InstaPunk Rules

Got a long letter from my sister. 17 pages typewritten. I had asked her what she as a professional academic was doing to fight back against the antisemitism that has taken over the two places where she built her academic resume over a decade, Vassar and Cornell, both of which are listed in the top ten antisemitic campuses in the United States.

She sent me a hummingbird card and professed, as professors do, that she had no knowledge of antisemitic behaviors on campus.

I do not recall. I have no recollection of that. Not remembering that. And “What difference does it make at this point?”

Hasn’t read my books but pats me on the head for my cleverness at satire. Mildly upset that I don’t read her academic papers on gender studies.

So here, in the graphic above, is the interior of the card she sent me, absent the 17 pages. And in the interest of full disclosure, here’s the front of the card. I’m so touched. You?

Hummingbirds have no legs. They fly all the time. Wings almost faster than time itself. Flying. All. The. Time.

But I’m also your huckleberry.

Say when.

Thinking Buckley’s pretty proud in his grave of the nasty slanderous rag his brainchild has become. No more brain. Just child. Time to put the slavering neutered beast down.

A quick and necessary end.

Yeah. NR was born in a war, the deadly battle against Soviet communism and parallel totalitarian impulses at home. The USSR was defeated and destroyed, which removed the original purpose. But if you’re a warrior you need an enemy. “We have always been at war with Eurasia.” We have always been at war with Trump because no one here can last long without the daily two minutes hate. We have always been at war with Trump because all animals are equal, only some are more equal than others, especially if your name is Napoleon Williamson.

Does she pose? Does she Vogue? Oh yes she does. “I’m Art Deco, dahling.”

I think about Madonna almost never. Love Camille Paglia but have always brushed aside her infatuation with the Material Girl. Which is why it’s significant that our new Iris reminded both me and my wife of this old video.

Hard to prove because like all cats she closes her eyes when the flash goes off. All we can offer is a hint of how she Vogues her ass off except when she wants more soft cat food.

I’m here. Take my picture. Stash that flash.

Hard to catch her poses. Quick quick quick.

Don’t touch me. I’m thinking up my next pose.

She knows you know she knows you’re looking at her. Fascinatedly.

The Good. Killed two mice so far. Shot them down. She is fast, fast with a mouse. And getting faster with the ugly.

Iris is the Angel. Raven is the devil with great big eyes. She’s been afraid of me until tonight, when I held her for ten minutes. She doesn’t know I’ll beat the devil out of her. Not kidding. We got both because I hate what people do to black cats. Seen too many of them squashed on the road. Won’t happen on my watch again. Raven started purring in my lap. She might be getting it.

Raven. Coal black. Why we did this whole thing: can’t stand seeing black cats mutilated deliberately on the road by old boys who think they’re bad luck. For me they’ve always been great luck.

The Bad. Raven killed a mouse too. She ate it.

And then there was The Ugly. Who was the guy like the guy in Road Warrior who had to be chained in front of the big truck with a face mask on him. That would be Elliott since the little ones arrived. Monster. Barbaric. But if I call him he does respond.

He’s the king. Fastest, most aggressive, most difficult, most loyalty to me.

Cute together, sure, but sometimes there was hard work to be done.

They had a long, fine exciting life, and this is also a time to remember that.

We used to have to go to chapel at Zero-Dark-Forty-Five.

1969. I was sixteen. Or almost sixteen. I was the editor-in-chief of a nationally esteemed prep school publication called the Mercersburg News. I had watched my school fall apart in about two years. There were two jock dorms when I arrived in 1967. In 1969 there were two drug dorms.

Then came the chapel walkout. A huge, life changing event. Half the school walked out of the Mercersburg Chapel during a Thursday 8:45 am service. The headmaster, who used to have a box of Gettysburg musket balls on his desk for awards to good students, called a school meeting. My best friend and roommate was one of the ones who walked out. Life had been riven.

You know. My best friend. He’s dead now. At forty. I’m alive. 62. He did meth. I didn’t. Or cocaine. Ever. We were both Harvard, don’t you know.

But the world cleaved in half that day.

I published the only extra in the history of the Mercersburg News. In a day and a half. Linotype.

So. I didn’t die. He didn’t die that day. But in reality we both did.

Never heard how lovely the voices are.

You had an idea, did you?

Went there. I really did. You try surviving four years in a place that tries to kill you every single day.

What do you do for the next forty-five years? You write and write and write and write and write and you wake up in the morning as I did today, saying only two things I’m grateful for. My ability to write and my love for my wife. That’s it. The total.

