WONDERING. WANDERING. WHATEVERING.
“Though I tend to think it’s usually a waste of space to devote a column to President Trump’s personality — what more is there to say about the character of this petty, hollow, squalid, overstuffed man? — sometimes the point bears stressing: We are led by the most loathsome human being ever to occupy the White House.”
— opinion columnist Bret Stephens
On hot days like this, of relentless and arrogant sunshine, when breezes are miserly and shade revels in its scarcity, I like to hole up and construct voodoo dolls of ole Mother Nature, pins at the ready. Even more, I like to do the same of climate deniers, using power drills instead of pins. Their heads are much thicker.
It’s a grim business, but so is the ever-changing weather, the cataclysmic climes of now. We’re all just one flood or wildfire from unthinkable calamity. To those who actually believe it’s an elaborate liberal hoax — for fucksake — I hope disaster strikes them first, because it will ineluctably strike, and soon. (Retribution?)
The heat is feral today, following a streak of enveloping fall-like weather occasioned by a mean Hurricane Erin pinwheeling up the Atlantic Coast, another portent of global warming. From the Times: “As the planet warms, scientists say that rapidly intensifying hurricanes are becoming ever more likely.” And: “Hurricane season could ramp up with storms supercharged by warmer ocean waters fueled by human-caused climate change.”
Awesome.
This isn’t a sermon or a call to action. By now we should know of the horrors ahead. Yet many don’t, willfully and aggressively, and their ignorance, flat-out stupidity, permeates the highest offices in the land. Planet-saving regulations are being excised with the slash of a pen, and a diabolical grin.
The brevity of this post is purposeful. Preaching to the choir is redundant. And name-calling is for presidents. It’s a squib of personal reportage, this, describing my fabulous arts and crafts.
Notice how I’m making a fat, scowling, orange voodoo doll. Pins not required. I’ll just light it on fire and flush the ashes down the toilet. There’s your wildfire and hurricane in one fell swoop.
As a childhood KISS fan, this makes my stomach twist. Trump has tapped the grizzled glam rockers as inductees to the Kennedy Center Honors this year, a tribute so perfectly tawdry, I don’t think many get the irony, the hilarity.
KISS, whose integrity has always been dubious, is reportedly not a fan of our portly prez, calling Trump a “true danger to democracy,” but now of course say they’re “honored.” Trump says he picked the bawdy band because they’ve “made a fortune,” which is true, but a repugnant reason to exalt them. He’s also trying to irk the libs, of course. Funniest snub: Tom Cruise dissed Trump’s induction. That’s why he’s a big-screen action hero who can practically fly, without a cape. (Seen the Photoshop illustration of Trump as Superman, cape and all? You’ll vomit.)
Trump’s so stupid he doesn’t even know what culture is. He also elected disco queen Gloria Gaynor for the honors, evidently unaware that her biggest hit “I Will Survive” is a celebrated gay anthem — a song he loves with ignorant gusto. It’s much like the Village People’s comically transparent “YMCA,” a Trump theme during his campaigns that he would clap to like a bloated orange oaf.
The bigot is blind. And deaf. Our tinpot despot has a tin ear.
Keeping it light, some recent news plucked from the headlines …
RIP Ozzy Osbourne, madman and mensch, who amazingly didn’t die of rabies. He was the gentle, doddering Prince of Darkness, whose live shows brought out the crowd-pleasing celebrant, all cackles and hand claps. He would hop like a pogo stick. I saw him in concert when I was 13, my first metal show. I can’t shake it decades later. Satan is smiling.
Trump can’t elude the loaded Epstein case, and he’s shaking in his loafers and pissing his pants as he tries to deflect the pressure. Wipe your brow, sir; the flop sweat is showing. And on a scathing “South Park,” so is your talking micro-penis.
The New York Times posted its 100 best films of the past 25 years just to tick me off. While I agree with the bulk of the choices, if in different order, some make me want to throttle the voters. For starters, “Parasite” (#1 ?!), “Mulholland Drive” (#2 ?!), “Inglourious Basterds,” “Hereditary,” “The Master,” “Amélie,” and I’m just getting going. But bless them for including “Melancholia,” “The New World,” “Grizzly Man,” “School of Rock,” and so many other gems. Still, I don’t know why I read such lists. I don’t need the aggravation.
