to fall back on, and unlike him I don't consider it weakness to seek help for my problems if lowering myself that far still seems like a bad idea.

So far it still seems that if I took a poll on whether those whom it may concern would rather see me become a degenerate drunk or just get it over with, with those being the only choices I've give you, most of you would rather see with crippling alcoholism (there's even a subreddit for that) than put myself out of everybody's misery. That still seems like a fucked up priority to me, given what's a fucked up situation in the first place , but then I avoided becoming a crippled drunk last year by drying out, and then lucked into a 30%-of-my-income apartment.

Last year my obvious "or else" was giving up living inside and going to a place like California to be a tipsy derelict. I wasn't quite ready to murder myself and I did have a plan to make being homeless bearable -- joining a gym to shower and work out, finding a safe place to camp away from fentanyl junkies, etc., -- but fortunately I was able to find a way to dry out for as long as need be that didn't involve any of that Twelve Step bullshit that's on my "die rather than commit" list of sins so that's what I did.

And it worked. For a while.

But October 2023 was still over a year before the next Presidential election, and putting up with this world you give me to live in didn't seem totally pointless. But y'all normies had to go and crown Cheetoman again, which would make being homeless (drunk or not) even harder than it was last year; from what I understood about what those people had to put up with in 2020 I've decided I'd really rather not. Now you've done it: you've made being homeless sound worse than death to somebody who used to consider homelessness rather inconvenient but not a disgraceful tragedy. It's hard enough to foresee a worthwhile future in my life as it currently is.

The electorate of the USA has put me in yet another existential crisis I don't need to go through. Things were bad enough already. This is what I mean when I say stupid people shouldn't vote: there are plenty of Americans who'll benefit from Trumpism, but most of those who voted for him are not among them. The USA is about to become a corporate oligarchy like Russia, after a few years of which it'll descend even further into failed state status.

Forty years ago, when Reagan had just gotten elected to a second term, people would reassure me that my dread of the future was a paranoid exaggeration, that the American people were too smart to let things keep getting worse. In 1984 people told me a situation like Trump's first term was extremely unlikely. But 40 years ago you also didn't expect the Patriot Act, or the 20 Years War, or a global pandemic. It would never come to that, normal people said. "Stop being paranoid -- and maybe go on medication."

How could the US electorate even allow Trump to get nominated in 2016? What so great about a "democracy" that would let something like that happen?

Cippola's Third Basic Law of Stupidity is this: "a stupid person is a person who causes losses to another person or to a group of persons while himself deriving no gain and even possibly incurring losses."

Keep in mind that we're not talking only about Trump base here, we're talking about Trump being on the Presidential ballot AT ALL. Say what you will about the Founding Fathers, but when the Constitution was written they simply could not imagine a situation when the American people would let such a raving moron run for President.

One good thing about Putin and Orban and the other autocrats of the world is at least they're not spluttering idiots. Hell, as dictators go Xi Jinping is not as horrible as Mao, for example.

You've really fucked me over this time. The only question is how soon it will get really bad. I've already stopped reading the news for the most part, shutting myself off even further from the world around me; I've already decided that total abstinence from alcohol (and 5/$1.29 cigars) is more trouble than it's worth. You've shown me that aiming for limitless longevity is ridiculously silly, in fact four more years of things as they are now might well be too much to put myself through.

And y'all tell me there's something wrong with my brain.

You people disgust me.

 

"Spamming or other bot-like behavior."

 

61 [M4F] - Kentucky/Anywhere - Inspire me, damn it!

Trigger Warning/TW

In this iteration I'm looking for a younger woman, say 30-45, who's experienced, intelligent, engaging, and a bit intense. Bisexual and/or bipolar are optional pluses; mental and even physical scars are probably required. Visible scars and piercings usually mean you're trying too hard, as does dressing & acting all sexy & seductive. And makeup is usually a turn-off, except sometimes blatant red lipstick has the right associations. And I don't really care how women dress as long as they don't look like cartoon characters who stepped out of Vogue or something. You yourself should be enough.

As for me, I'm not suave, or charming, or witty, and I'm not interested in trying to impress anybody with anything. The only selfies I've managed to take lately come out fucking hideous or just plain depressing. (I take much better photos of other people, I've even got an actual "analog" camera I bought from a pawn shop in 1993.) I'm in okay shape for a man my age in my ZIP code, which ain't saying much; "if I'd known I was going to live this long I'd have taken better care of myself." So you'll probably be glad to know I'm not very interested in sex, two antidepressants take the edge off that urge, but you might be disappointed to know I'm pretty much a pauper. You'll have to find a sugar daddy and/or husband elsewhere.

