InstaPunk Rules

We’re afraid to wake him.

We had kind of a war here yesterday. I was practically supine with allergies but my wife decreed that my life was less important than Raebert’s and it was time to cut off his hair so he could breathe better than I can in the heat.

That’s not the war. I meekly surrendered to the inevitable and we trapped Raebert in the dog room with a set of electric horse clippers. Her job, as a lefty, was to cut off all his excess hair by pushing the clippers consistently in the wrong direction, and my job — as a righty on Zyklon-B or whatever that allergy med is which makes me into a Boris Karloff mummy — was to pin a terrified 110 pound deerhound in the corner and hold him still while his mommy made increasingly wild clipper passes at his privates and other body parts.

The good news. He never once flashed his famous teeth and threatened to tear our heads off. The bad news. When we’d finished, there was a compleat Mini-Raebert on the floor (shown above.)

I suggested sweeping him out into the dog yard. The missus scoffed at the idea and suggested we wait till he woke up and wandered out.

Does anybody out there need a deerhound the size of a cairn terrier? He looks a good deal spiffier than the deerhound we have left after the horse clipper adventure.

Had a picture but I’m not allowed to show it. Imagine a large beautiful dog suddenly beset by moths. Moths with tiny fingernail scissors. Lots of yelping and writhing and squirming later, a sorry dilapidated survivor emerges. That would be Raebert, hereafter designated as Maxi-Raebert to distinguish him from the tiny monster in the dog room.

We’re okay. Except it’s time for next anti-allergy Zyklon-B tablet. Are we good?

Yalie thinks I’m just like all other modern writers he despises. (Click to see bigger.)

You know. If you’re Philip Roth or William Styron or Kurt Vonnegut or who else, you wouldn’t dream of inventing an entire literary movement that actually hates you. Or all the other people they hate.

But here’s the thing. My work was not Faulkner, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Dos Passos, Sinclair, Camus, Kafka, Lewis, Woolf, James, Mann, Beckett, Grass, Cather, Lawrence, Solzhenitsyn, Maugham, Steinbeck, Joyce, Ford Madox Ford, Capote, Bellow, Heller, Updike, Cheever, Pynchon, Capote, Kerouac, Orwell, Marquez, Nabokov, or Waugh.

It was, completely, my own. I had more writers than all of them. And here they are.

The signatures of all the bands of South Street on the day they dedicated the Boomer Bible, the first written protest against the utter nonsense of modern writing.

You see. There is this document. Signed by all the punk writers of South Street.

And their whole purpose in life was to overthrow the illustrious list above. They didn’t believe in believing in no meaning. They didn’t believe that a story was a single line penned by a narcissist from beginning to end. They didn’t believe that a story ever had an ending. They didn’t believe that the beginning of a story began with the first sentence and couldn’t be questioned afterwards. They thought the story was always, perpetually, up in the air, and that you had to plot your own course through it, somehow, some way, to arrive at a meaning that made sense to more than a few elect individuals.

And they thought, unlike all the geniuses they were rebelling against, that the sense to be made of things might be divine.

I lost track of the Epistle Dedicatory during a tough period in my life. But I found it again and paid $10,000 to get it back. I have it now. What do you have in writing you’d pay $10,000 for?

This little guy, with nothing to say, steered an entire generation to ruin. No wonder he’s a recluse.

He’s seen himself in the Octagon since age 3.

Buster “Big Bob” Fairweather has been living in agony since toddlerhood. Despite growing to near adulthood as a puny, underweight male person lacking in any athletic ability whatsoever, he has always seen himself, felt himself, to be a snarling championship quality mixed martial arts fighter.

Lifting weights hasn’t helped. The local dojo threw him, literally, into the nearest dumpster. His parents don’t understand. They bought him one of the increasingly rare and illegal chemistry sets in the hope that his talent for remembering the periodic table might rescue him from his youthful identity crisis.

