The Guardian’s theme song. It grows on you. Like the show.

I tried to watch the popular TV series The Mentalist. Slick, superficial, inane. The Aussie star struck me as gay.

Today seems to be my day for confessing failures. I was wrong about the Aussie star. His name is Simon Baker. Beautiful wife and three kids. (Gaydar fail. Sigh.) When I was surfing Netflix for Midsomer Murders replacements, I stumbled across a three year major network series called “The Guardian,” which ran from 2001 to 2004.

Watched the pilot. Not too impressed. A pricey corporate lawyer in Pittsburgh gets busted for cocaine and is sentenced to divide his time between his father’s law firm and 1500 hours with the child services department of the city’s welfare system. Yawn. Fish out of water stuff. Silver spoon kid seeing real people problems for the first time.

A bit too transparent, you know. The name of the lead character is Nick Fallin (get it?), and he is so remote and without reaction that you might think he’s just a pretty boy coasting through a TV gig. Everybody rightly denounces him as arrogant, superior, and beyond the pale.

Don’t know why but after a long pause (desperation probably) I went back and watched a couple more episodes. Okay. I’ve strung it out long enough. This is a GREAT American TV series. Simon Baker is a gifted actor, wasted in The Mentalist.

If you have Netflix, start watching it before it goes away. Sixty seven episodes. I’ve watched sixty five. Don’t want to see what they do to him at the end. Because the real ending happened a few episodes before.

The show dates from the era when series TV required 22 or 23 episodes a year. You wonder how any of the actors managed it. And the more I watched, the more I wondered how Simon Baker, so urbane and charming in the Mentalist, always a twinkle in his eye, could play the part of Nick Fallin day in and day out for years.

There’s only one hook for the audience. Everyone detests and despises him, absolutely no one likes him, but it’s clear that he cares, that he feels everyone’s emotions, and he is nevertheless imprisoned inside an icy exterior he cannot break through. Nick Fallin is an undiagnosed borderline autistic. The three Emmies Baker should have received were not forthcoming because he works so hard to do so little. He looks no one in the eye. He does not respond at all to the most obvious of emotional cues. He suffers unutterable torment without a flicker of recognizable emotion. And yet you can still see him hurt. And care. But never a twinkle in his eye.

All this in a show that is stuffed with overacting. The plots frequently careen into soap opera.

Not going to give you spoilers about the long arc of the show. But I will say I have never seen a major network series offer us such a subtly developed and more humanly revealed Christ figure. Nick Fallin? Code name for demon damned. It takes them three years to make their point, a long long arc that does seem prescient about innumerable social and cultural issues, but at the end you find yourself thinking that a guardian angel plumped down on earth might very well find himself conflicted, tempted by vice, and struggling every day to discover what is right in both the highest and lowest realms.

And, oh yeah. Billy Budd. Herman Melville’s Christ figure. Innocence betrayed. A much better read than Moby Dick. And, mercifully, much much shorter.

Autographed Ray Rice jersey.

I tend to congratulate myself for being right a lot, for being prescient, for having good timing. So it’s only fair that I admit when I’m none of those things.

Last Christmas, I got my wife an autographed Ray Rice jersey. Thought I did good. She went to Rutgers and after the Vick fiasco in Philly she transferred her team loyalty to the Baltimore Ravens.

To be honest, I had mixed feelings about the Ravens. On the one hand, they’re the only NFL team named after a poem. On the other hand, the Ravens are an abomination, the Cleveland Browns stolen from their home in the dead of night and therefore permanently accursed and evil. You know.

I had mixed feelings about Ray Rice too. He went to the NFL before he graduated from Rutgers. I carped about that, blamed the coach, though I understood the hardship argument without fully accepting it. He also couldn’t talk like a college student. “Should of went” is not a locution I countenance in anyone.

But we have season tickets at Rutgers, and we have seen Rice play valiantly many times. We watched him help the Ravens to Super Bowl victory. So I bought the jersey.

It was a matter of only days later that the Atlantic City elevator video surfaced. The one of Rice dragging his unconscious fiancé into the hallway. We were done with him then. There was no need to see what happened inside the elevator.

We were equally disgusted with the two game suspension. One of many reasons why my interest in the NFL is plunging. Why I seared Rush Limbaugh a while ago. I don’t care about political correctness. Hitting women is not a mistake. It’s a mortal sin.

Now my disgust has reached an altogether new level. The video of what happened inside the elevator has generated a ridiculous flurry of “shocked, shocked” reactions. Please. I never needed to see it and have done my best not to see it, in the same way that I have done my best not to watch beheading videos or the compound fracture videos of Joe Theismann or its NBA counterpart a few weeks ago.

But we still have this autographed jersey. Anybody want it? Call it a monument to the prophetic pretensions of yours truly.

If you want it, I’ll mail it to you.

What? Me worry? No. The rest of us did.

