InstaPunk Returns

  Typically, I broke all the rules. Didn’t cite what other critics said,  because they had no understanding, and I was going deeper  than  anyone else had gone. No footnotes. No plagiarism either. CLGS.  What I learned from being an English major at Harvard. My two best 20th Century writers were Virginia Woolf and F. Scott Fitzgerald. I wrote in my senior thesis about both of them, their two best books. I considered them absolutely equal in talent, beautiful, born brilliant. I had detected a sex difference worth writing about. Not about gender hierarchy. About the relation between sex and time as a dimension. Women are all about now, this moment. Men are about the arc of time, the span of life. I loved both books lavishly, but I came down on the side of, uh, no one. Just the revelation that men and women are different . My two graders were women. Not professors. PhD candidates. They kicked me apart for having no footnotes, no other authority beyond myself to legitimize my weird theory.

  Funny as hell and deadly serious Let me begin on a note we can all agree on. There is a time in our teen lives when we imprint on popular music. What we were listening to during the dramatic changes in our bodies, social lives, and aspirational identities stays with us, regardless of what we come to value and treasure later in life. Everyone has those certain songs that are foundational chords in their lives, and they respond physically to even a few notes of the recordings that gave rise to their libidos and, well, self . Two not unrelated things. This is a constant and nothing new. There are Sinatra imprints, Elvis, Beach Boys, Dylan, Motown, Beatles, Stones, Who, Doors, Bowie, Joni Mitchell, Judy Collins, Pink Floyd, James Taylor, Michael Jackson, Phil Collins, James Brown, Rick James, Springsteen, Metallica, and on and on and on imprints. (Apologies to the imprinters in Country, Disco, Jazz, and Blondie/Madonna Pop, have my own chords there too.) I never judge those. We just all

Overdue. All this great damage to the evil white male patriarchy that’s been done since Hillary finally cracked the tallest glass ceiling in the world by running for President a few years back. What we have to call progress in that vast percentage of the world population which wants to return to the days when the goddess ruled and all years were the same year, so much the same they didn’t even count them. It’s so much easier than all that thinking about things. Consider this a kind of joyful journal of the coming return to paradise. Not everything we need has yet been accomplished, but we’re getting there, quicker every day. Today’s Narrative Nutrients: —Don’t think of her as losing. She’s preparing the soil for tomorrow’s garden… Nikki Haley Says Next President will be a Woman —If the patriarch is big enough and bad enough, it doesn’t matter how you bring him down… Letitia James Says Almost Everyone Must Play by the Same Rules —The lunkheads can protest all they want. Impotent fools…

  Writing now is about death. I’ve said elsewhere, despite millions of words of actual writing, that all writing is fiction. Proven it by putting myself on the line.  How do you prove it though? By putting up posts that aren’t about words? They’re about numbers, images, music, words. I found this set of fellows who were not like anyone but their connection to me… What we had in common. July 10 birth date. Each of them a kind of father of the field he worked in. Depending on who you read, Pissarro is the father of all modern art, Tesla is more the father of the American Industrial Revolution than Edison and possibly more important than a testy Einstein regarding the greatest mind in physics. Proust is the writer who made writing about your own life the best replacement for writing about the meaning of life in the 20th century. He did it all from the couch, including all the testicular giants like Hemingway, Mailer, Heller, and Roth. (I could have written “Goodbye Columbus” in my sleep

  You’re not supposed to be able to draw yourself  Just a head. The only thing driving this campaign. Woman once told me my first response is ‘Intimidate the hell out of them, then get reasonable.’ She had never met me. Go figure. My campaign songs: Yeah, Still… Evvybody hates Harvard, including my wife. …Still Scottish… just finishing the thought. Why this  stuff  you’re asking. Because I am the Paracleet of  the Caborca. Rest of the way, I was there, way way older  than you. MetaWriting. What I have done, do.

  He’s gone. This never happened. Don’t tell me I’m the only who’s noticed. That would mean I’m having a psychotic break, into a state called dissociation. But I’m pretty sure that’s not the case. What I’m referring to is bigger than a solitary breakdown because it takes in too much to be one man’s delusion, no matter how vast his imagination. What I’m talking about is an increasing sense of unreality in the everyday experience of an entire population. No, not just a sense, an atmosphere that involves all the senses. Nothing looks, sounds, smells, feels, tastes quite right, and even time is out of joint. There are still connections, some glue that binds pieces together but the connections are twisting, torquing, breaking and reattaching in new ways. There is movement through time, but even the ticks of the clock are changing speed and pitch, mocking us all individually and collectively, so the only thing we can be sure of is that reality itself is becoming the globs in a Sixties lava l