Which you'd be welcome to do: I was never much good at normal typical relationships (insert " " where they seem to fit), monogamy felt too restricting until I just aged out of fucking around, and for over half my life I've felt sorry for anybody who wanted to be monogamous with me. That last thing really matters, because it puts too much pressure on me: I do what I do so you get what you get, to put it bluntly, so if somebody else can do what I can't or won't that's fine with me. It's been over 30 years since I gave a damn where else a woman goes. Go have fun and then come back, or get around to me when you feel like it, whatever. When it comes down to it I could be perfectly happy with the right married lesbian, for example. What matters to me is loyalty, not fidelity. (And you can pretty much take it for granted I won't be fucking anybody else: at my age I'd have to try too hard, and it's been years since I've felt like bothering at all.)

What I am looking for is a friend, an ally, a confidant, a comrade in arms... A partner in crime for honor among thieves. (There's got to be a less cliched way to put that but whatever.) Someone who's easy to look at, usually easy to be around, who can make me want to know her and who's up to knowing me. This is one reason I want somebody with a history: it's only in the past few years that I haven't been having one myself. Normal people with normal lives bore the hell out of me, and I generally tend to scare them or at least make them uneasy. I'm not a serial killer or anything, at least not in real life, but for most people out there I might as well be. "Yea though I walk through Uncanny Valley..."

Oh. By the way.

• Trump is a total buffoon who's got to be somebody's puppet, there are no leftist politicians in the Democratic Party, and (to quote my then 17 year old niece) most people aren't smart enough for anarchy.

• I've got no idea why there's something rather than nothing, for all I know there might be a Creator involved, but the God of Abraham is such a total bastard I'm glad that's all fiction. In general that kind of faith is somehow beneath me.

• What's wrong with genocide is that it's mass murder, not that it focuses on any particular kind of people: there is no race, religion, or whatever that's more special than any other.

• People who'd beg the court for life without parole instead of execution should be put out of their stupid pathetic misery.

• It's not that life is nothing but pain, but forcing existence on another human being is frankly immoral.

You get the idea? And that's just what I tell the world that hasn't met me yet. Put it this way: in my troubled youth people who worked in the mental institutions they put me in usually accused me of trying to shock people with my "controversial" statements, they just could not accept that as far as I'm concerned I'm just talking basic common sense. I might be "emotionally unbalanced," I've already confessed to taking two antidepressants, but there's nothing crazy about my opinions or my general take on life. I'd rather die a lonely miserable death than suffer fools at all. And sometimes it seems like the world is full of nothing but.

Now. To compound what might rule out responding 99.4% of the bare handful of people who've even made it this far: don't bother me if you can't step up. I'm comfortable with this getting no answers at all, and if anybody does answer it'd be okay if we try but just don't click. The only people I've known who I might imagine addressing this to either died years ago or just plain gave up. (And that they're not with me now is my own stupid fault.)

Okay? Okay.

("Here kitty kitty!")

An Inside Joke

[An attempt at fiction.] 

It’s 2:17 PM on the second Sunday in October. My sister turned 60 a month ago. Her youngest daughter, the one I don’t know, drove me down here in her father’s car: Robin and Steve don’t want me driving, not even in a rented U-Haul, because the word is I’m a hazard behind the wheel. The only place I give vent to rage is on the road, and only when I’m driving. Nothing ever really happened, the one time I totaled a car it was from plain inattention, but a passenger read my mind one July while we were on Interstate 64 and called the police in the next rest area we came to.  She’d made up some story about me being suicidal with a gun in my pocket.

So it behooved John Law to pull us over, take me into protective custody, and hold me for three days in a locked mental ward to see if I was committable yet.  Who the passenger was is irrelevant except that I didn’t know her well and she hated guns. Her fantasy that I might hurt somebody sounded convincing enough to the police; she alleged I was a danger to myself because it would be hard to prove I’m not. Or so she thought. 

I told her to drive the car to my place, we lived in the same neighborhood, and then never come near me again. She did, and disappeared. For all I know she changed her hair and I couldn’t recognize her. Faces and names don’t matter much to me, not unless they mean something to me, and almost nobody does.  I made a vow to never go out of my way for a stranger again. “No good deed…”

For three days I practiced reading Proust (I always had my ebook reader with me), kept politely to myself, and acted calmer and more level-headed than I usually bother to be. Then when they let me out I sold the old Chevy on Craigslist for an even $1000, buried my pistol for archaeologists to find if I don’t come back for it, sublet my apartment to a relative of a friend of the landlord, and after 35 years went back to roaming the country. Sometimes I hitchhiked, sometimes I rode the bus; sometimes I stayed in motels, sometimes I hung mosquito netting from a clothesline in the woods.     