I was disgusted and done after the first half. But here’s the official story:

Nick Foles threw two touchdown passes in the second half and the Philadelphia Eagles rallied from 17-0 deficit to beat the Jacksonville Jaguars 34-17 Sunday.

“You can’t lose your head out there,” Kelly said. “You have to understand that it’s a long game. We felt there were plays to be made.”

Iggles going nowhere this year. You heard it here first.

From Barbara. Paradise. Different things for different people.

But you’re from Jersey too. You know we have our own version of Paradise.

Sometimes summer. Memories of times past.

Sometimes trans-seasonal. Memories of times paster.

We get by. But love your views. Someday. Maybe. When life isn’t so hectic…

There are always nasty women. Some we like. Some we don’t. Some, meaning me. I don’t have to explain myself. Three I like:

Dorothy Parker.

Elaine Stritch.

Joan Rivers.

Though I despise Joan’s heirs, including Kathie Griffin, Margaret Cho, Rosie O’Donnell, and Sarah Silverman.

Unfair? I get to choose which nasty women I like. And don’t. I’ve chosen.

There is divinity. Only glunks fail to see it.

I wrote about this. Life is ineffable. Nihilism is nothing. Atheism always collapses to nihilism. Because if there is nothing at the beginning, there is nothing at the end. And we are closer to the end than we have been in a long long time.

Why I’m still awake at this hour. Read what I wrote.

Trophies for showing up. Terrific idea! Love our kids.

The title comes from my wife, who urged this fortune cookie on me this afternoon. Of course you can give up. I do it all the time.

Why am I giving up this time?

1. The world is going to hell in a hand basket.

2. The reason the world is going to hell in a hand basket is Obama.

3. The U.S. Electorate voted this incompetent idiot into office twice.

4. His margin of victory is two demographics without any capacity to change their minds based on anything but fact-free emotion.

5. The young people who are supposed to represent the hope of the future are either gullible fanatics inducted into some monotonic cause or retro Babbits who want a title on the door, regardless of whether the door is locked or on fire.

So. For now I give up. Congratulations, Brizoni. You’ve succeeded in torpedoing my earthly faith at least. The death of Christianity looks like a mighty positive development. Congratulations, Joshua Babbitt. You’re right. Life is really only about you. Tony prep school kids demand your attention first and foremost. Don’t worry. You’ll both get your trophies.

But my wife will be home soon. No doubt the hope generator will be restarted soon.

From “The Man Who Knew Too Much.” Not me, obviously.

An actual full frontal nude was so much worse than this that nobody at Apple, the MSM or FBI could take it. They had never seen nipples or pubic hair before. God, how they they’d love to. Can’t wait. The hunt is frantic.

Famous actresses who took pictures of themselves naked are now surprised that someone found and published the pictures. Really? Career boost on the way?

Both MSNBC and Fox News are chewing this to death. How tiresome and hypocritical can you get on both sides? MSNBC doesn’t want to objectify women. So let’s talk about how naked they are. Fox News doesn’t want to disrespect women. So let’s talk about how naked they are. Can we see the labia minora? Fox? MSNBC? Can we?

Where are the pictures? I’m happy to look at them. I gave up on Facebook long ago. They won’t let me quit their service, but they won’t let me look at naked stars, either. Pretty much like doing a full frontal nude privately to your 200 friends, eh? Tweet and delete. Posed pics never show the labia minora, anyway. The acid test.

Why is this an issue of any kind? Actresses do things to become stars. Anybody out there who doesn’t know that?

Ship John Light. Guardian of the Cohansey/Delaware Bay.

Went out there one day. We were maybe 21. In a twelve foot Boston Whaler. Guy who had the con told me it was the dumbest of innumerable dumb things we had done together since teenage, including driving at 125+ speeds on the roads, shooting pistols with no adults around, and water skiing on an eight foot diameter, eighth of an inch thick piece of plywood that could have, and probably should have, sawed us in half like a saw blade. Ship John Light was there because the waters are dangerous. To well rigged eighteenth century sailing ships. Worse for dinghies with two idiots on board.

We survived all of that. We both survived everything.

Except life. Now we’re both recluses. Even from one another. No better friends through our elementary school years — and after an interruption for boarding school — in our late teens and twenties. WE WERE AWFUL. If it had a motor, we would drive it. If the motor was dead, we would revive it with ether. We were monsters.

We always had different talents. He could do anything mechanical. Which is not to demean him. He had an 800 Math board score. I could do other things. You could say we were each other’s friends when no one else would be, and you’d be both right and wrong.

In most ways, we were opposites. He married the most persistent woman, which was — well, isn’t it? — the American Dream. Like the way Jimmy Stewart kept marrying June Allyson. I remained the screwed up romantic, falling for one after another of the wrong women. He had four children. I have had none.

He stayed in the house he was born to, and I travelled widely. He remained the pillar of his father’s business. I did something altogether else.

Yet we both experienced the same kind of pain upon the death of our fathers. He told me his father turned bitter at the end, which I’d never have expected. Just wasted away. Mine wasted away too, from cancer, but I don’t think that was all of it. More. Deeper. And sadder.

