I never knew of the existence of Aaron Spelling while he lived:

And I never suspected that so much of what I furiously detested and deeply despised about commercial television (the tastelessness! the complacent, matter-of-course heterosexuality! the stupidity!), from the sixties until quite recently, was his--or anybody's--actual, deliberate doing.  I had thought that things as putridly vile as 'Dynasty' and 'The Mod Squad' must have arisen spontaneously, like maggots from the mud of the Nile, wherever shit (noxious fecal matter) lay deep enough and were incubated with warm sentiment and drool.  I had no idea that any sort of purposeful labor was involved in the making of it.  Like many another Truly White Person, I have never owned a television, and I have only lately, thanks to Netflix and Hulu, taken to binge-watching whole television series on my computer.  

So, until a few weeks ago, I had never heard of the television series 'Charmed,' and I think it will still be a cold day in Biloxi before I will watch anything so deeply imbued with cunt-snot, even now that, by the grace of Hulu, I might watch it if it occurred to me to do so.  My loss, I'm sure Ms. McGowan will think it.

The most persuasive argument for the existence of Extra-Terrestrial Intelligent Life (that I know of) is the utterly chickenshit way its existence is being ever-so gradually, one damned, grudging extra-terrestrial planet at a time, admitted (by the Official Lizardly Admitters and Explainers of Things)--

"Otherwise," think these oh-so-gradualist, hierarchical, aristocratic Lézards-Explicateurs de Haute Crèche who speak for the others of their species, who own us, and exploit us, and, simply for their own comfort, don't want to think about a Galactic Civilization so barbarously and cataclysmically devolved that there were no 5-star restaurants in it serving Mexican toddlers à  la bave et au sang, "these wild-eyed anarchic, Luddite apes" (by whom they mean us) "will go rocketing off, bombing and breaking up the Eldest Great Lineage Egg-Clutches of their Nearest Interstellar Neighbours" (by which they mean themselves on the planets of Alpha Centaurii)--"And it will be the End of Galactic Civilization As We Know It." Flesh-Eating Lizards from Outer Space are always looking at the Big Picture, while at the same time dreading the loss of particular items from their Menu (which is representative to them of their by-themselves revered billion-year-old hyper-aristocratic Galactic Civilization)--rather like the French, whose Pâtés de Foie Gras de Dindon et de Canard hold the place, of cruelty and succulence, occupied among extraterrestrial lizards by toothsome Mexican tots.  

Chakras, I think

When I'm stoned on weed or hashish that I actually do feel a kind of buzzing or tickling throughout my body, in a fashion somewhat approximating chakral points, but mostly flowing through my hands and feet and limbs, torso, neck and head.  And when I move my fingertips near, but not quite touching, the surface of my body--like someone playing a theremin--I feel a distinct, pleasant tingling, that feels not unlike the way a theremin sounds.  I have never known anyone else who experiences these sensations, and when I have attempted to ask other people if anyone besides me feels them, I have always been answered with confusion and puzzlement, and sometimes rather unkind derision. But chakras, as defined  in Hindu philosophy and Yoga, do seem, I must say, implausible and fraudulently absurd, rather like the "vibrating heart" of Shaivism.  Twaddle.

Criminal Injustice

A Grand Jury has refused to indict the police officer who murdered twelve-year-old Tamir Rice, in the coldest of cold-blooded murders of a child that we have seen since the Nazis themselves filmed their own sporting ways with Jewish children during the glory days of the Third Reich.  The video taken of the murder of Tamir Rice is explicit, unequivocal, and open to no other interpretation than the deliberate, heartless, wanton murder of a child.  The police officers who perpetrated it ought to be hanged (though I personally feel that death under tortures would be condign), and the Grand Jury which condoned and exonerated it ought to be charged with complicity in it.

Having to...

In a world in which, were I alone in it, it would be my aristocratic First Principle to do nothing, only two things would motivate me to do anything:  (1) Necessity--like peeing and pooping, and eating, and trimming one's nails, and cutting one's hair, and bathing, and occasionally sweeping one's room--and (2) the Delight that one naturally takes in doing things, both necessary and unnecessary.  In a world in which I were not alone, my aristocratic Second Principle would of course be to provide care and nurture to the children in it, and to ensure that they, and their children, inherited the world in as pristine a condition as I found it, in the way that  aristocrats are supposed to bequeath things on the one hand, and inherit them on the other, without any diminution or attrition of aristocratic perquisites and privileges,  or of the material means, lands and property that are necessary to secure and enjoy aristocratic perquisites and privileges.   It all gets frightfully complicated immediately I acknowledge that I am not alone in the world.

