40 something years

Well, nearly fifty. My radio series scripts were written in 1970. I used manual typewriters in Milwaukee, Philadelphia, Allenwood, San Francisco, Sydney, Mill Valley and Cazadero, most of them little portables, a couple of Selectrics and IBM Executives on occasion. More than once, I had to use pencil and paper. Photocopiers were terrible back then, thin slick thermal paper that faded to nothing in a few weeks. Carbon paper was more durable, but you had to really bang the typewriter keys and mistakes were a tedious mess to correct with a hard ink eraser and a stiff little brush. I bought a lot of Liquid Paper. A fresh bottle was good for about a week and then it got thick and stringy, no matter how quickly you screwed the cap shut.

Useful personal computers came along in the mid-80s. Some of my best stuff at the time was written on an 8086 laptop that used floppies, no fonts, no bold, no italics. I wrote a show for IBM that was composed on an Osborne, had a dinky screen that you had to scroll left and right to see a whole line of text. The Amiga was considered a breakthrough. You could feed video through it, do captions and titles, draw stuff, animate it (sort of), and use it like a typewriter with a line printer, endless folds of perforated paper fed by a tractor. Floppies were smaller and slightly more durable, had hard shells. Still no internet. There was a tug of war between Betamax and VHS in America, plus a Philips cassette in Europe that you could turn over and record on both sides. Pro video was a chaos of 3/4" and three incompatible 1" open reel "C" formats. Studios in Australia were still using 2" quad tape. All audio was analog. I mention it because I was doing more film and video production than creative writing at the time.

Then I found myself sitting in a cubicle at Disney, spending Mickey's money to master home video product on D1 and D2, and I realized that my career in Hollywood was kaput. My movie scripts made it as far as the Development Committee at Columbia and got voted down 4-3 , vetoed by bosses at PSO, Kingman, and DeLaurentiis. Lyle Alzedo got sick and died, so my star vehicle for Lyle died, too. No matter what I pitched, the answer was always no. I decided to write books. The first one was written on an old portable Underwood by gaslight on a ranch that had no electric power. Oddly enough, it was published and did fairly well, a reference book with a humorous take on concepts and doctrines that ended in "ism." Decades later, I found a copy in a Colorado library, opened it and hung my head in dismay, wished that I had done a much better job. Writers mature slowly. My first novel took a long time to get right, twenty years from first draft to a third revision that actually makes sense, flows better.

As I became a better author, the market shrank. Book publishers consolidated or went out of business. Worse, as I gained control of my literary vision and a signature style, the world went bezerk with Political Correctness. Chicks, gays, and "people of color" were celebrated, straight white guys blackballed. I stretched my brain to grasp print on demand. My first few books covers were terrible, and I was completely baffled when it came to promotion. I sold no books. I gave up, segued to financial writing for Seeking Alpha and a business magazine in Abu Dhabi, did some writing for hire in the oil patch, helped new screenwriters at Zoetrope, self published a couple of nonfiction titles and wasted money at Kirkus and O Desk, shipped review copies hither and yon, and plugged my work on internet forums, all for naught.

Four years ago, I found a small plot of forest and pasture in the Ozarks, cleared a site at the top of a hill and built a house that my wife designed. When it was finished, I set up a little writing office in an old tin barn and began to write again, egged on by a talented novelist in New Mexico and an equally talented short story author in California, people I admired. The result was five new novels and five nonfiction titles, self published and handled with more confidence at Lulu, CreateSpace, Smashwords, and KDP. Books sales were slow, but I had forged an authorial voice that was natural to me. Fifty years of writing paid off in the sense that I could not be mistaken for anyone else, a unique storyteller, ruthless and expressive, unafraid to show and tell what happens between hard men and the women who love them. It doesn't matter, can't matter what other people write, whether I'm ignored or reviled. I'm too old to care, nearing the end of life. Fifty years of cigarette smoking has a price.

There is no undoing it. Not after such a gruelling uphill climb to a summit of my own, over a million words that had to be hammered like pitons on a sheer stone wall, no one to catch me if I fell.

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Has it occurred to anyone that the government shutdown should be made permanent?

If I understand it correctly, essential services are uninterrupted, Social Security and Medicare payments continue to gush, the Treasury is borrowing and jawboning as usual, and DoD has over a million people stationed all over the world eating three squares. FBI, DEA, BATF, and the Federal Bureau of Prisons are staffed 100%, and there's no question that Capitol Police and Secret Service are being paid. The Federal Government is the world's largest consumer of gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel, paying up to $100 a gallon to deliver it to Afghanistan. All of our MRAPs, F-16s, and ships at sea are still in business, every tank truck, barge, and escort.

It's hard to grasp how big the government is. Nine hundred thousand structures around the world, 3.4 billion square feet, 122 square miles under roof, with over two million vehicles and aircraft parked outside. Estimates of Federal employees and contractors are between thirty and fifty million, depending on how you count teachers, college professors, coaches, doctors, bankers and brokers worldwide who skim a six-figure income from Treasury debt, mortgage scalpers underwritten by Fannie, Freddie, Ginnie, FHA, and Section 8 largesse.

It's dead certain that Boeing, Lockheed, GE, and Raytheon would collapse without fat DoD contracts, but their national defense cash flow is contractual, immune from shutdown. If I had to wager, I'd bet that Congressional staff and travel junkets are immune, too.

I trust you know that the U.S. Government annually spends over $1 trillion more than it takes in from taxes and an infinity of fees including tariffs, asset seizures, and fines. The Feds are roughly $22 trillion in debt, unless you count unfunded entitlements of $200+ trillion. So, the obvious question is -- why not make this 25% "shutdown" permanent? It won't balance the budget or nick the ever-expanding entitlement gravy train, but it's a nice down payment.

Oooo, scary. People out of work!

I don't see why not. Every dollar the government spends on itself is a dollar taken from the private free enterprise economy, engine of all innovation and profit, minus the burden of regulatory compliance and shipping and handling by tax accountants and molasses slow bureaucrats who can't be fired or compelled to show up for work.

Returning medical practice to the doctors would be nice. When I was a young man, we paid doctors in cash like plumbers and grocers. All private hospitals did charity cases, no charge. I know it's hard to believe, but drugs were cheap. Not in some distant prehistoric time, but in the 1960s, before affordable Blue Cross was hijacked by a tidal wave of suddenly sacrosanct welfare payola, illegal aliens, and anchor babies.

I'd like to see Congress undertake a new mission, no new laws, only repeals, but I'll take a 25% shutdown gladly. Let it run a few months. Kick the tires on smaller government. Make it easier to hire people in the private sector by cutting regulations -- or furlough enforcement staff, turn off a few light bulbs and computer screens, have a garage sale and sell off some of the quarter million GSA vehicles that regulators toodle around in. It'll be difficult to retrain former government employees to do anything efficiently and cheerfully, but newspapers say that there are more jobs available than those unemployed, so a big chunk of the 800,000 out of work at Federal agencies will be snapped up in a hurry by private employers. Who knows? They might enjoy working for a living, instead of snoozing at the Bureau of Paperwork.

I'm told by NPR that vital Homeland Security operations like TSA are working without being paid. First off, pull the plug on NPR, thanks. TSA should be funded by airlines and airports and ordered to keep their hands off frequent flyers, cute chicks, grannies, and children.

Above all, bring the troops home. Not just a handful from Syria. An orderly retreat from bases in Korea, Okinawa, Guam, Bahrain, Kuwait, Afghanistan, Germany, and Saudi Arabia would go a long way toward enhancing national security, concentrating on defense of North America, patrolling our shores and borders. International trade is a stupid justification for imperialism, and there's no sane purpose in policing the Islamic world as badly as we police Chicago.

Whether private citizens want to subsidize Israel or cancer research is up to them. Voluntary associations are the whole meaning of a free society. Let freedom ring and put government on a Weightwatchers diet, shed some of those bloated trillion dollar deficits.

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The price of things

Shocking how much it cost. Forget the thousands and tens of thousands. Lots of things are expensive. But writing has mountains of constitutional and moral expense. Writers go naked in public, confess all, obvious in their ideas, in narrative, every word and glance exchanged by fictional characters. Writing careers are measured in long lonely decades of effort. I began to write over thirty years ago. It was never cheap or easy.

The fourth volume of Chris & Peachy was extremely costly in every respect. I sold my car to write The Tar Pit, destroyed my remaining credit to write Charity. But Finding Flopsie was worst of all. I gambled and lost. I liked the story well enough, but I failed to conceptually sew together a believable portrait of Peachy and her sister Kelly. Flopsie was a weepy soap opera, preposterous and overly ambitious. Chandler had similar trouble with Farewell My Lovely, one of his best, and Hammett choked with an unwieldly Dane Curse saga.

