To War! On Poor, Defenseless, Friendless Yemen...or the Hapless Inhabitants--mostly Women and Children--thereof

God damn the United States of America.  Damn them to Hell.

I quote:

"That a defenceless, impoverished country such as Yemen can be openly bombed by hundreds of US-supplied fighter jets--and for that criminality to be widely endorsed--is a sure sign that the world is once again sliding into the abyss of rampant criminality and the possibility of a more catastrophic all-out war."

                   Finian Cunningham, for the Strategic Culture Foundation

So "Saudi Arabia" is bombarding the Houthis in Yemen with drone missile strikes?

Does anybody believe that the Saudis aren't mere proxies for Israel and the United States?

The first time it was really, really good for me, and lasted a long time....

May, 1968.  Friday night in San Francisco.   I was at that dangerous age, 25, when my pre-frontal cortex had, at last, achieved its maximal full adult growth, all four of my wisdom teeth had grown in impacted and I'd had them extracted, and things were tense on the home scene.  Living across the hall from the apartment I shared with two young straight guys, brothers, from Alabama, was my secret, masculine, very straight-acting gay lover--just my age, who had a beautiful cock (uncut, owing to his Appalachian Hillbilly origins), and with whom I dearly loved to lie, fondling and stroking one another, reading Milton--

                            Sabrina fayre, 
                               Listen where thou art sitting,
                               Under the glassie, cool, translucent wave,
                                In twisted braides of lillies knitting
                                     The loose train of thy amber-dropping haire....


A couple of blocks up the street, lived my girl friend, a lively, intelligent, voluptuous brunette, with whom, on weekends, I had hot, uninhibited sex--of whom, and of which, my straight best friend, Dennis from Birmingham (the older brother) was hopelessly, miserably jealous.  So many reasons for not going home and, instead, for walking up Market Street one evening after work, going into a rather crowded, but pleasant little bar I'd never been in before and ordering a beer that I stood sipping at the back, among a lot of other young men  who looked just like me: Jeans, jeans jackets, pull-overs (May evenings are chilly in San Francisco).  When lightning struck, I wasn't at all sure I wanted to go with the thirty-something guy from Los Angeles, who looked sort of  like a young Al Pacino--I hadn't even finished my beer.  But he was smooth and witty, and he was hot for me.  We walked out, hailed a taxi, and fifteen minutes later we were sitting on the bed of what was obviously the best guest bedroom of his brother's house, smoking amazingly stoney grass, whispering (because his brother and eighth month pregnant wife were sleeping in the next room, and the walls were very thin) and taking one another's clothes off.  I had no idea how things were going to turn out, who would do what to whom, or even really what I wanted to do. Having to whisper made it fun, and funny, like kids in the back yard playing 'doctor.'  But as our clothes came off, I began seriously to admire his body: big biceps, lean muscular thighs, and, when it appeared, a magnificent, uncut eight inch cock that I bent down and took in my mouth to the root like a pro. The secret of cock sucking is simple: Want it, want it with your whole heart, and no cock is too big--not Portuguese cock, not even Magna Grecian cock.  So I was blowing him and he was stroking and tweaking me, and he started talking about fucking me--real low, because we were being quiet--telling me how much he wanted to fuck me, and asking me please to let him.  He was so sweet, so earnest, so gallant, that before I'd half thought about it, I was on my back, with my feet locked behind his butt, and his cock was going into me--and, without touching myself, I started coming. Two, maybe three, hours later I was still coming--and he was coming for the fifth time.  We had to stop then, panting, sweat dripping off us, both of us completely exhausted.

Riding the bus home in the gray dawn light, knees up, hanging my butt over the edge of the seat because it ached, I asked myself, "Am I a woman now?"

