Tag: Suckage

Things that totally suck

So Much For That Theory

Advice

As any fule kno, I have long advised people not to believe any of the so-called “scientific” studies out there, because when you get down to it, they’re all done with an agenda and are therefore untrustworthy. The worst, of course, are all those “medical” papers which tell you that doing X will cause you to die horribly from Y, because nowadays doctors are a bunch of insufferable busybodies who, like Democrats, know just what’s best for you and can’t wait to tell you all the ways they do.

There was one study a while ago, however, which gave me a little hope: I don’t remember the exact study or even the data, but it showed that a glass of red wine with dinner (not as dinner) was actually good for one’s health. Needless to say, I was overjoyed because as I often say, a meal without wine is… breakfast.

Of course, that study (which was published by some Italian doctors, perhaps a warning sign) has since been summarily debunked. Red wine, apparently, is now worse for you than chewable morphine, sharing a needle with Milo Yiannopoulos, or mainlining Drano. (That’s not what this new study says, of course; I’m making it all up, probably just like they’re doing.)

Screw that. As some smart guy (Joe Jackson, not one of the Jackson Five) once wrote: everything gives you cancer. And he’s probably right, in that just about anything taken to excess will bugger up your health. Sheesh, drinking two gallons of water at a gulp [sic] will kill you; however, I’ve drunk close to two gallons of red wine in an evening (back in the 1970s, uh-huh) and all I got was shit-faced drunk and a two-day hangover. And lost, when I tried to drive home.

Here’s my take on all of it. Eat and drink whatever you want. Just don’t overdo it, and do a modicum of exercise. (I’ve taken to walking a couple of miles a day, and I haven’t felt this good in years. Also, I’ve lost 20lbs since November last year.) Go ahead: eat that Twinkie. Just eat one occasionally, and not the whole frigging box in one go, and you’ll be okay. Ditto wine, cheese, bacon, chocolate, and all the stuff that’s supposed to kill you.

And if you lack the willpower to eat just a little instead of it all? Well, it will kill you. But I’m not going to chide you, because for so many years I had no willpower either, and it was going to kill me. So there ya go.

From Reader Old Texan comes this beauty, which I’ve called “Heart Attack Jenga”:

Go on; you know you want to.

Update: Apparently, chocolate works for men’s hearts (6 days per week!). If this is true, when I die they’ll have to beat my heart to death with a stick. But be warned: next week some other guy will discover that chocolate gives you incurable syphilis, or something.

Despair And Rage

Terrorism

After the bombing at the concert in Manchester, Katie Hopkins wrote a despairing article about carrying on:

After the Westminster terror attack on March 26 I said we were cowed. That we were like ants, carrying on as normal, waiting for the next footstep to fall.
And today I see this to be true. Ants, squashed by a car, hewn in half by a truck, bounced off the bonnet of a 4×4, punctured by ballbearings and shrapnel from a hardware store.
And the only thing we ants can do is act busy. Whip ourselves up into a frenzy of activity. Move this way and that. Scurry about carrying things. Film ourselves walking to work. Make posters about ‘having a cup of tea’, get cross about what is said on twitter.
…
The terrorists want us dead. They want the infidel to be slaughtered. And they spread their message most effectively by targeting our children, our little girls.
Try and deny you don’t feel a change in the mood of our country. Try and deny you don’t feel we are a little bit less.
Tell me you don’t feel like you’ve taken a battering, made it to the twelfth then someone punched you square in the stomach, drawing the air from you in one long ooof.
…
When the only option is to carry on as normal, what the hell else are we going to do?
Carrying on as normal is not defiance. Or strength. It is the default.
When someone dies in our family, we carry on as before because the alternative is to lie down under our duvet and hope the world goes away.
And sometimes we even try that for a bit, too.
But in the end, reluctantly, we default and carry on as normal. This does not make us strong. Or united. It makes us desperate to feel better.
This country is sick. It is calling out for a doctor. We need to know what will cure us. What action do we take? What do we do? How can we stop the hurt?

I can suggest a few actions, Katie, but you’re not going to like them because they’re difficult and harsh.