It happens. Writers reach too high. They get confused about how brilliant they are. I should not have tried to write from inside a female character's head. Men can always get away with depicting how women react and behave, but not their internal experience.

I can't say that I regret writing Flopsie, win lose or draw. Without Flopsie and everything that it cost financially and spiritually, there would have been no Kyle, no Karen, no Partners, and worse, no Executive Branch. As bizarre as it sounds, my entire life was lived to write a short story about Alaska. I'm famous in Fairbanks, and it finally sunk in that Alaska is an uniquely free and independent arctic continent, totally unlike the Lower 49. It wouldn't take much to push Alaska into secession when the Lower 49 go economically kablooey, which is already baked into the political mudpie, purely a matter of time, maybe sooner than we know.

A huge expenditure, when you think of it. 68 years of life, eight novels, an enormous trail of ambition and wreckage, high water marks and penury, all the fullness of life as a confused youngster, a charismatic playboy and a serious intellectual voice, every day of it a qualifying precondition to conceive a story about Alaskan independence, a future worth winning.

Fair price, I guess.

There's a terrible truth about entertainment. You're only as good as your last show. It's an impersonal fact of nature. Same thing is true of medical practice, engineering, government, and family life. Screw up once and your career is over. That never deterred me from going forward, endeavoring to get it right at least once. The Executive Branch was a final wager at the table of history. I bet my reputation as a soothsayer and storyteller, winner take all.

People don't do that for light and transient causes.

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Conveyances

It's been an interesting life.

All sorts of cars and trucks, a fire engine, an ambulance, a bulldozer, and a betjah. Hovercraft, ferries of all sizes, outboards, rafts, the Queen Mary, a canal barge, DC-8, DC-9, 707, 727, 737, Trident, Fokker, L-1011, 747, 757, 767, 777, Airbus, Embreaer, and BAE. An ancient prop with magneto ignition, a fast Cessna turboprop, an ultralight, ATV, utility crane, go cart, sled, and horseback. A wheelchair, a Chapman, a doorway dolly, shopping cart, and handheld leaning out of a TR-3. The parlor car on the 20th Century Limited, dining car on the Hiawatha, and the rung of a freight car. Subways, buses, British Rail, moving sidewalks, steam trains, a surgical gurney, and a parade float. Memorable taxi rides, golf carts, and Town Cars. Thousands of elevator doors opening and closing, an infinity of stairs, escalators, cobbles, asphalt, gravel, concrete, cornfields, storm drains, white sand beaches, ladders, and a bicycle built for two. My favorite destination was rural Luxembourg, but Singapore was pretty damn splendid.

If I was granted a wish, Elko beckons.

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Manhood

Some are great men. Many are average Joes. I'm about the size of half a man, a physical and moral midget. It's a valuable perspective, because the scale and scope of greatness are easily discerned, just as country folk behold an amazingly tall skyscraper and say oooo! As long as I live, I will always marvel at the Bank of China Tower, elegant glass shapes rising like a frozen pillar of crystal, a work of genius. The London Gherkin not so much. In fact there's not a single decent structure anywhere in Blighty. They have a hard time doing hotel rooms, too. The Brits are a benighted race. Generous, cheerful, industrious, honest, and talented, but no sense of design. Same thing on the Continent. Comfortable and utilitarian, never stupendous, always a headache trying to get from point A to point B.

America is the only place with good transportation, Australia first runner up, but it's unfair to compare them. There's nowhere to go in Oz. I like the Lucky Country, but they have no great men. They have folklore about highwaymen versus nitwits with a Royal license to govern.

So ... what is a great man?

Raw courage certainly seems fundamental, but many have been courageous. Clever is good, but cleverness is desirable to all men, a way to earn their way in life. Writers have a lot of trouble doing that. The courageous and clever seldom read. Horrible to consider, but radio and television supply what most men enjoy, football and cricket in particular. I find both of them to be intensely boring. Greatness has to be something bigger than golf or tennis.

A great man must hold the gift of life in his hands. He could be a neurosurgeon, a commando, the commander-in-chief of a great enterprise. Every waking moment is an urgent problem in prospect, another struggle to attack the impossible and chip away at it until it's tamed. On the radio just now, Mark Steyn said that Rush Limbaugh was "the indispensible man." Nope.  He's a talented clown, maybe a clever guy with the common touch, a postmodern Thomas Paine.

Popularlity cannot be measure of a great man. Jesus is popular, a free Get Out of Sin card, no thought necessary. Negro athletes are popular, no thought possible. Politicians are popular enough to win election with swing votes and massive media buys, one slogan per cycle. Hope and change. Make America great.

Hmm. It occurs to me that the measure of greatness is how much sorrow a man can carry, how great a burden his life becomes, embracing it as a challenge to his character. That was Lincoln in a nutshell. Davy Crockett at the Alamo. One of the most misunderstood men in American history was Jay Gould. He started with nothing, taught himself to be a road surveyor. At the end of his life he was feared, hated, sick, and friendless. Gould's crimes? -- the Union Pacific combine that stretched in all directions, Western Union, the first transatlantic cable, arbiter of a Wall Street panic. Many great men in the Gilded Age -- Morgan, Carnegie, Rockefeller, Ford, Firestone, Westinghouse, Edison. Their lives were difficult. They stood strong. Even the politicians had character, Theodore Roosevelt, William Jennings Bryan, Leland Stanford.

Most of the Civil War generals were great men, Union and Confederate. Most of the men who served in World War II were called to greatness and answered to the limit of their endurance. Admiral Lord Nelson at Trafalgar. William Wallace.

Oooo, wait a minute. Stop the presses. There was an American hero who inspired me more than all the others combined. An utterly tragic life, but pivotal in American political history, First Father of American Independence. His name is lost, no longer mentioned. A lawyer. Who cares about colonial lawyers? Did he say something important in a Crown court and be beaten so severely by tax bailiffs that he never recovered mentally, had to be replaced by Sam Adams?

"An act against natural equity is void." (James Otis)

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Liberty and force

I recently recorded a video and wrote a companion short story concerning the Executive, by which I mean a professional military compatible with anarchist theory, the rule of law, and competitive free market private enterprise.

In simple terms, the Executive is a traffic cop backed by nuclear weapons. Someone should possess the awesome power to deter aggression. I propose to make it a private firm owned by money center banks, insurance companies, pension funds, lunatic billionaires and other financial heavyweights, combined in a privately held consortium with periodic cash calls to fund national security in a fully free financial Wild West.

Ooooo! -- sounds dangerous all of a sudden. Free market capitalism, no regulators. Investors would probably go for it, let Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan direct the military and pay for it. I'll bet $100 to a donut that UBS and Deutsche Bank will want a piece of the action, too. There are numerous institutions who are hungry for freedom and prepared to pony up.

The price of civil liberty is small. A free society must have a judiciary to settle disputes and to control civilian police charged to investigate and deter street crime and murder. Matters like fraud are common law wrongs, often entailing class action and restraining orders to stop the looting and freeze funds. Money damages are the only remedy in common law jurisdictions. Shareholder suits are common. If our laissez faire judiciary is fair and objective, big financial institutions will be drawn irresistibly. Banks thrive in orderly, stable legal relationships. Every financial instrument, derivative, option, mortgage, share of stock, life insurance policy, and pension benefit is a contract. Why write bogus paper? Nothing but problems, wreck the firm and lose everything. Wall Street is loaded with lawyers to make sure that financial contracts are fair, valid, and enforceable. There are trillions of dollars backing those agreements.

Those trillions are thirsting for real security. A free society and its courts must be domiciled somewhere in the physical world. Court costs are pennies compared to national security. For instance, the Executive handles air traffic control, suppression of piracy and terrorism, armed defense of a geographic territory and sufficient clout to deter aggression by hostile foreign governments, of which there are many today and will be for the foreseeable future. Getting along with them financially involves project finance and all sorts of tax gymnastics that will remain worthwhile for traditional players like HSBC and sovereign wealth funds. Many states detest the idea of freedom, especially China, Russia, Britain, France, USA -- the permanent members of the Security Council and insatiable tax leeches. Not one of them is financially solvent or efficiently managed. Their idiotic plan for global progress is to "save the planet" and shuffle additional tens of millions of penniless migrants to Europe and America.

The Executive Branch handles immigration in a free society, requiring passports, a plausible purpose to enter the market, and enough money or sponsorship to find a place to work and reside. No special status for diplomats or divas. Common law means common law in all of the Executive activities at territorial borders, airports, seaports, etc.

