About Escape!

 

I want to talk about it, because Escape! has a slam bang finish. Not easy to do. Almost impossible to render properly to sustain suspension of disbelief without addressing technical issues that arise in every paragraph. The scenes are compressed in a crush of parallel action with numerous people to recognize and remember, because we encountered all of them intimately four or five times in the course of 240 previous pages. A slam bang finish cannot be slowed to help confused readers.

 

If you read it with the sort of thrall that flows from catharsis and actual worry about the fate of men and women we like and care about, the finish is a nail biter that ratchets tighter and explodes, almost certain doom — which triples the risk of a flopped soufflé, unless the rescue makes sense and plays correctly in every detail and shade of expression through dénouement and a punchline. It's a high wire tightrope back flip without a net. Why I attempt such insanely risky literary stunts is inexplicable, yet required by my structural plotline of the story and foreshadowed in a dozen clues. Gadant can lose his temper, feel empathy, tell jokes, and suffer heartache, but he's steady and strong enough to assess a life and death situation and reveal nothing to an opponent. He has bold bronze eyes for a reason.

 

Hmph. If I keep raising the bar, how the hell am I supposed to conceive a new story? Writing is not a difficult problem. What to write is a distant hush. I have to be completely alone to hear it, a slow half mile walk to the country store.

 

 

Immigration

 

Well. That's awkward. I solved the immigration crisis. I previously advanced the argument that liberty trumps property, and there have to be public roads to get from A to B, which is a leaky boat of political philosophy that adds to our difficulties, instead of fixing things. Don't fret. I have another brick in the border wall. It was implicit that no newcomer or stranger can cross fenced property lines, which exist in profusion on both sides of the public road, aside from churches, hospitals, schools, police stations, and other institutions that talk to paupers routinely and extensively. Everything takes several hours in an E.R. or days in a jail cell. Religious institutions are notorious slow. But strangers are welcome to witness head scratching and low energy among those who engage in public assistance. I did some of that when I was younger and more generous with my time. Young people do it to gain experience.

 

So should penniless immigrants. We solved their plight during the earliest stage of colonial America's development, and I think it was a halfway fair procedure. Few were forced into it. After six or seven years of indentured servitude, a contract was satisfied and the signatory became a free citizen of the state. Georgia was almost exclusively populated by indentured servants. Not good public policy to go overboard on this particular arrangement. Formerly enslaved indentured servants thought nothing of owning African slaves. The indolence and cruelty of antebellum abuse of African slaves was mostly the low moral superiority of former indentured servants somewhere in the family tree. In modern America, both of my grandfathers worked for no money during the Depression and succeeded in amassing an extensive network of property interests, in collaboration with farmers, bankers, and regional bigwigs. Both grandfathers belonged to relatively similar Protestant church congregations that extended their reputation for circumspection and honesty, which takes a lifetime to cement. Marriage is a merger of the economic strength in two families. Most parents are suspicious of suitors and glib smiles. One thinks of vacuum cleaner salesmen and door to door supplicants for a fake charity, children recruited to beg with simple innocence. Oh, well, free market shenanigans. Best to see the humor in it. As a youngster I sold magazines, seeds, and greeting cards door to door, a future Maxwell Smart in spirit, learned a lot by knocking on doors, especially the magic carpet of knocking on the doors of commercial enterprises. Two outcomes I was surprised to win by knocking on doors: I encountered men and women of considerable prominence nationally and worldwide, and I was given exciting opportunities.

 

All children begin their lives as indentured servants of their parents, with little choice in the matter, paupers at birth, unable to produce much during the first few years of life. Not such a bad deal in most cases, do what mom and dad say, try to be helpful on the farm or the family home. There are always chores to do, from frame house to urban penthouse. Kids are student workers, and the implicit deal between generations is reciprocal, when parents become grandparents and need help in dealing with a society that they scarcely understand, so unlike their experience as young adults 50 or 60 years ago. I made the remark yesterday to a woman of my generation that I missed the Bell Telephone desk set with a nice heavy receiver and Touch Tone dialing. Our telephones existed at the office, which made offices active and purposeful. We didn't carry telephones around all day. Offices kept business hours, usually a trusted secretary in charge. My grandfathers went to see people and discussed matters in person.

 

Donald Trump did it, and he baffled his White House staff and thoughtful observers by working long hours in the Oval Office and elsewhere, entrepreneurial discipline that required a lifetime of effort and learning to achieve. Amusingly, the thing to be learned is independence and alert individual assessment of opportunity. For instance, when I made a movie it was preceded and made possible by a whole lot of personal assessment of potential opportunities and communities. Golly. It boggles my mind how far I traveled to get a movie off the ground, frequently broke, willing to take an indentured service gig again. I got room and board in exchange for devoting my full time skills and abilities when I was a handsome youngster. Youngsters of all races are attractive and usually willing to devote their loyalty if you feed and shelter them and show them how to do stuff. I was offered apprenticeships and did a few for no money, gaining knowledge that propelled my career as a filmmaker. How I directed the course of that career might have been handled differently by another sort of person. I aimed at art.

 

That's how to handle immigration. Address them as children or indentured servants who can earn their place in society. Some will make better decisions than others. Crime should be punished summarily by private parties who are threatened by it, basic Second Amendment preparedness, augmented by living in a secure community where neighbors know each other and attend church together, or in somewhat similar Protestant congregations, Catholic parishes, or a synagogue. Islam was never an important force in American society, and Sharia law is unconstitutional on its face. England, France, Germany, Belgium, and Scandinavia have been profoundly burdened and bloodied by Islamic immigrants. America is toying with explosive tinder by sheltering Islamic migrants from Afghanistan, Syria, and the Horn of Africa.

 

Governments always do the wrong thing. What matters most is private choice with a decent regard for reason, security, and adult responsibilities. I've traveled a great deal and met some hundreds of people of all ages everywhere. A few were dangerous. I was ready to kill or be killed, a self defense policy that all peoples and all nations have understood since the dawn of man and is likewise understood by most sentient animals. If you're nice to a dog, feed and shelter him, he will follow you loyally and defend you. Children require more effort, and it's uncertain if children will behave reasonably past age 16. The rule of thumb is no. At age 16, their indentured servitude is completed and they're free to sell their labor. Contract labor and personal service agreements are limited by California law to seven years.