All to no avail. Buster has already sued his parents and the state and federal governments to procure him the massive surgeries he will need to contend in the Octagon with Rhonda Rousey. Sex change surgery is a willing sacrifice he’s making to offset his small stature and get his shot at the big time.

He has eighteen books about defeating the arm bar. He also has three about navigating the gender change. And more than a hundred about beefing up in the weight room, once he has the right female hormones and steroids to qualify for American sports celebrity.

Just last week, he gave his first press conference announcing Johnny Weir as his new MMA coach. His parents would have been there, but they had a yard sale they had to tend to, no doubt to fund their, uh, thing’s new career.

ESPN already has him/her signed for an initial exhibition bout. Sports Illustrated is saving its cover for his/her first bra fitting. Rumors already are swirling about an actual ESPY Award in 2016 or so.

Could the future possibly be brighter for any millennial athlete?

Golly. We’re betting Rhonda Rousey is really scared at this point.

Probably locked in her trailer and threatening never to come out. Wouldn’t you?

Anonymous sources are reporting that Tom Brady has been living a secret life as a B-movie action hero. For years.

Tom Brady and actor Casper van Dien are the same person. Both married to supermodels, both so pretty that women swoon in their presence. The question is, how many supermodels is Brady married to, under how many names?

I leave it to the MSM vultures to follow this story to its no doubt squalid conclusion.

Notice how many times I went ad hominem. I must have deserved her ire.

Cheri Jacobus has decided I’m hateful because I have no sympathy for Joe Biden. She’s blocking me because I was less than friendly about her grief for the vice president’s family.

Started to go wrong here.

Uh, they DO know. They’re that corrupt.

So. I’m getting blocked — yeah, blocked on language grounds — by a supposed conservative who occupies the high morality of expressing sympathy for the serial groper Joe Biden because I had the nerve to repeat the use of the term “cunt” lefties have continually applied to Sarah Palin. You know what? I don’t care, Cheri Jacobus. Bidens really are scum, don’t care about their losses, and I just wish you had as much compassion for a mother of five who once ran for Vice President. They called her a cunt. Does that bother you? Nooooo. The Bidens are in mourning.

Not awesome, Cheri. (Which is the male version of the adjective btw.) I can give you the right version right here.

Proving how incredibly full of hate I am. Care to rethink?

Block me all you want. I will never have any use for even the most jovial Stalinists of the left.

I’m the only one who has deciphered this code.

It’s called the Voynich Manuscript. Scholars, linguists, and cryptographers have been working like bulldogs to decipher it for several hundred years. It’s the most renowned and mysterious book in Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book Library.

Who else has anything like this? Harvard doesn’t have it, or everybody would already know the simple answer by now. It’s a double book code, keyed to Proverbs in the Bible and Purgatorio in Dante’s Divine Comedy, only in reverse. Well, that’s the obvious part. The kicker is that it’s also keyed to the earliest landscape art in western art, which occurred in this place and is important — Siena. Where absolutely everybody everywhere was gay, with long nipples and leafy underwear.

So. When you make the obvious code substitutions, the text reduces to a fairly prosaic construct, since only about one out of a hundred letters actually means anything and the pictures are there just because they make a nice party decoration at Stillman College.

Yale-elluiah.
Yale-elluiah.
We love dope,
And Buckley’s Pope,
The tree of life,
Tits stiff with strife,
And it’s so cool,
Cause we’re no fool,
And green’s our thing,
Like with nippling.
See the pics,
And suck our sticks.
Just causing fear,
Cause we’re not queer,
In New Haven.
Yale-elluiah.
Yale-elluiah.

You have to imagine the Jeff Buckley vocal for yourselves. It’s really the best thing since Rufus Wainwright almost got into Yale. Wait-listed and passed up for a transgender Rottweiler.

Okay. He got the lyrics wrong. Why he didn’t get into Yale. He should reapply.

Well, Yale still has the Voynich Manuscript. A feather in their lovely hat.