Most the Executive's power is held in reserve to deal with the unexpected. There is an air force and a navy, a professional nucleus of army officers and troops, security men to guard the Commander-in-Chief and military sites. Not a penny more than essential facilities and trained personnel. That's the beauty of private funding by cheapskate bankers, who will try to trim every national defense line item, but provide enough dough to protect their golden goose, a free market without financial regulation. A good rule of thumb is 1% of GDP for national security expense including procurement and maintenance. That might translate in the financial sector to a 0.05% annual haircut, the highest "tax" rate on earth, but they get to vote as shareholders, choose directors, set policy, and control what the Executive does.

Civilian control of the military is a natural condition. Private enterprise is the engine of all value creation and free cash flow. Finance fuels the market and connects entrepreneurs to capital investors, lenders, and insurers. Successful enterprises pay the freight for national security. As old stodgy companies are displaced by new high tech market entrants, shares in the Executive might change hands. National security might grow or shrink, depending on the tenor of the times. It's impossible to predict how long freedom and security would exist, if young Turks refuse to fork over funds. No one can be compelled to support the Executive.

The one thing that threatens a free society most of all is NAP, the idea that military force is wrong, no matter what the mission or legal basis. The same complaint can be levied against law courts, police, private property, and a currency of paper bank notes. It doesn't matter what folks think or say about the use of force. War is hell. It destroys homes and factories, breaks things and kills people. No one really wants war, except the masses whipped into a frenzy by a charsimatic fool. I recommend using a weathervane. If the Commander-in-Chief starts making bizarre televised speeches about patriotism, that's the time to skeedaddle.

In modern America, we've been led by aristocrats, community organizers, schoolteachers, spooks, and jovial showmen who were democratically elected one man one vote. Every one of those plebeicites increased the size of government and waged wars. That's why I'm quits with voting. I'd rather give the job of control to a board of directors representing financial interests. No banker on earth would agree to war if he had to pay for it in cash, scarce capital squandered on destruction, markets monkeywrenched by fear.

Meanwhile, don't cross the Executive's red lines. No terrorism. No threats.

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Not notable

Easy to say, difficult to digest. I'm not notable. The term has specific meaning at Wikipedia. There is no Wikipedia article about Wolf DeVoon, and I very much doubt that my death will be noticed, except by the nice old lady who runs the general store. I owe a hefty balance.

My latest opus was issued in the size and shape of a child's coloring book, that's how little it mattered. Self-published books are invisible. I've written 23 of them. Web content doesn't count in terms of notability. I can't guess how many forum posts and blog posts I authored. Published magazine articles, radio interviews, and videos don't count, either. Wolf DeVoon won't be notable until SOMEONE ELSE decides to say something about me in the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, LA Times, Atlantic, New Yorker, Rolling Stone, GQ or Advertising Age. Colin Kapernik was celebrated by all of them, and he made the cover of Sports Illustrated, USA Today, and Time, despite being one of the worst quarterbacks in NFL history, eleven losses before he got fired for being incredibly stupid and vain.

Doesn't seem fair. I'm just as stupid, equally vain.

Politicians get noticed. Mass murderers and evangelists get noticed. It's a coin toss whether a scientist might be notable, unless she's a guru of climate change and gender fluidity. Now that I think about it, it might be felony sexual harrassment to review a straight male novelist, universally shunned by agents and publishers. Chicks and queers rule the book trade.

I hit a million words recently, decades of effort, much of it writing full-time, because I have to have solitude, months at a stretch to conceive and execute and polish something as huge as a novel. I laugh about it some times. Facebook decided that I was a "public figure" with zero Likes and no Talking Abouts.

Breakfast, lunch, and dinner this week is discount balogna, slivers of onion, and mustard. I have one pack of cigarettes left, one pack of Ol' Roy soft food for my dog. He can't eat cheap kibble or defend himself because he lost half of his teeth to a lunatic vet. I lost half of mine over the years, so we're symmetrical, old and unable to do much except to gum soft balogna and dream of boiled eggs, sharp cheddar, fried chicken, Dewar's on the rocks, hot rib eye.

Gracefully surrender the things of youth?

Okay, I suppose that my creative work was juvenile. I stood up for masculinity and gorgeous women, outlandish love stories in outer space and on the hot filthy streets of Los Angeles. I had them chase each other in Central Java and Oud Loosdrecht and Columbus Circle, places that were familiar to me, the plumes of another life, all six continents when I was young and handsome and daring. All that's left is daring to claim that what I wrote was important.

Not notable, just important. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of justice.

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Can't make this shit up

"We can chew gum and eat at the same time."
Debbie Dingle (D-Mich) on NPR, explaining Dem congressional agenda

The lame duck Republican who set up Brett Kavanaugh for public humiliation and now threatens to block all further Trump judicial confirmations is named Flake.

And the California town completely destroyed by fire was Paradise.

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Yikes!

Life suddenly became extremely bizarre. In 1997, I concocted a character name for a valiant USMC hero on Mars in the 22nd century. Today I received an email from a young woman who asked if I knew her late father, who in reality had the same name and same USMC rank.

How does one explain the inexplicable? -- and what cosmic whiplash might happen next? -- email from Lt. Janet DiMarco, or a real Col. Chris Cable married to a real Peachy?

Thank God my writing career is over, no blasphemy intended.

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Somewhat silly

Uh, immigration

With thousands marching toward the border, President Trump is prepared to deploy troops to (shoot them?) uh, do something by golly (put them on buses, to be fed, housed, educated, and doctored in humane detention centers? asylum claims filed? given transport home?)

Meanwhile, there are hundreds of thousands of Arabs and Asians who came on student or tourist visas and forgot to leave. No one knows where they are. Ten or twelve million illegal aliens are loose in Los Angeles and San Francisco, swelling welfare rolls, working as casual day laborers with fake identity documents, concealing and enabling  MS-13 gang members.

Since everyone else is talking about immigration, I suppose I'll have to say something, too. I'm supposed to be a sharp cookie, specialized in constitutional theory, right?

Let's begin with previous writing. Liberty trumps property. There have to be public roads to facilitate travel between Point A and Point B. That said, no one has a natural right to trespass on private property, except power lines, pipelines, and other sorts of community facilities like airport approaches that limit airspace and subsurface resources that extend underneath multiple properties and have to be unitized as a matter of equity.

Speaking of equity reminds me of another dozen ways that neighbors can limit what you do with private property. If you invite MS-13 to set up a base of operations on your land, there is nothing in law to stop neighbors from waging war via police or private action. The caravan of thousands marching toward private land on the border are likewise a "public nuisance" that could be ordered to scram, to cease and desist clogging up Border Patrol operations. If a court order is ignored, they could be imprisoned until they comply.

Unfortunately, court orders are appealable, so we'd end up detaining them pending review by a circuit court and conceivably the Supreme Court. If a cake shop dispute can go all the way to the Supreme Court, there's little doubt that thousands of asylum seekers could do it, too, claiming to be wrongfully detained, denied due process, racially profiled, ill-treated while in custody, and so on. It's a sort of No Win clusterfuck.

If it were up to me, I'd build a fenced highway from the border to the nearest Salvation Army soup kitchen, and let private charities deal with refugees, however many make it across the border. Border Patrol should identify and arrest evil men disfigured with MS-13 tatoos, turn them over to ICE for detention, interrogation, and prosecution. I am opposed to the death penalty and cruel punishments, but war powers could be invoked against drug dealing, with POW camps established at the border. MS-13 gang members arrested in Long Island or LA or Chicago can be sent to the POW camp. There's no Geneva Convention privilege to distribute heroin and phentanol, to intimidate and imperil U.S. citizens.

Can Congress declare war on MS-13? Sure. It's a cohesive foreign force.

Obviously, that's not going to happen. We can't rely on Congress to do anything logical or timely. Think about it. What should private actors do when confronted by evil? Turn a blind eye to women and children, help them to reach safety, far from the field of battle.

What would Galt do?

Duct tape math.

There's a formula on the wall of my writing office, 2 + 1 = 0.  It needs to be updated, 3 + 1 = minus 1.  Three years of writing full time, ten titles, almost half a million words, plus a year to clear land and build a house, left me stranded and penniless, begging the neighbors for day labor at minimum wage so I can buy dog food, cigarettes, Oscar Meyer, coffee, and saltines, more or less in that order of priority. The dog has to eat. Not his fault that he got run over by a FedEx van, dislocated hip, broken foreleg that didn't heal right, blind in both eyes with thick white cataracts and crusty goop that has to be softened and cleaned every morning. He has to be bathed two or three times a week, fighting summer fleas that refuse to die.

Summer doesn't bother me. Winter does.

