A Steady Mist to Recall Departures, a Bitter Downpour for Betrayal

Obviously I'm still conflicted or I wouldn't have opened that can of Alpo yesterday.

Lookit, I don't know if and whom Al Gore would have bombed and invaded if he'd been POTUS@ 9/11. I am saying he would have eagerly bombed and invaded the minute he thought it in his political interest. In immediate post-9/11 America, does any person here doubt it would have been in his urgent political interest?

The always implicit question here is my complicity. There are still enough hippies on my side of the seesaw we can still grrrr a knucklebone of cultural war out of Corporate to help us ignore the consequences of war war.

The second implicit question is, if empire is empire - if Demco and Gopco both kill with equal amorality in pursuit of Empire's perpetuation as first act - do I materially support the party that amorally markets towards my own (a)moral beliefs and prejudices when lives in a crumbling empire are at stake? If my vote for Babs

helps make gay marriage legal in Maryland in exchange for Bab's patronage of Fort Meade and the NSA, what deal have I struck if I consider the latter more important?

Holyfuck, Antonin Scalia or Clarence Thomas or Sam Alito or John Roberts needs to DIE! resign suddenly during the Presidential campaign (how great would it be if it was Roberts?). Make Corporate have to make that decision at the height of next year's campaign if for no other reason than to poke me and see if I'm alive.

• Mug's game.
• UPDATE! BUMP!
• Failing to understand how power is managed.
• New tradition. 
• American extremists.
• Tin foil patriots. 
• An allegation.
• The right to exist.
• On Pastor Sanctimonious.
• On Pastor Sanctimonious.
• A defense of flogging.
• Things you might have missed.
• GHS!
• Kemp Mill Records (make sure you scroll across the photo).
• Did you know Washington DC has a professional soccer team?

It's true! and it's President is threatening the District again!

We continue to work on this in both D.C. and Baltimore. We’re looking at several sites in D.C. We’ve had several conversations with the District. There’s no specific proposals being discussed at this time, but I believe there is a general consensus in the Wilson Building [city government headquarters] that they certainly want D.C. United to remain in D.C. On the other hand, Baltimore will probably come forward with a pretty solid proposal. There’s certainly a great location in Baltimore and a willing developer. We’ll be deciding, I hope, sometime this year what our future is.

As far as which of the two cities, our name is D.C. United and we don’t take that lightly, but the Baltimore opportunity is a real one and we have to take it seriously and do our due diligence in both locations.

Fuck-me-jig, I'll grit my teeth and drive to Baltimore, though by this timetable (a decision this Fall) there's probably at least two more years at RFK.

One of my five desert island authors, Stanley Elkin, was born 81 years ago today:

Ben, everything there is is against your being here! Think of get-togethers, family stuff, golden anniversaries in rented halls, fire regulation celebrated more in the breach than the observance, the baked Alaska up in flames, everybody wiped out - all the cousins in from coasts, wiped out. Rare, yes - who says not - certainly rare, but it could happen, has happened. And once is enough if you've been invited. All the people picked off by plagues and folks eaten by earthquakes and drowned in the tidal waves, all the people already dead that you might have been or who might have begat the girl who married the guy who fathered the fellow who might have been your ancestor - all the showers of sperm that dried on his Kleenex or spilled on his sheets or fell on the ground or dirtied his hands when he jerked off or came in his p.j.'s or no, maybe he was actually screwing and the spermatozoon had your number written on it and it was lost at sea because that's what happens, you see - there's low motility and torn tails - that's what happens to all but a handful out of all the googols and gallons of come, more sperm finally than even the grains of sand I was talking about, more even than the degrees. Well - am I making the picture for you? Am I connecting the dots? Ben, Ben, Nick the Greek wouldn't lay a fart against a trillion bucks that you'd ever make it to this planet!

   
- The Franchiser

And it was wondrous in the negligible humidity how they gawked across the perfect air, how, stunned by the helices and all the parabolas of grace, they gasped, they sighed, these short-timers who even at their age could not buy insurance at any price, not even if the premiums were paid in the rare rich elements, in pearls clustered as grapes, in buckets of bullion, in trellises of diamonds, how, glad to be alive, they stared at each other and caught their breath.

 - Magic Kingdom

• Sorry for the small font - I c/ped from old blog and can't get the font to change and, while I love you, I'm not typing all that out again.
• UPDATE! Holyfuck, Dan reports that all Elkin novels are now all available as e-books.
• UPDATE! Here's an essay by Dan on Elkin.
• I think I'm 0 for 3 re: AAO.
• Chorus from Oedipus at Colonos.
• New My Morning Jacket!
• The trial.
• The owl.
• The kick inside.
• Touch me.
• James and the cold gun.
• Panic on.

WHY IT OFTEN RAINS IN MOVIES

Lawrence Raab

Because so much consequential thinking
happens in the rain. A steady mist
to recall departures, a bitter downpour 
for betrayal. As if the first thing
a man wants to do when he learns his wife
is sleeping with his best friend, and has been
for years, the very first thing
is not to make a drink, and drink it,
and make another, but to walk outside
into bad weather. It's true
that the way we look doesn't always
reveal our feelings. Which is a problem
for the movies. And why somebody has to smash
a mirror, for example, to show he's angry
and full of self-hate, whereas actual people 
rarely do this. And rarely sit on benches
in the pouring rain to weep. Is he wondering
why he didn't see it long ago? Is he wondering
if in fact he did, and lied to himself?
And perhaps she also saw the many ways 
he'd allowed himself to be deceived. In this city 
it will rain all night. So the three of them
return to their houses, and the wife
and her lover go upstairs to bed
while the husband takes a small black pistol
from a drawer, turns it over in his hands,
then puts it back. Thus demonstrating
his inability to respond to passion
with passion. But we don't want him
to shoot his wife, or his friend, or himself.
And we've begun to suspect
that none of this is going to work out,
that we'll leave the theater feeling
vaguely cheated, just as the movie,
turning away from the husband's sorrow,
leaves him to be a man who must continue,
day after day, to walk outside into the rain,
outside and back again, since now there can be
nowhere in this world for him to rest.