Outlaw the Muslim religion in Britain. Close the mosques, then tear them and the minarets down. Deport the known radicals — start with the imams, even the “moderate” ones — and go from there. Reestablish Christianity as the official State religion. Start persecuting the remaining Muslims: make it difficult for Muslims to hold State jobs — start with the Muslim members of Parliament by mandating that no Muslim can hold elected office (like you used to do with Catholics, by the way), then spread that ban out to any State job, national or local. Close their bank accounts, stop all welfare payments and withdraw council housing privileges. Confiscate their real estate properties out from under them if they refuse to leave Britain. Outlaw halaal establishments. Make it more difficult for Muslims to stay in Britain than to leave. Confiscate their British passports, revoke their citizenship and make them “stateless”. Reverse the “refugee” flow back into the other direction by giving all Muslims thirty days to leave the country — and make sure they can only go on to Muslim countries, because we sure as shit don’t want more of them over here, and I’ll bet most of Europe doesn’t want them either.

In case you’re wondering why I’m suggesting something so brutal, and where I’m getting all these ideas, the answer’s simple: it’s what the Arab Muslim nations have been doing for over sixty years to the Jews (and in some cases to Christians too) living in their countries.

Yeah, they’re going to hate you. Stop being pussies about it.  They hate you already. Try hating them back, in greater measure. If the incidence of terrorism increases, speed up the deportations, imprison them until it’s their time to go — hell, the British invented the concept of “concentration camps” in 1900 in South Africa, remember? — and if they start screaming about legal protections, change the laws.

And if you don’t have the national will (what we Septics call “balls”) to do all that, then give up, submit to the will of Islam and lick the hands of the religious police of Islam who beat you in the streets for wearing short skirts or eating pork pies, because that’s all you deserve.

Yeah, it’s going to hurt. It’s going to hurt your economy, your famed sense of decency and even your fabric of nationhood. Sometimes, when you fight fire with fire, everyone gets a little burnt. That’s still much better than being the only one who does. And right now, your children are the only ones getting burnt by the fire of Islam. Do nothing, and all this — 10/10, Manchester, and the many atrocities to come — will never end.

Yes, this is horrible. But remember: you didn’t cause this, or start it; they did. You just need the resolve to finish it.

Update: Yes, you may consider this a “backlash“. The first of many.

Here We Go Again

Politics, Two-Minute Hate

Buckle your seatbelts, folks: this one is going to make the Pussification rant seem like a ladies’ tea party.

Over at some website I’ve never heard of, a guy named Spencer Quinn has some nice (and some not-so-nice) things to say about Your Humble Narrator (and you really need to read the whole article before you read any further). I feel I need to respond, and in so doing, I’ll set the record straight and make my position on some of his discussion points perfectly clear.

My problem with the alt-Right is the same problem I have with libertarians: as commenter “Pat Buchanator” once put it at Instapundit: “This is how it always is with libertarians. No matter how appealing that quart of vanilla ice cream looks, there’s always that tablespoon of dog shit mixed in that turns you off.” Thus it is too with the alt-Right and me:  we start off with some common ground — quite a lot, actually — and then the conversation reaches that “Oh, bloody hell! Why did you have to go and spoil it?” moment, when Teh Crazy comes out of its hole.

My common ground with the alt-Right is this: like them, I think that Western civilization and culture is the greatest thing that ever occurred to mankind. It has elevated our society from brutishness and beastliness into civilization, quite possibly to the zenith of thought, achievement and prosperity. Just taking the period from Ancient Greece to the Internet, it is difficult to imagine how life would exist today were it not for Western culture — the sciences, economy, music, arts, literature, morals, manners and mores, the whole damn thing. Western civilization, in other words, is absolutely worth maintaining, prolonging, venerating and all that.

And here’s the first little roadblock that the alt-Right throws in my way: their distaste, and even hatred for Jews.