I began the Intercolumn Reference on this machine.

The year was 1978. Before I even knew there was such a thing as the Internet. I was writing. Which meant I was typing. And I had this idea, about what people knew or thought they knew, and I was going to cross-link it with other things people thought they knew. Got the Bible idea. The beginning of the ICR idea.

Typing. Typing. On an old Underwood. You’re not going to believe this, but I wrote the first three books of The Boomer Bible on this Underwood. And I included the ICR from the beginning, which meant that I was writing two columns with a thing in the middle. Meaning I had to know ahead of time what EXACTLY would be in each column and how to make the central ICR column. On an Underwood Standard.

Think about it. You write halfway across the page, stop for the ICR, and then proceed to a pre-programmed second column.

While I had no idea what the ICR would ultimately consist of.

A friend of mine accused me of the sin of experimental writing. But there was never anything experimental about what I did. I knew what I was doing, but it took me ten years to do it. There came a day when I realized, finish it or never do anything worthwhile.

So I wrote The Boomer Bible. I was thriving as a management consultant. I just quit it. Had a nice office. Moved across the hall. And wrote and wrote and wrote. My business died. Because I was writing not leading the partners. Couldn’t stop.

Here’s how it worked. As I went to sleep each night, I made plans about what I would write the next day. As soon as I sat at my new computerized keyboard, I started writing something else. For months. Then I sold the book to a publisher. Which is when I got focused on doing this much on this part every single day. And I finished it on time.

Then came the ICR. Weirdest part of my life. I told the publisher the book didn’t exist without the ICR. So I spent six weeks doing it. Had the whole book in my head all at once. Dreamed about it all night, every night. Then, I spent all day every day, every single day, pinning it all down.

Here’s one example of what happened with the ICR.

There Isn’t Any God.

Thing was, the book was something you had to light up when you read it. The whole thing. Funny, eh?

A past that is cantering away from us, not retreating, just late for something better.

There was a time, not that long ago, when all of us knew ladies. Something I wrote fifteen years ago:

Some of us… can’t help remembering ladies. They were our mothers and grandmothers, our friends’ mothers and grandmothers, and they had no idea they were prisoners of a vicious sexist culture. They knew how to smile, how to make strangers and shy ones feel welcome, they knew how to dress up for a party, how to dance to ballroom music, how to practice countless skills that made houses into cheery homes, and we loved them. In every possible way they exemplified the essential human virtues and mediated their children’s vulnerability through their own. They were playing a life-and-death role, especially in those first six years, and one that fathers couldn’t play because their role back then was different. Fathers weren’t second-string mommies, always playing catch-up on the sensitivities not born into men. They were, when all was said and done, judges — the ones charged with preparing the children to be strong against the institutional temptations and corruptions that were coming after the time of safe haven was over. Their job was not to be taken in the way mother could be by an artful grin or pleading. Their job was to say no, to describe the consequences, to levy the punishment so that the lesson would be learned in the home, not in the dangerous realms of the outside world.

“Before” there were fathers and mothers. “After” we have “deadbeat dads” and a plethora of lawyers, doctors, journalists, executives, and bureaucrats, all with ticking biological clocks and an enduring confusion about the difference between home and government. If they can’t be in the home, then they want the world as a whole made as safe as a home. They want more laws, more protections, more services. They beg the government to come deeper into the home, inside the car, into the chemistry of their children’s brains. [Any] post hoc ergo propter hoc analysis is dead wrong. The women’s vote has played a pivotal role in the rise of nanny government precisely because they’re always looking back in the direction of a home that is no longer what it was.

So, a friend sent me hunt pictures he’d photographed, beautifully, himself. When I asked, he had no idea why I would link a reminiscence about ladies with these tableaus of life among the gracious. He’s that much older. He doesn’t understand the connectedness of things.