 

All work constrains liberty to some extent. I had to fill out beaucoup forms, make representations, and submit to drug tests for certain jobs, with tons of passport, visa, and insurance hurdles. I know what it means to be poor, sick, and humbled. I experienced all of them, falling from great heights of privilege to crash on Skid Row several times. At some point, you have to stand up straight and tall, get cleaned up, and start over as a matter of devotion to the tremendous gift of life, not to be forsaken. I don't diss the huddled masses yearning to breathe free. I was no different.

 

A contract of servitude, whether private or military, is an appropriate opportunity for paupers age 16 and older. In recent decades, 150,000 noncitizens have earned U.S. citizenship via active duty combat military service, obedient to cruel officers. They had to learn English pronto.

 

Boys should be directed by honest, dignified men, the girls employed and guided by women. The free market is not always so nicely organized. Smart kids will learn to escape perverts and bullies. Others will be aided by public institutions if child abuse is detected. Many immigrants are young men in their 20s, a difficult cohort to wrangle. The key to their success is contract employment. Construction, landscaping, factory work, and the ugly business of meat processing become benevolent and instructive institutions by welcoming illegal immigrants. We have to reform our laws to relax the rules of private sector contract employment regardless of a worker's immigration status. Union stewards are stubborn and maddening. I rolled my eyes at union fussiness and got yelled at when it was break time, both as a union worker and later on as an employer. Workplace regulations are good policy. Employers are usually eager to promote safety for liability reasons. Injuries are legally actionable.

 

Four million Americans quit their jobs in August, another 4.4 million in September. U.S. employers are frantically seeking to hire 11 million people and can't fill those jobs. Put wetbacks to work on long term contracts as indentured servants with room and board, pocket money, health care, and union safety rules, to earn state citizenship in six or seven years, thus eligible to sit a U.S. naturalization exam.

 

 

Mountain climbing

 

I don't want to do this. I'm old and tired, don't get enough sleep. There's nothing left to prove. Nobody reads me anyway, so what difference at this point does it make, to quote a profoundly corrupt Secretary of State. Great model for a villain, ne c'est pas? I don't want another villain or a hero or anything simple. Been there, done that multiple times. I need to conceive a traditional long form novel, 1000 pages in hardcover, a heavy weapon in close quarters if you have to clunk somebody over the head with it.

 

I'm not going to self-publish it. Agents and publishers get a veto on serious literature. Ups the ante in a lifelong poker game, me against the world. I need to envision four aces and a joker. It will take years to write and more years to shop. I might not live to see it in print, which is fine, published posthumously for promotional oomph. Maybe it will prompt bookish people to read some of my adventure novels and frown at the old fashioned formula, boy meets girl.

 

Huge mountain to climb. An epic novel that's not about boy meets girl.

 

 

Dear royal dumbshit

 

HRH Prince William and other interested persons,

It is my uncomfortable duty to suggest that liquid fuel refined from oil is a vital component of world trade, mechanized farming, heavy goods transport, plus rapid deployment of military, technical, and humanitarian personnel and high value cargo by air. We are ill advised to abandon oil production or to mandate conversion to alternative motor fuels. Bio diesel is not clean tech. All efforts to produce fuel from blue green algae proved to be prohibitively costly. Gas-to-liquid processes are likewise wasteful, and in the modern context it is foolish to divert natural gas necessary for all-weather generation of electricity and low cost heating. Fuel cells are weak and heavy. Oil powers 95% of transport.

Electrification of transport is not a full solution. I will attach a research document on critical elements, the compelling message of which is resource nationalism and soaring consumption of rare earth metals required in modern electric vehicles, wind turbines, and solar panels. Formerly abundant supply of tin, lead, zinc, cadmium, platinum group metals, dysprosium, and silver are becoming geologically scarce.

I am particularly concerned about oil production. All of the easy plays have been exploited, produced, refined, and consumed. Horizontal fracturing of oily shales is costly and dirty. Tar sands are infinitely worse, an environmental disaster at Fort McMurray. Remaining crude oil potential is mainly offshore in deepwater plays that are too far from markets to justify pipe laying for transport of associated natural gas which always occurs in oil production. I raise this matter to discuss "flaring" of gas and highly volatile natural gas liquids, which is wasteful and a direct contribution to global warming that the World Bank has endeavored to halt. I developed a simple method of converting flared gas to sea ice, briefly sketched in another attachment hereto. Flared gas in Nigeria could be converted to electricity by substituting a generator instead of a compressor. The strategic goal is to husband energy instead of wasting it.

Thank you for encouraging novel solutions. In the distant future, hydrogen motors and liquid fluoride thorium nuclear power are promising technologies that deserve your support. My efforts are short term, easily deployed improvements to make offshore oil platforms net contributors to oceanic cooling.

Respectfully submitted

 

--------------------

The royal imbecile handed out £5 million in prizes for bullshit, futzing with land use in Costa Rica and a bleached coral reef in Oz. Prize contest closed.

 

 

Odd as heck

 

bolt spinner Gadant

Bruno Heckmeier

Chris Cable, P.I.

Kyle Marshall and Jimmy Becker

Judge Harry Faraday

Dr. Archie Kellogg (an alias)

Gerry Ralston, Hugh Whitehorse, Morton Disley

elderly poet Blane Ballard

Jake, God, and Lucifer

Max Turpentine

Mollusk P. Molever

 

The women were wonderful, but my main character was always a leading man who had to suffer and triumph. Some went out with a bang.

I wrote a lot of personal memoir, never triumphant, never heroic, too easily seduced. That's why I liked fictional heroes, especially the supporting cast of bravehearts. Malik, Springer, and Jimmy Blue. Lt. Col. Terry Beane and industrialist Ralph Smugg. Asshole Lyle Mefford. Gunnery Sgt. Art Flores. Private banker Phillip Argonne and Lance Corporal Tom Hoffman. Admiral 'Skip' Williamson and Col. Gerry Green, MI-5. Nick Narcourt, Barry Mintz, Ben Bryer. Black ops director Mr. Brown, Billy Crane, and cousin Orville. No two alike, every man individual and distinct. The villains were heartless and clever. Gerhardt Arbuster. Clinton Spurls and Big John Corrigan. 'Binky' Balfour. Danny Stephanopolis. Colonel Bauer.