The problem was that my sister is in my medical files as my next of kin, along with my psychiatric diagnosis and a bit of my personal history. So some desk worker at the hospital called my sister to let her know where I was and why, and when she called me to hear my story I was stupid enough to be honest with her: I’d been having the fifth or sixth bad day in a row,  that just happens sometimes for no reason at all, and I was probably cussing and muttering to myself about how pissed off I was at all the shit I have to eat. It wasn’t serious, these things come and go, but I can see how it might scare somebody. So the dizzy Scorpio who’d asked me for a ride set me up to get me off the road. A public service, I gather.

And my brother-in-law, who knows me too well, decided that I shouldn’t be driving. Or carrying a gun. Because of my “anger problem.” And if I didn’t agree my sister would get on the phone on Monday, the second day of my stay, and start trying to have me committed. It might have worked, or maybe not, but I like to stay out of trouble. 

So after a few months of wandering the Interstate system, when it started getting cold at night, I decided to move inside for the Winter. But at that point I couldn’t afford the first month’s rent and the security deposit anywhere, and staying in motels would eat up my SSI check so I’d never get ahead, so I had nowhere to go but the sofabed in my sister’s finished basement.  The deal is I pay them whatever it costs to feed me, keep $100 a month for pocket money, and give the rest of my check to my sister to save for me so I could afford to get the hell out by April 15th, IRS Day. Just because that date is easy for everybody to remember, and far enough away so I’ll have a nest egg ready. Oh, and set up a way to get my psych medication there, and never miss a dose. Because my family cares about me and they want what’s best for me. And there’s nothing I can do about it.

So here we are, my mysterious niece and I, at a folding table outside a vegan restaurant.  Neither of us is vegan but she has a friend from high school who manages the place, and they do have good carrot juice. (The secret is the spices, they say.) And carrot juice does well with clear tequila, which I’ve taken to carrying in my “man bag” (‘so it’s purse, fuck you’) for special occasions. And I’m sitting across the table from her, downwind, because I keep playing with a big cigar like I’m thinking of lighting it. I probably won’t, I’ve just taken to fidgeting (hence the booze), but “those things are disgusting, just the thought of them.” Just on principle. And my sister and her husband have always been very big on principles, and they raised their kids that way. And I have been made to understand their thinking, though I was slow on the uptake till I needed to be otherwise. So I’m only allowed to smoke anything outside, and only if it doesn’t bother anybody else. 

So here I am, a bald old man who’s obviously suffered, around the corner from “a prominent research university.” Waiting for somebody I sort of dated for less than a month 39 years ago, a graduate student in something to do with advanced mathematics I can’t understand (I was a poet, you see), whose Facebook page mentions she works in the same school she studied in, whose website informs us she’s been a tenured professor since 1996. And lists her email address. And surprisingly she remembered me, and more surprisingly she admits it. And she’s got nothing else to do this weekend. And she’s always wondered how I turned out.

The last time I saw her I got barred till further notice from Baltimore’s premier gay disco. Because while she and her sister were getting on people’s nerves with their interpretive dancing I started singing along with MacArthur Park. Loudly. Off-key. Leaning against the wall by the dance floor as if I might just topple over. The girls were instructed to help me exit this establishment. Immediately. When I showed up a few days later, hoping to find that cute little twink I’d noticed that night, the barkeep recognized me and told me I was not welcome, nor were my girlfriends. 

She remembered that, she said in her email. And she still thinks it’s funny, though she’s sorry I got in trouble. Oh. “and by the way,” she’s been 12  Stepping for 30 years, and she does Pilates, and she’s vegan. And she’s surprised to hear that I’m not dead of AIDS or suicide or a car crash or something. And I’m the craziest person she ever dated, and the smartest townie she met that year. (“What a waste,” she’d say.) So she just has to satisfy her curiosity, since I popped up. 

And the only person who was available to drive me was the youngest niece, who was an infant when I “ran away from home,” who I’ve seen only a dozen or so times in the past 28 years. Who’s very patient with me, who also has an ebook reader. 

We look like we might be related, she and I, if you see us close together and catch us at the right time, but otherwise we might as well be different species. She looks like a typical suburbanite of her generation, in flowing peasant skirt, a T-shirt about an emo band that broke up before she was born, a paisley headscarf keeping her long brown hair from flapping in the breeze, and brown suede hiking boots over argyle socks.       

While my head is shaved clean, my Fu Manchu mustache is cut off evenly with my bottom jawline, and I’m dressed to impress: a hot pink Oxford shirt, untucked and with the top three buttons open, a black heart pendant on a leather thong just below my Adam’s apple, and camouflage pants bloused over a pair of black leather combat boots that were GI 30-odd years ago when they were first issued. ($27.99 on ebay, with $14.99 shipping.) The boots sport pink paracord laces to match my T-shirt, and I’m wearing every ring I own. It’s a little joke only certain circles would understand, and they’d hate me for making fun of them.