Editor’s Note: we appear to be in a kinetic war with the Russian, which provoked a thermonuclear threat from Mr. Putin this morning. Not much other news, except the prospect of annihilation this morning. So it goes, quoting Mr. Kurt Vonnegut in his marvelous book “Slaughterhouse Five.” Marlow provides thought and observations this morning. There is another stream I will try to wrap my brain around this morning, so apologize in advance for clogging the in-basket.

– Vic

Marlow’s note: I have had many of these thought shards in a prologued editing, unsure of whether they separately or together should see the light of day. Recently surfaced personal moments convinced me to send them along. They are disconnected, stream-of-conciousness excerpts that date to as far back as late 2016 from long ago, left-for-dead-on-the-vine essay idea outlines . . . they recall in part the peculiarities and weirdities of the ’16 election and its aftermath and were selected more or less at random. I assume no responsibility for what follows since it includes some non sequitur additions and tangents.

December 2016 and beyond
Burned Out and Shorted Circuits

Shorted out

“We screwed up after losing in 2008. We failed to learn from the brutal stomping visited on us then. We were doomed to be brutally stomped again.”
– Anon Clinton campaign adviser off the record, November 8 2016

December 2016

Savannah dawn along River Street

A red dawn is creeping up on the Hostess City now — 6:07 AM in red on the alarm clock. I can hear the muffler exhausts and diesel whines of the early morning buses loaded with dock workadayers rattle my windows on Park Avenue . . . out here at the far end of the East Victorian neighborhood. This used to be the end of the line for street cars, trolleys and everything else at the southernmost edge of the 19th century’s Civil War Confederate America.

From my perch I can see the large jagged lumps of this port city’s new monster container ship cargo cranes and tony new tourist boutique hotels looming over of the Savannah River in the grey morning light. Soon thousands of hungry, bleary-eyed tourists will be softly barking out their breakfast orders to the cafe, diner and greasy spoon wait staffs after their long nights out on the town. Eating at one of those places at these times is like visiting a dog pound right before the morning feed.

One afternoon about three days ago the wonderful brown and blue clad gnomes of Californian vineyard wine clubs showed up at my door, with no warning, and dropped off multiple boxes of various vintages. There were also separate deliveries of holiday treats and gifts for my beloved W.

There was a comfortable kind of consistency in this kind of finish to another year, because of the way the 2016 election cycle’s presidential campaign coverage played out. We would need large quantities of wine to go with a rising national whine.

From mid 2015 through November 8 2016 from airport tarmacs, small Iowa coffee shops and endlessly dreary campaign speeches in high school gyms, there was hardly a sentence in that jingled, jangled, jumbled saga that wasn’t produced in a last-minute, teeth-grinding frenzy of hardly hidden excitement of something once again wonderful was about to happen. Eight years before, an African American had been elected president. This time it would be a woman.

“Hooray for us” the reporters all but shouted (maybe they really meant “Hooray for the US”). There was never enough time to plan their coming celebrations. Every article or broadcast program deadline was a crisis given the daily exposé of some new outrage. All around us were experienced professional journalists who were telling us that America’s current good times were about to get better. None of them felt any concern to consider the what-if’s of the opposite occurring.

Not even $500-an-hour psychiatrists could have cured what happened next to these disappointed ones. Even if treatment could have helped, they didn’t have time for that. Perhaps, it had something to do with a deep-seated personality defect in the chattering classes, or maybe unresolved kinks in whatever blood vessels had blown out on election night . . .

They had had so much fun covering the campaign. It had been uniquely energizing to bring forward a new old-stock candidate in ’16 who could win over a demonstrably unprepared, unprincipled, louche candidate of the deplorables. There was an unmistakable euphoric high evident during their daily participation and coverage — particularly so, since they identified with this odds-on favorite candidate . . .

Yet, they had missed on the weird energy out there. Blue collar males like back in 1972, for instance, altered the outcome drastically in states like Michigan, Wisconsin . . . she could have won those states with a big turnout among her first-time voters, so they opined during the wee hours of the nationally televised, twitterized election wake.

She shoulld could have won (Note: her post election 2017 book’s ghost co-author later wrote that her election was unlikely, given the nature of her campaign organization. For one thing, it was too technically oriented . . . or at least the best part of it was technically oriented. At the command level there was almost constant confusion, and her indecisiveness compounded that confusion and left the technicians in charge. She ignored the old guard who could do the grinding ground work and could turn the vote out, but they weren’t allowed to do so in sufficient numbers and dollars. They also needed her to visit these out of the way places to generate the needed vote and energy. The technicians told her not to. She, not having a strong decisive person at the top nor a really great and integrated old and new school staff command, was doomed too fail.).