We haven’t talked for a long time. He doesn’t approve of me. For oh so many reasons. His reclusiveness is different from mine. But exactly the same.

I think I can guarantee you all now, we both drive like little old ladies these days, and if we had our preference, we’d let our wives do it for us. If they knew what they were doing. His always had a tendency to ignore the speed limit in residential zones. Mine still tailgates on the Turnpike. The Two-Second Rule does not compute with math majors. Go figure.

It’s much much better to stay home.

Live like a prince, patronize to the proles like one.

I’ve disagreed with him before. I’ve made fun of him at times (yeah, read the post and enjoy all the graphics), despite agreeing more often than not. But this time, last Friday, he totally screwed the pooch.

Here’s the link: We’re Just Days Away from the Start of the NFL Season and We’re Talking About Domestic Violence Penalties. Despicable. I won’t quote it out of context. You’ve got to read the whole thing. Apparently, love for the NFL supersedes all.

It’s rare that he misses the point completely. This time he did. Domestic violence is not a joke, a PR cause, or an excuse to blame liberal media.

Men who beat women are the lowest of the low. Even if there are crazy women in your life who ask to be abused, who demand to be smacked, it’s the man’s responsibility to end the relationship. There’s never ANY excuse for it. That’s part of what being a man is. Mostly, it’s men who cross the line and one hell of a lot of them do. I have no use for the “lifestyle” argument. Broken jaws, eye sockets, noses, ribs, arms, and legs are counterbalanced by Maseratis and grossly over-decorated McMansions? Screw you.

This is an all-time low point of the Rush Limbaugh Show.

I’m posting this before his show starts today. I’m hoping for the rarest thing in talk radio, a full blown Rush apology.

I’m not hopeful.

P.S. Coincidentally, Rush wasn’t on air today. Maybe this will all blow over. Maybe he isn’t a dick Steelers fan to the exclusion of all else. Maybe.

I’m very tired, you know.

I’m in my seventh decade. You lose a step along the way.
You try things that don’t fit with who you are.

I don’t know. Maybe I was going for an Old Man of the Mountain thing. My father and grandfather both sported mustaches late in life. Well, my grandfather always had a mustache. And snow white hair from the age of 21. Try to compete with that.

I know it’s not Wolverine, but white hair overnight at 21? Imagine.
From the rest of his bio, I’m pretty sure he was the first X-Man.
Of course, he was my age when this was taken. So much more dignity.

My dad spent his life living up to him. My rebellion was that I didn’t try to live up to either of them. Couldn’t be done. So I went my own highly individualistic way. Freedom!

Until, like all stupid young men who get older and smarter only gradually, I realized I was always, obsessively, trying to live up to both of them. The consequence of being the son and grandson of men.

Strike that. The son and grandson of gentlemen. My father was critical of me, but he also criticized himself to me when he (rarely) transgressed his own code. He was in many ways opaque, but his courage was to tell me when he had been deliberately rude to a man who, in retrospect, didn’t deserve it.

This is, ultimately, a sad story. What all the young men will ultimately find life insists on. Nothing rational about it. Life is finally poetry, and justice is not measured in official outcomes but splinters of insight.

Do you want to hear? Probably not. It’s a mere anecdote that spans half a century. But maybe it will explain why, in my musings, I succumbed briefly to a desire to hide, which is always the function of beards.

In the early 1960s, we lived here and my parents socialized with all the local social lions, some of them fabulously rich. As I’ve also explained. One night, one party, shortly after the election of JFK, whom my father despised as a shanty Irish, drug addicted hood. (No idea to this day where he got that idea.) After a few drinks at a ritzy party, he announced “I hate all Democrats.” Just as a local unrich Democrat state senator entered the room. My dad was too embarrassed to apologize. So he didn’t.

Subsequent to that, I was, well, coerced into becoming a Cub Scout. Good for my socialization, I suppose, since I spent so much time reading and exploring by myself in Little Egypt.

The pack was located in the colonial village on whose outskirts we lived. They had their own history and tribal customs. While the Bostonians dumped tea into a harbor, these folk burned tea in the public square. The residents were mostly descendants of the tea burners. They didn’t like the wealthy outlanders. I discovered too late that I was one of those. They beat me up at every meeting, once punching me so severely in the groin that a doctor had to be called. The ringleader of the bullying was the son of the man my father had inadvertently insulted.

Pressured by the doctor and my parents, I told who had done it. My dad called the parents of the kids involved. All but one blew him off. One night I was called downstairs to see someone at the door. It was that man with his son, whom he brought expressly to apologize to me. I accepted his apology. There were no recriminations. From then on, he was my friend.

My father told me afterwards, “I’m in his debt. He proved to me he was a gentleman. I’ve never proved to him that I am.” But I think he did. There were no fisticuffs. Both were gracious, honorable men.

