An Open Letter to Talal Itani

Thank you, Reverend Sage, for the purity and clarity of your English translation of the Holy Quran. I feel on reading it that your remarkable and worthy Faith has, for the first time that I am aware of, been given  a deservedly comprehensible and intellectually and stylistically respectable presence in my native language.  This, no doubt, is how the Quran should sound in English.

Not, alas, of course, that I am persuaded by it, but that I am assured that at last I understand Islam via its Sacred Scriptures.  Do the faithful never shudder a bit at the insistence straight through from the very beginning of the Quran on "Belief in the way that others believe"--nor feel, with disquiet, that such insistence is the very essence of duplicity and charlatanry?  

Dunno what I'm doing right...

Just watched the latest episode of Supernatural ("Lucifer's and Kelly's Baby")--which I tried and failed to watch last night on my computer--all the way through, with sound and subtitles and no commercials.  Delightful.  Morally Sane.

Just read, in Wikipedia, the true story of Emmanuel Macron and Brigitte Trogneux--

How they met when she was his 39 year old drama teacher and he was just 15.  They're married now, but somehow the queasy-making nastiness lingers on.  Not the utter, disqualifying financial venality of Mme. Le Pen's other opponents (and their families), but still gag-a-maggot creepy as a forest leech.  This is not mattering in la douce France where a taste for anal sex is considered perfectly normal (as, of course, it is), but his being booed by workers who earlier in the day had cheered Marine does (matter--and gives hope).  Like the French, I don't really care (nor give a fuck) whom M. Macron fucks--what disquiets me is that his eyes are slightly too small for his otherwise rather pretty face.

Does the Deep State/Establishment/Powers-thar-Are Exist? Does it--whatever it may be--recognize its own Existence?

One knows that it was the entity which raised Hillary Clinton to eminence, from whom she derived her limitless campaign funds, and which, if any existent entity did, suffered Angst and Nightmares and Bitterly Humiliating Defeat in her Loss to the absurd, unmeaning  buffoon and (likely) Alzheimer's victim Donald Trump.  Now again, in the French presidential elections--in the hysterical attempts to denigrate Marine Le Pen, and in the fatuous attempt to make presidential material of the characterless, insipid, virtually amorphous Emmanuel Macron, that the Deep State seems ready almost to materialize.  Gone are the days when, in a Nixon and his evil strategist Kissinger, the utter corruption and villainous wickedness of Supreme Power had human and open (if butt-ugly) faces.

The chief problem with welcoming Sissies, Trannies and Lesbians to the Feast of (Male) Gay Liberation is

That any normal (i.e. masculine), self-respecting gay man hates--loathes viscerally--the very idea of having sex with any of them as much as he does the idea even of having sex with actual girls (creatures with actual vaginas).  In fact (for such we are commonly made by God or Nature, as you will), effeminacy is ordinarily as repugnant to us real, macho gays as real femininity--and we fucking resent being told that this, our most essential negative characteristic, is a species of captious bigotry.  Too bad if it's your vagina (or feminine nature, or effeminate pose) that we nauseate and shudder at. We are not, in sum, as much what we despise and abominate, as we are what we love and worship. And we have the inalienable right to despise and abominate what we damn please, as much as we have the right to love and worship almighty cock.

But seriously, having arrived at the usual approximate term of human existence, the ridiculously old age of 74 and a half years,

I have to say that my two main revolutionary objectives in this life, the legalization of marijuana and the normalization of male homosexuality have been perfectly and thoroughly realized.  There's more to do:  One senses that the fundamental understanding that it is an unacceptable infringement of human liberty to prohibit any human being from ingesting any drug he wants (including, in the appropriate circumstance, a lethal one) is now not quite, but about to drop, like a ripe fruit from the Tree of Wisdom and permeate the consciousness of mankind as naturally and obviously and easily as people now believe that there is no divine right of kings.  

On this the 100th Anniversary of Lenin's arrival in Petrograd, It's Time to Consider Our Own More Radical and Less Blood-Thirsty Revolutionary Secession of Pacific States, and while, by joining with them the Canadian Province of British Columbia, Forming and Constituting the Bioregional Republic of Cascadia

The way lies clear  before us, except that most prospective Cascadians can't see it.   They think of (the United States Security Agencies') the DEA's and the IRS's practice of seizing the money and goods of their hapless fellow citizens in the guise of "asset forfeiture" (if they think of it at all) as afflictions that have befallen others, not as abominations that must, by God, be put an end to by radical abolition of the Tyrannous Powers that decreed them.  Blind Fools.  But Blind Fools, nonetheless, who have legalized recreational marijuana and same-sex marriage, and for whom there is still hope of their achieving their own Rightful Autonomy.