The job of creative writing is odd as heck. I don't know where characters come from, no idea how stories seem to evolve by themselves. The women were always difficult to control, too many moving parts in the feminine psyche. Female readers are impossible to please. I don't care what LGBT thinks.

Unhappily, I've painted myself into a corner, socially shunned for who I am, what I know about life, and my willingness to talk about it publicly. Erik has been almost unique in supporting me, a literary lifeline thrown by a very capable author. I don't know what my future will be, whether a new idea will emerge with enough clarity to write another story — another year of sweat equity, bad food, coffee, cigarettes, and progressive decline, to do signature art for art's sake, in celebration of heroic men and hot babes drawn to each other by irresistible natural right.

 

I agree with NPR

 

Let's cut 30% of U.S. fossil fuel use tomorrow. No more gasoline, diesel, natural gas, heating oil, jet fuel, lubricants, or coal-fired power production for Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, eastern Pennsylvania, Delaware, Baltimore, D.C., and upscale suburban Virginia. They don't produce any fossil fuel and they can fucking freeze and starve to death.

 

That was easy. Give them what they want and deserve. If we cut off Illinois, Minnesota, and Michigan, that's another 20% of freeloading Democrats and murderous gangbangers gone. California will have to learn to live with less and lighten up on Kern County. Plenty of shale to frack in Monterrey, if they want to make movies and grow lettuce. Wisconsin might have an untapped oil and gas field offshore in Lake Michigan, or they can burn cow pies. I don't care what happens in the touchy feely Pacific Northwest, destroyed by antifa militancy and dysfunctional policing. Florida is offering a $5000 bonus for cops who relocate to the Sunshine State where solar might actually make sense.

 

.

Africa can go to hell

 

I don't know how to make this more emphatic. We owe them nothing. Giving Africans money is like throwing napalm on a bonfire, fueling corruption and interminable economic failure. I don't care what brainless Africans or BBC liars say about climate change. The very first fossil fuel to shut down is African oil production that shovels payola to rotten tyrants and brutal armies who make life hell for women and children. African generals and politicians do nothing to stop criminal gangs, kidnappers, or incompetent idlers pretending to be public servants.

 

Wait a minute ... I've changed my mind. We owe Washington nothing. Electing Democrats to strangle liberty and throw paper money at the idle is fueling inflation and widespread shortages. I don't care what brainless academics or NPR liars say about social justice. The very first fossil fuel to shut down is the hidden cost of dirty coal in solar panels, rare earth motors, and magnets imported from China that shovel payola to Communist tyrants who make life hell for industrial slaves and Hong Kong protestors. American social media moguls, stuffy self-righteous Republicans, and unionized teachers do nothing to stop urban crime, ruthless fentanyl cartels, child abuse by LGBT and CRT propaganda, or incompetent bureaucrats pretending to be scientists.

 

I don't know how to make this more emphatic. D.C. can go to hell.

 

 

Supply problems no one wants to discuss

 

Forget everything else you've heard.

1. We are preposterously dependent on China, ceased making much of anything in USA. China supplies 90% of our electronics, antibiotics, vitamins, plumbing parts, toys, tools, clothing, furniture, you name it. If it were up to me, I would order the fleet of Chinese container ships parked offshore to go home. It's a matter of national security. We need to rebuild and expand US manufacturing.

2. Stop wiring new cars with complicated accessories. Automakers canceled orders for Chinese chips because car sales plummeted a year ago and idiot managers put themselves at the back of the line for "just in time" shipments. Has nothing to do with the container bottleneck. Chips are flown in by DHL, FedEx and scheduled airlines, international flights halted by lockdowns and flight crew quarantine. US chips made in Silicon Valley are shipped to China. How smart is that? And worse, the F-35 is equipped with Chinese chips, a back door vulnerability to enemy combat radar and targeting. We need to claw back semiconductor manufacturing pronto, roughly $200 billion in capital investment, an almost trivial sum compared to Federal spending of $7 trillion this year.

3. The bottleneck at Long Beach and San Pedro is union rules and Customs inspection. Every container has to be opened to check for fentanyl hidden in the cargo. Union longshoremen have to move every container with electric dock ferries to Customs and then to a warehouse. There are lines of California approved big rigs waiting 36-72 hours, loaded with empty containers to swap for full ones that they will haul to the state line, where lines of idle long haul diesel rigs are waiting for loads because they aren't allowed to enter California. A total clusterfuck caused by delays in ordering, delays in shipping, union rules, Air Quality prohibition of diesel engines manufactured before 2011, and Biden paying workers to stay home instead of working. In August, four million people quit or retired, mostly in food service and retail, fed up with low pay, long hours, rising crime, and stifling masks. There are 350,000 commercial warehouse and driver jobs advertised with top wages and hiring bonuses offered, no applicants.

4. Christmas hysteria is stupid. You can't buy love. Make popcorn and sing carols. Hug your kids, watch It's A Wonderful Life and turn off the damn digital crap. Every Apple product was made in China. Talk to each other for a change. Be prepared to answer kid questions honestly. If you believe in Jesus, read the story of Bethlehem aloud, or let Linus recite it in A Charlie Brown Christmas.

5. The myth of "US energy independence" is one of the most pernicious lies shouted endlessly by Sean Hannity and Mark Levin, after Biden's embargo of drilling on Federal land. In 2019, America consumed 20 million barrels a day and we produced only 14 million bpd. The rest of it was imported from Canada, Mexico, Arabia, and Brazil. The current situation is worse, producing 12 million bdp — half of it from horizontal fracturing in Texas, Oklahoma, Colorado, and North Dakota, the other half from vertical wells in deepwater Gulf of Mexico and Kern County California. Oil frackers are making money at $80 a barrel, but they have to keep drilling because horizontal wells have steep decline curves and they are running out of rich oily shales to frack on state and private leases. Biden's order to stop auctioning new Federal leases halted investment in multibillion dollar deepwater projects in the Gulf and exploration of the Alaska National Petroleum Reserve, a frozen coastal swamp hundreds of miles from the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge near Prudhoe Bay (which is almost kaput as a producing field, drilled in the 1970s).