Makes voyeurs of us all.

When you’re ducking the news because it’s too awful to look at, somehow you can wind up watching the endless syndicated episodes of CSI shows, the one in Vegas, CSI Miami, CSI New York, NCIS, and all the others that show dead naked women on the stainless steel table of the pathologists. They blur this and cover that, but it’s all a peekaboo show and makes us closet necrophiliacs simply by watching well paid actors talking about rape kits and vaginal and anal smears and torn perineums and DNA, DNA, and DNA.

So, channeling my inner William Burroughs, I wrote a poem about this bizarre phenomenon.

My CSI Sonnet

A dead woman is the saddest thing.

She still has eye makeup and painted fingernails.

Her feet are deformed by years of high heels.

Her breasts are flaccid and inert on the morgue table.

Her hair is still done.

She can’t close her legs to conceal her sex.

She is no longer with us.

If only she could be.

If there could be a light in her whited eyes.

If her legs could cross.

If her fingers could touch.

If her mouth could smile just a little.

If she could have just a little life.

A dead woman is the saddest thing.

This elevates and ennobles us how?

He made a speech. A speech? He’s ready to be drafted? No. He just wants more.

What’s wrong with these old guys who can’t give up on power dreams? I’m old. I don’t want power. I want peace and quiet.

Nobody can be this majestic.

But Psmith. And Raebert.

He was 31. And is still.

There is a plan, a pattern, and a purpose. God bless you, Sue Schrock.

Mattel caps were the best

Have I ever owned a real gun? No. Have I ever shot anyone? No. Am I a Privileged White Male who’s played with guns? You bet your ass.

Got me a hat and some cowboy boots pretty young.

Then I got me my deerskin jacket. Fringe and deer smell and all. Buttons I could barely do. But I did’em.

With the boots and the hat I was way cool.

Then I got me some six guns. When you’re young, or really little, you need two to get the equalizer effect.

I know I wasn’t fast on the draw, but two guns kept you from toppling over to one side.

And then you get older. Daddy gets you a long gun for Christmas…

Boy, did I kill some imaginary Indians and Brits with this beauty!

…but he doesn’t let on it’s a BB gun with no BBs in it. He doesn’t want you to put your eye out.

Still, stupid and backward as you are, you keep getting faster on the draw. Till you’re ready for a real gunslinger single rig, with bullets capped one by one by Mattel.

I was fast and getting faster.

Then I got to be an adult, ten going on eleven. Started wearing ties and jackets and this discreet shoulder harness. In my off-school hours I was Napoleon Solo when I wasn’t James Bond.

Yeah. Snub nose .38. Shoulder holster. $4.00 and worth every penny.

Ah, but then the world tipped over into closet underground espionage. You couldn’t even wear your shoulder holster anymore.

Most of the time it was a camera that couldn’t take pictures. Then it was a gun that could only shoot Mattel caps.

About the time I retired from gunplay and went to the real world hell of hand to hand combat with other privileged white male idiots. Who mostly still rule the world, no matter how much you losers hate it.

Elliott. Kick everybody’s ass? Yeah. Bite off an ear? Sure. Terrorize kittens? I’m on it.

Only difference? No face tattoo.

$29.99 plus labor.

Cruz might be making his big move on Super Saturday, but it’s nothing compared to what Boudica and I did in just under an hour. We assembled the cat gymnasium we recklessly purchased after midnight some days back. It came in pieces with two bags of undifferentiated screws and washers. We assembled it with no yelling(!), a vendor supplied Allen wrench, and a good old fashioned hammer. We have also solemnly warned the cats to stay away from it. Forbidden. Verboten. Achtung!

Maybe they’ll ignore it. Cats generally prefer cardboard boxes filled with styrofoam peanuts. Mamas prefer thoughtfully designed cat toys. Husbands prefer getting the damn thing built and then watching the chips fall where they may.

We’ll let you know.

Money is contagious. Far more serious than orgasms are the thrills of being close to very large sums of money.

Goodby, Ruby Tuesday. Who could put a blame/dame/fame/lame on you?

She ducks her shark eyes just before she kills you.

Yeah. She tried to skewer Trump. Tried really hard. All she did was prove how she looked in a short haircut and white stuff. Here’s how she looked.

What guys were seeing anyway.

Except when guys think they can see her without her clothes.

She was not cool and collected. She was Lamia.

