Are liberals stupid? K said as she read the title of this blog post on her tablet at Thursday Night Pints. That's the first sentence I'm going to type for the post, I said, capture the hypocrisy and irony of three well-off upper middle class white people bemoaning the state of progressivism in America on our digital devices while drinking designer beer and single malt scotches. My son, said L, tells me to go live a teepee and crap in a pit when I bitch about Democrats. It's like being told America, love it or leave it when I was protesting Vietnam in the early 70s. When I managed Crown Books stores in the early/mid 80s, I said after we each gave today's version of the same conversation regarding the Less-Shitty Problem updated for topicality, we sold Harlequin romances that literally were the same book over and over - the publisher's salesmen showed me - nouns blanks to be filled in for next months' editions, each book ending on the same page at the same place. They even had a formula, I said the salesman said, if the location was San Francisco the heroine's name was Kate, if the heroine's name was Francesca the location was London. K's phone rang, L made a phone call, I bought a round. Hilltop crosstalk for a small bit, real life for a bigger bit. We miss you, D. Then a return upon leaving to the Less-Shitty Problem, it's irresoluteness, for all the ________ of my opinions, all the _______ of yours. Write this sentence, said L: peggy pegs peg blanks with pegs.
- Jesse put that Lindsey Buckingham song in my head yesterday, immediate cascade sparked.
- Hamster, do you remember the name of the Random House sales rep? He was the Harlequin guy?
- Do you remember the name of the grey-haired hippie woman who was spooky sexy/unsexy, I think she was the Dell sales rep?
- For the record, L was calling us pegs.
- The time and space of contemporary war.
- Snowden: when China helped the US?
- The criminal NSA.
- The service of Snowden.
- Ex-con.
- Triskelions.
- Biggest Triskelion scandal yet?
- Triskelions and free speech.
- Triskelions and the profits of a police state.
- We, the Corporations?
UPDATE!
PERE UBU PLAYING DC SEPTEMBER 10th!
Who's in? Just bought six tickets, Earthgirl and me, Richard, Mr Alarum, Hamster already in, who else? I can get more tickets.
- UPDATE! And they may be coming to a town near you too!
- You will jog for the master race.
- The perils of Paula Deen.
- No one who has ever dealt with any flavor of DC area Park Police will find this story surprising.
- Proverbial details.
- nighthawk.
- 80s indie pop remembered.
- WOWEE! Prunella just sent me news that Pere Ubu is playing Columbus, an hour's drive from Bamgier, in September. FIELD TRIP?
- Forgive me, I love Lindsey Buckingham's music.
APPARITION OF THE EXILE
Bruce Weigl
There was another life of cool summer mornings, the dogwood air and the slag stink so gray like our monsoon which we loved for the rain and cool wind until the rot came into us. And I remember the boys we were the evening of our departure, our mothers waving through the train’s black pluming exhaust; they were not proud in their tears of our leaving, so don’t tell me to shut up about the war or I might pull something from my head, from my head, from my head that you wouldn’t want to see and whoever the people are might be offended.
From the green country you reconstruct in your brain, from the rubble and stink of your occupation, there is no moving out. A sweet boy who got drunk and brave on our long ride into the State draws a maze every day on white paper, precisely in his room of years as if you could walk into it. All day he draws and imagines his platoon will return from the burning river where he sent them sixteen years ago into fire. He can’t stop seeing the line of trees explode in white phosphorous blossoms and the liftship sent for them spinning uncontrollably beyond hope into the Citadel wall. Only his mother comes these days, drying the fruit in her apron or singing the cup of hot tea into his fingers which, like barbed wire, web the air.