I have no idea why that is. Pound for pound, the Jews have contributed as much or more to Western civilization than any other group — it’s even called the “Judeo-Christian tradition”, FFS — and to discount this contribution deliberately, to me, shows a shallow intellect at best. (At worst, Hitler, but I’m not going to go there.) Of course, I know that many Jews are socialists, communists, progressives, one-worlders, and all those things that are not only themselves distasteful, but are contradictory to Western thought. Ending slavery in the Western hemisphere (an action performed solely by Western nations, lest we forget) is not the same as allowing Western culture to be perverted or submerged by inferior cultures — and let’s be perfectly honest, when compared to Western culture, all other cultures are in general absolutely inferior to ours. To say otherwise is to be ignorant of history, or to be able to consciously deny the fact of the matter despite all evidence to the contrary. Judaic culture, by the way, is not inferior to, say, Western culture and civilization because in no small part, theirs is almost indistinguishable from that of Western Europe because of their commonality. That Israeli liberals seem perfectly prepared to help bring about the destruction of Eretz Israel was always a mystery to me until it was explained to me (by one of my good friends, an Orthodox Jew) that these liberals hate the state of Israel because it is culturally closer to Western European democracy than it is to Eastern European socialism. And the liberal Israelis have camp-followers all over the world: in Europe, Britain, the United States and anywhere that Jews can be found in any numbers. Does that mean “conspiracy”? Sure, if you’re a moron, because there are many, many Jews who are conservative, too — but somehow, the Conspiracy seems to have passed them by? Not credible.

So: am I pro-Israel? You betcha. I’m even more supportive of Israel when I look at the nations of assholes who want Israel destroyed.

Do I think that a lot of Jews are liberal assholes? You betcha, again. (Don’t even ask me about Jews and their support for gun control, unless we also mention JPFO, who also seem to have missed the memo.)

Am I prepared to become an anti-Semite because of The Great Jewish Conspiracy? Think again, Adolf.

Would I stand aside if some anti-Semitic pricks started playing their little neo-Nazi reindeer games with Jews in the streets? Not only would I not stand aside, but I’d be standing between the two groups, telling the anti-Semites that they’d have to get past me first.

Ich habe Dachau gesehen.

And as long as I have breath in my body, “Never again!” will not be just an empty phrase, even if that seems to be the case with some Jews(!), who think that their tribe’s survival of the Holocaust was somehow irrelevant in today’s world.

So the minute some alt-Rightist starts with that anti-Semitic shit, I turn right off, because I will never be part of that insanity. (It doesn’t even have to be the alt-Right; over at Taki’s Magazine — which I generally love — I’ll be reading something amusing or educational, and then the Great Zionist Conspiracy gets mentioned, and figuratively speaking, I toss the magazine across the room.)

The next thing about the alt-Right that gets up my nose is their little unicorn-rainbow dream of a “White ethnostate”.  Once again, oh FFS. Let me tell you this: I grew up in a wannabe-White ethnostate, I knew White supremacists, and oh my gawd, I was even related to a bunch of them. They were all, to a man, mean-spirited, ugly people, and their system of government — apartheid — was even uglier than they were. Even though their philosophical underpinning made apparent sense — the catastrophe that was (and is) Black Africa showed that Blacks were incapable of self-government — but their prescription to protect themselves against that was horrible and ultimately doomed to failure, as events would prove. Forget that shit; I not only hated it, and them, but I rebelled against it, stopping well short of planting bombs and shooting random White people in the streets, however, because those are what we call today terrorists. Even with the best intentions in the world, I was not going to become a White Nelson Mandela (who was, lest we forget, as much of a terrorist as Yasser Arafat despite, like Arafat, becoming somehow acceptable in his later years as a head of state). As much as I loathed apartheid, I was not going to take that next step, because too many innocent people would be harmed. Remember that, because it will be important later.

Now some people, e.g. the aforementioned Mr. Quinn, have trouble reconciling my position with my somewhat trenchant thoughts set out in Let Africa Sink (I told you I’d need to republish it). They all miss the point. Let Africa Sink was written in a mood of profound sadness, pessimism and despair, and was never meant to be some kind of rallying-cry and blueprint for a bunch of sick racists. FFS: I am an African myself; I was born there, I lived there for a third of a century, and my family first arrived in the Cape in 1692. I have every right to call myself an African, as much or even more than Jesse Jackson can call himself an American. I left Africa because I saw absolutely no hope for the whole continent, not just South Africa (which, by the way, is well on the way to joining Zimbabwe, the Congo and all the other little beauty spots over there). I left because all I could see was a future of bloodshed, hatred, venality and human ruin. I have seen nothing since that has made me want to change my opinion by one iota. Africa, as a place and as a human entity, is fucked beyond words, and there is nothing, nothing that will end or even ameliorate that scenario.