6. Coal matters more than you know. If they kill coal, we're going to have blackouts and brownouts, no power to charge a huge fleet of electric vehicles that GM and Ford are tooling up to manufacture. I don't care how many solar panels and wind turbines are mandated by the Green New Deal. Storms will wreck costly offshore wind installations. Solar produces nothing at night, in the rain, or in dim winter sun.

7. At the moment, Federal Reserve bond purchases of $2 trillion a year and 0.25% interest rate policy is floating $30 trillion of Treasury debt. The Green New Deal and lavish cradle to grave free shit will double that debt over the next two decades, $60 trillion that will cut our AAA credit rating and push up interest rates. The long term historical interest rate for Treasury debt is 4%, maybe 7% for the $20 trillion owed by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, 9% for a future $20 trillion of state, county, and city debt. We will hit a brick wall sooner or later, paying as much interest as Medicare and Medicaid combined. No money for new warships, new aircraft, or new missiles to counter the Chinese threat. Mild 6% inflation today will become 25% hyperinflation. Gangsters and desperados will terrorize unarmed suburban whites.

Bottom line, socialism is a speeding train wreck. Big surprise, huh?

FDR famously asked John Maynard Keynes what would happen in the long run, and Keynes answered, "In the long run, Mister President, we'll all be dead."

Mike Gallagher can't understand why nobody wants to work. They were paid to stay home, scared stiff of being exposed to Covid, don't want to be assaulted or carjacked, waiting for another Federal check, fatter SNAP, free preschool and daycare, $3,000 a year for each kid, a Social Security COLA boost, free rent and utilities, free health care, free booster shots, food pantry boxes and Meals on Wheels. It doesn't matter whether a liberal or a conservative takes charge. The road to socialism is a one-way ticket. Entitlements will never be repealed. Millions of illegal immigrants will never be deported.

Remember Mrs. Thatcher, the iron lady? She doubled the NHS budget, expanded social services, gave "job seekers" weekly benefits, free college, and free housing. Donald Trump was no better, handed tens of billions to airlines and Pfizer, Moderna, and J&J, hundreds of millions to Walgreens, CVS, WalMart, Target, General Motors, and states and localities, plus 80 million Treasury checks, up to $3,600 for a family of four — a total of $1 trillion emergency "stimulus" in freshly printed Federal debt.

Postscript to Hannity and Levin. Shut the fuck up about Nord Stream II, a second natural gas pipeline from Russia to western Europe. The first Nord Stream line was completed over a decade ago, a joint venture with Germans, who have no gas of their own. The Dutch Groningen field is kaput. Siberia has fifty times the natural gas reserves that USA does, and we can't compete with gas rich Russia or Qatar. American gas reserves are shrinking, both conventional and unconventional, barely enough to keep the lights on, make steam, and cook dinner another decade or two. Subsidizing LNG exports is idiotic.

It's hilarious that you two bozos think Keystone XL had something to do with US energy independence — a 100% Canadian funded project to sell us more Canadian crude.

 

 

Personhood

 

In previous writing I said that no one wishes to be who they are. For instance, I sorely wished that I was taller, stronger, and smarter. What happens in life is grudging acceptance of life on life's terms, or we rebel by demanding equal dignity, or think ourselves better than others, put a lot of effort into grooming and imagine that personhood is negotiable. I worked with good actors who were amazingly talented in transforming themselves into fictional characters, but Laurence Olivier, Helen Mirren, and Peter Sellers were legendary chameleons in an exclusive class by themselves. They paid a heavy price for it. Bill Cosby had a big range of transpersonal film acting ability that was shocking and unpopular, got squelched by TV producers and advertisers to play a harmless, amusing nice guy.

 

Most people squelch their range to please parents, employers, spouses, kids. Diplomats are nearly devoid of personality. Politicians and corporate CEOs are coached and polished, say carefully chosen words that they did not write. Consultants design their clothes and hairstyles. I don't want to discuss bubbly smiley evangelists like Joel Ostein or Barack Obama. The worst of the worst are clever men who play dumb: Jerry Lewis, Charlie Chaplin, Moe Howard, Bob Hope, Johnny Carson, used car dealer Cal Worthington in a ten gallon hat. Women have a right to play dumb but it ends in sorrow.

 

Ascendancy of brazen LGBTQ is no different than soaring public debt and sky high P/E ratios, the make believe romance of lipstick on a pig, Liberace smiling in sequins and diamonds to disguise a crap lounge act. Bullshit pantomime and running gags don't make anyone prettier, more talented, or happier.

 

I have a modest talent, but it's honest, unrehearsed. Not pretending to be straight like Rock Hudson or faking intellectual depth like Joe Biden reading from a teleprompter. I'm old and weary, couldn't play games if I wanted to. I don't blame younger people for being deceived by clever liars and seductive fantasies. Be advised that A is A, a thing is itself, reality is real. The greatest actors suffered horribly, vomited backstage, drank heavily, and took pills to kill the pain of loneliness. Don't do it. If you were born a boy, be a boy and aspire to manhood, free of fake stage make-up and bangles.

 

All things noble are as difficult as they are rare. (Spinoza)

 

 

Heroic

 

My neighbor Don is heroic. Vietnam at age 17, plenty of bar fights, never took any shit from anyone. Father, grandfather, great-grandfather and patriarch of a big clan. His adult children are tough, hard working, decent men, their wives and children intrepid and happy. I've met some of them riding with Don, crunching gravel at 10 miles an hour over hills and dales and narrow creek slabs. A good friend to have. We're about the same age, fellow hippies. His wife is wonderful, an artist, an avid reader, has some health issues and a big humorous smile. Don tells stories, makes me laugh or listen carefully if it's grim news of another death. He's lived here a long time, armed to the teeth to deal with a dangerous world. That's why my wife and daughter have an adequate arsenal and live on a tactical hill ringed with barbed wire and a steel driveway gate, a dog and chickens to make noise if a predator intrudes. That's life on life's terms. Gardens to tend, food to be put up in Kerr jars, rabbits and deer to be harvested.

 

I sit in the tin barn and write, smoke, listen to the radio.

