If You Have a Bathtub on the Front Lawn…

Jeff Foxworthy used to have a routine where he would make a series of jokes in this pattern…

“If you have a bathtub on the front lawn…you might be a red-neck.”

“If your family re-union is also a get-together of all your exes…you might be a red-neck.”

And so on.

He had a sit-com in the 90s and the cold-open was him on a living room set talking to a kid (playing his daughter I would guess) and reciting this routine.

It didn’t work and then they tried again. Different characters and set-up but it featured Jeff Foxworthy saying “If your recipe for a cocktail starts with build a still you might be a redneck” and so forth.

If I had the opportunity to talk to Jeff Foxworthy I would say that the important thing for him to focus on and bring to his fans is not the content — his views about rednecks — but the form.

I would like to see him do a routine “If you are being written down in the Summa Theologiae…you might be a scholastic proof for the existence of God.”

“If you are currently being ruled by an Ulan…you might be a rump Mongol state.”

“If you are are six different ways to say who and how many people are carrying…you might be a Latin conjugation.”

Because who cares about who might or might not be a redneck, really? After a few more centuries of development of AI will there even be rednecks?

But the relationship between clues that you might be a thing, and the thing itself — that remains evergreen. Like the beautiful forests where Foxworthy’s rednecks might go camping.

At the end of the tunnel I can vaguely glimpse a meta-Foxworthy — perhaps an AI — saying

“If you are a series of ambiguous statements about a category that is nevertheless resolved — the ambiguity I mean — by a not-yet-gestalted commonality of that category’s vibe — you might be an exemplification of my comedy.”

And so on, deeper and deeper into this glorious and scary woods.

Princess Power

Machiavelli relates the story of a beautiful young well brought-up Italian princess, that goes like this. The princess was married to the prince and had two toddlers. There was a war, cause the prince’s sergeant-at-arms wanted power. The enemy killed the prince and captured the princess and her two little kids. They wanted the other army to surrender. The princess agreed that she would negotiate a surrender for the army, and leave her two kids as hostages. They let her go. She told the army to fight the enemy to the death, got up on the castle wall, lifted her skirt and showed them her vagina. “Go ahead and kill my kids!” yelled the princess “I can make more.”

The princess is a good role model for us all. They can never kill our creativity. They can take our creations, but let them have them.

We can make more!

The Outsider Part 2 (from the unpublished manuscripts of Howard Philips Lovecraft)

So I haunted the pyramids and ran with the gibbering ghouls until my mid 30s and then I met somebody who wore a mask and I said — why do you wear that mask? — and she said — well, I grew up in this weird castle and never saw another human being, and then I left until one day I saw this really horrible awful looking monster and I reached out and touched a surface of polished glass and I realized the monster was me and I decided to wear this mask and flee society and run with the gibbering ghouls. “No way.” I said. “Me too. Let’s hang out.” So we hung out for a few years until our kids got into pre-school and the teacher said hey, let me take a look at you, and we did and he said – you guys are fine. So it turns out the problem was more the growing up in weird castles full of ghouls rather than any actual objective physical deformity, which kind of makes more sense. Or at least equally.

I Didn’t Have a Chance to Ask My Father About Who Was the Angel and Who Was the Demon

I was talking to my friend Damocles who brought up a parable of the Buddha which I first heard in a book by Buddhadasa. “Is it okay for Buddhists to eat meat?” somebody asked and the answer was, you should eat meat if you have to, but you should regard it as we would if we had to eat a member of our own family, a son, in order to survive a trip across a desert with no food. Now my Dad’s story would be the story of a man who had to abandon his son to his fate in order to take a trip across the desert. And my Dad’s mistake was to say that the only way to live with that decision, which he did make, I know, was to say that the son he gave up was not a real son. Or maybe it was not a view my Dad believed, but he thought it was kinder to share that view with me, so that I would not condemn myself at the point when I would have to make such a decision. I think whether he believed it or not, my Dad made a mistake. I agree with Damocles.

I learned a certain strategy for dealing with pain and guilt from my father, the strategy of saying that the things we do and suffer that give us guilt and give us pain are not real. They are something like illusions, like shows on t.v. It’s not a good strategy because if you decide that the most significant events in your life are just shows on television, then you turn your whole life into television. Maybe that’s why I went into television.

Some people fantasize about escaping life by suicide. But Thoreau — or was it Ben Franklin? — was right. We most of us die by suicide. And the kind of suicide my father was teaching me was to die by withdrawing from life, and treating it as if it doesn’t matter. The lie told by the angel in his story.

But! But. What about all the demons who use our love for life to enslave us? Was my father wrong to warn me of those?

Was Damocles wrong to ignore those?

Maybe my Father was right.

Demon, Angel, Man

This is a story my father used to tell me and it has three characters in it, at least as he told it, and they were a Demon named Matty, an Angel, named Susan, and a Man named Garen. Well, now that I remember the story the man had a boy, about seven — I assume about seven because I was about seven when my father told me the story — and this boy’s name was Dubuku. So four characters – a Demon, an Angel and a pair of humans, father and son.