Among my first awarenesses of the problematic complications of not being alone in the world, was when, as a seven year old, having taken a very urgent shit with intense pleasure and satisfaction, I burst forth from the bathroom, crossing my paternal grandmother who was going in, and exclaimed to her, "It feels really good to poop!" And I could tell from her reaction--or from her careful lack of reaction--that I had spoken the unspeakable.  Not that I wanted to discuss it with her particularly anyway.

I was reminded of my failed attempt to communicate the joy of a good dump to my grandmother, when, many years later I read an uncensured account of the graffiti in the recently excavated, curious, standard, two-holer privies of Pompeii, among which was found "Aristodemos took a really great shit today!"  Like my seven year old self, Aristodemus just had to tell somebody, and we may assume that he resorted to scratching on the wall of his privy with a convenient lump of charcoal to convey his message, because there was, by chance, no one sitting on the hole next to him--to whom, in the apparently usual Ancient Roman fashion, albeit in the demotic Greek spoken by the Magna Grecians who made up the majority of the population of old Pompeii, he might have confided, "Xenon, I'm glad you're here, because I must tell you that I am having the most amazing shit!"  And Xenon, instead of answering with an edge of disapproval and disgust, as we (of the Modern Age) would probably, nay certainly, do, "Why tell me about it, Aristodemus?  Do you think I can't smell it?" would have said something cordially appreciative like, "Good on you, Aristodemos!  Yeah, that really stinks!"

How did we become such different people?

As I've said--while my father and his brothers were physically brutalized by their parents, my grandparents, into non-entityhood--their sisters, my aunts, in their very different but recognizably sisterly ways, turned into delightful human beings....

There were four:  Lois, Betty, Dorothy and Margie--and, of them, the eldest and the smartest, a school teacher and a professional woman in California, Aunt Lois, was perhaps my favourite.  She was the only relative of mine, maternal or paternal, that I knew of who sometimes attended the opera--She said that Lohengrin was "over-whelming" and that the music was "glorious."  She also once, at a family picnic, grabbed me and hugged me because, as a ten-year-old, I had observed that eating healthful foods makes you healthy.

Aunt Lois's husband, Ray, though an immensely likeable man, an intense pinochle player, and sort of the designated Clan Bard of long, funny stories, was, of all my aunts' husbands, the one most unlike his wife, and most ill-suited to be her husband--and when I remarked on this disparity to my mother, she answered bluntly:

"Ray raped Lois on a supposed date, when he was on leave from the Navy, and she was just finishing school.  And when she got pregnant with your cousin Lillian, he married her--and they have lived happily together ever since."  

I should say that Cousin Lillian, who, if she were alive, would be in her mid-eighties--was an Honors Graduate from Stanford, and one of the most intelligent women I've ever known--and, to my bemusement and wonder, in her twenties and thirties, she was a Great Beauty, who married, briefly but effectively, for money, and who ever after lived a life of  independence, splendor and fabulous luxury.  Or so I believe. This much is certain:  During the 60's when Reza Pahlavi and his ghoulish Savak ravaged Iran, Cousin Lillian was married to the son of a governor of an Iranian province, and I have seen many pictures of her attending the Shah's many wastefully luxurious parties, standing on staircases, in long dresses, with her hair done up, dripping with jewels.  She said she hated it (utterly despised the Shah), but it was fun for her to introduce her mother, my Aunt Lois, to the Empress and the Queen Mother.   

Is this a Red Letter Day?

Playing bridge online today, as I do, under a pseudonym, almost every day, I bid, and my partner made 7 goddamned diamonds!  2100+ points.  

Sleeping in front of the Computer this afternoon--a dangerous practice [What if I should fall in?]--I revisited those Aprilline Days of Horror, France in the mid 14th Century, When the gaudy, silk-clad Beasts who ruled the World seemed likely to kill everyone in it....

All the while singing, piping, twanging, hearts a-bursting with merry, melancholy melody:


Les Fourriers d'Été sont venus
Pour appareiller son Logis,
Et ont fait tendre ses Tapis,
De Fleurs et Verdure tissus.

En étendant Tapis velus,
De vert Herbe par le Pays,
Les Fourriers d'Eté sont venus
Pour Appareiller son Logis.

Coeurs d'Ennui pieça morfondus
Dieu merci, sont sains et jolis;
Allez-vous-en, prenez Pays,
Hiver, vous ne demeurez plus;
Les Fourriers d'Été sont venus.

