Editor’s Note: Marlow nails some important stuff here- particularly what happens to those of us of a certain age in the midst of the night, and the thoughts that come in the small hours, when the powers of darkness are exalted.

– Vic

Author’s note: I have been kicking this around in my head for some time. This is the first of several pieces on the Alt Radical Bleak.
– Marlow

At 3 or 4 AM, somewhere around early January 2016, I woke up in the dark in a state of pain. This had happened before. It was one of the forms my reflux took after a third glass of wine or eating too late the previous evening before retiring.

I did the usual. I got up, took a stomach pill and walked around a bit upstairs. As always I felt mildly crappy and fatigued. Suddenly I had a thought, actually an inspiration.

I had an anti-beltway message to deliver. I announced softly to no one in particular, since the cats and W were fast asleep downstairs, “I am sick and tired.” Just that.

The effect was more than a bit satisfying. Ego satietate iam defessus, ergo sum. In my mind I gave a heartfelt, bulleted anti-DC and anti-media speech and exited the living room for the kitchen and the coffee maker.

For a moment, standing there alone in the kitchen during those small morning hours, I thought I could start writing stuff like that and I jotted down a couple of scattered ideas on the back of wayward credit card slips on the kitchen counter. But then my enthusiasm collapsed. Who the hell did I think I was writing about great issues from my perch in this small southern city. All I would be doing was confirming to the world what an jerk I was. I was a simple blog contributor of bohemian lifestyle pieces, travelogues and the curiosities I found along the byways of America.

Mmmm. The morning’s fresh dripped coffee aroma was nice. A little half and half. Very tasty. And then it started. Totally unsubtle. It was the way the dry husk of my mind began to function each day under the near toxic assualt of caffeine.

I could not deny it, but such were requirements of firing up a near seven decade old brain to start the day of reading the news dispatches, seeing what friends were saying about the world and gathering my own thoughts about what it was all about None of my efforts’ results were deeply metaphysical but were simply a tumbling and spasming gyro trying to synch back into some form of stable upright orientation to the ongoing multiple political revolutions that were rushing over me and my friends back north inside the capitol nation’s beltway.

These friends were remarkable, possessed of perceptive, if not beautiful, minds. Their thoughts and writings were burnished, untheatrical, and often wryily humorous. They greeted the daily parades of folly from around the globe with the same tilt of mind and the same perfect neutral voice that revealed a fearless fairness and utter intolerance of crap. Their posts were the flickering candlelight in the darkness that clouded the board and situation rooms of the rich and poweful in their beloved beltway town.

They were bright stars in a distant galaxy of darkness. They were the chroniclers of the Radical Bleak. A clique of cheek. Government geeks who quietly shrieked. Nose tweakers of the powerful whose bodies creaked.

Some even had perches that allowed them to broadcast worldwide their subtly seditious thoughts on outlets like BBC and CNN. Mainstream media hadn’t gotten what was going on in the country let alone what these bloggers meant to the national dialogue yet. The very idea of them, these Jeffersonian revolutionaries, who had actually put their lives on the line during their long military careers, could have such influence over nation state domestic and security poilcy ran counter to eveything the entrenched elites believed in.

None knew then what would become apparent ten months later that a rogue endorphin mist emanating from certain internet blog webpages and social media, not those of my friends mind you, but those from the Alt Radical Bleak, would envelop the country and help elect someone who was universally thought to be unelectable.

To be continued…

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