 

As always, NPR got it 100% wrong today in praise of a new Matt Damon movie set in medieval France — asserting that there is no truth, no reality, and everything is a matter of individual perspective. The most  insanely emotional broadcaster in America funded by politically correct pussies and public institutions happily concluded: "We are all heroes in our own mind."

 

A hero in my own mind? Hah. Everything I endeavored to do in life failed. I was a mediocre musician,  an incompetent director, hopeless entrepreneur, vaguely courageous in fair weather, totally dependent on the good graces of others, an incompetent father, a terrible employee, and perpetually ignored. I tried to be positive and flunked. I was deaf to bosses, colleagues, good counsel, celebrities, and plain common sense.

What I saw as inspiring was scoffed at and dissed. All of my wives had buyer's remorse, and in today's context, I trust that my career as a lover would be vilified. Small wonder that no one wants my literary work, a million words in defense of liberty, a wild romance of white male aggression, privilege, and pleasure. I despise spineless surrender to a mob of savages to compensate an "injustice" or their hurt feelings. Life is not fair. Of necessity and objectively, it is life on life's terms, unique and individual.

Occasionally, I've explained why I lost my temper, which doesn't matter and doesn't change anything. My social skills amount to pitching the impossible and unwanted. Given enough rope to hang myself, I issued terse orders, paid too much to get what I wanted, wrecked work opportunities, and ignored the consequences. It was not heroic. It was a formula for disaster, the road to ruin and shame.

Go ahead. Listen to a touchy feely TED talk on NPR, smile and blink. Today's theme was "revitalization" in praise of snarky black people and spiral cord injury victims, people you will never encounter if you read my tall tales or philosophical rants. My message to democrats is drop dead, there is no divine right to vote, legislate, tax, regulate, punish, or reward whatever you think would be nice for everybody.

NPR heroes are patriots of color like Colin Powell, promoted and mourned as a "pioneering" political stooge. Republicans admire Oliver North, bravely shredding documents at the White House to cover up a covert conspiracy to trade arms for hostages and fund Contra coke smugglers. I'm not heroic. I didn't fight in Vietnam or Iraq or Afghanistan, didn't roll over with my paws folded for Hope And Change.

In the past I was quoted by anonymous anarchists, because I said that I subscribe to the Fuck You school of political philosophy. It's my life, not yours to marshal and march into battle.

That's why Don and I see eye to eye. He said fuck you to Army officers and crooked cops, willing to get his ass kicked by men twice his size and didn't care who won or lost a bar fight. That's heroism in the trenches of life on life's terms. He thinks I'm okay because I was the smallest guy in prison, bulked up in the gym and faced killers who were three times my size, fifty years ago. I have emotional and physical scars. So what? Nowadays I'm too old and frail to fight anyone. If necessary, there's a replica Ruger on the shelf loaded with bronze BBs. I don't trust myself with firearms. Writing is a tense business. Too many novelists have shot themselves.

See? — I'm not heroic. I don't even want to promote my work anymore. Too stressful in a world owned and operated by happy smiley squirrels and evil chipmunks, playing patty cake with chumps. Nobody needs or wants hardboiled fiction, an antique genre that deals with gangsters and crooked government and heroic assholes and leggy babes in high heels, Depression era life on life's terms.

 

[milwaukee]

 

.

Carnality

 

I learn things listening to Eric Metaxas. He had a guest who spoke about being a dope dealer and skirt chaser as a teenager, then he broke down sobbing and found Jesus, who wasn't far away because his father was a Baptist preacher. I was never tempted to break down and follow my father's faith. He was an obsequious insurance agent who dealt with factory fires and hail damage, a job he inherited from my grandfather, who was a more interesting person. Grandpa created big industrial projects by optioning land and investing the savings of a Luxemburger farmer. When I visited Luxembourg, I spotted that farmer's family name in a church cemetery. George Patton was buried nearby.

 

Travel is carnal. Spiritual travel is essentially hooey, playing deuces wild. Excuse me. The dog wants to move to his longer chain, and I have to eject a stick insect from my open doorway. I live in the carnal world. Forest. Gravel road. Patches of overgrown weeds that I have to whack when I feel like being athletic, swinging a powerful trimmer. When I load the reel, it has to be the right length, seated properly and wound carefully, so it won't jam. More carnal reality. I have to eat sensibly. When I'm busy writing, carnal expression of carnal thoughts, I end up with a cold mug of coffee. It used to happen routinely in video production, and I came to think of it as "TV coffee" — always cold when I had a moment of rest to sip a formerly hot fresh cup. Carnal life exists in a time and place, not in some cloud cuckoo land with infinite or ultimate perspectives. I like philosophy as much as the next fellow, but it's useless without existential referent. The Old Testament is full of battles, chariots and swordsmen who fought with their neighbors for a thousand years. Zionists are still fighting their neighbors with highly carnal fighter jets and bombs. The millions trapped in Gaza, Damascus, and Beirut struggle with carnal survival, mentally crippled by allegedly holy men and religious doctrine. Their carnal incompetence killed hundreds and wrecked big chunks of Beirut because a mountain of fertilizer was seized and stored improperly in a dockside warehouse. Carnal reality routinely punishes incompetent holy men and their captive helots. Like Jezebel, the carnal princess from Phoenicia, I'm often tempted to attack holy prophets, but I have better things to do than screw with incompetents.

 

Spirituality? Plenty of spiritual virtues in production, distribution, and retail. Competition is nonstop discovery, a sharp impetus to see deeper and farther. New ideas are the holy grail. Our lives are filled by knowledge and carnal wisdom, the truth of birth and death. It doesn't matter whether God created the Singularity and shook his Finger at Judah. I'm not Jewish, just a regular guy tapping the keyboard of a laptop. A real laptop. It doesn't matter whether the New York publishing kibbutzim have a spiritual writ. Remember Lloyd Blankfein, the chairman of Goldman Sachs? He told a reporter that Goldman was doing God's work — the most ruthlessly carnal outfit in history, co-located with the NYSE and front running it with supercomputing robots. That's how the Dow zoomed from 8,500 to 35,000, nose bleed P/E ratios for legacy shares and tech "unicorns" that have never made a dime of profit.