She perched gracefully atop sign posts, fences, rocks and cars, like a canine ballerina, poised and pliant. Maddie the spotted coonhound was the subject of her owner’s lustrous photography, clearly in the spirit of William Wegman’s whimsical photos of his preternaturally patient Weimaraners. Maddie’s charming pictures boast 1.2 million Instagram followers and comprise two books. But there will be no new pup pics, as Maddie died this week at age 14. I just got acquainted with her visual poetry, and still I’m crestfallen. Her loving obit.
Chuck E. Cheese got mouse-trapped. “Come with me, Chuck E.,” said the policeman who arrested the human-sized mouse — er, a human in a mouse costume — at the children’s pizza chain in Tallahassee, Fla., this week. The un-mousey behavior? Credit card fraud. Somewhere Mickey Mouse is blushing. “Astonished children wondered why the restaurant’s mascot was seemingly done for the day even as they continued to eat pizza and play arcade games,” said one report. “How do you explain this to a 4 and a 6 year old?” asked a witness. A youngster wanted a photo with the mighty mouse, but “a cop out of nowhere grabs his arm and says: ‘Chuck E.’s busy right now.’” Dying to know how his fellow inmates take to his gaudy outfit, big plastic head and all.
Hulk Hogan, a hideous human being, did the world a favor — he died.
“In recent decades, young men have regressed educationally, emotionally and culturally. Among women matriculating at four-year public colleges, about half will graduate four years later; for men the rate is under 40 percent. This disparity surely translates to a drop-off in the number of novels young men read, as they descend deeper into video games and pornography. Young men who still exhibit curiosity about the world too often seek intellectual stimulation through figures of the ‘manosphere’ such as Andrew Tate and Joe Rogan.” — David J. Morris
In these mid-summer doldrums, a few rambling thoughts that amount to nothing in particular …
Best sentence all summer: “Her lipstick is a philosophically incomprehensible shade of chalky orange.” (From “Eve’s Hollywood” by Eve Babitz.)
I have yet to read a memoir that didn’t bore me silly or raise an eyebrow or two. Nabokov’s “Speak, Memory” is a possible exception, and “Eve’s Hollywood” definitely is. I’m skeptical of minutiae only the writer cares about, like how their father flew planes in World War II and their sister married an alcoholic son of a bitch. I can hardly believe a word of what the authors say, especially when they do things like insert direct quotes they muttered as toddlers, forty years after the fact. (See: Mary Karr’s aptly titled “The Liars’ Club.”) It’s all magnificent hooey.
I’m sleeping like crap. Nothing new, but I’m locked in a stretch of relentless insomnia. I called my doctor and he gave me a low dose of Lunesta. It’s done nothing, even when I take more than the prescribed amount (whoopsie). I pop Benadryl and a dorky over the counter sleep aid as well. I’m all drugged up and I still don’t nod off till 4 or 5 or 6. Then I sleep till 9 and awake vaguely refreshed with murder on the mind. I feel like a Stephen King character.
Kamala’s got me revved. For now. The initial blast of flowers and fireworks — her spontaneous honeymoon — is about over, and now she must face the music … er, the monster. Trump, a hopeless buffoon, bigot and playground bully, will meet his match in the debates. Kamala will be the buzzsaw that Trump’s ignorant, lying face encounters and it will be beautiful. That ear boo-boo Trump’s so proud of will be shown for the nothing it is, except symbolic and specious martyrdom. He keeps blathering about the American “bloodbath.” Yes, indeed.