Now the red hats are in charge. And their chief is as stupid as stupid comes, so they say.

Their despair will bring them very soon to a feverish point with their hunger for a savior, a white knight, someone on horseback. Meanwhile, this bad man has dictatorial power for four years.

Secretly, I suspect that some of them may long for another form of central government — one that is ruled by experts and does whatever it wants for four years. The whole framework of the presidency is seemingly getting out of hand to them. It’s come to the point where what they want can’t occur unless they enervate people to the point of blank-eyed salivation and whip on their enemies with big sticks daily. Not even rock stars can survive in this new combat style of American politics.

– – – – – –

February 2017

So, we came to see in early 2017 that this Russian thing would serve as their big stick. People who claim to know about this stuff will tell you average readers and viewers are primarily motivated by fear, stupidity and craziness.

Having spent most of my life living in flyover country, I know that most of us lead pretty dull lives with which many are bored. So, what we need is not repeated hourly expressions of how bad things are when they are demonstrably not. Beyond our daily routines of work, eat, screw, and sleep, we crave to drift over the line into cheap thrills once in a while. Collusion 24/7, Russian or otherwise, won’t be cutting it

There must be a powerful adrenaline rush to get us Americans to rise up, streak out of our houses into the streets and demand change. That they try to do this to us daily risks the consequences of too many adrenaline rushes. They will burn out our circuits . . .

Burnt out circuit

– – – – –

January 2018

. . . paychecks and personal net worths are rising in 2018. According to polls, people who seemed on the verge of anti-MAGA hysteria last month now are coming round to support, or at least not rise and strike, the mad man in a red hat.

Despite these new signs of an unwanted and terrifying future, they continue wasting their time on rambling jeremiads . . . but unless somebody shows up pretty soon with extremely powerful hallucinogenics, there might not be any mid term election revival.

What might that do to their popped and singed circuits?

– – – –

Early February 2018

It was a dark Saturday night when we celebrated our neighbors imminent departure for her new home along the Ohio river, We were sitting in her backyard around a fire pit with drinks in our hands — me with a tumbler of iced bourbon she needed to rid from her northbound shipment of household goods.

Up . . . up . . . up . . . into the clear crisp black emptiness of the night sky twinkled stars and a full moon that lit up a thin, sharp white line along the coast that was the Atlantic Ocean surf. We couldn’t see it from our chairs but it was there, telling all perceptive mariners that landfall was near.

Behind us and the eight foot high concrete block wall she had had built to keep the crooks, druggies and street walkers from her back yard three years ago, a half dozen drunken homeless folks were lurching around the El Cheapo convenience store parking lot on Abercorn Street and the nearby roofed, bus stop shelters. They were careful not to spill their evening’s drinks on each other from their paper bag containers and risk losing their elixirs or worse getting picked up for being DIP — Drinking In Public outside the old and historic district where such was permitted.

Despite the chattering classes continuous bleating of tragedy was close aboard, the country’s Fasten Seat Belt signs were still off. Sadly, its No Smoking signs blazed away with restaurants and taverns not allowing such.

Since many of us during these turbulent times feel like the
yellow clothed passengers above, perhaps we should buckle up?

Our neighbor’s backyard smelled delightful with the hard wood smoke lazily drifting from the fire pit, while we earnestly munched on foods that she wished to be rid of from her overstocked larder, courtesy of Sam’s Club. Almost half of her kitchen’s pantry was full of various large format sized bottle of spirits — not those sissy sized, one-and-a-half ounce containers. This was a town that takes its imbibing as a serious matter.

The Hostess City most of the time maintains the decorum of the clubhouse at Churchill Downs on Kentucky Derby Day in its public spaces. In our squares and large public parks, whenever it feels the need, the city instantly transforms itself into the infield at the Indy 500 on race day.

Ah, dammit . . . there I go again with another flashback of past friends and neighbors leaving our tight groups of merry revelers both past and present. Some doctors probably say there’s no cure for their recurrence; totally unpredictable, like summer lightning in the Midwest countryside or sharks swimming in the shallows along the Georgia coast . . . unreeling across my heart like a half-remembered, poignant movie scenes all rolling at once. Moist eye syndrome . . . in public . . . again. Crap.

Later that same night . . .

My burned out connections are short circuiting again . . .

. . . I’m at a distant late November college football game again, sipping from a hidden flask and looking out on the snowy field from time to time . . . when suddenly my head rolls back . . .