 

 

Bafflement

Mystified and stunned that I wrote Finding Flopsie. Doesn't matter what anyone else thinks, Flopsie is a triumph of storytelling. It glides effortlessly from UCLA to Laguna Beach, Santa Barbara, Santa Rosa, and Pasadena, then a daring chase to Singapore, Bali, Sydney, the Outback, Christmas Island, and a remote mountaintop in Central Java, nothing but grim obstacles and uncertainty, never sure of success.

 

Shaking my head, stumped by another masterpiece, Partners.

 

And then Escape!

 

Someday sooner or later, if I live that long, there will be another novel, working title Mister Blank. I asked a Bible scholar to help me find the fable of Jezebel, his nemesis. On such thin filaments of story, something compelling and astounding will emerge. When I began Escape! all I knew was its locale, a creaky space colony in solar orbit.

 

Yesterday, a neighbor asked me if I wanted her to drive me to a doctor. I said no, because if they got hold of me they'd never let me go. I don't want a stent or a pacemaker or poison. I don't care if I die in my sleep or collapse somewhere on the gravel road. My last breath will be a coda, to be reprised in the history of human affairs and hardboiled adult tales, a legacy unlike any other. I'll live forever in my video lectures on liberty and the rule of law, a new constitution to secure both, perhaps to be amplified at a future crossroads when the fake regime of worthless paper and hollow pretense implodes.

 

Baffled by how much I achieved, how far I traveled in life.

 

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A world of cruelty and pain

10,000 children killed and maimed in Yemen. Women and girls captive, raped and tortured to death in Pakistan, India, Afghanistan. Millions are starving and brutalized in Burma, Congo, Mozambique, Brazil, Sudan, Somalia, Libya, El Salvador, Haiti. Endless civil wars, assassination, genocide, criminal gangs and drug cartels of incredible cruelty. Poverty, disease, illiteracy, tyranny. No society in ancient history was exempt. "Modern" Western and Asian powers waged brutal wars against primitives and against each other, millions of Russians, Chinese, Germans, Brits, Japs, Jews, Vietnamese, Arabs, Ukrainians, Poles, and Americans killed for abstract ideals and control of oil fields, mineral deposits, cotton, grain, rubber. 10,000 are shot in Chicago every year by gangs fighting for dominance, revenge, savage rage. Public education and policing have failed.

The lesson of history is to bug out. Find your way to a peaceful, prosperous, rational community, loyal only to yourself, no obligation to religion, tribe, or tradition. Escape. Do whatever you have to, pay any price for a fresh start. Work. Study. Save. Spend every hour of every day to find a way to free yourself. Don't tell anyone what you're doing. Don't expect any help. Doors will open if you have something to offer. Go. The only fatal error in life is to despair and do nothing.

 

Worst science fiction novel ever written

That's what a guy said in a forum post that Google cached, although the remark was deleted by a forum moderator, one of several posts asking about my first novel Mars Shall Thunder. The mod posted links to a free text version, maybe a 1997 manuscript that was scraped more than once. It promotes readership, which is fine. Recent novels are protected by Amazon and Lulu. I was surprised that somebody wanted to read Mars, just out of the blue.

 

Worst sci-fi novel ever written? A reviewer on Audible said that Galt's Gulch was the worst Audible ever, not bad production wise, narrated by R.K. Maier — but specifically disgusted that I was contemptible. I catch a lot of flak for thinking and speaking my mind in public. It's hard to estimate how big an audience my voice reaches. It's in all my novels loud and clear. In Mars I defended the rule of law and when that doesn't work, facing a totalitarian state, revolution is often necessary. If I remember correctly, Sunni Maravillosa and Samuel Z. Jones said nice things about Mars in second draft. Sunni remarked that I was one of the few male authors who could accurately describe exclusively female experiences. Sam gushed that it was thrilling and Mars was marvelously realized. Personally, I don't know. I wrote what I could.

 

Atlas Shrugged was voted the worst novel ever in a Chicago newspaper poll. Not much doubt that Atlas was science fiction. People wrongly talk about it as a dystopian fantasy. She was ahead of her time and couldn't conceive that America would be destroyed by blacks, multiplying like rabbits, taking 1/3 of all Federal civil service jobs and 2/3 of big city police chiefs. Rand was outraged by legalized robbery — the impulse to tax and spend, taking money from productive people to promote trash. Forget about trash, white or otherwise, the evil purpose is to tear down and wreck the good. Not necessarily the rich. The innovators who love the work of discovery, devote a lifetime to invent something new. Atlas Shrugged presented a remarkable idea, that evil requires the sanction of the victim.

 

Maybe I presented something equally remarkable, that justice is armed defense of innocent liberty. Rand didn't explore the philosophy of law, left it as a blank page in her body of work. She thought ethics was the main attraction, which it is, to the extent that individually we need to pilot ourselves. Law is a much different field of inquiry, asking what constitutes an impartial, impersonal process of public order and custody of orphans, the mentally ill, and felons. Bad policy to do nothing about crime — although that's precisely what's happening, as you probably know if you pay attention to news headlines. Many stores have shut their doors, because black shoplifters can't be arrested or detained if they snatch less than $950 of luxury goods in a mall or specialty shop. Narcotics are endemic. Cops are quitting.

 

Back to the topic of being a bad writer, if I am. Many people think I am.

 

What people think or say about me is totally irrelevant to the work of writing a novel. I'm done with nonfiction. I devoted 40 years of study and wrote about justice aplenty, much of it in essays that were widely read, then several books. I know I have an annoying style when I write nonfiction, blending my personal experience with impersonal argument dressed in technical jargon.

Reminds me of Chiseltown, a satire jammed with moviemaking jargon. It still makes me smile. Bruno was a very lucky guy.

 

Honestly, I just write what I can. A novel is six months of slamming keystrokes, catching typos, waiting for the right thing to come next. Outlines are revised continually. Characters are flesh and blood people to me. I hear every breath and unspoken subconscious reaction. People have secrets that leak out.

 

25 years after Mars, I revisited space in Escape! I absolutely don't care if people despise it, which will probably happen sooner or later. It has intimate sexual content, girls who are girls, men who are men, the truth of hope and happiness and sorrow in sharp focus. It's not a question of competence. Both sexes are equally capable in Spar One, the girls slightly brighter than the men, which is normal. Women need men to be strong and confident, willing to throw themselves into danger. Space is an unforgiving environment. Men are not angels, as Madison observed. Evil must be detected and defeated.