3rd Millennium, 2nd Decade

Whenever I leave my computer (roaring old Mac OS X 2008 that it is) on for a long time unattended , and it has gone through all of its and my screen-savers, and the screen of the monitor has just gone black, at the very top, in little white letters, appears the (to-me) inscrutable and plaintive-sounding legend:  You have no Songs with Artwork in your ¡Tunes Library.  So I get online and ask it, please, to show me an example of a Song With Artwork--and it won't.  It's like it's embarrassed or something. And well, I can't help suspecting, it might be embarrassed.  The Great Divide we are looking at each other over, my computer and I, is, first of all, its dumb-ass definition of all music as "songs," which it takes from the post-literate generation which created it, and which it knows by no other name.   Even if my Mac Pro could be programmed to understand that songs are just a part of Music--though, to be sure, a very important part--Dancing is usually not singing (though it may have been 600 years ago), and the 1812 Overture is not a song.  And then there's the issue of attaching explanatory, or illustrative, or even somehow relevant, images to a "song"--which to my mind, and eye, and ear, is  exactly the ideological crux of conceptual misapprehension that makes Modern Dance  a heuristic pain in the ass, when it so cheaply and presumptuously attempts to "interpret" Mozart concertos and symphonies, while completely ignoring the tons of dance music that Mozart actually wrote for dancing to.  But hey, O my unconsciously barbaric young cryptomaths, I've got an idea of music that actually does have a sort of image that naturally goes with it--always has for me anyway:  The Largo Ma Non Tanto (2nd movement) of the Bach double violin concerto pairs nicely, I think, with images of the Ultra Deep Field taken by the Hubble Telescope.

Bach - Double Violin Concerto (part two)

Au Cinéma

Just saw last night (Thank God Almighty for Netflix!) another new-to-me Russian film, How I ended this Summer, 2010 actually, written and directed by one Alexei Popogrebsky, and perfectly acted by Grigory Dobrygin and Sergei Puskepalis--excellent actors, in a rather depressing but utterly, nay stupendously, excellent movie.  My eyes and throat are still aching from it--Ancient Athenians must've felt like this after a cathartic morning listening to Agamemnon and his cohorts getting their pitilessly just deserts.  But since when did Russian movies become flawless masterpieces?   Does it have anything to do with Russians not being poor any more?

Someone--I have no idea who--has taken my advice of 8/18/2014, and begun shooting (two so far) the criminal police officers of Ferguson, Missouri--without, alas, as yet killing them.

With time and practice, it is to be hoped that fatalities will increase.  The good news is that, whoever these loyal Patriots (though they be but indifferent Marksmen) are, they have escaped both detection and detention, and hopefully will return at an opportune time to the necessary, exemplary task of slaying the police officers of Ferguson, MO.  And then perhaps, emboldened by their successful slaying (i.e. without their being apprehended) of the Ferguson Police, will other Patriotic Americans of Good Conscience (whom I nominate the Charlotte Cordays among us) see their way towards beginning the annihilation of the other agencies of Fascist Oppression, such as the FBI, the CIA, the DEA, the NSA, the correctional officers at Rikers Island, and the many Drug Swat Teams throughout the land too numerous to mention.  Vive la Révolution!

I would like to remind our bold, incisive Revolutionary Heroines, however, that assassinations are most effective when the assassin is not apprehended by  Civil Authority--or indeed known to them. If, for example, our Heroic Original, Marie-Anne, Charlotte de Corday d'Armont, had slit Marat's throat, to silence him, before stabbing him to the heart, she might have gained a few moments to flee back the way she had come...and lived to kill yet another murderous revolutionary tyrant--perhaps Robespierre.  And the Terror would have been over almost before it had begun.

What I learned from Drugs (Part 1)

Aeons ago, when I was fourteen or fifteen years old, faking a knee injury so that, with the equally fraudulent permission of my doctor, I might escape the humiliation and indignity of Physical Education Class (i.e. Gym, i.e. Mass Calesthenics, and Group Showers after) and sit in the school library and read, I read in the Encylopaedia Britannica a summary of the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission Report of 1894:  Marijuana is harmless!  Even good for you! Prohibition of marijuana is a barbaric injustice!  I told everybody--my parents, teachers, policemen, clergymen, kids at school--that I knew so, because I had read it in the Encylopaedia Britannica. Nobody believed me; or, if they believed me, they thought that it was not important, or not so important as the fact that, by denying society's right to criminalize drugs, I was virtually denying society's right to exist.  So?  "So, you're just a kid.  You'll think differently when you're grown up." Funny thing about growing up....

Skip ahead six or seven years.  President Kennedy had just been assassinated and I had just attained my majority. I was going to Business College in Spokane, and my very soul was dying inside me.  I  actually enjoyed double-entry bookkeeping--but Business College? I filled the long hours, when I might have been learning about economics and entrepreneurship, by reading French poetry and the novels of Hermann Hesse, and by writing and receiving long letters from Craig, my first-year-in-college roommate, who by then was attending California State College in San Francisco, and who invited me to come share his apartment in the City.  So, one evening early in the month of December, 1963 I packed my suitcase, on which I had stencilled "California State, S.F.," and took the bus to Cheney to see Deacon and his landlady Toni Pugh, whom I had come to consider my Soul Mates in This Life, who drove me to the highway, where quickly (which was fortunate because the snow was blowing and drifting in a freezing blizzard) I caught a ride to Umatilla, Oregon, where I checked into a cheap motel for the night and called my mother to tell her that I was dropping out of business college. And the next morning I bought a one-way bus ticket to San Francisco.  