I’m just going to show you the pictures and let you spin your own connections, like the spiders we all are. But note the perfectly easy composition, the natural framing of a scene, the unstated emphasis on appropriate attire, and the beauty of formality and order. With more than a nod to the vibrancy and relevance of all kinds of us despicable animals.

Fun and anticipation aren’t just human emotions.

Do you know — you probably don’t — that equestrian events are the one sport where women compete equally with men. They often win. This most aristocratic of contests is where women first staked a claim and proved their mettle. Why? Because it’s important how you look while doing it. AND they’re as brave and skillful as men.

My wife taught me to ride. And laughed when I inevitably fell. Motorhead can’t handle one horsepower.

You can resent the well-to-do and laugh at their pretensions. But all of you who slobbered over a royal wedding need to look in the mirror. There is such a thing as The Quality, and we all admire and depend upon it.

Beauty needs no justification as long as it has no cruel purpose.

The man who took these lovely photographs had no idea why I would connect them to a paean to long gone American ladies.

Can’t think of anything that will convince him. But life is a parade full of costumes and conventions and courtesies. We still have the costumes, ugly though they are, and conventions persist like waves at the shore, whether they bear seaweed or syringes. What we’ve oh so obviously and utterly lost are the courtesies.

One of the best photographs I’ve ever seen.

Although Raebert tells me this one is HIS favorite.

All photos in this post are copyrighted by David Zincavage. Thank you, David. You put real meaning into the term “old school.” Click on any/all of pics to see them bigger.

Is it useless to ask any of you to think esthetically for once? Or is life really supposed to be about bra straps and cargo shorts? My mother was a lady. So were all her friends. I’d trade all of today’s college girls for that tiny band of brave, polite, accomplished, and modest LADIES.

Who’s the smartest dog in the world?

Bereft of other options, we watched the new movie about Peabody and Sherman on Netflix. No Wally Cox but otherwise fun.

On a lark I did a Google search hoping to identify Dr. Peabody’s breed. “Small dog, long ears.” Guess what turned up.

Yeah. Basset Brains.

Congrats, Jim.

Faster than a speeding bullet, slower than a sighthound, smarter than a kid’s gyroscope. I give you Pug!!!

My wife doesn’t want to claim credit. But she deserves it. Eloise was a rescue nine years ago. We knew nothing about pugs. Saw some stuff on TV. They were all fat as ticks and beloved. We took her to our emergency vet a year after we scooped her bruised and bleeding off a highway and thought we’d done good to fatten her up to breed standard. The vet yelled at us. Politely, mind. She told us Eloise was overweight. Uh, vociferously.

So we put her on the same kind of regimen our sighthounds are always on. Enough food to keep her nourished and healthy. No sweets, no, well, anything, that will pack on the pounds. Year by year we don’t see other pugs who have her energy, speed, dexterity, and vitality. She’s easily twelve by now and still whirring faster than a gyroscope. My wife did this. And Greyhound Friends. Dogs love every kind of food. Our testament of love is that we can deny them strudel to keep them alive for years longer.

God bless us every one.

I’d look crumpled too.

We were loving the Monaco Grand Prix until the final ridiculous ten minutes. Lewis Hamilton had won the pole and never looked back. With 12 laps to go he had a 19 second lead. Which in Grand Prix racing is an eternity. All that remained was the spraying of champagne on the podium.

But then the Furies struck. A 17 year old rookie tried an ill advised pass and plowed into the barrier. Caution laps followed. Inexplicably Mercedes Benz called Hamilton in for new tires. When he emerged from the pit he was in third place. And somehow, miraculously, the German marque’s German driver was suddenly the winner of his third straight Monaco Grand Prix.

Next up? The Indy 500. (Ya know, the two most fabled car races in existence on the same day?! C’mon.) Topsy time. So we don’t know much about Indy racing except that women aren’t very good at it. Which bit one Juan Pablo Montoya in the ass. One of the female racers rear-ended him under a caution flag. After they repaired the damage, he was dead last in the field, in 30th, three others having already retired. So he won.

