Editor’s Note: There is an Author’s Circle meeting Sunday mornings, quite apart from the irritating Editorial Board, which permits participation by the increasingly irritating Compliance Branch. The Sunday Session is suitably timed for those who have attended holy services, or staggered back from brunch. There is one who claims to be an early riser and has achieved both in preparation. Our problem at this meeting was dealing with the loss of Point Loma, one of the cadre of leading critical thinkers. His voice will be missed, and affect the larger issue confronted by noted contributor Marlow, who joins via Zoom with a bottle of refreshing brown liquid at his right hand. With the truth being what it is these days, we think the following may contribute to our effort to find suitable balance in those of us who remain, and a suitable Forward to encapsulate the times in which we (happily) reside, as explained in the Footnotes suitable for daily updating as necessary, due to dramatic policy shifts in Swamp City. Marlow’s words are a suitable contribution to dealing with the ne world. We think Point Loma would approve.

– Vic

Author’s Note: Vic, I humbly offer these in-house views à travers nos défauts, à travers nos défauts, et à travers nos plus grands défauts.

– Marlow

PS I call dibs on a raspberry jelly filled Krispy Kreme donut for our next meeting.

PPS I always though equities meant stocks, so are we getting some ESOP distro?

PPPS Will SH management assure its labor force that no nether region swabbings will be required as a condition of continued employment? Or is that a mandated part of the Congress’s Plague Relief Bill?
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Take Trois re SH Authors: A Tongue In Cheek Critique

Tongue in cheek critique of SH clique

Vic,

A one pass fly-by view from a highly elliptical orbit resulted in this initial take on our assembled writings.

-Marlow

Our stories vacillate across multiple worlds or threads. There are many but they seem to subdivide into three primary clumps. The main one is about the who, what, when, why, and where we currently inhabit and experience; the historical ones are those in which we, our parents or our heroes lived; and, the fantastical ones that we see/feel exist across and atop the former two. It is the one of totems, fables and gods.

Our current one we treat with sarcasm, satire and irony. Its players and events deserve it as we expose venality, power hunger, greed, abject bullshit and claptrap. The historical ones we treat in a matter-of-fact way that strips them of accumulated hagiography, deserved and otherwise, as we attempt Jack Webb just-the-facts style to show the everydayness of the events and people and that the conferred heroism on their players is somewhat oft putting to those who are described since they all felt till their dying days was that they were just doing their jobs.

The fantastical worlds are where “good” and “evil” fly about and existentially struggle, up is down, right is wrong, left is right. Put another way, things like refuges (Vic was the first of us to figure out we all need and seek these as we go on) and secrecy is often out in the open and in plain sight. It is mythical. We treat it Joseph Campbell style with dashes of hidden humor.

We and our characters lived in the darkest and brightest centuries of mankind’s existence. We constantly revise our stuff. We write without any consideration of publishing. Yet our scribbling is of great importance to us.

Our everyday sailor language in these pieces is a contradiction of everything wooden, official, and imposed on the stuff we did during our service time. It is a joy to speak thusly.

As we found our voices, things written or events that occurred in our twenties that dealt with contemporary events of the Cold and various Small Wars led us to our near fanatical insistence on faithfully depicting those wars and our small parts in them.

We are formal, original, devastatingly satirical of modern American life, theatrical in rendering of the terrors of its social media, pop and cancel cultures, audacious in our portrayals of its wanna-be saviors, thin skinned bureaucrats, print and media puff piecers and the scads of bad actors of all types and persuasions.

We prize laughter via our satire, caricature, and buffoonery and treasure America’s natural, unguarded vulnerability. We will kill to defend the latter. As handmaidens, we did so in the past.

We as those who came before delight in exploring the complex poetic forms of American freedoms.

While our digital manuscripts will never be burned, they can be orphaned and go off to die in a digitally unarchived elephant graveyard. Nevertheless, we toil on.

Writing is one of our ways of ridding ourselves of old age’s tendency towards not being courageous. We try for being penetrating rather than simply defiant.

I sense that in some ways we are grateful to be able point out the newly arising e-Gulag. We still try hard to not feel or write poorly about today’s young ‘uns’ sense of fragilities, inevitability, stagnation and learned helplessness.

We love our characters – the petite satans, the homeless ones, the small-m masters, our chroniclers, the godless gods, the Mark 1 Mod 0 exploiters, endless exploiteds, strangers, friends, Judases, apostles, the upright, the slitherers, the cloven hoofed and the ones with claws. We know them all by heart. We continue to write with occasional long interruptions our chaptered gospels without knowing if their participants will get a reward, a punishment, or nothing at all. Maybe those things are not for our spirits. In any event, they deserve peace.

I feel we are romantics in the old sense of the written word and music.

21st century life in America’s Imperial City now appears to ape that of 1930s Moscow with ritualistic vampirism and the tearing off and replacing of heads. Might we or should we describe this as witchcraft with its flights on broomsticks?

Methinks our love of clowning offers us ironic ways to contemplate the utterly crazy yet unconsidered conditionalities of modern life. I guess that our carnivalization of this world allows our readers to safely approach the relativizing of worldly and heavenly absolutes and the terrifying mysteries of religion, politics and economics.

And now I must muffle my keyboard to whisper type this — there’s a bit of settling of scores in what we do. We get to hand out vicious yet appropriate legacies to all enemies as we attack their BS dogma, sacramentally prescribed ass-kissings, and official truths.

So, as we move on over to our fabulous yonders — something unknown but sensed, let us parable-ize and fable-ize our experiences so they may outlast us and our known issue.

We still have many colored relief maps left to draw of our Moscow on the Potomac — they will float motionless, weightless and substanceless in front of us, despite their circus-like theatricality and overabundant bathos. Few of our fellow citizens will adjust to or learn to watch critically since all of our energy is devoted to patiently waiting for our daily bread and stimmie checks.

So, let us be like the Saturday Night Live Super Bass-o-Matic spokesman for this “normal” state of affairs. It’ll be clean, simple, and after five or ten of these fish, it’ll get to be quite a rush! Bass-o-Matic — so we’ll never have to scale, cut or gut again.

As the Saturday Night Live bass-drinker said, “Wow that’s terrific bass!”

Welcome to the one-world state as human freight, mis hermanos.

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