Now stay with me here, because what sets me apart from the alt-Right is that I won’t — can’t — make the leap from Africa being so screwed to “Blacks are therefore inferior to Whites”. You know why I can’t? Because of Ben Carson, Walter Williams, Thomas Sowell, Clarence Thomas, Richard Pryor and Denzel Washington (to name but some). Even an idiot like Maxine Waters, despite being a socialist to her core, has not advocated racial violence and anti-White terrorism (so far). In other words, when Black people aren’t Africans but Americans — Americans who moreover believe profoundly that Western European culture is far better than the alternative and who therefore espouse the principles of Western civilization despite their own ethnic heritage — it is impossible for me to say that in general principle, Black people are inferior to White people. Can’t go there, even if Carson et al. are woefully in the minority in the Black community. I can’t go there even in the face of evidence that Black-run cities (or, to be more correct, Democrat-run cities) are pathetic failures and African-style hellholes of poverty, corruption and homicide. I see little difference, by the way, between the looming disaster that is San Francisco (which is not run by Blacks) and the appalling tragedy of Detroit (which is, and has been for a long time). If a majority of Blacks espouse socialism, the fault is not their ethnicity but their education. (Hell, a sizable number of White people espouse socialism, too; don’t get me started on those idiots.)

If so many Blacks vote Democrat instead of Republican, and end up with failure in consequence, is that a reason to think that Blacks are that inferior to Whites? Let me point out a little-known fact: without the White (Afrikaans- and English-speaking) working-class voters, South Africa’s apartheid would have collapsed decades before it did; but like American Blacks were by Democrats, they were promised jobs, job security and social advancement by the Afrikaner nationalists, which meant that the White working classes bought into the eventual promise of apartheid: separate development. The “dumping grounds” of South African apartheid followed shortly thereafter. White voters, in other words, are just as capable of adopting an evil philosophy (apartheid) as Black voters are drawn towards supporting a different evil philosophy (socialism).

And that’s another part of alt-Right philosophy that pisses me off. If I may use the rhetoric of Albert Jay Nock: suppose that you’re right; suppose that we Whites should create an exclusive White ethnostate that bars (among so many others) Blacks and Jews: how, exactly, are you going to create this little White nationalist Nirvana? How are you going to move this from a unicorn’s wet dream to ugly (and it would be ugly) reality? It sure as hell isn’t going to happen in the United States, no matter how much you want to create the White Man’s Paradise in, say, Utah or Idaho, because there will have to be some rearrangement of peoples for that to happen — and I repeat, that ain’t gonna happen anywhere in the U.S. Good luck trying that elsewhere — well, maybe in South Africa’s Orania, but guess what: you alt-Righters won’t be welcome there because you’re not Afrikaans. See how this ethnic superiority thing works?

I saw at first hand how the South African government went about creating the reality of “separateness” in a multi-racial society, and let me tell you, it was revolting, appalling, and made me want to join Mandela’s Spear Of The Nation organization, albeit only for a short while. I’ll tell that story another time, because if I do so now, it will engender a red-hot anger in me that would make Pussification seem like a scholarly discourse.

Let me tell you all: underneath all the words about “White pride”, “promoting Western European values and culture” and “cultural superiority” are some really, really ugly beliefs, philosophies and plans of action; and I want absolutely no part of them.

I know that my way of supporting Western civilization might seem weak and ineffective to the alt-Right. I prefer to vote for politicians who prefer capitalism to socialism, Western culture over, say, Muslim culture or African culture. I prefer to write about Western civilization and extol it, letting people read my stuff and thereby (I hope) being persuaded to follow my example and in turn persuading others to be likewise. I raised my children in the Western tradition, and have drawn maybe thousands of people to my way of thinking — even if only by reading my stuff, they realize that they aren’t alone in their beliefs, and that our mostly-Anglocentric Western way of life is the right one.