I’m more aggrieved at myself for what happened many years later. By an accident I was living in that very village not 15 years ago. I remembered the man and his wife. She was lovely, with a windswept hairstyle I wish would come back. But the story in the village was that they had both come to grief. She was incapacitated and nearly catatonic, I don’t know why, and he was physically debilitated, confined to a wheelchair. People described the two of them sitting in what should have been their perfect retirement home, staring listlessly at one another. He’d been a realtor, an earnest local politician, and she had been the mother of three. And their inheritance was unimaginable ruin.

Then, one day, I saw a sight I will never forget. A man in a motorized wheelchair wheeling down the exact center of the wide road called Ye Greate Street. He looked neither left nor right. I think, just once, he wanted to see the Cohansey River again. I’ve had that feeling myself. I told myself I know that man, know who he is, that proud jaw, that stolid substance. I should run into the street and introduce myself and tell him about the example of fatherhood, manhood, he had shown me.

But I didn’t. He whizzed slowly by. Now I know how my Dad felt.

Why people grow beards and hide behind them.

Forgive me, Mr. Robert Webber. I coulda, shoulda, didna.

But I’m older now. Hope to see you later on. Clean shaven.

For you, for me. The ineffable Cohansey River.

Float me on a wooden boat on that river. I’ll be content.

P.S. No intent to deceive. Best pic I can offer. Just can’t take the flash of the camera. Sorry.

I am everyone’s nightmare. I don’t care what anybody thinks. I have spent all day avoiding two terrible posts I knew I had to do. Sorry for the eye slits. Can’t keep them open when the flash goes off. I chose to do this egotistical post instead of the harder ones. Sometimes two posts are too many. Sometimes five are not enough. Why I’m just treading water.

But look. If I’m not St. Nuke, I’m Johnny Dodge. Still everyone’s nightmare. Count on it.

And, yes, I do have eyes.

I see everything.

Seventh decade of watching. That’s worse than the NSA. Because it involves actual insight.

An old, famous New Yorker cover. How it works in the benighted province of Manhattan.

She was a pioneer. A female standup comedian who started at it fairly late in life. A boundless font of energy who motored on through personal travail, tragedy, and controversy. She idolized Johnny Carson, then was betrayed by him. She could have given up and spent the rest of her life repeating old routines in Holiday Inns. But she never did. (I saw an ex-Tonight Show staple standup opening for Sinatra at an open-air concert in Cincinnati. He was doing, word for word, the last monologue I had seen him do for Johnny Carson twenty-some years before.)

Sure, she’s controversial. She got married late in life, had a child late in life, continued busting comedy barriers by getting bluer and bluer over the years, and she endured the vicissitudes of life — her husband’s suicide among other traumas — and kept on trucking. She got addicted to cosmetic surgery, a horrifying refuge of the insecure, and augmented her comedic income with shopping channel hucksterism because her husband left her penniless and there were all those face lifts to pay for.

In some ways, she’s the ultimate stereotype of a New York Jew, bossy, foul-mouthed, obnoxiously liberal, and sometimes just plain ugly in her insistent egotism.

But hold up for a second. Take a look at the map up top. It makes me think of another trailblazing comedienne named Minnie Pearl.

Yeah, the price tag on the hat was part of her schtick. She was from Tennessee.

Do you know of her?

Pearl’s comedy was gentle satire of rural Southern culture, often called “hillbilly” culture. Pearl always dressed in styleless “down home” dresses and wore a hat with a price tag hanging from it, displaying the price of $1.98. Her catch phrase was “How-w-w-DEE-E-E-E! I’m jes’ so proud to be here!” delivered in a loud holler. After she became an established star, her audiences usually shouted “How-w-w-DEE-E-E-E!” back. Pearl’s humor was often self-deprecating, and involved her unsuccessful attempts at attracting the attention of “a feller” and, particularly in later years, her age. She also told monologues involving her comical ‘ne’er-do-well’ relatives, notably “Uncle Nabob”, his wife “Aunt Ambrosia”, “Lucifer Hucklehead”, “Miss Lizzie Tinkum”, “Doc Payne”, and, of course, her “Brother”, who was simultaneously both slow-witted and wise. She usually closed her monologues with the exit line, “I love you so much it hurts!” She also sang comic novelty songs. She often danced with Grandpa Jones.

Pearl’s comic material derived heavily from her hometown of Centerville, which in her act she called Grinder’s Switch. Grinder’s Switch is a community just outside of Centerville that consisted of little more than a railroad switch. Those who knew her recognized that the characters were largely based on real residents of Centerville. So much traffic resulted from fans and tourists looking for Grinder’s Switch that the Hickman County Highway Department eventually changed the designation on the “Grinder’s Switch” road sign to “Hickman Springs Road.”

Parochial in the extreme. But I think Joan Rivers was exactly the same, just as parochial. Just as everything about Minnie Pearl was ultimately Tennessee, everything about Joan Rivers was ultimately New York. She went to Barnard College at Columbia, she had the pre-feminist hunger to succeed, to prove she could best the men at wit and in monetary gain, and she was big city relentless in her ambition.

