InstaPunk Returns

  I have a friend, real not FB, Bryan Womack, who dates back to the original Boomer Bible website , where he posted under the sobriquet Winston_Sith, an obvious reference to Orwell’s 1984. We’ve never met in person, but I have done this in his honor… The accompanying post is here … He was and is, out there somewhere, a mathematician in search of the truth about prime numbers, which I also follow under his leadership but with differing results. We both think they’re the key to the universe, but our surmises are discrepant .  Okay. That’s a lot. What does it have to do with The Wall, Pink Floyd’s much glossed over masterpiece and musical legacy, despite the vicious antisemitism of Roger Waters? There’s this lady, a classical musicologist who has never been to a Stones concert, or any other rock concert I can discern, who is obsessed with Pink Floyd’s The Wall. And she fills me with envy. Everything is connected. Anybody who knows me at all knows this is my cardinal tenet. Back i...

 How many do we need in public life?

The Boss White Dude Bradley Whitford When I first heard the name “White Dudes for Harris” I thought immediately of Bradley Whitford. It was the role of his lifetime. Playing White House power behind the scenes Josh Lyman, who bullied his secretary to make things happen for the righteous presidency of Jeb “Martin Sheen” Josiah Bartlet, a little guy with MS who was in every way a precursor of Obama but for being physically small and weak and gloriously intelligent like no one else who could talk Christian while being the smartest meanest man in the room.  Bradley Whitford himself went to Wesleyan University, one of the ‘Little Three,’ who always knew they were smarter than Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. Are we cool enough yet or what? I always despised the smug self-hagiography of the West Wing. The longest running political propaganda as soap opera entertainment in the history of American television. Bradley got himself Emmies and Golden Globes pushing his own inane political agendas...

Another has-been life ruined beyond repair. Trump Curse writ large. Rosie O’Donnell still can’t get over the fact that Trump won the Republican nomination in 2016 by blowing off Megyn Kelly’s gotcha question about his mean tweets to women, using her as the completely understandable punchline.   Millions of men, and even some women, said to themselves, “I would do that too.” She’s a sad case. But this latest outburst got me to thinking. Maybe I’ve been unfair to The Donald myself over the years. With my wife and others, I’ve taken the position that I admire Trump as a President and would-be savior of the Republic. I’ve also said I wouldn’t have him in my house for dinner. Or, less pompously, that I have never had any desire to meet him in person. I have fought strenuously for his political life and fortunes. No one can deny that. But I also fought for George W and Mitt Romney (as I had done for McCain, whom I genuinely despised) when they were running. Didn’t want to meet them...

  Yes, it really is possible to have a kind of 6-pack when you’re wasting away. Weighed myself today. 5’ 9”, 128 lbs. Let’s think about what this means. Not what you imagine. My whole life is contracting, and I tend to think of it in terms of focus not loss. I have always been an Alpha.*  Now I am structurally a Gamma.* Physically crippled to the point where I have to take a hundred-year old cane to my cigarette and vodka runs in Delaware. Have it down pretty well. I can do the cigarette outlet on my own two feet. At the liquor store I park the Jeep almost all the way to the next strip mall so I can use the cane to mount nothing tougher than a slope. Oh gee. Vodka?! Hell yeah. You don’t want to hear this? You wouldn’t without the vodka. Why it’s still a part of the regimen. Being Anonymous was never a part of my destiny. Sorry, Bill. Things you would never know. Like, I drank in all kinds of bars, white and black, for 40 years and never got into a fight. I once stopped a cabbi...