Most of the human condition is dealing with The Pendulum: as our societies develop, the pendulum swings from Right to Left and back again. Often, the reverse swing is overly long, and that leads to all kinds of trouble. (The French Revolution’s Reign of Terror is an excellent example, by the way, albeit an example of showing that even Western civilization can screw things up.) The alt-Right, to me, represents just such an over-correction of The Pendulum’s erstwhile swing to the Left, and frankly, I don’t find much to recommend their fantasies.

I am aware that the alt-Right may turn on me and start with the name-calling, e.g. “race-traitor” (which sounds so much better in the original Afrikaans, volks-verraaier, and which has been used on me before), or their favorite, “cuckservative” (one who is nominally conservative, but actually in thrall to liberals), and all the other cute little epithets they’ve come up with to describe those who, if they aren’t with them, must be against them.

Guess what? I am against you. I’m against your anti-Semitism, your White supremacism, and all the other bullshit that you hide under camouflage phrases and euphemisms. I know exactly who you are, and I’m not one of you.

There is no “paradox” in my philosophy; I just refuse to succumb to the temptation of ascribing societal failures to outside influences such as the “Jewish Conspiracy” or “negroid inferiority”. (Historically, it reminds me too much of Weimar Germany and pre-1917 Bolshevism.) As Quinn noted, I don’t take that extra step in “logic” that will move me over to the alt-Right because quite simply, it’s a step too far. Sorry if that puzzles you. Life isn’t a simple case of black and white, or even Black and White: it’s far more complex than that, and I’m sorry if you can’t see it.

And one last thing: in his essay, Spencer Quinn has many kind words to say about my bravery and “brass balls” (as he puts it). Do not for one moment think that any of that is going to disappear should someone decide to confront me in person. Please remember that as a young man, I once stood up against the guns and sjamboks of Afrikaner apartheid; and I’m prepared, even in my old age, to stand up to you. I am a lot meaner now than I was then, and I have a lot less to lose. That’s not a challenge, by the way; as Quinn noted, I really just want to be left alone — and in the alt-Right’s case, that means not co-opting my writings in support of your foolishness.

Sincerely,

Kim du Toit

Disrespect

Culture

I remember once that Daughter was going out on a date with some guy (whom we hadn’t met), and of course we insisted on meeting him. (I should point out that we told her this a few days before the date, so there’s no excuse for what follows.)

So Date Day comes, the doorbell rings, and Daughter answers the door. Whereupon I hear some furious whispering from her — furious in that I could hear it from down the hall:
“You can’t show up to take me out dressed like that!”
“Why not?”
“I told you my parents are conservative!”
“I’m dressed okay.”
“No, you’re not — Jesus, they’re going to kill you! You have to go back home and change into something nicer! Go, go!” and I heard the door closing.

Of course, I got up and raced over to the library window to see what the kid was dressed like, to Daughter’s extreme embarrassment.

Let’s just say that he looked as though he’d just come from a beach party by way of working on his friend’s car, with dirty cutoff jeans, a ragged tee shirt, and flip-flops. No wonder Daughter had been appalled. And when I asked her, she said that she’d just used us as the excuse: she didn’t want to go out with him dressed like that. Good for her, but that’s not the point. Daughter had told young Slobbo, frequently, that her parents were conservative; so his appearance as a slob on that day was one of two attitudes (or both): “Screw your old-fart parents!” or “Your opinion doesn’t matter: I’ll dress the way I want.” (I should point out that a week later, he was gone from Daughter’s life. After she discovered that he already had a steady girlfriend at university in Houston.)

I don’t know when or how it became acceptable for women to dress up for dates, while their boyfriends think it’s okay to look as though they’ve just come from a beach party by way of working on their friend’s car, with dirty cutoff jeans, a ragged tee shirt, and flip-flops. I don’t even know why young women today put up with it, because at the heart of the matter, if the guy doesn’t care what he looks like when he’s out with her, I can’t help thinking that he doesn’t care what she thinks — surely, no woman would be proud to introduce Skid Row Simon as her boyfriend when he looks like, well, Skid Row Simon.

As with all things, allow me to illustrate with pitchurs. In each case, the girls are dressed exquisitely, while their dates… oy vey.

I should point out that in each case, the men are apparently no longer their boyfriends.