People carp about her cruelty on Hollywood red carpet events. She was a ruthless fashion critic. What hardly anyone seems to realize is that she was at base a New York fashion snob and an extraordinarily candid old fashioned Jewish girl. Famous women who insist on dressing and acting like whores offended her. She made it the stuff of comedy. But the dripping venom of her jokes was unacceptable to the nouveau riche of Hollywood. She got fired from red carpet coverage. And so reinvented herself again. Now she would be the ‘Fashion Police,’ in which capacity she tirelessly slammed the rising young survivors of the casting couch and used her earthy Jewishness to make anatomical jokes no one had ever heard from a woman, let alone one in her advancing old age.

Yeah, she occasionally slammed conservatives generally and Sara Palin notably. But look at the map. It’s like Minnie Pearl claiming George Gershwin never wrote music. Consider the source.

I just saw what may be her last episode of Fashion Police on the E! Channel. A 90 minute special about both the Video Music Awards and the Emmy Awards. Her very last joke on the show may be one of those perfect last lines. The climax of Fashion Police is always the awarding of the title “Fashhole of the Week.” This time it was for someone named Amber Rose, who went to the Video Music Awards in this:

Really? Really?

Joan has made herself famous at Fashion Police for vagina jokes. She once gave herself an award for the thousandth one she’d told. Sorry. I should have been outraged. But I kept seeing an octogenarian little Jewish girl fighting back against moral rot in the only tool she had at her disposal — aggressive, uncompromising, disdainful wit.

Her last joke?

“This dress reminds me of a chain link fence at the border. Hundreds of Guatemalans tried to escape across her vagina.”

Add your own final punchline. Did they escape by going over, under, or through that chained up vagina?

Joan was 81. No saint. Hardly anyone who makes it past 50 is, if you want to know the truth of it. I wish her well. And hope the map of her heaven looks like a certain New Yorker cover.

Get up, Joan. Let me tell you the Eddy Rickenbacker story.

He was in a commercial airline crash in 1941:

When Rickenbacker arrived at a hospital, his injuries appeared so grotesque that the emergency surgeons and physicians left him for dead for some time. They instructed their assistants to “take care of the live ones.” Rickenbacker’s injuries included a fractured skull, other head injuries, a shattered left elbow with a crushed nerve, a paralyzed left hand, several broken ribs, a crushed hip socket, a pelvis broken in two places, a severed nerve in his left hip, and a broken left knee. Rickenbacker’s left eyeball was also blown out of its socket.

He was dying. Until he heard a radio announcer proclaim that he had died. With his remaining strength, he smashed the radio to bits and proceeded to recover.

As I said. Get back to work, Joan. More than half the population have vaginas. That’s many more jokes to be made. Get better soon.

UPDATE. This doesn’t sound good. Camille Paglia weighing in with less to say than I have said but somehow more finally. Wake up, Joan!

Don’t look like me.

I know. You think I don’t know. I’m the eternal outsider. But after ten years together, I have to take some responsibility for my wife’s children and grandchildren. Not a lot of responsibility. Just being nice. They’re all awful. Starting with the great grandchild. He’s a bruiser. His daddy’s a veteran. His mommy is small. I haven’t met him yet. But I’ll be resentful for sure.

Which leads to my first rule of grandfathers.

1. Don’t overdo the love babies thing. Babies do lots of disgusting things. When their moms ask you to hold them, plead frailty.

Unfortunately in this day and age, grandchildren are likely to come in assorted ages. I have one who is so mean and selfish that she reminds me of me. And she’s not even Scottish. Though she’s six. Which is the exact emotional age of most Scottish men. Thank God she’s Irish. But. She’s so predictable, she manipulates everyone, stares at me until I stare back at her, which makes her giggle, leading to Rule two.

2. Horrifyingly nasty granddaughters need to be teased, stared at, and told what to do.

I know it sounds impossible. It isn’t. Take it from me, Instapunk. My granddaughter thinks I’m really cool. She peeled pistachio nuts for me last week. Two for him, one for me, she announced. I told her she was okay.

3. Teenage granddaughters turn into women overnight. But the older you get, the more you remember they’re still little girls.

Have a college girl granddaughter. I think she likes me because I’ve actually tried to talk with her. Successfully. But to me she still seems fourteen. So I disapprove of all her boyfriends automatically, and she’s able to bridge the gap because she calls me Robert.

You know what, though? I’ve told her exactly what my hopes and fears are for her regarding education. And she listened. She’s getting A’s now, but I fret about her living alone at home in the old neighborhood.

There’s a grandson or two too. One too old to think of any connection. But I think we might be moving toward at least a rapprochement. It’s a long leap we have to overcome. His father is a construction worker. He’s a computer scientist who sidelines as a construction worker. I used to be in the computer business, after having been a truck driver in a lumber yard. No chance of any commonalities.