The thing to know about the Demon Matty was he stalked the prairies looking for people to humiliate and to degrade and to enslave. And the thing to know about Garen was that he was not supposed to have had a chlid. Where he lived, not just anybody could have a child — there were rules, you had to have a certain amount of social standing, and Garen did not — he actually lived with his parents. So when he briefly met Dubuku’s mother and they had a kid, he was barely even allowed to see the kid. And he felt terrible. He thought — I don’t care what my mother and father say, Dubuku is my kid. And he read a lot of books about making it across the prairie to the ocean and he decided I’m going to do that. And if a demon kills me, a demon kills me. I just can’t live this way.

But what happened was that the Demon Matty caught him and he didn’t kill him because what did hte demon Matty live to do, my father asked me?

Humiliate.

And?

Enslave?

And?

Degrade.

Yes, my father said. He was very tall, like two feet taller than me (my dad was six four) and he had a lot of horns and sort of sharp crusts on his body — he was naked — and on his back was a cage that he could make very hot. So he grabbed Dubuku and put him in the cage and heated him up. And the kid would cry and scream. And the Dad had to do whatever the demon wanted because he didn’t want his son to be hurt. So he’d be doing all sorts of stuff you do when you’re a demon’s slave — humiliating degrading stuff — all so he could help his son. And sometimes Matty would let Garan try to rescue his son but it was just a trick — the cage was too tough — he’d pretend to be asleep and Dubuku would be crying and Garan would try to break the cage and get him out and then he’d open his eyes and laugh and just roast the kid for an hour and let the father watch. As a punishment. And to humiliate him. To show him — you think you’re a good Dad but you’re not. You can’t even help your kid.

Well this blog post is getting a little long, reader so I will tell you — who was the angel? Who was the angel Susan? Susan appeared to Garan one night at night as a sort of glow over the prairie, and a thunder of the buffalo kicking the ground there she was a beautiful woman all made of light with blonde hair and she said the thing that gave Garan his freedom.

I knew because I knew my Dad it was not — how to kill the demon. My Dad didn’t believe you could kill demons.

She said to him — Garan, Dubuku is not your son. Dubuku is a creature created by Matty and snuck into your life back at home in order to trick you into going into the prairie and becoming his slave. He is not your son. He is not a boy. He is a demon creation, the same way they make tangles out of hair, or frogspawn out of foam. He is not a boy, he is not your son, you don’t need to worry about him.

Garan left while the demon was asleep, while the boy was sizzling for some minor infraction and he made it to the ocean.

What kind of story is that my wife said to me? Why did he make the demon punish the man by torturing a son? Why would he make the angel teach him not to love his son? Why would the demon be the one who makes you care about your son and the angel be the one who makes you not care about your son? What kind of father would teach that to his son.

I always defend my father. So I defended him then. Against my wife. She was quite upset.

“I think he wanted me to know it is hard to tell who is a demon and who is an angel.” And I went for a long drive.

When I came back from my drive she had forgiven me (or maybe forgiven my father? Or agreed with me? I don’t really remember) and we went to sleep. But before I went to sleep I wondered whether my father was the demon my wife had said he was, or the angel I thought he was, or maybe, perhaps, the man. Or the boy? Who can say. He’s gone and there is nobody left who knew him well enough to ask.

The Secret of All Story-Telling: Anagnorisis and Peripeteia

I

There was once a college professor named Stradivarius Wigwam who assigned his students a paper on the secret of good story-telling according to Aristotle. As the students handed in their papers defining anagnorisis as removal of ignorance and peripeteia as a reversal of fortune, the professor realized that he had wasted his life teaching ungrateful idiots and wandered out into the world to seek his fortune.

II

Former Professor Wigwam camped out under a bridge where he met a Hindoo Swami named Chandrananda (the bliss of the wheel) who explained to him that in the Hindoo epics the key to story-telling was nested stories. Professor Wigwam asked him for an example of such a nested story, and he told the following example.

III

Before I donned ochre robes I was in love with the daughter of a rich poppy merchant who would sit on the veranda of their great house every day in a swing sipping chamlee juice, and she asked me to tell her a story, and I did.

IV

The Young Swami’s Story

There was once a king who asked Vishnu to understand the secret of Maya. “Very well,” said Vishnu, “Wash your face in this basin.” The king put his face in the basin. Straightaway, he was the leader of a tribe of low caste hill people who were attacking the capital city. He set the city on fire, but his attack was repulsed. The leaders of the city set dogs and ogres on his trail, and also Rakshasas. They pursued him to a foreign land where he disguised himself as a peddler of mirrors. He became wealthy and married the daughter of the king. The king died, and he became king himself. Then one day his city was burned by a pack of low caste hill people. He fled the city. He was captured by Rakshasas. The Rakshasas dragged him to the ocean and threw him in. As the waves closed over his head he opened his eyes. A moment had passed and his face lifted from the basin. “Now you understand,” said Vishnu, “The secret of my Maya.”