But my question is: what possesses women to answer the door to such slobs, and not say, “I’m not going out with you if you’re going to be dressed like that!” I can understand that less-attractive women may not have the luxury of turning down a date, any date; but the the two above could surely have said something. (For all the invective that Paris Hilton gets — mostly from envious people — you can’t deny that she’s always exquisitely dressed. And she can pick and choose her dates with aplomb, so why this?) And they’re not stupid young girls anymore, either: Paris was in her late twenties or early thirties, I think, when the above pic was taken.

At the heart of the matter is this: dressing like a slob when you go out by yourself is just being a slob, and while I disapprove, I don’t care too much because I have better things to rant about. But to show up for a date dressed like a fucking tramp shows profound disrespect for your partner — like she doesn’t matter — and that I cannot let go by without comment.

Young men need to get their shit together. What was a “statement” during the Dirty-Hippie Era (I was there, I know all about it) is no longer that statement; instead, the statement is: “I’m a tool and an asshole.”

And shame on women who enable this trend, too. I promise you this: if he doesn’t care how he looks to you, you don’t matter to him other than as a cock holster. Raise your standards, FFS, or you’re going to get treated like shit by men for your whole life.

Here’s one last pic to demonstrate the point: on the left, Don Draper and on the right, Jon Hamm. Same guy, different clothes.

If given the choice, a woman would prefer to go out on a date with the guy on the right (and it’s not a beach party), there’s something wrong with her.

For those men who want to update their look by going retro, start here.

Everyday Ennui

Bad News

Is it just me, or is the news nowadays really boring? I’m sure that to some people, it’s fascinating to watch the intrigues surrounding The Donald’s Executive Orders, or how the Socialists in the Democrat Party are doing their usual petulant-spoiled-child snit because they can’t get their own way, and of course there’s always the Loony Left who are still running around with their hair on fire because omigod-Hillary-wasn’t-elected-and-now-we’re-stuck-with-literally-Hitler! (Pro tip: not even close. In fact, if you look at their respective proclivities and ideologies, that Stalinist sow Hillary Bitch Clinton is far closer to the actual Hitler than Donald Hairstyle-Casino Trump.)

Then there’s the non-news, usually revolving around a Kardashian or some equally foul “reality” star (all of whom, I am glad to say, I know little or nothing at all), whose latest nude “selfies” have been “leaked” to Britain’s Daily Mail or whatever, or who have fallen in / out of love with some tattooed thug / rapper / loser [some redundancy]. To me, this is like having favorite performing seals at the zoo, and following their cute antics and tragedies and joys and heartbreaks and, and, and… and is that not a good description of reality TV? Does any of that shit actually matter to anyone who doesn’t write a gossip column / host a TV show? Does anyone care that some trailer-park artiste named Mama June (who actually looked like a walrus, according to some picture I saw which attached itself, burr-like, to my memory) has lost half her body-weight and now looks merely repulsive as opposed to slit-my-wrists grotesque?

Okay, maybe I’m being too harsh. Because I’m right now at a stage of my life where I honestly don’t give much of a flying fuck about anything, perhaps the Republican “replacement” for ObamaCare really is a stinker, or it isn’t. Maybe it’s a Big Deal that Senate Democrats, that bunch of neo-Trotskyist turdbrains, are risking the “nuclear option” of a simple majority vote (having created that little bit of parliamentary legerdemain themselves, anyway) that would put Trump’s guy Gorsuch in the Supreme Court. And maybe the ceaseless yowling of the Left and their publicity arm (a.k.a. the mainstream press and TV) means something in terms of how it’s affecting Trump’s First 100 Days. (Which, by the way, is an equally-specious construct because a hundred days means sweet F.A. to anything. What if the number was 105? 110? 92? They’re all just numbers, artificial deadlines meant to put pressure on a new President, and they, along with the people who have created this artificial yardstick, mean precisely squat.)

And maybe the riots on campus and inner-city streets by the frigging loonies of the so-called “antifa” are going to continue apace without any action by the Justice Department or local police forces — right up until a couple of Korean shopkeepers grab themselves some AR-15s and start doing a little riot control on their own behalf. (You can stop all that cheering and clapping now; it’s a hypothetical.)