A relentless man.

He won. But not before a titanic five, six, and sometimes eight way battle for the lead transpired. No one, it seemed, could hold the lead for more than a lap or two. The whole last half of the race was some of the best driving, best racing, I have ever seen. On the penultimate lap, the beleaguered Montoya passed both the second and first place cars and pulled away for the win. To my mind the greatest Indy ever.

And the worst Monaco. Mercedes Benz has officially apologized to Lewis Hamilton. Like that will do any good.

On TCM online. Slaughter with neckties.

A process of devaluation has long been underway. Read somewhere today that our president wished us all a “Happy Memorial Day.” Please tell me it’s not so.

What I wrote back in 2006.

Midnight to 3 am.

Been on the course. Terrifying.

Getting ready for tomorrow’s running of the Monaco Grand Prix. Starts at 7:30 am EDT on NBC.

IF you’re a night owl, you can prepare for the spectacle with two great documentaries:

1

Senna

Greatest F1 Lap of All Time? He won Monaco six times. Dead now, like so many.

It’s safer now. But the history reminds you there was a time when men took insane risks for the glory of it all.

Enjoy.

Hamilton has the pole position.

You want the boy to read? Try these.

There were two generations of Tom Swift. The ones above were the first. The ones below are part of the second generation.

My dad found my stack of these and threw them away as time-wasting junk. You know how good they must have been. He was too late. I’d already read them. All of them.

Smile. Certain you can find them out there on the interwebs. Do yourself and your kid a favor. Look for them.

The greatest momma action hero of all time.

She wins, dadgummit. Never gets old. Trivia question. Has Michael Biehn ever not gotten killed in a movie?

Why is there no room at Westminster for the smartest dog my wife and I’ve ever met?

Lots of categories, right? Guard dog, seeing eye dog, police dog, bomb sniffing dog, drug detection dog, cadaver dog, best-in-show dog, agility dog, flyball dog, water jumping dog, and therapy dogs of all descriptions, who fix PTSD sufferers and make both the very young and the very old in hospitals very very happy.

Time for a new category. Control dog. Raebert has his own specialized mission. His purpose in life is to make sure that we spend 100 percent of our time with him, preferably with his 110 pound carcass sprawled across both of us on our, meaning his, couch. Beyond that, he insists, every single night, that we go to bed at the right time, which happens to be HIS bedtime. Also, he hates the buzzing of flies and leaves the room when that happens or anything like it, including any sort of buzzing sound, like, well, women talking on TV.

Control. I mean, is there any chance that he could get a mustardy Captain Kirk command jersey colored collar and get a shout-out in the center ring at Westminster? Don’t answer that.

No Westminster honors? Kiss my giant rear end.

The nightmare of Dr. Samuel Johnson.

Yes, I do. Maybe not like yours. I have dreams in which I’m grappling with a terribly important plot problem that can’t be solved. I wake up in the middle of the night, frustrated but relieved that the problem does not actually exist. Then I go back to sleep and am slammed into the middle of the same problem. Wake up, rinse, repeat, repeat, etc, until dawn.

So. The other night I got enmeshed in a dream about chihuahuas. For once, it was kind of a fun dream. Everyone in public life was a chihuahua. There were Democrat chihuahuas, Republican chihuahuas, celebrity chihuahuas, NFL and NBA chihuahuas, MSM chihuahuas, and then there were the rest of us who never noticed that the ones in charge were tiny, domineering, snarly, ungrateful, half-witted, uh, chihuahuas.

In my dream I built this vast edifice of nonsensical critters in outlandish outfits running under our feet toward an idiotically impossible Utopia called, I don’t know, Taco Bell?

But like all dreams, it faded swiftly after I woke. Complete fizzle. Guess I’m a much better writer in my sleep. Only two fragments to leave you with. This, from Boswell’s Life of Johnson:

I told him I had been that morning at a meeting of the people called Quakers, where I had heard a woman preach. Johnson: “Sir, a woman’s preaching is like a dog’s walking on his hind legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all.”