. . . there I am mentally sketching the scene to assist me in remembering these last precious moments of college life, muttering to myself some kind of French version of my college team’s fight song . . . nudging someone who was about to go off to a distant Asian war’s battlefields, blissfully unaware of the violence about to come our ways. I nudge him again, “Man, let’s never forget this . . . say . . . let’s promise we do this every five years in remembrance of these good times . . . ”

“What?”

“Don’t chicken out, man. Just be ready to run like a bastard when the final gun goes off and storm the field.”

He stares at me, smiling but not sensing any trouble. We had done this before. Neither of us understood. This would be our last time as students. As we charge the field, over his shoulder I see players looking and coming towards us, moving slowly down the length of the long cold sideline benches, trying to seem casual as they shove over the tables of football crap and push aside the State Troopers there to protect them from us. They are seniors like us and want to remember this last time as well.

It was our last time, indeed, for my friend died in a distant, unnamed rice paddy eleven months later.

It was a good thing that we never knew that that was going to happen. Those were truly our days before the disasters, well, let’s just call them unnatural and unsettling times — real, imagined, hyped, hustled and Hollywood-ed — to come.

We had styled ourselves as mavericks. counter cultural, and anti-political then, but would slowly over many decades become (expediently?) pragmatic, babbling, at times rationalizing . . . sometimes even kind of . . . like used car salesmen. The personal would become political twenty years later, and then vice versa times 1000 two decades further.

– – – – –

A bit later in February 2018

We’ve been living in a human zoo without cages, what forty years ago would have been called a freak show. You know the places — where people in dark corners pass crap around. Back then we thought this was confined to the peep shows, bawdy film houses or urine-soaked doorways in the sketchy sections of town.

Now, all of a sudden, it seems to those who have been following these developments that we are being assaulted by daily recitations of not just the weird but the repugnant doings of the people at our national cockpit’s flight controls . . . abusers, sex crazed addicts . . . certifiable lunatics both inside and outside the cockpit are crowding to get into it to maintain or wrest control over the nation’s flight level and vector.

Today’s high tech, White House cockpit probably has millions of lights all around it — green lights . . . red ones . . . all kinds of blinking dials — supposedly it’s a wonderful place to be. The surge of power its engines have — we don’t feel it way out here in the cheap seats, but the feeling . . . up there in front must be like driving top fuel dragster. You can feel that incredible, kick in the pants surge of power behind you. It might even beat that of my motorcycles all to hell . . .

This past election’s harvest seems completed, and another summer is coming, and we will be saved from the lint-heads and elitist malcontents of the establishments (of whatever ilk they are) and their small fake-mushroomed crises and scandals unheinous and of no clear and present danger to the financial security or physical safety of our country’s men and women.

Yet, the mood of the nation appears vengeful, greedy, bigoted and blindly reactionary on both sides of the debate. Yet both sides for the most part just want a White House who will leave them alone.

The predominant feeling, particularly among the young, seems to be one of bewilderment and despair. They post on their social media pages, “What the hell is happening and where do we go from here and . . .”

The pendulum keeps taking wild, big swings but we are becoming more and more unsure of whether it’s going to come back into a more regular motion. People seem on the verge of saying “What the hell is the sense of trying to hold on?” Both sides seem to be parties of expediency, something that’s put together from pieces that don’t fit together every couple years. We don’t like this dim, vulgar and vague new politics. It is a can of worms, a fast-rolling ball of madness, incompetence, and a bunch of ego freaks running around in circles with nobody in charge.

There’s just so damn much weird energy out there. Everyone — the politicians, their staffs, and the media — are all on the edge — sharp edges — sharper than any I have ever seen, including some of my life’s edgiest moments on two wheels. I used to think that it was impossible to imagine anything stranger or weirder or higher or closer to those freak-me-out edges I experienced out west on motorcycles. Those moments possessed a fearful energy that could put one over the top of anything. It sometimes stirred up a frenzy that nearly got me killed, but, Jesus Christ, it was something that I never forgot.

There is a sickness in the air. Our breathing is constricted not just by the toxic info air we breathe, but by the lung and mental spots that X-rays reveal to have formed from prolonged exposure. We possess sharp intelligence, but our infospheres make few demands on it. We need more than just a Medicaid paid, salutary holiday to a mountainside spa for the mind. Something quite radical is required. We need a complete and utter divorce from it. We are smarter that its providers assume. We deserve better.

The accompanying current rheum is much scarier and seems much less subject to correctives. Plus all our circuit breakers have been seemingly hard wired in the closed position, making the eventual overload that much more dangerous.

Copyright © 2018 From My Isle Seat