4. Grandsons think you’re deadmen. Don’t disabuse them of their presumption. Surprise them with your longevity.

It takes boy children a long long — did I mention long — time to recognize that men might have advice for men.

Annoying. We didn’t all run out on our families screwing every babe at the country club and every secretary in the office, but… Enough of us did. Which is screwing our sons too. And our daughters.

Grandfathers have to field every kind of ball bouncing out of the infield.

5. Grandfathers have to hold the line. Right is right, wrong is wrong, even if your granddaughter has a crush on her cousin. Even if they seem to be moving drugs around. Somebody has to be willing to levy judgment. (Not saying this is happening. Just being hypothetical. Another GF task.)

6. Grandfathers have to be willing to die for rules one through five. Sorry.

7. Don’t look like me.

If you need any clarification of the rules, I’m happy, or at least willing, to oblige.

I’m right, I’m right, I’m right, Goddammit.

So. Brizoni is finally ready.

I haven’t dismissed these arguments. I’ve dismantled them. [Yeah. I saw the movie. Shutter Island. Lots of dismantling there.]

I’ve been plugging away at yet another dismantling of everything you said in your last email, point-by-point. Marshalling evidence, refining arguments. Don’t want you to think I’ve ignored anything. Gonna be massive. Mozart, Michelangelo, Dante, Bacon and Magellan [uh, where is it, big boy, this massive evidence, any sign whatever that you know more about Mozart, Michelangelo, Dante, Bacon and Magellan than I do? SPOILER: Not here. He brings not only no massive evidence but no evidence whatsoever. He just attacks me.] But I keep getting hung up on this:

“I like to hear you say,

In my view, Ayn Rand has done this successfully.’ Yes, in your view she has. In my view, she hasn’t. Would John Galt have done anything to stop the Holocaust or the Killing Fields? It doesn’t actually come up in Atlas Shrugged, does it? Rather, there’s a sense of letting the dumb-ass victims be dumb-ass victims while us smart ones run away to the Colorado Hole in the Wall Butch and Sundance were aiming for.

What you have can’t be called a “view.” It’s a mostly uninformed opinion. [As opposed to your own uninformed opinion.] I know you think you Get It, no sweat, because that’s what Robert Laird does. Not this time. You read Atlas once in high school, didn’t understand it***, retained less of it as the years wore on, and now have a bad picture of her philosophy sketched from too few facts. Add those facts together and you maybe have half a clue, at most. [No facts whatever in Atlas Shrugged. It’s pure ideology.]

Since you don’t know what you’re talking about, you inevitably attack straw men. [Atlas is completely about straw men, not my response to it.] The theme of Atlas is, to cop the lexicon, the role of man’s mind in human life. Which it dramatizes by showing how quickly, and how totally, human life falls apart when the mind withdraws. [Hardly. The book is a cartoon, starring Dagny, the curious winner who keeps losing… and talking.] The book is demonstrative, not prescriptive. If Rand had thought Galt’s Gulch was the way to go in real life, she would have gone there. [uh, Dagny went there.] She could have built the place with her own money if it came to that — she died with a couple million bucks stuffed in a Savings and Loan across from her apartment. [I thought Ethan Frome was a good capitalist parable too, all that gold stuffed under his mattress.] It could have been many times that if she’d ever cared to make any investments whatever. She never did. [Everything under the mattress is the Russian way.] All she wanted was the freedom to write. The rest was gravy. She didn’t flee to a secret paradise and watch the world of fools burn. She thought the world was worth trying to save. Can you say the same? [Really, you callow clown? You dare ask that of me?]

I thought about linking to a debate that answers many of your entry-level objections. You should at least know what you’re rejecting before you reject it. [I’m well aware of everything I’m rejecting. I’m a fucking polymath and a genius. You’re a lowly rote-Randian with pretensions.]

I’m not sure I should bother. I worry you flat-out, full-stop, don’t care to think any further. That you’ve reached a comfortable stopping point. [Acute observation. Ask anyone. They’ll all swear I’m quitting hope tomorrow. Or the next day.] You’ve had your fill, thanks so much, and what kind of monster am I to force more down your gullet. Fact? Proof? No such thing as either, if you squint hard enough. Maybe the universe began ten seconds ago, with history intact. Yooooooooou can’t “”””prove”””” it didn’t, can you? Pigeon strut. And a sigh of relief that God is safe and sound behind the veil of unreasonable doubt. [What worm has eaten your brain? What have you ever proved? Name any one thing you’ve proved. Except your own idiocy? If I squint hard enough, I can see a fool blowing up his own life in a narcissist fantasy.]