What would Galt do? -- no phone, no car, no money, no book sales. I have successfully exited organized society, worse than a desert island, ignored by the world and forgotten. Once a day I walk up the hill to fill a couple jugs of water and empty spam from my inbox. I get one email a week on average. The last one was from my brother Roger. My sister-in-law expressed an interest in reading Partners, which is a sort of obscenity, a family curiosity, old nutty Alan, a black sheep destined to starve to death. I had to punch two extra holes in my belt last week.

Have at it, Gail. Read two pages and wrinkle your nose, shake your head in disdain and put it down, never to be opened again, no book review on Amazon, no mention in social media. I swear by my life and my love of it that it doesn't matter.

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An alternate universe

I often wished I could have had a respectable life. Scott, heir to a foundry, solid citizen. Last time I saw him, he was mowing his lawn, smoking a cigar, grumpy as heck. Something similar happened to Glen, sad and truculent. Cheery Joette died young. Eileen became an academic feminist, a functionary of government. Tootie played well with others, smiled a lot. Tommy was a naval officer. Steve followed in his father's footsteps, a bank officer. He was stuffy and unhelpful when I helped my mother present a check to pay off her mortgage. Probably got fired when his small town bank was acquired by a regional brand. Up or out, right, Steve?

Charlie became a librarian or something at an ashram, after a long career as a drunk. My pal Tom worked at the same part-time job 30 years with occasional forays in video, much of it access comedy, old jokes told twice. Jay faked reality and used Ronco Spray-On Hair. I didn't think he was particularly talented or clever, but he lived his entire life in show business and did a great job as art director on a show that Tom produced and I directed in 1982.

Okay, suppose I had been born in another time, like my father. He drove a halftrack in WWII, went to college and met my mother. Five sons used him up, kept him indentured to a job and a small town that he hated, beaten into accepting Food Stamps, devastating humiliation. He always wanted to work construction, move to Arizona, got to do neither, died where he was born. Ditto Uncle Fred, a bachelor shunned and shamed by pilfering a client's cash, did tax returns for helpless idiots, died in the house that he and Aunt Mary inherited, never left the nest. My brothers fared okay, I guess. Roger did exceptionally well, but he was hobbled by caring for my parents in their long horror of illness and incompetence. I escaped and never went back, except to visit and escape again as quickly as possible. There was nothing for me in Milwaukee or the crushingly airless German village that destroyed my parents.

Lemme think, who do I admire? Anne Coulter for sure, Ivy League law school, happy as a clam and perfectly confident no matter how awful the opposition. She laughs at them. Margaret Thatcher was wonderful in the same way, tough, happy, skewered blockheads gaily and took down the Soviet Union in partnership with Reagan. I did not want to be Ronald Reagan, nor did I admire Donald Trump. George W. Bush was a stone idiot, his father equally shallow and conventional. Jeb is the smart one? Hahahaha.

Oh, come on, surely there must be someone who you'd rather be?

Blank stare. Hammett and Chandler had horrible lives, Fitzgerald infinitely worse. Patton was a monster, although George C. Scott was splendid. It's certain that Jimmy Stewart was loved, but I'm not sure how good an actor he was. Acting was unnatural to me, directing automatic. That was the only definite talent I exhibited as a kid -- ringleader, organizer, leader. A client in Philadelphia asked: "How long have you been an idea man?" The question stunned me, made me think, and the only thing I could say in reply was: "All my life."

That's good news and awful news. In a recent email, my brother Roger opined that I was a "visionary," which was a respectable office on occasion (Edison, Voltaire, Grotius) but more often a trainwreck: Marx, Jesus, Mohammed, Kant, Owen, Wilson, FDR, Mao. I like to think that I advanced better ideas, but the price was awfully fucking steep, an entire lifetime and big misadventures  to discern a simple idea or two. I never regarded myself as particularly talented, aside from directing and editing, storytelling, pitching ideas.

Denied a career in show business and exiled as an author, I should have done something else in life, but what? Butcher, baker, candlestick maker. Machinist, artist, janitor. But the truth is inescapable, I was always a terrible employee. Personal best was a year at Disney, pushing paper and pushing the envelope, unwanted. I was under a lot of pressure. Tab had adapted Hunchback of Notre Dame, a one-sheet poster opposite my cubicle, saw it ten times a day. Tab got a nice WGA payday and I got $15 an hour to master Miramax bullshit. We started out as apartment neighbors in a cheap North Hollywood lanai. Cut it out, quit bitching. You don't want Tab's karma, nor Tarantino's or Spielberg's, that's for damn sure.

Okay, more truthiness, I was horrible at math. I remember the classrooms quite clearly, 14 years old, totally lost in geometry and pre-algebra. No science for you, dumbshit. The specific alternate universe I hoped for as a kid was radio communications. I couldn't memorize Morse Code to get a ham licence, a cognitive deficit, every second a new blank slate. No wonder I needed help as a filmmaker, couldn't shoot my own stuff, had to be prompted by a script girl on the set, made silly mistakes and missed common sense visual opportunities, emotionally overwhelmed by a performance, a stunt, a dolly move, a moment of life in high relief.

Sex mad, moment by moment seduction in high key. All I can do is shake my head, partly in plain disbelief. Gone now, of course. Too old and feeble to fuck. So I started putting porn on the page, outrageously graphic. No wonder I write so slowly. Stories unfold in slow motion, unplanned, extemporaneous. Plain language. A deep seated fear of repeating myself, using the same word or same idea twice, an impossible mission. Unread, utterly isolated.

Poop. Happy to be me, with one simple misery, grinding poverty, unable to feed myself. The draw of an alternate universe is money, applause, recognition as an idea man. Too late now. My ideas were unwelcome. Is that the fate of all visionaries? Terrible result.

Or is it? Consider Kavanaugh. Silver spoon, only child, first in his class, athlete, Yale, secret White House clearance, Harvard law professor, DC circuit court judge, never thought a radical idea in his life, squeaky clean follower of fascism, suddenly ruined by Deep State black ops, another turn of the torture screws every day and every sleepless night. He will die a broken man, everything wrongly taken from him, a straight-laced Boy Scout eaten by the lions.

Compared to Kavanaugh, being me sounds pretty good.

.

Intensely proud

I opened Finding Flopsie tonight, skipped past the soap opera set-up and went straight to Chris on his own, losing his teaching job, his office, his p.i. license, and his pride, all in one afternoon. Absolutely terrific -- and then the story takes off on urgent business, active and grim, Chris Cable at his best, age 64. Whether I got Peachy's story right is debatable, but it simply had to be that way, role reversal with her evil sister, a tortured animal.

Not much to say about Partners, my masterwork.

I cleaned up Mars Shall Thunder for the anthology Eight Ruthless Novels, happy with it and proud of it, my first full-length novel. The Good Walk Alone was a rolicking comedy, free as a lark, fun to write, drove me crazy writing a serial to weekly deadline. DiMarco remains my favorite character of all, a tough female homicide cop, age 38. I don't know quite what to say about First Feature. Personal stories are holy, if anything pertaining to show business is.

The Case Files trilogy (Valor, Tar Pit, and Charity) are what they had to be, a modern Nick and Nora Charles, to honor Dashiell Hammett's final novel The Thin Man, a burlesque that broke the noir genre, gave us penthouse cocktail parties and sexy women as a backdrop to murder. Chris and Peachy are a little different, equals in life, an unbeatable team. A Portrait of Valor tests them to the limit of human daring and spiritual endurance at the peak of their vitality, 30-something, deeply in love for the first time, perfectly matched in marriage. In many ways Valor is my favorite story. Boy meets girl and they go to heaven and hell to earn each other. Being childless opens the door to an important truth, the wider moral horizons of Charity. In our calm, clever 50s, new life happens if we embrace it.

I suppose it's true that all of my stories are aspects of my personal life, things that happened to me, one way or another, amplified a notch or two. I wrote about people and places I knew well enough to speak confidently. I had a life full of adventure. A little sad that it's over, but that's part of life, too. No one likes to talk about the end, and it would be wrong to paint the final chapter of any fictional character's slow demise. Bad enough that I have to do it.

Nice to leave a literary legacy, the splendor of young adulthood and active middle age, great eagerness to thrive, a whole world to gamble and win -- or to lose, in the tragedy of Partners, a story that I did not expect to create. Partners was costly, in time and talent and weight of burden, everything I had to give and endure, the capstone of my career. I know it for a fact, I worked 20 years to prepare myself to write Partners. Completely unexpected and worth it.