“She was a gordian shape of dazzling hue,
Vermilion-spotted, golden, green, and blue;
Striped like a zebra, freckled like a pard,
Eyed like a peacock, and all crimson barr’d;
And full of silver moons, that, as she breathed,
Dissolv’d, or brighter shone, or interwreathed
Their lustres with the gloomier tapestries–
So rainbow-sided, touch’d with miseries,
She seem’d, at once, some penanced lady elf,
Some demon’s mistress, or the demon’s self.”

— John Keats, Lamia

Yeah. She was a serpent. A killer. She almost killed me. Except for me being immortal.

Yes she is. She’ll be ditching her husband any minute.

She thinks she’s smarter than everyone else. She thinks wrong.

Missssster Trump….

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=yfcmoo3a_24

Mitt, with the peekaboo stance, lost the big game twice too. Lost the heavyweight title to a Swedish guy nobody ever heard of unless it was really McCain drenched in lutefisk, got it back, and then lost to Sonny “the Shroom King” Obama. Which was obviously great preparation for the boxing world’s near unanimous desire to defeat, humiliate, and otherwise lay low the Louisville lip.

Didn’t work out. Won’t do anything but tarnish a personal reputation Mitt Romney spent a lifetime building. Feel sorry in that regard. But he’s made a sad hollow shell of himself on the public stage. He’s exposed as a hypocrite, a treacherous friend, and a mere tool of the power players in his political orbit.

Trump will now proceed to demolish him, and given the party tactics employed against him, Trump will have no reason to hold his punches.

What a giant fail. Almost as bad as Floyd Patterson playing peekaboo with Cassius Clay.

We didn’t plan on it. But we got it.

Black and white. Night and day. Literally. Iris the White Queen does her crazies in the morning. Raven the Black Queen does hers at night.

The chess has to do with the intricate machinations involving access to soft cat food. The real food is kibble, which is continuously available, but the contention is for the contents of those tiny cans filled with unspeakable who-knows-what that cats just love.

Squared off 24/7. Only thing missing is the clock chess nerds use to show how quickly they decided on their next move.

Iris attacks early and hard. Gulps down the first doling out of the day. Raven who is more passive aggressive waits for later, knowing she can stay up all night and feast while Iris gets more and more settled on the pleasure of sleeping on mommy’s feet behind a closed bedroom door.

But Iris dispatches her Bishop, Elliott, to block Raven during the night. Sometimes we wake to the sound of yowling as Elliott pursues Raven downstairs. Which is when the Black Knight, Raebert, wakens with a what-the-hell woof and runs pell mell downstairs to rescue his liege.

Yeah. After the first night or two, it seems the two Queens no longer sleep together in the same cozy bed. They’re not enemies but they are competitors. The good news is they both think they always win. As soon as they get their own fine banquet of salmon entrails or whatever is in those cans.

Iris wins!

Raven wins!

Or I guess you could call it a stalemate.

What all the beltway nerds forget. People want confrontation. There are good guys and bad guys. We all know it. We want to see the bad guys taken down. Why Hollywood exists. Why there are tabloids. Why there are cop shows. And lawyer shows. And action movies. And westerns. We want the bad guys taken down.

Let’s be honest. Sometimes we want brutality for its own sake. Why it’s sometimes forgivable.

But we also want valor and beauty. Which is why we resort to real life.

Battling the odds and the hatred in a rigged game.

We want drama and hair-trigger justice.

Until we all want to break loose, because we’re just completely fed up.

Unless we want to do it all alone. All all alone.

Because there are true stories of confrontation…

And iconic stories of confrontation…

Then there’s myth. First three…

And legend. Down to two…

And godawful reality, when it’s down to just one damned mean one.

And the low down bitter reasons why we fight. We don’t all want to be just a number.

Confrontation. We all die in the end, don’t we? But some of us die fighting. Maybe that’s what people are hoping Trump brings out in them.

There comes a time when the frontrunner is everyone’s target. The blows come thick and fast, hard, brutal, fair and unfair. It’s a time of punishment and a necessary proof of endurance and resilience. For Trump that time is now.

I have said, repeatedly, let the voters decide, because this day would one day come. Now we’ll see. The video above is instructive because the legend has always been that Ali invented the rope a dope tactic on the fly because he hadn’t anticipated the terrible power of George Foreman’s punches. Not true. Ali trained for the rope a dope strategy, knowing he had to last and last until Foreman had punched himself out.

Does Trump know how to last through the rounds of pure pain and come back dancing? We’ll see. Won’t we?