V

But needless to say these stories only entertained the daughter of the rich poppy merchant for a summer. One day, the young man came to see her, and he was told brusquely that she was gone – she had crossed the ocean and married a Sri Lankan. Distraught, he renounced the world and donned ochre robes and studied the scriptures in a hermitage. And when his own master died, he traveled to America to preach, but he came upon hard times and sought shelter in the overpass of a bridge.

VI

The swami told the professor the story, whereupon he returned to his job and walked into the lecture room and the students were still writing their papers on the secret of story-telling which was anagnorisis (the removal of ignorance) and peripeteia (the reversal of fortune). He collected the bluebooks, put a trash can on his desk, deposited the bluebooks therein, borrowed a cigarette lighter, and burned them while the students watched. 

“Now you understand the secret of story-telling, ” said the professor. “You all get an A.”

looking

looking for claps

he found collapse

looking for paps

he found perhaps

The Barbarian Kingdoms

I dreamed I was at a dinner party in the late nineteenth century.

Attended by German professors of classics.

In celebration of some festschrift or other. All the attendees were learned, all had published significant contributions to the literature on Late Antiquity, all were familiar with the cursus honorum.

There was not one among them who was not qualified to supervise a habilitationshcrift on Romanitas.

And like the armies in the clashes of the third century before the establishishment of the Dominate they took the familiar defensible positions.

This was during the goose course, Poppo proclaiming that the Barbarian Kingdoms viewed themselves as continuations of Rome.

“They did not know it fell, the Empire, these proud men, eg the Lombards.” so, Poppo.

While Reitzenstein opined “We should not think them fools, the barbarian kings eg the Visigoths. They used the words to get the power. As strong men always do. Rome, Christ, dish, water, woman, star. All words, which without the sword, are nothing but farts of air.” He drained another beer stein.

Then quietly, maliciously, spoke up the great father doctor, the elder Hermann, Johann Gottfried Jakob Hermann, and he said “Twas ever thus. The Rome of Augustus was not/the little Etrurian town of seven hills. There was no Rome, nor ever will be.”

The mood grew dark but velvety over twilight and cigars and each man drew attention to his inner Rome.

As it always is with men, with scholars, and with Germans. The cognac turned them existential.

Was my wife ever my wife? wondered Hermann.

Do I even know the empire fell, thought Poppo. The younger man helped him rise.

They wandered and waddled through the streets of Heidelberg, to their rooms, some alone some not.

We should not think them fools these nineteenth century professors, they were like you and me. They knew what was coming as we do.

And each was smart enough to ask the question, the question — what is left of me now, now that I have been conquered

By the barbarian kingdoms?

Pleasant Sweet Moments with Mlabenus Meeks

Richie was a very bitter man. He had a lot of anger. He had more anger than he knew he had. He would work out whole scenarios about people he worked with, ones that just said “hi Richie” at the break room, and he’d imagine they loved him, and then realize they didn’t, and hate them. Honestly, it was tough to be Richie. There was this girl at work, Wanda, and Richie heard that she loved german sheperds cause they were such beautiful, lean animals. She wasn’t even talking to him, she was talking to Dave from marketing. Maybe that was part of the problem but Richie gave himself up to the fantasy that he would buy a German Sheperd dog and deliberately make it obese. He’d forcefeed it cozy shack pudding all day long like a fois gras goose, or maybe he wouldn’t have to because of a dog’s natural, mindless gluttony, but he’d see clear to it this animal had a diet of nothing but whip cream and ice cream and cozy shack pudding, wolfing it down, stuffing it down its gullet until a year it would be like unrecognizable you wouldn’t even know it was a dog, much less the noble, fucking beautiful lean German Shepherd and then he’d present it to Wanda, this waddling bloated rashy pig of a beast, sucking wind asthmatically, still too stupid to lay off the Cozy Shack pudding and he’d say “Wanda, what do you think now?”

Except he wouldn’t. Where would he get the dog? Where would this all happen? In the apartment on 81st he shared with his mother? And what would really be the denoument? Would there be an orgasmic climax of vindication or more likely would he seem insane?

Would she even remember the comment from the breakroom? Probably not.

He was a miserable, nasty, man Richie was and he knew it and hated himself for it. Until one day, he entered the foyer of the amazing Mlabenus Meeks!

I’m too poor a storyteller by far to tell you why it was that a few weekends of tea and graham crackers and watching Scooby Doo and Grape Ape on the television made Richie a better guy, but it did.

Look at him now! He’s lost weight. He’s got a smile on his face. He is happy to talk to people and to take a genuine interest in their lives.

And Wanda? Ha-ha Dave. Fixed your wagon. Cause not too long after all this happened “I like dogs Wanda?” Perky with her little sweaters, ‘Have a nice weekend?” Wanda?

She perished miserably from bone cancer!

The Jasm Chasm

Was a pyrot

they pet their own cat. they pet the other guy’s cat. they pet the lady’s cat.

within the abyss there is another abyss or it’s not an abyss, p.s. it’s not an abyss

was a pyRomanian

Rocket of Emblem Made

Pure Fluttery Goodness, dirempt and verklempt

Ranshatagga and his Horde of Demunz

One Heart One Life One Breath.

oh, there is another one!