Truthfully, I don't recommend that anyone else pursue a creative career. The field is occupied by hostile assholes and pusillanimous slime. Indie self-publishing is a fake solution, gateway to obscurity, sandbagged by Amazon and Google if you stand up for straight white wildcats. I cared about my characters and their circumstances, emptied my wallet to let them breathe and stand fully erect, a proud race of titans. "Old fashioned," Cass declared. So be it. We owe our industrial preeminence and military power to such people, men and women who face a world of tawdry evasion, ritual, and inertia, and kick it into the gutter, where it belongs.

A pity that I wasn't born rich, but if I had been there would be no Chris and Peachy, no Janet DiMarco, no Harry Faraday and Laura Oak, no Kyle and Karen, no Freeman's Constitution to honor and defend them. Pretty good bargain. Those who fight for the future live in it today, Ayn Rand said. True, false, or purple, I'm satisfied that I did everything I could to advance the idea of defacto liberty. Whether sterling hero or hardened criminal, nothing displaces human potential, personal choice, stern perception of values, to live free or to die a coward's quiet, anonymous, meaningless end on earth. The gift of life is not to be thrown away cheaply.

.

It was a Deep State operation

San Francisco-based talker Michael Savage broadcast an important story last night. Dr. Ford taught psychological warfare at Stanford. Her brother organized Fusion GPS. The attack on Kavanaugh was scripted. Do not underestimate Obama-led CIA spooks and FBI agents. They will stop at nothing and have unlimited funds, indoctrinated and trained to lie under oath.

Security of the White House and Republican leadership depends entirely on Secret Service, Capitol Police, and a small Marine detail. Damn well better be on a war footing, prepared to deal with chemical, biological, or nerve agent attack. No wonder Paul Ryan is retiring.

A  Mueller leak of rumors and lies before Nov. 6 is dead certain, a classic "October surprise" like the phony Trump dossier leaked to the press in October 2016. Equally certain are Antifa / Me Too / Black Lives Matter marches and riots, with an avalanche of sex abuse accusations hurled at Republican candidates, physical attacks in restaurants and campaign events. In the event that Dems win a majority in the House, v.p. Mike Pence will be targeted next.

.

Okay, smart guy, now what?

Totally brainless. 

Apparently, I'm not going to die tomorrow or on a predictable schedule. This is both good news and awful news. I'll have to do something about that, write something. Please, no more novels, way too much work, months of frigid winter looming on the horizon. It would be nice to write something that made money. I had a gig last month, notes and ideas. Unlikely that the same lightning would hit my wallet twice. Tom chipped in money ostensibly for services rendered a year ago. I consider it a gift, little chance of paying him back. Uncertain if there's any carpentry work to be had, or whether I'm strong enough to do that again. Rats.

As interesting as the puzzle of poverty may be, that's not the big problem. I need an idea. I already discarded (again) the stupid cozy mystery The Dead Things Place that I started in 1987 and tossed in the trash. I can do a lot of things, but I can't write anything simple, a whodunnit in a redwood forest, a Park Service ranger who has to figure out how a body got dumped. Gah.

Okay, smart guy, where to?

Not outer space. Been there, done that. I toyed with the idea of shooting video at the Pioneer Gathering event next week, a couple hundred people, black powder rifles, hatchet throwing, handiwork, coal-fired donkey engines, bluegrass music. It's something that anyone could do, shooting fish in a barrel with a little HD camera. Nope. Any doofus can make a documentary. Video schmideo.

A nonfiction essay about Trump and the Democrats. Pt-t-t-th. I used to be fairly creative, for fuck's sake. The last thing I need to do is follow headlines, get lost in a shitstorm of bloggers and 180-character twats. Same problem with work for hire at Upwork. Last time I wrote an article there, the client screwed me. Projects offered that I wouldn't touch with a dirty fork. Sometimes I think the world has gone bonkers. But that doesn't solve my problem. I need a creative chore that makes sense, something only I can do.

Hmph. That would be a story (taps fingers on keys). Maybe a short story.

Who? Where? When? What? Why?



(insert idea here)



.

Kosmic joke

Exxon's $4 billion Kosmos offer rejected

(This was my debut Alrroya newspaper column published in 2010. That I subsequently wrote and produced an oil industry luncheon video introducing George W. Bush as a "great American leader" goes to show how easily and cheaply a writer can be bought. It took a long time to find photos of W. where he didn't look like a stupid deer caught in the headlights.)


In October 2009, I noted ExxonMobil's offer to buy the privately-held Kosmos Energy 24% interest in Ghana's Jubilee oil field. Based on Tullow maps and well data, I deduced that Exxon was using a medium term $100 per barrel price model to determine how much to bid for the Kosmos stake. No surprise, it matched oil forecasts by T. Boone Pickens, Goldman Sachs, and former CIBC World Markets chief economist Jeff Rubin.

Kosmos promptly accepted the Exxon bid, in a straightforward move to monetize their Jubilee asset. They were out of pocket less than $1 billion funded by Warburg Pincus and Blackstone Capital Partners. Exxon's $4 billion offer would give them a $3 billion profit and zero their risk of development and doing business in Ghana. Kosmos previously reduced their risk by farming out stakes to Anadarko and Tullow, who did the actual work of drilling and discovery. Clever little Dallas-based Kosmos had achieved what all E&P "minnows" hope to do -- get a license, bring in experienced operators, then flip it to a fat supermajor.

Except the wheels fell off and Exxon's offer died.

Who, why, and what killed the acquisition is a convoluted story. It starts at a racetrack in Dallas involving Texas politicians, a Federal class-action settlement, and a Monte Carlo head fake that propelled attorney James C. Musselman from obscurity to VIP status at a White House state dinner for Ghana's President John Agyekum Kufour.

Musselman got his start in the oil business as an investor in Triton Energy. He became its CEO in 1998 when Tom Hicks, owner of the Texas Rangers baseball team and chairman of private-equity firm Hicks Muse Tate & Furst, bought a big speculative stake in troubled Triton.

Musselman's job was to pump up reserves and sell the company, which he successfully did in 2001, after reporting an operating loss of $383 million. Hess paid a 50% premium to Triton shareholders to acquire the Ceiba oil field in Equatorial Guinea. Musselman and his team were deemed geniuses, and they briefly worked for Hess, until Hess had to declare a $530 million impairment charge and write down 70% of the Triton reserves they paid $3 billion to own.

But that's not how it played in Ghana, nor in Dallas where Musselman and his ex-Triton team founded a new company, Kosmos Energy, in 2003. They were touted as West Africa experts with a new project negotiated by Craig S. Glick, who left Hunt Oil with inside knowledge of  the West Cape Three Points block in Ghana. Hunt acquired 2D seismic data totalling 2,225 km and 264 square kilometres of 3D. They drilled and logged two deepwater wells. Those wells were immediately east of the future Jubilee discovery. When Hunt Oil quit Ghana in 2001, the story gets a little bizarre, clogged in multiple layers of state secrets.

Before he became President of the United States, Gov. George W. Bush was co-owner of the Texas Rangers, which he sold to Hicks. After he left the White House, Bush bought a house in the exclusive Preston Hollow neighborhood of Dallas, down the street from Musselman's $6 million mansion. It seems likely that they knew each other in 2003, when Bush met Ghanaian President John Agyekum Kufour in Dakar and urged him to do business with US backing.

Two of Kufour's trusted associates laid the groundwork for a deal with Kosmos. Dr. Kwame Barwuah Edusei, a medical doctor practicing in Washington DC, and George Owusu, a self-styled Ghanaian oil broker living in Houston, formed a company called E-O, rather hilariously registered at a chicken farm near Accra. Kosmos and E-O entered into a written agreement signed by Edusei for E-O and Glick for Kosmos, covering future exploration, production and other revenue: Kosmos 86.5%, Ghana National Petroleum Company 10%, E-O 3.5%. The agreement stated that Kosmos would carry E-O and additionally pay them $250,000 upfront. Kufour appointed Edusei ambassador to Switzerland in August 2004 (to open a numbered account?) and later appointed him Ghana’s ambassador to the White House. Owusu became Kosmos Energy's Ghana representative. Owusu's Kosmos salary, perks and other graft may have totalled $2 million before he ran afoul of anti-corruption due diligence by Anadarko.

President Kufour, after serving two four-year terms, had to step down in 2009. He and his cronies did everything possible to grease the wheels for Kosmos, Anadarko, and Tullow -- signing off on low royalties, 100% off-loading for export, and token involvement of GNPC. President George Bush and First Lady Laura Bush made a 3-day goodwill visit to Ghana in February 2008, meeting all 30 tribal chiefs, promising US development aid, and stumping for Kufour's New Patriotic Party, hoping to upstage and deflate perennial opposition presidential candidate John Atta Mills. In September 2008 there was a gala White House state dinner to honor President Kufour and Kosmos boss Jim Musselman. In Ghana, NPP newspapers and radio stations celebrated their fabulous new oil wealth, thanks to Kufour and Kosmos.