Why you think the Byzantines had the right idea. [???!!!] Stagnation is fine as long as you’re content. Who needs Mozart when you’ve got your grandfather’s hymnal? Who needs Michelangeo when you’re surrounded by all these perfectly fine frescoes? Who needs Dante when you can just read Matthew 24 again? Who needs Bacon at all — never mind that medicine has had no new ideas for five hundred years. [???!!!] Who needs Magellan when everything’s awesome right here? [You’re insane. Utterly. I told you more about these people than you ever knew before.] Spend your days like a soft white belly, basking in the sun. What a lovely retirement for a worn-out old man. Peace without life. [You think what you’re doing is life? lol. When it comes to minds, you’re the soft white belly. The jelly of not quite knowing much topped by the deathly flesh of not believing in anything but the screeds of an ancient Brit homosexual.]

Hell with it. Here’s the link. You’ll skim it for an excuse to ignore it. If even that. Religious freedom means the the [sic] freedom to lie to yourself about whatever you want. Without so much as being called out on it. Facts be damned. [So keep on lying to yourself, dude. Don’t let me stop you. I’m just twice your age and twice your IQ. No prob.]

Go on. Prove me right yet again. [Yet again? You’ve never proven a single damned thing.] My expectations are as low as a casket.

In which it is proved once and for all that the once vaunted Brizoni is now an incoherent meth-head. When he comes to his senses, he can call me. But he’s not now in my league. Never will be. But not many are. Sorry. I’m in a mood. Not a mood for pretending.

That would be the notorious pigeon strut. Which I do every day. Notwithstanding being a worn-out old man.

***”Didn’t understand it.” Where does such arrogance come from? I understood it fine. Loved it. I was fourteen. Brizoni is now twice that age and more. He’s still mentally fourteen. Sorry, folks, I’m tired. Shouldn’t have reopened this can of worms. I apologize. He really is a moron. Past help.

P.S. I’m all done pretending now. Brizoni is a junkie. Anyone reading this who knows him get him some help. He would never have written or argued this poorly without being in serious trouble mentally. Mother? Wife? Anyone who follows his Internet exploits. Get him some help.

P.P.S. Just saw the ‘smoking gun’ of Brizoni’s rant. Should have detected it before. My error. Highlighting mine.

I’m not sure I should bother. I worry you flat-out, full-stop, don’t care to think any further. That you’ve reached a comfortable stopping point.

“Full-stop”is a Britishism, their affectation about avoiding the use of the simple grammatical element known as the “period.” Probably related to their aversion to all things female, which is so pervasive that they use the words “twat” and “cunt” exclusively as insults to men. They’re too afraid to use them on women, except under the most extreme circumstances.

At any rate, this usage by a boy from the Pacific Northwest is proof positive that he has been reading the tweets and other spontaneous Internet defecations of Richard Dawkins. But here’s the interesting thing. Being the butt slave of both Ayn Rand and Richard Dawkins has to be a rending experience. No chance that Dawkins would regard Rand as anything but a capitalist twat. No chance Rand would regard Dawkins as anything but a pansy Brit cunt.

Gotta be tough on poor Brizoni.

Rather than deal with the polar opposites in his own religion, he chooses the much easier alternative of attacking me and mine. Sad.

But also funny. Time to man up, rent boy.

Doesn’t look the same. In fact, not nearly as good. I can explain.

In child rearing, everything is upside down these days. People, parents, children are upside down. I show you the picture above because it’s where I grew up. Not to impress you with my personal provenance but to make a, to me, valuable point. This thing looks like a McMansion. Whoever has owned it since my parents did has destroyed it.

My dad bought it for about $2,500 in the late 1940s. It was a ruin, suffocated by ivy that was actively sucking the mortar from the bricks. The yard, all two and a half acres of a six acre plot surrounded by farmland, was a jungle. The previous owners had torn out supporting walls and annihilated the plumbing. The kitchen was a disaster, the second story leaked, and everyone on both sides of the family thought my parents were crazy for buying it.

It did have a name. The Samuel Tyler House. The middle part that looks a smiling face was built in 1732. The larger wing to the left was added in 1815. A frame addition that has been replaced on the right was built during the Civil War. It was a rolling architectural history of America that my parents set about restoring.

When my sister and I came along we were loved but we were also labor. Scraping, painting, mowing, working. Vacations were not trips to Disneyland but projects. Heard the term house poor? That was us.

We had a pool in the shape of a fish. Left behind by the previous farm owners. No drain, no filters, but by God it was in-ground and we prepped it every year. The sewage pumpers came every spring to remove the muck of winter, and then we waded in to paint the interior and watched happily as the garden hose filled it was clear water. The tails of the fish had steps, so that’s how we learned to swim. Sit on the step, walk slowly into the deeper water, and daddy was always there to catch us.

As I got older, the lawn, the grounds, expanded. I mowed and mowed and dad kept increasing the size of the lawn. It was a dictum of his that weeds cut often enough would turn into grass. And at least, nicely mowed, they did look like grass.

As I’ve noted before, we also built a tennis court. Where I learned to play not well enough.

Throughout, the house and grounds kept getting better. The ivy was removed. The wings were united by white paint and period shutters my parents hunted at antique fairs or building demolitions.