Learning from Drugs--LSD

My first and only acid trip of lifelong significance happened on the 19th or the 20th of June, 1965, on a boat in Seattle.  A little before nine in the morning, Hugh Tinling gave Deacon and Margo, and me, each a sugar cube with  an estimated 500 micrograms of  LSD in it, originally provenient (Hugh believed) from Dr. Timothy Leary, which Hugh had kept frozen for about a year in the freezer compartment of his refrigerator.  Deacon and Margo went to their bed in the foc'sle and had sex, and had--judging from Margo's afterglow--a wonderful time.  I went aft and lay face-down in my briefest of cut-offs on the hatch-cover over the main cabin for a couple of hours, soaking up the morning sun.  Having already acquired my tan for the year, I was not at all sun-burnt.  First, with my eyes closed, I began to reflect on the sermons of Meister Eckhardt that I had been reading the day before; how, if Truth could be separated from God, it would still be preferable to God. Then, ecstatically, I felt my Mind rise up from my body like a balloon on a tether, and while I looked down at myself (from about a dozen feet above my prone body), I suddenly saw that I was seeing all consciousness, all life--and death--like a river flowing.  I came down around noon, went for a swim, called Bill Weaver in Spokane and told him I was coming to visit. Which I did for several days, then returned to the boat for the rest of the summer in Seattle.  

The ecstasy has come and gone, but the basic point of view has stayed with me throughout my life: This/that is what the plenum of life/death is--and I, like a balloon on a tether, am its non-agential observer.

On a rainy evening in Seattle in October, in a spectacular instance of divinely guided serendipity, I walked into a used book store on First Avenue on my way home from work, and, without selecting them--barely looking at them--bought Vivekananda's Four Yogas, the fourth of which, 'Raja Yoga,' which is a commentary on the Aphorisms of Patanjali, became my meat and drink for the next year, till I had fairly memorized it.

A couple of years ago, reading the Wikipedia article on Ionesco (whose plays I had grown to love), I found this:  "Walking in summer sunshine in a white-washed provincial village under an intense blue sky, Ionesco was profoundly altered by the light.  He was struck very suddenly with a feeling of intense luminosity, the feeling of floating off the ground and an overwhelming feeling of well-being. When he 'floated' back to the ground and the 'light' left him, he saw that the real world in comparison was full of decay, corruption and meaningless repetitive action.  This also coincided with the revelation that death takes everyone in the end...." It's the only thing like my own experience on my first acid trip that I have ever heard of.  But you'll notice that, woven through Ionesco's floating, luminous experience, is an element of gratuitous (presumably Christian) dualism, and an inability to grasp the fundamental truth as I saw it:  That life and death are in essence the same cosmic force flowing into one another ceaselessly.  Poor Christians.  They will starve in the midst of plenty.

Hold it just a damned minute--These things may or may not offend or worry Justice Scalia, but they bug the hell out of me....

"Scalia's concerns about black students who need "slower schools" because they are in essence stealing opportunities from more "deserving" and "qualified" [None of these 'scare quote marks' are mine] white students is highly selective and extremely myopic.  Scalia is apparently not offended by how colleges and universities across the United States frequently admit less qualified men in order to maintain "gender parity" [my quotes] in a given freshman "cohort." [my quotes and my italics] And given his connections to the Republican Party and "movement conservatism," [my quotes] Scalia is likely none too worried about how children of legatees and donors (i.e., rich white people who have money) are able to secure preferential admission (and in many cases also graduation at America's colleges and universities--when many of them, like Gorge Bush would not have been admitted based on test scores intellectual acuity or merit."

Says fuckin' who?  Says fuckin' Chauncey DeVega in a front-page editorial in today's edition of my old love-to-hate favourite, Salon magazine.

Well, Chauncey--whoever you are--you may believe that some of us out here in reality-land really do believe in a grades-and-tests-only standard of fairness for college admissions.  If I were Dean of Admissions and somebody came up to me blathering about "legatees" or "gender parity"--just the same as if he was prattling on about "racial diversity"--I'd tell him please not to waste my time with fraudulent twattle (or twaddle).  And may God strike me dead before I will refer to any number of freshman students, male or female, as a "cohort."

I think sometimes ¿what the hell do I subscribe to Netflix for? Then, more by accident than anything--Certainly by no intelligent guidance from Netflix themselves--

I find myself watching a sloppy, maddening, utterly enthralling gem of a movie like Xenia, as I did last night, having, as it were, pulled it from the bottom of the heap--and I am completely reconciled with my dipshit movie-purveyor.  I would actually prefer, I think, that these would-be commercial whores (the Netflix company) remain having not a clue as to the intrinsic value, artistic or otherwise, of the movies they so randomly, relentlessly and insistently and for the most part insultingly ("We think you'd like...") throw at me.

This is a fucking wonderful movie, full of heart and intelligence, that I'll be thinking about and re-watching for the rest of my life.  A sort of a less tidy Almodóvar (boy are its ends loose!) is what it reminds me of, as grindingly Greek as Almodóvar is drillingly Spanish.  Some things I wonder--like the night-passage through the Vale of Tempe (where the laurel grows), such as aspirants for the laurels of Apollo have made for 3,000 years--if anybody (but me) understands how Greek.  Or even if I understand it.  