 

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Accepting the fact

As far as I can tell, I have been exiled to Amazon.mx

 

Everything. Generally well presented with nice stuff up top, but everything in my body of work sold by Amazon is nuevo y mui grapo en Espanol todos. The ratings and reviews were included, the reviews in English, many five stars and a couple of raspberries. My work has always generated ire among a certain class of educated persons. In the old days when the internet was young and we searched Alta Vista, my writing was well received in Sweden and Finland. A paywall ebook on heterosexual success (don't ask) factored in my recruitment to Laissez Faire City, whereupon I became a minor sensation and generated a lot of ire. So it's not a new thing. Quite remarkable that so many people seemed to tolerate my unique sense of reality and found merit in my work, both fiction and nonfiction. Their encouragement kept me going several decades, especially during the last few years when I was reaching for fine literature.

 

That's silly, of course. I write outrageous adventures, not fine literature that would satisfy a BBC World Service Book Club editor. Sometimes I listen to what passes for fine literature in the eyes and ears of women delighted by a female author's description of something dull, to be applauded as gifted writing. I'm not female or dull, so I'm not gifted.

 

Be that as it may, it's disconcerting that my latest and easily best novel to date (Escape!) is not available on the main Amazon U.S. portal, center stage in the home of the brave. I'm an American novelist and a U.S. "libertarian icon" as a radio host in Fairbanks exclaimed, because he was surprised and pleased that I was still alive, several years ago. I had just completed my first story in The Case Files series, A Portrait of Valor, introducing Chris and Peachy. Reviewers said nice things about my writing ability as the series unfolded. When I finished the last book in the series, Finding Flopsie, something much different would emerge next. Partners was my first effort at writing in dramatic triangles, which succeeded nicely IMO. After Chiseltown and some satirical novelettes, suddenly the 88K literary triumph of Escape! Well, not exactly sudden, five or six months to conceive and write.

 

I'm canceled in a most peculiar way, exiled to Mexico. Not banned. (Too highly ranked as an author?) Decades of thought. Thousands of mentions across the web, including Quotes.com. It would be noticed if Google went nuclear on me. Friends might make 1st Amendment trouble on my behalf. Personally, I don't care, nor do I expect justice from Google, Kindle, Goodreads, or Wikipedia.

 

Hey, Amazon! — do I get paid in pesos now?

 

My favorite finger

The ring finger on my right hand. I've always thought it was nice. I considered why and realized that it was used to snap the fingers of my right hand, a professional snap to mark a moment in time. Standby, ready, and —*snap!* Directing the flow of pictures and sound in an editing suite is to see and hear 30 frames a second in video, 24 fps in film. It matters exactly which frame to cut and why.

 

A couple hours ago, I thought about home school. I was thrown out of high school and disliked college enough to raid it for law library access and Dean's List in philosophy, couldn't stomach any more. Every collision I had with higher ed thereafter was crummy. I lectured at a Villanova seminar, produced a video for Northern Nevada College, and installed two dozen distance learning cameras, projectors, and sound systems at UNR's vile Department of Education. I butted heads with Hospers at U.S.C. and Prof. Juhasz in Boulder, then a tenured clown from Chapman who I ordered out of my kitchen because he was sexually assaulting the cook, a married gal who was preparing lunch for houseguests. Next week was a dramatic contrast. The KGB general was a perfect gentleman, dignified and happy because Atlas Shrugged was going to be translated into Russian and the newly elected Russian president was a reformer, dedicated to capitalism. A year later it became evident that Putin and his inner circle were crony capitalists.

 

See? The benefit of homeschooling. You learn things.

 

As a teen I learned factory work, a couple gigs in a rock band, how to rip news from a teletype, how to use a variety of communications gear, how to operate a mimeograph and publish things, how to type (badly at first) and to compose artwork and text for major market rags. I learned everything involved in cinematography and sound recording. Directing and editing took decades to master, with a lot of home study, experiments, and travel. My first film projects were processed and printed at the Technicolor lab in Chicago. I rented nice Arriflex cameras, beautiful Schneider primes, a bucket crane, and a Sony sound boom. It takes time to get comfortable making filmed entertainment. At age 40, I won creative battles with TV facilities, big crews, famous people, and a Jersey Island shelf company, learning by doing it.

 

I also learned how to wrangle sheep, llamas, and chickens. I fought a forest fire. I helped a KLM stew escape Java. There's no limit to what you can learn at home, wherever home is around the world. It's hard to learn much in a small town that you never leave. Go Pirates! (my high school 's football team, bitter rivals of Cedarburg, another small town). Kids I knew as goofballs in elementary school became county commissioners and real estate salesmen, never left their familiar patch. My parents didn't go anywhere. I had to wrestle my freedom from them at age 17, eager to explore the world. I knew very little, started in urban kindergarten and took it on the chin whenever the world surprised me, which it did repeatedly as I made my way to New York, L.A., London, Sydney, Paris, and so on.

 

I don't think anybody learns anything without home school and travel. I reluctantly explored an Arab capital, no interest in visiting black Africa. I had plenty of involvement with American blacks, learned a great deal from them and about them, some of it quite sad, most of it complicated. Everything happens at somebody's home, theirs, mine, yours. Whatever we learn about romance and heartache unfolds in private. Nobody learns about life in schoolrooms, sitting in chairs, bored by the obvious.

 

I visited a high school English teacher I liked, still teaching 20 years later, and volunteered to address a sophomore class, show them what a page of screenplay looked like and what a page of literary work looked like. The kids were brain dead. They glanced at the photocopies I handed out, didn't read them, and didn't hear anything I said about writing. I should have cut the lecture to six words.

 

Writing is homeschooled. Thousands of hours.