The inside of the house was transformed. My dad turned an inside storeroom into a library he named the den, whose books I spent my childhood reading (and listening to all that Sinatra). The rotten floor of the 1732 portion of the house was replaced, for reasons of expense, with a concrete pour covered by thick carpet. But it worked anyway because there was an eight foot wide fireplace in which we had roaring fires, popped popcorn, and before which we played Anagrams and other games designed to make us smart. That room became our dining room. The place where I learned what utensils to use, how to use them, how to ask politely for someone to pass the bread, the butter, and the salt, and how to remember the state capitals when asked. But the utensils were sterling silver.

The house was, in spite of its provenance, never luxurious. Despite six fireplaces, the place never had any insulation, and we were cold all winter. There was one bathroom, not big, and a downstairs lavatory that was almost too small to use although the well water from there was always frigidly delicious.

If you go back to the picture, you can see a wing added on the left. My dad did that. (We all wire-brushed the ivy tendrils off the bricks of what was once an outside wall but now the centerpiece of a colonial kitchen.) It was time to get my mother a decent kitchen instead of the collapsing ruin of the Civil War frame mess, which got rehabbed into a study, a laundry, and a downstairs shower bathroom. We were living high by then.

You may have gotten the idea that my parents controlled my life utterly. But not as utterly as this:

A whopping 68 percent of Americans think there should be a law that prohibits kids 9 and under from playing at the park unsupervised, despite the fact that most of them no doubt grew up doing just that.

What’s more: 43 percent feel the same way about 12-year-olds. They would like to criminalize all pre-teenagers playing outside on their own (and, I guess, arrest their no-good parents).

Those are the results of a Reason/Rupe poll confirming that we have not only lost all confidence in our kids and our communities—we have lost all touch with reality.

“I doubt there has ever been a human culture, anywhere, anytime, that underestimates children’s abilities more than we North Americans do today,” says Boston College psychology professor emeritus Peter Gray, author of Free to Learn, a book that advocates for more unsupervised play, not less.

Truth is, I always had a kind of freedom few kids know these days. This patch of ground we called home was surrounded by farmland. I had hours every day in the summer when I could go back into the woods to a place called Little Egypt. It was my own private Middle Earth. There was a creek, a pond, trees to play Cowboys and Indians or Secret Agent in, and I did all that. First place I threw myself over my bike handlebars. With no one to tut tut. I could be there for hours and hours without any worry back home. Trees and vines and skunk cabbage and cap pistols and my dog, a German Shepherd named Mattie.

When I was fourteen I bought a truck to drive to Little Egypt. Bought it with $100 saved from mowing neighbor lawns. My dad initially resisted, thinking I’d been cheated, but he helped me paint it and turned me loose on the dirt farm roads. Mattie always rode with me. She died the first night I spent away in college.

You know, life is not supposed to be all fun, all penalty free. Even kids are responsible for what they do. But life should be some fun, as long as we can manage not to hurt ourselves too severely before we know what we’re doing. Risk is always part of the picture. My parents let me adventure in Little Egypt. Unsupervised. But they’d done their own homework. They knew that I knew what was right and what was wrong. And that’s why they trusted me to be entirely alone for four hours at a time.

The house in the picture. Don’t get it. I can hear the cell phones buzzing. Same address. Different place. God help them.

Not Raebert. But exactly like him, It’s the deerhound way. Also the human way. Times we believe he doesn’t love. But he does. In his remote, mythic way. There’s the Tasmanian tiger yawn after what looks like coma. Then he kisses.

I took a video of Raebert’s magic eyes, which do not do red eye but blue eye. My wife posted it to Youtube with a deerhound tag, which despite the occasional wolfhound or Afghan intrusion, surfaced other deerhound videos. So I couldn’t resist one more post on the subject here. I was particularly taken by the one above.

His eccentricities continue, as if he’s inventing them to remain mysterious. His latest is pawing food out of his bowl and then overturning the bowl altogether. Not for me, but for the missus. He much prefers her Danishes and sticky buns, the last bit of her sandwiches, and every chip and sweet and hors d’oeuvre that emerges from the well stocked cupboard by her desk.

I think his all around insanity might be keeping us sane through some challenging times.

But I don’t want anyone to forget he’s not just a couch potato. He has all the physical capacity to do this too.

Not Rae, though I’ve seen him run… But this isn’t Deerhound Diary either.

It’s daunting to live with. Sometimes after an outing he comes bounding up the stairs at something like top speed. If he couldn’t stop on a dime, as he does, there would be broken bones.

Then he subsides. As I do after a strenuous post. 100 percent on and 100 percent off. Like a switch being thrown. I know the feeling. I guess the appropriate term is ‘extreme personality.’

Sorry for interrupting. Go on about your day.

Turn up the sound. A brief exchange between Rae and me. Not a trick.

Most of you are familiar with Deerhound Diary. Thought you might want an update on Raebert’s mood. He’s not pleased with all the end of the world stuff that’s going on right now.

But neither am I.