Was Jean-Frédéric Bazille gay?

Maybe not.  But if you can behold this young fisherman's magnificent backside without a feeling of gratitude towards the artist for portraying it  just as it was, you are hopelessly straight.

What this New Era is, unbeknownst of course to the somewhat retarded Heterosexual Hegemony, is the Era of the Personal Trainer--

which, without the majority of most people's (who are, after all, straight, and therefore, just a little less intelligent than the queer, bisexual or gay Cultural Elite) being aware of it, has raised the standard of Male Beauty to a cutting-off pitch of muscular development such as has not been seen in our species since the days of the

Roman Republic.  All the young men who take their shirts off in movies these days have well defined deltoids and pectorals and abdominal muscles; while as recently as twenty or thirty years ago it was a matter of chance--and of consummate indifference to their fat, vulgar, Jewish producers and directors--whether they did or didn't.  Or might have, or might not have.

I do not, however, know (nor, of course, care) if young women are as much more beautiful these days (than they used to be) as young men are.  I doubt it.  No doubt that young women do insist on having personal trainers at the same rate as young men do, but it is not certain that being in shape is as important for a young woman's appearance as it is for a young man's.  

Hillary Clinton Comes Out of Hiding To Warmonger

But who's kidding whom?--Does the New York Times have its elbow in Salon magazine's ribs?

"Hillary free to speak her mind"?  And it never for a moment crosses her mind that she lost because she was a terrible candidate?  Does she really think that "Misogyny" (Whose misogyny would that have been?) and Putin had something to do with her defeat?  No, she doesn't, not really, but she says she does. Hillary is a liar.  Her mind, and her mouth, is full of self-serving lies.  The fact that she believes the lies she tells doesn't mean she's telling the truth.  But--one wonders--does the Deep State believe its creature Hillary's lies?  Sickeningly, it appears to.  It even appears that it has no choice but to believe them.  If I were a rationalist that would frighten me.

I can't say that I've read all of the writings of P.G. Wodehouse

--he was, after all, in his day a successful and prolific writer of the libretti  of Broadway Musicals--and in plain terms, I would rather eat worms than listen to anybody's ghastly, vulgar, stupid, smart-ass musical comedy.  But, I'll bet, I've read every single one of Wodehouse's comic novels in which Lord Emsworth, or Bertie Wooster and his man Jeeves feature as protagonists, at least a dozen times each.  "Custom cannot stale, etc."  And strewn through them, sparkling like gems, are descriptions of the morning cuppa that only an Englishman could pen:

                Just right, as usual.  Not too hot, not too sweet, not too weak, not too strong, not too
                much  milk, and not a drop spilled in the saucer.

Which, with some personal modifications, is just how I like my morning Darjeeling (which I alternate with Assam).  And the glowing bien être that diffuses throughout my physical and mental being even while I am imbibing the elixir seems little short of miraculous--in its mild way, psychedelic. 

To be fair,

I have only eaten raw fish once in my life (oysters and random, tentative nibblings at other people's sushi don't count): a ceviche made by a lady-friend of mine as a kind of act of revenge on her large, rich family's Thanksgiving dinner; which her family pronounced to be, and which was, in spades, detestable and inedible.  It was, as I recall, blazingly hot with chili peppers, soapy, chewy and nasty. No doubt it served her relatives right. Nor do I count the thick steaks of an immense salmon  that a half dozen hours previously had been swimming off the coast of Washington state, which, briefly passed under the broiler of a hot oven, were more than half raw, and perfectly delicious.  But I remain adamant in my refusal to try even "sashimi grade" raw tuna (considering that I loathe, cannot bear, the fishiness of canned tuna).  Or raw anything else--I am thinking of raw eggs and steak tartare, which I find nauseating.  Thank you.

One Thing You'll Notice If You Live long Enough And You're Gay:

Beautiful boys turn into even more beautiful young men.  A case in point being the exquisite Colin Morgan (with the help of a little otoplasty):

No Country for Old Men

Damned fine movie, which kept me watching it long after I realized it was far too much of a stone bummer for my Ovidian taste.  I remember reading a synopsis of another story by Cormac McCarthy, and telling myself, "Leave such cruel and morbid moral insanity for the diversion of the Vulgar Many, who can enjoy it without understanding it. You'll simply be hurt by it."  I should listen to myself.

Revelations about Donald Trump from David Pakman (whom I like):

The Donald has Alzheimer's--a fairly advanced stage of it.  Aha!  Of course.  This could very well, even, explain why Trump didn't step aside late in the campaign, as we all expected, and as it had apparently been planned that he should, so that Hillary could claim victory.