All for nought. Social democrat and former national tax commissioner John Atta Mills was elected president of Ghana by a razor-thin majority, after an odd ballot re-run in a remote rural constituency. His first act in office was to appoint a special advisor on energy policy, Tsatsu Tsikata, long-serving patriarch of GNPC who was put in prison and tried for "causing financial loss to the state" when Kufour came to power in 2000. His trial lasted eight years and Tsikata was pronounced guilty, then pardoned when Mills won the 2009 presidential runoff.

Tsikata flew to Houston and visited Anadarko to pick up their Corrupt Foreign Practices file on E-O and Kosmos Ghana. Then he flew to New York and retained Morgan Stanley as financial advisors. Next on the agenda was a $10 billion line of credit from China. George Owusu's and E-O's assets were seized. Kosmos was put under investigation. In 2010, Tsikata flew to China six times, negotiating with CNOOC.

When Kosmos filed a request to sell its interest in Jubilee to Exxon, the government's reaction was slow and comical. In due course, the Energy Ministry said, they would vet ExxonMobil and consider their suitability to partner a Ghanaian oil company. We intend to produce Jubilee gas first, before oil production, because our country needs more electric generation, and we will be working with world class government engineering experts from Trinidad and Tobago. Your $4 billion Exxon deal is imaginary and illegal.

The only buyer Kosmos Energy could talk to was Tsatsu Tsikata.


<end of text>
<research notes appended>

One last birthday

I have the notion that I'm dying, no particular reason for it, a general sense of frailty. In two weeks I will be 68 years old. The last thing I want to do is shiver through another winter, and I don't see much purpose in doing that. How did old indians die? -- walk into a frozen cave, lay down and die. Better than suffering in a hospital bed, plaything for medical experiments that never work, bombarded by television. I can't think of a worse hell, inescapable TV made by evil shitheads. Maybe that's what mythological hell is like, tormented by the obscene, a long wicked laugh at my expense. Memo to Lucifer: it won't work, bub. I don't care what you or anyone else throw at me. I've been ridiculed plenty, no stranger to verbal punishment. Try physical torture.

I have to get in line with reality. No one will ever find my work, buried under a mountain of horseshit on the web, millions of people in universities pushing conventional wisdom. If you want to honor my death, play Led Zeppelin's 'When The Levee Breaks.' It propelled my first novel, listened to it looped endlessly while I wrote the action scenes. Make a note (hat tip to Alejandro): music first, then story.

Another note. Talented people are generous. I don't know that I include myself in that class, but maybe I am, always generous with other writers and filmmakers similarly situated, good work that didn't stand a micron of hope to be recognized or rewarded by the Jews. Sorry to be offensively blunt. Look around, follow the money in publishing, movies, music, stage. Drunk or sober, Mel had it right. Nice that I shared dinner and lunch the next day with him, a great guy. Not the best actor on Earth, certainly not a director, just a wonderful man with plenty of women and children. I understood him. I lost track of how many women and children I had. Someday someone will write a nice biography of Mel Gibson. That's the difference between him and me. When I die, everything I did will die with me, unacknowledged.

The world keeps secrets. Sigh. Too many to discuss. Obama's school records are sealed for a reason. Hillary destroyed emails for a reason. The Civil War had nothing to do with slavery. The U.S. Constitution had little to do with deliberate rational design.

Hmph. This wasn't supposed to be a political screed, damn it. I wanted to wish myself a last happy birthday greeting. Dead certain that no one else will. There is a wife and daughter up the hill who will ignore September 30th, dissing Dad for the thousandth time. People indulge bad habits to make themselves feel superior. My bad habits are slightly different. I smoke pot to see visions, feel the beat of life; cigarettes to kill the pain of loneliness.

I think I've covered everything in essays and autobiographical stories, clips and stills in a five minute salute to myself. Happy birthday, Dorf. Long way from juvenality to Wolf DeVoon. It could have been far worse, a machinist's apprentice or factory hand.

Bye, Clare.

.

Anywhere, maybe nowhere

"Where to, bud?" the taxi driver asks cheerfully.

Imaginary dialogue that happens every few minutes. I have nowhere to go. My dog was run over by a FedEx van barreling down the hill yesterday, swerved to straddle him laying in the middle of the road on a sunny day. I called Tooie out of the road hundreds of times, made him sit and stay out of harm's way. Old shihtzus don't listen, have their own agenda. He's up at the house, broken foreleg and internal injuries, laying quietly on bathroom tile, stoned on doggie pain pills left over from oral surgery a couple years ago. Took all the pleasure out of life, as you may perhaps understand if you ever loved a dog. He was at my side day and night for nine years, slept at my feet in bed each night, rescued from a shelter at age three or four. Not knowing if he would survive, I dug a grave yesterday. Enough about that.

The prospect of losing Tooie was the last straw. Six weeks ago, I collapsed face down in the dirt in broad daylight, couldn't move, had to crawl. It left me enfeebled and now I use a hardwood cane, especially going uphill at a half stride, or is it a quarter? A slow shuffle, nothing like my emphatic stomp as a younger man, raising hell around the world before I turned 40, doing it again in my 50s, all six continents, and plugging along in my 60s to wage war with philistines, to buy property and build a house. Impossible to go further now. No money, no car, no stamina. I used myself up, every ounce of brain and muscle.

"Where to, bud?"

Well, it won't be writing another novel. I know what they cost. It won't be another movie, strictly a young man's game. It won't be a tech project. No imagination. My forte was analog and mechanical devices, neither of which are much in demand. Too old and ugly to smile, unqualified and inept as a salesman or preacher.

I said everything I hoped and wanted to say. Now it's the world's turn to do something about it, discover merit in my ideas and literary legacy. I won't hold my breath. The world has other things to do, like honor more negroes, kill fossil fuels, and impeach Donald Trump. My work was shunned and ignored. No book sales. No film rights sold.

"Where to, bud?"

I don't know. I have a few years left, perhaps, no desire to visit Wisconsin or California, and I couldn't buy a plane ticket or rent a car if I wanted to. Credit cards vaporized over a year ago, no cash in hand, $15 in my checking account, just enough to keep it open. It's a free checking account for senior citizens, no monthly fee. When I tore up the forest and built a house I ran tens of thousands through it, six figures through company accounts at Chase and Wells Fargo and Frost Bank and a bullion account at the Perth Mint. All balances zero, company defunct, probably in trouble with the IRS. The last time I filed a tax return was in 2015.

"Where to, bud?"

I don't know. Anywhere. Maybe nowhere, to die in my sleep from boredom and want. I've been postponing it as long as I could, pushed myself to write a masterpiece, kept going until I was convinced that it had been achieved in July, two months ago. I collapsed and fell down a couple weeks later, took a long time to get back on my feet. Then my dog got hit by a van. I don't think that my daughter needs me any more. All grown up, headed to college.

No strength to stand on my feet part time at a McDonalds, flipping burgers. No brain to run a complicated digital cash register. No mountain left to climb. For the first time in my life, I'm finished. Not beaten -- I carved my own way, forded raging rivers of opposition and an ocean of cowardice and despair. Certain achievements stand out in particular, like the preamble of The Freeman's Constitution, a new robust definition of justice. Whatever happens next is okay in that respect. I hammered a legacy on Earth.

Hmm. In Partners, I observed that people don't eat if there's no future. Wilda just brought me a little styrofoam box with two cold leftover onion rings and a few french fries. Wonderful. The idea of a cold Coke was overpoweringly real. Driver! Take me to a Coke machine!

.

The list

Very boring, not worth reading, honest. I wanted to park it somewhere for the record, a historical thing. All the stuff that wouldn't fit in a 5-min video. I had a busy life.