As always, I’ve been watching lots of classic movies from early and midcentury Hollywood — the Golden Age of pictures when men were either gruff or suave (and glistening with pomade) and women were silky and soft-focus, radiating unreachable glamor. Black and white was king and the best pics were positively charged with swoony cinematography and dazzling chiaroscuro. Those were the days. (And I’m someone who name-checks “Alien” and “Jaws” among his favorite films, alongside “All About Eve” and “The Big Sleep.”) Recent viewings: “The Big Heat,” a crackerjack 1953 crime thriller by Fritz Lang, starring Glenn Ford and Gloria Grahame, who gets a pot of scalding coffee tossed in her face by Lee Marvin and has to wear a giant bandage for half the movie; the unbearably charming Cary Grant and Irene Dunne in the 1937 screwball marriage/divorce romp “The Awful Truth,” which features the brilliant dog Skippy, who also plays Asta in the great “Thin Man” films; and 1955’s “The Big Knife,” where a fist-tight Jack Palance is a movie star sucked into the manipulative corruptions of fame. A rabid Rod Steiger noshes the scenery like it’s beef jerky. And that’s just three oldies I’ve recently watched (I’ve seen them all before). They beat the living crud out of big, dopey summer blockbusters any day.
I bought a hair dryer. I swear to god. It cost $15. It screams like Janis Joplin.
And there they were, the hirsute hillbillies and toothless terrorists who mobbed and defiled the U.S. Capitol yesterday, a cankerous confederacy of dunces, rampaging racists and whooping ignoramuses. That much cheap camouflage is never a good look.
The lowest of the low, these punks and goons are in lockstep with their pestilent potentate, whose grotesque name and rightfully imperiled title shall go unspoken.
I’m at a loss to add anything brilliant to the roiling conversation about the fatal White House-whipped insurrection. But what was it Robert De Niro famously said about the one-term racist/criminal/liar/sexual assailant?
This.
At long last, I got my first flu shot. The transaction — their needle, my flesh and humility — happened in a grubby drug store pharmacy. The prick was quick and slick, and I didn’t even pass out. Nice work, Maggie.
Peg me a shiftless procrastinator, a craven needle-phobe or simply irresponsible, but I was never motivated to get a flu shot. I figured as I never get the flu, why volunteer for a small agony. This, in hindsight, was naked folly. The new nature of viral contagions changed my mind lickety-split, and almost happily I rolled up my sleeve, squinched my eyes and turned my head as the pharmacist harpooned me.
Of course when I first saw the syringe, I made an exaggerated ack sound, like I was horrified of needles, which, well, I kind of am. To wit: When I was 12, I contracted mononucleosis, which is referred to as the kissing disease by hormonal middle-school gossips. Much blood was drawn from my arm, and more than once the nurse had to pull out smelling salts before my drooping body slunk to the floor. (Smelling salts are fantastic. They’ll snap you out of a coma.)
Finishing the mono bit, news of my illness spread across campus, initially as fodder for racy rumors but ultimately becoming a badge of honor. Not only was I out of school for six weeks — a scholastic triumph — I returned a sort of hero, a tween Don Juan who not only got, but conquered, the mythic kissing disease. Thank you.
Today the flu vaccination is coursing through my body, a shield against aches and fevers and coughs and sneezes. But that’s only partly true. Because Covid-19 still lurks with no vaccine in plausible sight, no matter the president’s flatulent lies. And Covid is not just the seasonal flu, as our genius in chief crows. Remember this doozy? “When it gets a little warmer, it miraculously goes away.” (I need a large crowbar.) Or this, about the U.S. death toll so far: “It is what it is.” What a fella.
And now he’s pressuring his administration to approve a coronavirus vaccine ahead of the November election, before they have proof that it is safe and effective, reports, well, everyone. “The faster, the better,” Trump spouts.
It’s the stick-it-in-your-arms race: Trump rushes to produce a politicized vaccine while Russia does the same in order to burnish its standing in the nationalistic spotlight. Who can do it first? (Me first!) Are Trump and Putin kindergartners? Yes. Yes, they are.
I’ll take a Covid immunization — when it’s thoroughly tested and certified by doctors and experts who do not kowtow to venal politicians. A hurried, premature Covid vaccine got a volunteer very sick this week. Yeah, I can wait.
It’s been two days since my comparably inane flu shot, and I think I have the slightest sore spot where the needle poked me. Boo-hoo. This is serious stuff. I’ll be glad to get another flu jab next year, and I look forward to a safe Covid shot. I’ll be there, rolling up my sleeve, squeezing shut my eyes and turning my head in the other direction. Smelling salts optional. The shot itself: mandatory.
Guess who’s thinking, “Get me out of here. Dear God, please, get me the hell out of here.”
GNASHING. 