When I look back at life in the 60's in America, living as I mostly did in San Francisco, what strikes me is how well off we were.  It was possible then to get off the bus in a city you hadn't seen since you were a kid, and look around for a couple of days and see the sights, and, when you'd just about exhausted your grubstake, to choose just any employment agency downtown at random, walk in, and within a couple of hours have a routine, not too onerous job that you could live on. And by live I mean:  pay your share of the rent, have all your meals out, buy clothes and sundries, and see as many movies and attend as many concerts as you liked.  Imagine.  And San Francisco then, in the winter of 1963/64, for a young man like myself--as it had been a century before for the young Mark Twain--was Paradise on Earth.  Within three months I had caught crablice twice and gonnorrhea once (from Nick the Greek, a devilishly handsome scuzzball).  And, as I suggested to my roommates, we had so much disposable income among the three of us that we could easily afford to support someone else--say, a starving artist.  This met with unanimous approval, so we set out for North Beach to find one.  I would have preferred a gay male starving artist, but what presented herself, whom I complacently and without cavil accepted as a starving artist-enough, was Cecily Flora Kwiat, a Lesbian poetess (from Winnipeg), and Cecily's young but dissolute companion, Constance Maudie (from Fresno).

"Ladies," we said to them sternly, "You are free to come and go as you like, do what you want, eat what you want, and favor whomsoever of us gets lucky--but there are to be no drugs, and specifically there is to be no marijuana."  About a week afterwards, Cecily and Connie took each of us into the kitchen, one after another, and got us loaded on pot for the first time in our lives.  A few days later, after work, I brought the young man, Michael Maser, home with me, whom I was supposedly replacing in the San Francisco office of the insurance company we worked for--while he took over the Oakland office--and got him, for the first time in his life, stoned.  The following week, when Mike took over the Oakland office of Sun Life Assurance Co., Ltd. of Montréal, was, according to the secretaries who worked for him, "a Reign of Terror."  He bought himself a meerschaum pipe that he kept full of marijuana and smoked incessantly.  He took all the incoming mail and put it in the outbox, and put the outgoing mail in the inbox.  Every other day he gave everyone, including himself, the day off.  All of which I knew about only inferentially and by hearsay. So that, when Harry Bowman, our genuinely nice and unaffectedly dignified boss, called me into his office and asked me, as if I should know, "What's the matter with Mike? Is he on drugs?"  I replied, "Only marijuana, I think."

Mr. Bowman (I wouldn't have ventured to call him Harry) seemed shocked at my implicit dismissing of marijuana as a serious threat to my co-worker's well-being or mental stability. "Marijuana!" he shouted, and waved me out of his office with the sort of rude gesture that you use to tell a waiter that you don't want dessert.  Shortly after I returned to my desk, I got a collect call from Mike, which I accepted, thinking that he was, after all, still a "Fun Life" (as we called it) employee.  But, in fact, Mike was calling me from a pay-phone beside the freeway--he was on the way to San Jose to join the Rosicrucians--having "cleared out" (which sounded ominously like "destroyed") the Oakland office of Sun Life Assurance Co., Ltd., and sent, he said, a vitriolic-sounding letter of resignation to the Home Office in Montréal.  And he just wanted to tell me good-bye,  and to thank me for everything.

So--Is marijuana/pot/hash the innocuous wonder drug that I imagined it must be, fifty-seven years ago, sitting in the high school library, in Estacada, Oregon, reading the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission Report of 1894?  Truthfully--having smoked it two or three (or four or five)  times a day, every day, for the better part of these many years--yes, it is.  Only I didn't have any idea, as a fifteen-year-old, of what a glorious enhancement smoking marijuana would prove to be to music, sex, and listening to sermons on the Tao, the Vedas and the Sutras.  One can do without it--but why would one?

