Cry If I Want To

“I certainly hope not, and if that is the dreary case, how the hell does she think she's going to keep Bill Clinton from horning in on everything (NPI.) Honestly, has the nation gone to sleep on ... oops, not my blog? 'KTHXBYE!”

... I was busily ranting away at Frank's place when I realized, tis only right, mete and just to confine one's rant to one's own blog. Especially when you exceed the comment box.

Based on the results of yesterday’s primaries we may yet see a former President as First Gentleman in the White House ...

Frank had writ (done wrote?) (writed?) and suddenly I was overcome, as if by fumes. So infuriating was the realization—and don't tell me America hasn't thought of this, although it is perfectly obvious it has not—Bill Clinton will no more stay out of the Oval Office than he successfully kept his pants zipped. (That sentence would be better in present tense, but it seemed crude; one does not really know. One did know, however—and however unwillingly—more about presidential ejaculatory matter and other grossities than we, as a nation, ever wanted.) (It stains.)

Did this not carve a deep enough rut in the national neocortex? Are not all, to a man and woman, sick to death of Bill Clinton and his close relations? (Oops, bad choice of words.) If the name Clinton be not anathema enough, take a gander, I dare you, at the worst, most devotedly unhip, glaringly 1995, clunky, unreadable excuse of a website ...

Do you know what youth for Hillary is called? (Hold your barf, please. We have bags.) 

“Hillblazers.” That's right, and anyone under the age of twenty found clicking that link will be promptly sent into treatment. I have monitors.

When the great culture war of the Sixties was over ... oh, sigh. Same old rift, nay, same old ne'er-to-be-bridged chasm. Between, you got it, the normal and Teh Square. 

Which is how she won Ohio.

(I wonder how the vote came down in Winesburg.)

Next up: Watch Barack Obama busta move.

Hating Hillary

Frank writes on Listics: “Stanley Fish fishes around the Jason Horowitz article in GQ, but neither man can quite bring himself to call the Hillary hating what it is. Jason? Stanley? It’s MISOGYNY ... I am puzzled about how the topic of “hating Hillary Clinton” could be addressed without either writer (or their editors) making a single call-out regarding the misogyny and sexism that underlie so much of the vituperative ad feminam critiques.”

Way to go, Frank! And here I thought the only man who could really "get" what it's like, being on the receiving end, would have to be black.

Like Chuck D, who elaborates so well on John Lennon's somewhat prescient, “Women are the niggers of the world.”

Yessah boss, we is. We's mighty careful what we do, where we go, how we talk.

Remember, however low a man, there is always some one lower than he. Whom, as he wishes, he may treat like dirt, ignore like dirt, take for granted like the dirt beneath his feet.

If Hillary is elected, this will be more interesting than Obama drawing racists out of the woodword—they already been drawn. But the weird silence of men on the ugliness of misogyny, the horror feminae ... know any guy who speaks up on that?

Besides Frank?

Just Like That

That's all I've been hearing in my head, Frank.

My seven deep dark secrets? Not so much.

Bearer of Bad Tidings

... I hate to be, but Fra-ank, if I think of it this way:

"One way to sort it out is to think of it as the populists versus the corporations"

Honey, we be dead.

Alternate Title: Frank Goes to a Conference.
But that would be too, too informational.

Zo Gets Her Badge On

What the fork was I bitching about? There had been this badge up at Listics that took me forever to mouseover ... and when I did, whoa! Of course now it's long gone—I told you, I operate on, um, Icelandic time—but there's nothing easier than helping yourself, on a Mac. Just drag that sucker to the desktop, and it's mine mine mine. Unless of course FP has some kinda weird license on it. Copyright I get. That other stuff, no. As far as I can tell, that other thing plays to the conscience, which makes it just tighty-whitey liberal do-goodism. Not that I don't believe in the Good, or that it springs perpetually from the heart—I simply cannot stand anything that smacks of PBS.

So, after finally remembering what this thing was on my desktop—Frank! What greater honor, what higher accolade! I display proudly “The Good Blogkeeping Certification of Incivility!”


That Frank is ...is an old hippie. Is what he is. Not, of course, wholly unlike oneself.

Old not in years—well, maybe that too, depends on your perspective—but to have once been a hippie is to shed traces forever after of that far-away state of heart, of mind ... much as a distant star sheds a light visible only if you tilt your head a certain way.

Dear HST, you can still see the line where the wave broke, from Grizzly Peak. On good day you can see over the city and, way out to sea, all alone, the Farallons. The water is so bright. What I have always thought is that the wave never broke at all, but rose higher and higher til it curled over the San Francisco and fell into the Pacific, disappearing into the ocean again. So that, really, there was never any end. Not in me, not in Frank, or Annie ... not in a million other souls. The wave may grow smaller as it ripples outward in both the ocean and the dusty dimension of time, may seem to disappear ... but that is illusion, my dear Mr. T. You know as well as I, waves never die.

Of course, Hunter Thompson is dead. Largely because he never stopped playing that edge. To get jacked that high, daily, to write, to live in supreme coolness (what a burden, in itself)... an unsustainable method if ever there was one. Which became clear the moment any of us had kids. Although one of the saddest scenes I remember was coming across a campsite of utterly stoned parents ... and a band of puzzled, dirty children, who ran up to our car like beggars. Hi! Where you going? What's your name? When really, they were terribly lonely.

If I'm talking to HST again, there must be Gonzo about. Which is at least half hippie anyway—at least for those who had edge. In Berkeley, we had edge. Some of us still do. There's me ... there's Dave Winer ...

Edge as opposed to those drug-addled flower children in the Haight (present company excepted, Annie.)

So here you are, dear href Frank. My public thanks. I've never received an award for being a pain in the ass! (Unless you count my divorce decree.)

You're the best,
Zo