And this vision of our latest political savior, the ultimate doyenne of the chihuahua universe.

Don’t cry for me, Clintonistas…

Are you looking at me?!

They’re jocks.

I once wrote lightly about the Lingerie League. Now we have the Legends League. Let me put my point in bold print.

These women can play football.

So. I’m not happy about the thongs. Is it because I’m old? Or a case of late onset decency?

They can throw, they can block, they can run, they can be hard ass, and I feel embarrassed to be looking up their asses. I don’t even need to see their tits. Or their camel toes.

If you feel different, I feel embarrassed for you.

Yeah. Love it. But don’t. Of two minds. As I said up top.

Supine, broken, but wise.

He doesn’t have any interest, no possibility of gain. Meaning he’s disinterested, not uninterested, two words that have become swappable in recent years. He’s not uninterested. He’s just not staking any claim on the outcome.

What does he do? What can he do? He’s seen all the crap which preoccupies parents. None of that dents him. Kids are cute, they poop their pants, they show signs of life, and they mostly turn out like their parents.

Is that okay? Probably. Most people are average or there wouldn’t be a word “average.” Is that okay with you? Fine. As long as you understand that “average” also means a flip of the coin between modest accomplishment and total disaster. You know. Tattoos. Drugs. Biracial babies. Anything that will piss off the unfortunately stupid parents who were too busy running around to pay attention to the home front.

Is your teenager a stranger? Maybe because your little loved one was always a stranger, who learned in her twos and threes how to manipulate you, turn one parent against the other. And always get what was wanted. But you missed it because you always put the kid first and ran and ran and ran from one silly appointment to another. With no time out from soccer or gymnastics or Tee-ball to read, well, anything.

Why grandfathers have a role to play. We know nothing about toilet training. We don’t care at all about kid fashion. We just look at the interactions of parents and kids and draw our own conclusions.

Children are all would-be monsters. If they can manage it, they will rule their parents and then the world. Grandpas don’t actually care about cute. They’re not even seduced by every mewling kitten. We’re tired, old, cynical assholes. The newest kid is just another predictable riddle.

Truth? We don’t actually enjoy dandling them on our knee. It hurts. We don’t enjoy them running wild all over the place. That’s just them running wild all over the place.

But we do care about what these larvae might become. Normally, we keep our mouths shut and pretend that parents know what they’re doing. But we don’t think that. Parents are a mess. Amateur, agenda-driven know-it-all know-nothing’s who parade their fertility as some kind of affirmation in front of people who simply wish they’d go away.

Kids aren’t cute. Parents aren’t sympathetic characters. They’re all just pains in the ass. Why there really need to be grandparents. The people who speak the truth to all the idiots most involved in the horror of raising children.

I have a few rules. But I won’t number them. Too old to remember numbers. Guess I’m supposed to pretend rules will save the day.

Shut up! All of you.

Don’t pretend that kiddy twirling and keening is talent. It isn’t. Talent is Mozart playing harpsichord concertos at the age of three.

Don’t EVER let them win board games or any variation thereof. They’re young and therefore stupid. They need to learn that and adjust to the fact.

Give them less than a third of what they ask for, demand, beg for, make your life miserable over. They basically suck. They’re not as conscious as the family dog you’re ignoring in his/her favor, and they want much much much much much more. Hell with’em.

Don’t repeat their cute malapropisms. Read to them and make them read back to you. Not even going to frame the argument for this one. Your whole job as a parent is to make them conscious as quickly as possible.

Tell them when to stop and make it stick.

You’ve guessed by now I’m not a nice guy or a nice grandfather. Which makes me the best grandfather. My granddaughter recognizes me as the only authority figure she trusts. Odd, eh?

She was in a hurry. Wouldn’t let me take a GOOD picture.

Off to the wedding. Me? Knees again.