My Mother, who in her own Opinion, had held her own at giving Teas in her Sorority in College,

Was nonetheless not a little intimidated by the posh, old-money glitz of San Francisco in the 1940's, which then, as now, barely concealed a sardonic hardness towards middle class values behind its welcoming friendliness and charm.  She had, without a doubt, never seen so many well-dressed women--and men--in her life.  It never occurred to her to just dive in and have fun--to go to the opera, or maybe shop at I. Magnin's, or have lunch (with zabaglione for dessert) at Original Joe's, or crab cioppino on Fisherman's Wharf.  She didn't get it.  I, on the other hand, had been getting it from the moment I first saw it, and maybe I helped her, just a little, to understand what San Francisco is to a gay man:

It was our next-to-the-last day in the City, and we set out early to visit Golden Gate Park (which in those days was free of dog shit) and Fleishhacker Zoo.  But, as we were a little early before the zoo opened, we stopped at the children's playground, with its heavenly spiral slides.  There suddenly appeared a handsome stripling youth of some seventeen years--just the age I liked them--who asked my mother and was given permission to play with me (those were innocent times).  And play we did; most memorably, sliding down those celestial spiral slides--me before, between his muscular thighs; him behind, wrapping his arms around me.  On the last ride down, I said, "I wish we could do this forever."  And, smiling, he said, "Never ask forever."  Afterwards, looking at me strangely, my mother said to me, "He was a very nice young man."

My best Bons Mots (so far in this life)

1.  Wine is food.



2.  I believe that O.J. Simpson should have received the death penalty for the murders of Ronald Lyle Goldman and Nicole Brown Simpson, on account of the beauty and innocence of the victim.



In response to a friend who accused me of feeding my cat, named Clothilde, whom I called Fille de France, "a little high on the food chain" (braised sweetbreads):

3.  Mais elle est Princesse, et les Princesses mangent les autres.

Outgoing

"Hi Richard,

So why couldn't the the Late Classical world have gone on forever, getting more and more refined and skeptical, and eventually discovering anesthesia and antibiotics?  They already had sanitation and sewerage such as the world would not see again--after Attila the Hun cut the aqueducts--for 1,500 years. And they were very close to precision engineering (they had ball bearings).  Why, oh why, couldn't they have just stuffed the Slavs and the Alans and the Alemani back behind the Caspian Sea and gone on?  Why did so many heavy heaps of mischief have to fall before Italians discovered quick-recovery hot water heaters?  Reading Lucian, nothing seems more unlikely than the Dark Night of Barbarism and Religion that came after him.

Douglas."

The CIA, of course, assassinated Nemtsov, knowing that their Stooges in the EU would think that Putin had done it,

But the American Gangster fashion in which it was perpetrated raised immediate doubts that Putin had anything to do with it.  Putin's remarks when he first heard of it, basically saying that it sounded like exactly the sort of false-flag operation that he has been warning his people might happen, seemed moderate and judicious, and his promising Nemtsov's mother, as he did today, that her son's murderer will be brought to justice was magisterial.  God, how his people must admire him, love and trust him!--while the leaders of the West, by comparison, look like howling, extra-legal barbarians.

The first time I saw San Francisco

A little after the middle of August, 1947--a couple of weeks before their 30th birthdays, and about five weeks before my fifth birthday--my folks packed up our new Chevrolet coupé convertible, with me and my two-years younger brother in the back seat, and drove out of the hot and dusty, post-harvest Palouse Country of Whitman County, Washington (State), on a trip to Santa Barbara, California: An exhausting journey in those days before air conditioning or the Interstate Highway System, and which both my mother and little brother were half dead-of (from car sickness and heat prostration) by the time we got  (via the ferry) to Umatilla, Oregon.  I don't remember the rest of the trip after that till we got to Northern California and stayed at a motel surrounded by redwoods--which was a little rustic, with no hot water, but which my father and I found acceptable, while my mother and little brother groused about it endlessly.  But I quickly escaped their depressing company and found outside, just a few yards from our cabin, a grove of serene, immemorial redwood trees--who spoke to me, bidding me welcome and telling me not to be afraid.  It seemed to me that they were laughing with me, or singing to themselves, and at the same time making me understand how incredibly old they were.  It seemed that (whether these were the spirits of the trees, or the trees themselves, they all spoke at once in a kind of harmony) they had much to teach me, and were about to--when my mother grabbed me by the hand and led me away, scolding me for getting "lost."

The next thing I remember was that it had grown hot again, and we were in Chico, California, staying with cousins of my father who possessed two things which I found to be perfectly wonderful:  An orange tree in their front yard, and a player piano in their living room.

And then, the next day, rather late in the afternoon, suddenly we were on the Golden Gate Bridge, with the top down on our Chevy coupé, heading into San Francisco.   I was disappointed with the bridge itself, with the fact that it was not, as advertised, golden.  But with the gleaming whiteness of the city, and the park-like green of the Praesidio, I was, and have ever since been, ravished.  I knew that in some sense I had come home.