COMPANIES FORMED
Duck Diversified  boutique fashions, shop decor
Cinemation  film production
Studio on The Square  commercial art
Altendorf Media  public affairs
Backyard Productions  film
Nocturnes Ltd  series production
Baxter Von Altendorf Ltd  film
Diamond Sound  pro audio in difficult environments
Polvo Mining Company  teak deck recliners, living room furniture
CWSX LLC   geology and geophysics, hydrocarbon exploration
Golden Critical Research  commodity & critical elements data
Crone Software  digital graphics technology
Global Cooling Corp  flare ice invention

MULTIMEDIA SHOWS
No More War  slides/16mm for avant garde rock shows
Troubled Teens  slide rack for a United Way agency
Meetingplace  sync slide show
Macondo  compilation of ROV screenshots
Crone Software  investor presentation

RADIO & RECORDING
Underground Switchboard  jingle
Dorothy Fudpucker  series producer, sketch writer, voice talent
Soglin For Mayor  broadcast spot producer
Allenwood Jazz Ensemble  keyboards
Legitimate Bizness  sound mixer, post supervisor
The Koala Bears  single
Nightingale-Conant: 'Power Vision'  writer, studio coach
All Things Considered  interview guest
Patriots Lament  3-hr live radio talk show interviews

FILMS
Melodrama  16mm experimental
Factory Dance  camera, editor
Prelude  camera
Zooty Brisko  director
The Oval Door  rerecording Foley engineer
Eye-Tracking Demo  (for Lucasfilm)
The Starlets  recut for European release
The Marionette  director
Lifers  director, camera operator

TELEVISION
WITI-TV6  freelance 16mm news stringer
The Soglin Debates  campaign media director
What's The Action?  pilot segment director, post supervisor
Click  cowriter, pilot director, segment editor
The Golden Girls  NABET backstage flunky
ORF Austria  camera at NATO Summit, news package editor
YLE Finland  news package editor
ITN / Channel Four  news package editor
London By Night  director
Women Mean Business  director
New Age TV  director
Cindy's Hit Factory  director

DOCUMENTARIES
The Mister Man Competition  director
What Is Capitalism?  man on the street video
Exile In Paradise  camera, editor
Inside Wolf DeVoon  featured personality, director
A Life  clips and photos

MUSIC VIDEOS
Chelsea Brown: 'Nice Dream' and 'Living For You'   director
Coco York: 'Fever'  director
Terry Disley Ensemble: 'Who's The Dancer?'  director
Mystic Theater  concert video 'A' camera
Carry Walker: 'I Said So'  studio set, sound design, video
Big Fun  director
Quest  director
Deadlock  live show 'A' camera

INDUSTRIAL & EDUCATIONAL
IBM 'Taking Off'  editor, montage sequence
LA Dept of Water & Power  offline editor
Massage for The Elderly  director
Technique of Video Editing  writer, director, animator, editor
Bodega Bay  director
People Helping People  director
British Telecom  shareholders venue video
Fed Ex Airspeed 'Time'  writer
Scottish Electricity  offline editor
Marketing & Merchandising Co sales video  director
Western Nevada College 'Join The Team'  director
George W. Bush VIP event   photo research, video script
Scene Cards  on-camera tutorial, computer graphics

PRINT PROJECTS
WLVE  newsletter design, production
Clicker  logo, posters
Soglin For Mayor  print production
Alvah Bushnell Company  photography, design, direct mail
The Luxury Living Show  key art
Western Intl Offshore  art direction, page composition
Nature's Own  art direction, direct mail
Electro-Rent BV  research and marketing plan
Cthonia Institute  booklet composition, web design
Oil and Gas Investor  media kit design

UNION STAGEHAND
Pioneer Auditorium  audio mixer, electrics
Caesar's Tahoe  audio tech, grip
Horizon Hotel & Casino  film crew grip
Reno Convention Center  electrician
Reno Hilton  lighting, AV set-up
Denver Convention Center  trade exhibitors, sound

STAFF JOBS
Klau Van Pietersom Dunlap  graphic artist
Comcor Communications  instructional media designer
3-D Television Inc  general manager
Electro-Tech/ETI Systems  installation tech
Crown Business Communications  writer
International  Multimedia Group  art director
Studio E   manager, director
Buena Vista Home Video  technical coordinator
Don's Oil & Gas News  editor, feature articles
Hart Energy  writer/editor, industry conference videos

R&D
Polytron Research  video microscope styling, components
Stereorama Corp  autostereoscopic projector redesign
Lockheed Aircraft  examine L-1011 windscreen defect
Cinema Equity Sales Corp  custom lenses for Rank Cintel scan
Jones Prods  RGB anaglyph encoder
London Underground  video system design, proposal team lead
Crone Software  widescreen multitouch workstation

TECH DESIGN & INSTALLATION
Roosevelt Hotel  sound
Authorized Video BV  control room and duplication plant design
Grand Duchy of Luxembourg  movie studio design, financials
University of Nevada Reno  audio/video/projection in 22 classrooms
BHP Diamonds  perimeter surveillance, card entry
Nevada Attorney General  card entry, intercom
Comstock Hotel & Casino  design, refurbish zoned audio/public address
Delta Casino  audio upgrade
Waterpik  upgrade factory public address system

PUBLISHED ARTICLES
Kaleidoscope
The Milwaukee Sentinel  (quoted)
Media + Methods
The Comstock Chronicle
Laissez Faire City Times  (featured writer)
G21 World Magazine
Strike The Root
Sunni's Salon  (book review)
The Free Liberal
The Plug Nickel Times
Alrroya Abu Dhabi (weekly column)
Seeking Alpha
Objectivist Living

BOOKS and PAPERS - NONFICTION
The Record Company Handbook of Video
Glossary of Professional Video Terminology
ISMs: A Compendium of Concepts, Doctrines, Traits & Beliefs
All-Purpose Guide to Female Women and What To Do With Them
Walking To Ayrshire (booklet)
Laissez Faire Law
An Eggshell Armed With Sledgehammers
The Tragedy of 21 Darts
BHP's $15 Billion Lotto Ticket
Screenplay Form and Structure
The Constitution of Government in Galt's Gulch
Abbreviated Wolf DeVoon (Lulu pdf)
Recent Work
More Recent Work
The Last Book, includes 'Rube' autobiography
Film School In One Lesson
Authors Exist to Please and Flatter Readers
A to Z

FICTION
First Feature: A Rake's Progress in Downtown Gomorrah
Mars Shall Thunder
The Good Walk Alone
Dreamland (web published, reprinted in Eggshell)
A Portrait of Valor
The Tar Pit
Charity
Finding Flopsie
Partners

ANTHOLOGIES
Wolf DeVoon Reader (out of print)
Chris & Peachy
The Case Files of Cable & Blount (ebook)
Eight Ruthless Novels by Wolf DeVoon
White: The Collected Hate Speech of Wolf DeVoon

ORIGINAL SCREENPLAYS
Guardian Angel
Maya Samurai
Cry Justice (treatment)
The Guitar Player From The Black Lagoon
Nice Girl (rewrite)
Governor Mike
The Marionette  (co-writer)
Pelada Red
The Case of The Empty Case
This  (comic teen space opera adaptation)
Mars Shall Thunder audio drama

.

All the shit I've done to people

I've been watching a video I made yesterday, a compilation of film footage and still photos, highlights of my career as a showman. I should say sadistic lunatic. A truly incredible list of crimes. I threw pies in people's faces, dumped buckets of paint on their heads, made them slip and fall, set them on fire, had a dwarf use a slingshot to shoot a marble at a showgirl's butt on stage. I forced a perfectly respectable, capable cinematographer to use a single bare lightbulb in a ceiling fixture. I bellowed at a dignified senior producer in a swish West End restaurant and demanded a four man crew, two cameras instead of one, and when I got to the concert, I bullied and berated the group's manager to let my people walk on stage with the headliner. I've told people to their faces that they had no talent, give it up, don't even try. The number and depth of my egregious financial sins were too many to count or weigh.

I've been incredibly cruel to women in intimate circumstances, demanded pregnancy, threw away their innocence and dignity, sent them through studio gates to deliver a screenplay, dress for maximum pleasure, watch me flirt with another chick.

Some of my stunts were preposterously vain, challenging top executives who had the power to crush me. I routinely manipulated friends and colleagues, family members, decent folks who admired me and wished me success. I think I drove my father insane with distress and shame. I was snotty with a Federal district judge and forced his hand two or three times. I told a distinguished, well known philosopher that he was full of shit in front of other guests on my patio. "I've written twenty-two books!" he bellowed in rage. I laughed him.

Worse, much worse -- I think that some hundreds of people, maybe thousands were moved by ideas that I promulgated. I put my hand on the lever of history. No sense of humility.

I hope and trust that I'm nearing the end of life, alone and shunned for ample cause, which is more or less fair and square. You know what I learned? I'm a fucking idiot, not to be trusted with a bag of chocolate donuts and cheese and onion sandwiches. No sense of restraint. We get exactly what we deserve in the bathroom at 4 o'clock in the morning.

OMFG, I just remembered! -- in a 1982 filmed comedy sketch, I had a bad tempered dinner patron at a fake restaurant berate a young black waiter, grab him by the necktie and shove his face in a bowl of cold noodle soup. "Okay, I'll heat it up right away, sir," he begged contritely with noodles hanging off his fake mustache. The title of the sketch was Winning Through Viciousness. I didn't write it, but I staged it and directed it. The black kid did a brilliant job, and I was astounded, exclaimed to my cast and crew how brave an actor he was.