And maybe Russia did this, and maybe they didn’t; and ditto the Israelis, or the Brits, or the inhabitants of Outer Assholistan, whoever the hell is breathlessly “discovered” to have influenced blah blah blah, b-b-blah blah blah —  is it any wonder that we look on this bullshit as though it were just a plotline of Days Of Our World Turns General Hospital? (Are any of those shows still airing? No, don’t tell me; I care even less about them than I do about Amy Schumer’s latest fiasco, or maybe it’s not hers but her Uncle Charlie’s.)

Here’s my take on all of it: it’s all bullshit, the whole fucking lot of it. Everybody’s either lying, making shit up or telling the absolute truth, or telling partial truths. Nobody can tell the difference nowadays, so in the absence of a decent alternative, I’m not going to believe a single thing anyone tells me anymore — whether it’s the President, the Congress, the Pope, the EPA, the CDC, the FBI, the State Department and especially the lying Jackals Of The Press (JOTP) — I’m going to assume that each and every one of them is lying their asses off, and I’m going to ignore them all until the bullets start to fly.

Which is what I think will have to happen before we can start trusting these assholes again, because it’s no longer in vino veritas; it’s in telo veritas — in modern terms, truth at gunpoint.

In the meantime, I’m going to concentrate on turning the 5,000-odd photographs of my adult life into pixels so I can finally throw away that damn giant shoebox of prints which I’ve schlepped across the Atlantic and over much of the United States for the past three decades.

That will have more meaning to my life than anything that mountebank Mitch McConnell says or does. Until the bullets start to fly, of course. And I don’t even care about that — because I am, as ever, extremely well-armed myself. They can all go to hell; I’m already in Texas. And now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to the range.

Black Despair

Grief & Loss

I lost it last night.

As I’ve been emptying out the house, I’ve come across all sorts of things which remind me of Connie; photos of a younger version whom, tragically, I never knew, old awards for some job excellence, thank-you letters from grateful clients and so on. Some of the things elicit a wry smile, some a strangled sob, and most a simple, “Oh, sweetheart.”

The kitchen has been the absolute worst. You see, amongst all her other achievements, Connie was a superlative cook, a cross between artist and artisan, and any of my Readers fortunate to have been guests at our dinner table will attest to that fact. Her spice “rack” (two overhead cupboards’ worth) overflowed onto the counter into four actual racks, and her utensils, from Le Creuset pots and pans to a wooden tortilla press — you don’t think we bought tortillas, do you? — were like the woodworking tools used by master craftsman Norm Abram: a means to create works of peerless quality. And unlike so many women, cooking for her was never a chore but a delight, just as long as she wasn’t asked to make prosaic stuff like sandwiches (I was deputized for that).

Back when I was working in Corporate America, I was in a meeting in my office with two of my subordinates when I got a call from my secretary: “It’s Connie; she apologizes but she has an important question for you.”
So I hit the speakerphone and said, “You’re on speaker, and I have Jim and Kenny here with me, so keep it clean.”
She laughed. “What do you want for dinner tonight?”
“I dunno; maybe just a salami sandwich?”
Icy silence. Then: “Hmph. Your choices are: Beef Burgundy or Banana Chicken Curry.”
“Oh. Okay, the curry sounds good,” and after the farewells I hung up, to see two pairs of eyes staring at me in astonishment.
“What’s the occasion?”
“No occasion.”
“You mean, she does this — cooks you this kind of meal — all the time?”
“Pretty much every night, unless we’re going out. But she doesn’t like to go to restaurants unless she’s tired.”
“Why?”
“She says she doesn’t like the way restaurants — even the good ones — screw up the food.”
“My God.”

So last night was Kitchen Night. I got about halfway through — tossed the spices which neither I nor the kids wanted or needed — but when I got to the copper saucepans,  crepe cookers and ebelskiver pans, I ran into a wall. “I can’t do this, sweetheart… I just can’t do this anymore. It hurts too much,” and I collapsed against the counter, weeping like a little girl. If the earth had opened up and swallowed me at that moment, I would have welcomed it.

The kids (Daughter and BF along with Son&Heir and Canucki-Girlfriend) will finish the kitchen today and tomorrow. Without them, I would have just left the house, never to return. As it is, I could barely write this blogpost.

Sorry to unload on y’all, but I did warn you that there’d be days like this. Today, the isolation is not so splendid.