Further Thoughts on Tyler Max's and Geoffrey Miller's new book "Mate: Become the Man Women Want"

If your purpose is dating--i.e., fucking--women, say, a dozen or two or three times (more than that and you might as well marry them), it may be, after all, sufficient that you seem to be, or to have become, the Man (that) Women (after all, are likelier to Imagine that they Want than they are really to Want); and there are men--usually very good looking, perhaps somewhat narcissistic men--for whom fucking the same woman as many as a dozen or more times would be insufferably, disastrously tedious:  For such a man, in  his prime, through misguided, Puritanical iron-willed self-resolve, actually to become the Man that Women (think, or imagine that they) Want would be a tragedy so bitterly unnecessary that nothing could redeem a life so wasted, and that maybe only a Nathaniel Hawthorne could do pitiless justice to.

Say that you are witty, and kind, and that you have a lively sense of humor.  So far so good.  Let your personal hygiene standards be high.  Smell of soap, and dress with a certain style of your own (i.e., dress to please yourself). Let your love of small, refined, cute, exquisite, sublime and cuddly things--Impressionist paintings, classical music, Mexican food, puppies and children--be uninhibited and unaffected.  Know how to change a diaper.  Let Milton, or Virgil, or Dante, be your favorite poet.  Unless it's a staggering amount of money, pay no attention to the cost of things, but be aware, always, of their intrinsic value.  Speak French, Italian and Spanish as your second, third and fourth languages. Be nice to everybody, and treat both sexes gallantly.  Never insult, and don't poke fun--although a gentle teasing is aces. When you make assignations to have sex, do so as "visits" with friends whom you hope to "find home."  When you take a lady out, ask her if she wants to have dinner with you and see a show.  Even if you think that's "dating," don't call it that.   And don't call it sex, call it "making love."  And that is all, provided that you are a reasonably attractive young man, that you need do to get fucked, as much and as often as you can handle.  The ladies, trust me, will take care of the rest.

And of course "Diversity" defined as anything more, or more particularly, than "the (Abstract) Quality of being Diverse," is a Crock of Shit

As a Gay Egalitarian Humanist and a Mildly Impatient Misogynist--not a Feminist, and not a "Queer,"

I would like the Loud, Shrill, Slow and Stupid Sex, and its worshippers, to understand my four or five Basic Disbeliefs:

1.  God:  There is no God.  The Universe created itself.

2.  Class:  There is no Class; there are no Classes.  Everybody is a Class unto himself.

3.  Power.  There is no such thing as Power.  "Power Transfer" is utterly bogus.

4.  Patriarchy.  Does not, never has existed.

5.  Privilege.  The "Privilege"  referred to by envious Feminists is other people's Natural Right, and has no other substantive meaning.  It may be unfortunate that there are rights which Feminists can never enjoy, or it may simply be the inevitable and condign consequence of their insisting on their own specialness.

Item on YouTube: a video, age unknown, of three adult male lions having a leisurely, perfectly egalitarian 3-way:

Astounding both for its mutuality and for its cordial equality.  One might have thought that one or the other of these naturally authoritarian beasts would have wanted to hog all the attention, or, perhaps, have grown jealous of one of the others--but no, I've never seen, except in the 3-ways of male dolphins, and of men, so perfectly gentlemanly and fraternal a sharing and enjoyment of their own and one another's bodies.

And speaking of YouTube revelations there is another video of a full-grown lioness have carefully isolated and cut off from his herd a very young wildebeest, whom she has only to lay under her massive paw and deliver the mortal neck-bite to--and the youngster charges her, and does so repeatedly, while her deflection of his charge grows ever gentler and more maternal, till she is just holding him down and licking him like one of her own cubs, and eventually simply lets the brave little fellow go.  As only a Christian could fail to understand:  Kids is kids.

INTERESTING essay/article from Tucker Max's new book (c-written by Dr. Geoffrey Miller), "MATE: Become the Man Women Want,"

describing, fully and accurately, I believe, for the first time anywhere, what it's like to be the lesser, weaker, slower, shorter, fatter, dumber, submissive two-fifths of a heterosexual dyad in a sexually dimorphic species like homo sapiens sapiens; in short, what it's like to be a woman: Exciting but scary.  No wonder at all that the quality most sought after by women in men is "having a sense of humor."  Hyperactive, over-muscled psychotics with a sense of humor are less likely to kill you than grimly serious ones.

So, our authors' explanation of why "honesty" and "truth-telling" aren't even on the table in the first, social interactions of the sexes is plausible and persuasive; what they fail to account for is why, besides wanting to fuck them, men take any interest or pleasure in the low-level, patently absurd and quite stupid games that women insist on playing.