 

I'm in a peculiar mood tonight. I laid in bed and listened to the BBC program Fixing The World, which airs once a week. It was a documentary account of Boris Johnson's 2020 "Everybody In" emergency order to pick up every bum on the streets of every city in England — tens of thousands of homeless dope addicts, drunks, and lunatics — to be housed in hotel suites like Holiday Inn Express so they didn't infect anyone with Covid. Some had to be evicted for trashing the place and assaulting others. Some went into private flats rented by the government. All of them were enrolled in welfare programs that put money in new bank accounts that the bums could spend on drugs and liquor, with regular visits by England's corps of social workers, housing officers, counselors, statisticians, and BBC reporters. A third of UK population is unemployed, elderly, handicapped, mentally ill, or incompetent, hence the vast welfare "sector" piled on top of a truly astonishing NHS army of bureaucrats, crowded GP offices, and hospital waiting lists. I had to wait six months to see a clinical psychologist when I lost all hope in Scotland. A wonderful shrink, a little Scot with a giant forehead. He asked questions, listened to me, and after two sessions declared: "There's nothing wrong with you. Finish the fucking novel."

 

That was quite a long time ago. I published 30 books since then, most of them novels and novelettes. Occasionally I get royalties when someone buys one of my self-published titles. Amazon sent me 12 cents this month, a slush fund from Kindle Prime, a penny per book downloaded free. I allowed it to promote readership. There's a $4 Smashwords anthology of The Case Files. Same strategy, give away work that cost years of dedication and love. Make a note. Free or cheap doesn't work.

 

Now that I've been canceled by Amazon, exiled to their Spanish language server, I don't see the purpose of climbing another mountain. It takes six months, working 6 or 7 days a week, to write a new novel.

 

I need to do something else. Maybe close up the tin barn and go somewhere, as soon as my dog dies, which he will soon. Losing hair, can't walk straight, gnarly skin tumors that itch. I give him a lot of help and cheerful attention. As long as he eats and drinks and pees and poops, we carry on. No dog lives forever. I need to look over the horizon.

 

I could snap the ring finger and thumb of my right hand, so to speak, go somewhere and make a movie. How to do that as an old toothless pauper is unimportant. All sorts of things are possible if you go out in the world and forage. I have video editing software on my laptop. I could borrow my daughter's digital camera. The first thing to do is to conceive a story to tell in pictures and sound.

 

Good plan, provided the dog doesn't outlive me.

 

John Huston made 'The African Queen' when he was 81 and in poor health, uninsurable. I'm only 71. On the other hand, I'm not Huston, and he had an easy job vaguely directing Hepburn and Bogart and only making two minutes a day with an army of lieutenants — a cinematographer, production team, location management, power and light, mechanical effects, a miniature river boat, studio scenes, and ordinary stuff like wardrobe, makeup, housing, security, portable toilets, and catering. I had a big crew like that in 1984, shooting 'The Marionettte,' which stopped after two weeks with forty minutes in the can, because a larcenous producer didn't pay the cast and crew. Big revolt on the set of a giant theatrical stage rigged with working fountains, an enormous staircase, and 20 choreographed dancers waiting to perform.

 

I don't want to work with a heavy crew again. It would be helpful to have a camera operator who knows where the horizon is, a sound man without peacock ego problems, a script girl to spot continuity goofs, an attentive utility hand, and a driver who can serve location food and water, put up tables and folding chairs and deal with the public. A black belt Buddhist would be ideal.

 

Art director Ruud van Dijk was a genius, died too early in life. We were about the same age, and Ruud did a spectacular job on 'The Marionette' — sets, props, artwork, period rental stuff, a life-size puppet, an infinity of custom set decor and the aforementioned stage fountains. A year or two before my project started shooting, he had designed and decorated a big budget Cheech & Chong picture that was filmed in Amsterdam. Dutch sets were wonderful, but I don't want to growl at a slow 30-man crew and paper pushers in a production office again. Once was enough.

 

Big budget A-List directors are protected by producers, production managers, and associate producers, so directing is fairly serene, spend a lot of time resting until notified by a 1st assistant director that the set is rigged and lit, camera people ready to shoot, the cast in wardrobe and makeup, ready to work. I wanted to get to the A-List and couldn't finish 'The Marionette,' which blew up my career, retreated to television, starting at the bottom again, video editing, ENG camera, little shows — then directing a big crew to make 'London By Night' in landmark venues and locations, Covent Garden , Piccadilly, a night concert at Windsor with on-stage coverage of the Gipsy Kings and an interview with Stephanie Powers. A dozen more intimate interviews were staged at little tables in a swish nightclub dining room, VIPs at other tables in the background, cocktail waitress, dignified maître d in black tux. Solid work in signature style, elegant and intelligent. William Morris said it was too British. Sky said it was too American and old fashioned. French and German television distributors don't sell anything in English language. Investors complained that I had too many black people in it, an Empire Ballroom Afro style show, sound bites of black celebs starring in West End musicals, and a Motown legend who performed on a disco set.

 

Humph. BBC liked what I did with cameras and launched Ruby Wax in a late night talk show that aped my style and bungled it. Producer Magazine ran a feature story on how I deployed SMPTE time code to sync tapes from pro camcorders on quick set up tripods, an infinity of angles that I directed in post by snapping my fingers. On the set I was able to spend a lot of time with talent, after pointing to camera coverage. DP Nick Fry and his gaffers gave me natural, dimensional light in the nightclub. We rolled for eight hours, a mountain of material to make minutes. An enormous sound crew mic'd and recorded a Latin jazz big band and a lounge combo with lovely Sue Shaddock giving a stellar vocal performance that I shot with a nylon stocking stretched behind the lens at the focal plane, a soft glamour close-up. I had some of the best camera operators in London, experienced men who understood me.

 

I like talking about this crap for two reasons. I'm proud of what I achieved, homeschooled. It's crystal clear that I don't want to do the heavy lifting of a big show involving big money again. If I make a little movie, it's going to be little. Simple sets, simple lighting, simple story, small cast, small crew.

 

Meanwhile and pending other business worth pursuing, I've been monitoring airline pilots on 132.425. To hell with BBC. Lemme think. An air drama at a small regional center. A missing plane. Stock footage of air traffic controllers. Fade to a lone wolf FAA investigator who travels by car a long way to interview a tough, adamant hillbilly logger who reported a flash of light in the sky. No crash debris. The plane simply disappeared. I need a love interest. An FBI agent, young and pretty, knocks on his hotel room door. She wants him to drop the investigation, won't tell him why. They butt heads ("Go ahead and arrest me!") while Lone Wolf studies satellite data and spots a crop circle. Sounds like a movie.