People always did as I asked, high and low, around the world. I've called doctors to come in the middle of the night to sew up an attempted suicide off the record, Russian bodyguards to assault a village at dawn. I persuaded traffic cops to let me go after chasing me for miles.

Jeez. What a long strange trip it's been, made a million mistakes, published a million words, took a million liberties in the name of art, the highest form of pleasure known to man. I faced killers and aristocrats and people who were eleven times smarter than I was, held my own, bent them to my purpose or told them to fuck off.

Why? -- because we live but once. I lived.

An awkward situation

If you don't hear from me via Blogger or Facebook or email periodically, I probably died.

No reason not to die. I wrote to Brigid a couple weeks ago and said that I don't have anything further to reach for or achieve, not after Partners, which is true. I settled a trust, made a will and a full disclosure in print if my daughter cares to re-examine who her father was. It would be nice to pay off my account at the general store, but frankly it won't be much of a crisis for anyone if I die a pauper. My brother Roger will frown that I owe him $60, but Chase and Wells Fargo can go climb a rope, for all I care. An executive at Gulf + Western once told me not to worry about debt, after which it was easier to move forward as a film director.

The world has had multiple opportunities to advance my creative career, fifty years worth of movies and books and essays. I got nada. I'd rather not talk about the bullshit they preferred. We each take a turn at the spinning wheel. What goes up must come down. Of all the music I loved, Blood Sweat & Tears moved me like no other. Sorry, Frank.

Ooo. Since I'm talking about death, here's my playlist for a memorial:

21st Century Schizoid Man, King Crimson
Talk To Me Darling, The Pretenders
In The Light, Led Zeppelin
Nights On Broadway, The Bee Gees
My Little Suzy, Styx
Spinning Wheel, Blood Sweat & Tears
Sofa #2, Zappa

It's on my mind because I fainted and fell down flat on my face in broad daylight, rearranged some ribs and bruised a number of muscle groups, had to use pain pills for 10 days, couldn't cough or sneeze without howling. Better now, but vulnerable, no longer strong enough to do serious labor. My brain still works, although 400,000 cigarettes and family history make me a good candidate for stroke or heart attack. Occasionally I wish to die. Impossible to kill myself, because it would hurt my daughter, which I cannot entertain, absolutely verboten. I have to die from natural causes. So I wait patiently. Doo bee doo bee doo.

My favorite images

Becker

In the novel Partners, there are three principal characters: Kyle, Karen, and Becker. The story could not have been told without Becker -- no transformative challenge for Kyle, no romantic crusade for Karen. Although the story is told from Kyle's perspective and his love affair with Karen is both superlatively sweet and often terrible, the mysterious gunslinger Jimmy Becker is the fulcrum of every scene, whether he's in foreground or not.

I painted Becker's family, a trio of sharply drawn personalities, father, mother, sister, and a dead twin brother, to show that everyone descends from a chain of life and circumstance. I also indicated that Becker served as a U.S. Marine Corps officer in Germany. That's all I dared to explain, in drips and drabs, because I detest exposition, cardboard confessions that recite one's backstory, purpose, and notable achievements in junior high school. Absolutely NOT something that Becker would do. He's as tight as a closed vise, incapable of schmoozing.

Because that renders Becker somewhat opaque, revealing behavior nothwithstanding, it's fun to chat about this interesting man. He's almost a monk, sacrificing himself as an angel of vengeance. He's controlled by his cold hearted parents and corrupt family friend Lt. Lepsky, fairly obvious from dialogue and description. Kyle is a shrewd observer. He sees that Becker is an unstable paper tiger with an emotional glass jaw, desperately in need of a partner to support him and a woman to love him, which Becker denies. He shoves everybody away in anger, won't let them join or compromise his crusade to dominate. Simple Kyle sees through it. Becker needs him and Becker cares about Kyle and clever little Karen. He does this by cursing Kyle, pointing a gun at him, ordering him to go away, and in the finale abandoning Kyle to face death alone -- after making Kyle his wealthy heir in bank documents!

Are there other characters like Becker? Sure. They're thriller heroes and odd ducks consumed by blind, insatiable revenge after losing a loved one to the bad guys, a See Spot Run motive for Charles Bronson to sleepwalk through "justifiable" violence. In the film Bad Day At Black Rock, it was Spencer Tracy's turn to avenge a death and to kill. It bored Tracy. He sleepwalked through pasteboard scenes, let the talented ensemble of snarling bad guys shine.

In reality, are there men like Jimmy Becker? Fewer now, but yes there are and were in 1975. Marines are devil dogs prepared to fight and die, steeped to the bone with one imperative -- to obey orders unquestioningly -- and trained to fight as a team. The smallest possible team is two. Becker needs a partner at his side. Lepsky and Judge Verhoeven issue the orders.

That's why I wrote Partners, to show what partnership is, why it exists.

https://www.amazon.com/Partners-Wolf-DeVoon/dp/1722608595

For the good of the nation

I forget -- oh! -- now I remember. Wilda's lede in her weekly gossip column suggested doing something for The Good Of The Nation, which seemed like common sense to heed. I told her I'd get right on it, patted her affectionately and came home to my writer's lair, if you can call a tin barn a writer's lair. It has a coffee pot, microwave, laptop, and a plywood bunk that needs a pillow. The old one became so filthy with mold that I had to toss it on a flaming brush pile, along with that week's trash bags. I generate a lot of garbage, not exactly good for the nation, but it's life on life's terms in rural living. A year ago when I still had a car, I drove trash bags to town and let the town garbage collectors bury or burn it. If I understand the national situation correctly, nearly every consumer in the United States produces tons of waste.

Nothing I can do about that. Voting won't fix it. Same intractable problem with 9,220 Veterans Administration buildings and 49,000 Dept. of Agriculture offices and inspection stations, plus 373,000 miles of road maintained by the Forest Service, a USDA subsidiary. The military? Hah. Defense occupies 696,470 buildings worldwide, plus 8 million square feet in Virginia. Roughly six million people are directly or indirectly employed by the Pentagon, not including allies. In the Old World, allies were called "auxilliaries," had to be fed and watered, disinclined to do much serious fighting, unless they were British Gherkas. Ancient history. War is a Raytheon inventory to be launched by stealth fighter or drone nowadays. There's not much that you or I or anyone else can do to enhance national security. It's already the third-largest budget item funded by government, after Social Security and Medicare. I'm not sure that anything can be done to assist the Corps of Engineers with 650 dams, 12,000 miles of channel, and 926 harbors to maintain. I guess we could vote to borrow more money from offshore tax havens.

I'm not big on voting. The last time I voted was in 2008, because Sarah Palin was on the ticket, a reasonably normal person, guileless and honest. Since then I spent quite a lot of time at my laptop, exercising my remaining wit as an author, hoping to contribute inspirational literature for The Good Of The Nation.

I should have stood in bed, as the expression goes. Jews, blacks, gays, and doe-eyed victims of Christianity have a lock on publishing and the 16x9 public square of televised squabbling. Frozen out, I self-published twenty books. Good joke on me. A decade of effort exiled my work to laughable obscurity. My latest and best novel was shunted to Amazon.mx, denied existence in English, deemed unfit for American readers. Mighty hard to leverage The Good Of The Nation when the nation in question forbids admission to the marketplace of ideas.

"Free speech has limits," they scold. "You can't shout fire! in a crowded theater."

Maybe that was my mistake, I should have shouted fire in a gay nightclub, won a customary fifteen minutes of fame as a patriotic pariah, a noodlemeyer paraded in an orange jumpsuit and leg irons. If I owned a car, I could have waved a tiki torch in Charlottesville, shaved what little hair I have left on my head. Unfortunately, I don't give a shit about Confederate statues or any other legacy writ in concrete. The focus of my work was liberty, an extinct species of civil rights, and embarrassingly frank cis-het adventure novels, an antique artform.

It seems strange that national progress should be left in the care of bartender Sean Hannity and butch Rachel Maddow, but they're certainly less boring than Andy Rooney was, a salutary binaural eclipse of monotone Sunday night CBS schtick. I give Fox and MSNBC a one finger digital salute and note in passing the fan-losing Negro Football League taking a suicidal knee for The Good Of The Autonomous Vehicle Gig Economy Queer Nation. Mom always said that I was an optimist. Liberty is the future for some of us, unwilling to bend over for modernity.

I find myself in agreement with Fernando Wood, the mayor of New York, on the occasion of Confederate secession from the Union. "Let the erring sisters go in peace," he pleaded. Why not? Separate yourself for the greater good of all. Boycott Nike.