Two faces have I

This is a frame grab from Abbreviated Wolf DeVoon Part Two, a spontaneous video close-up. Note that the ears are about the same size, not drastically out of scale or tilted. Perhaps I was leading with my right eye, characteristic of thoughtful discourse.

On a previous occasion in correspondence with a profoundly wonderful female FBI agent, I created a pair of psychographic photos, two lefts mirrored and two rights mirrored, to show her that she was two people cohabiting one skull. Her femininity and innocence was obvious in one picture, and her dark ruthlessness equally obvious in the other.

Well, having little to do, except to noodle on curiosities, I repeated the experiment utilizing the frame grab from Abbreviated Wolf DeVoon Part Two. Splitting the image and mirroring two left sides and two right sides of my face produced an amazing revelation. Intellectually, Wolf DeVoon is a square shouldered champion prize fighter. Emotionally, I'm a nerdy 90 lb weakling. Very strange that my two noses are completely different.

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How humiliating. Puts me in mind of something Rex said in conversation, that his security chief thought I was a weakling. I replied: "I might be a weakling, but I'm not a chicken."

Good thing that creative writing is a highly focused intellectual literary challenge. A dollop of sensitivity helps from time to time, but it's totally debilitating when, months later, I re-read something I wrote and burst into tears. The Executive Branch is all knuckles and know how, except the family scenes, little Millie in her highchair, 9 year old Peter scolded for talking with his mouth full at dinner, and Cathy worried about her husband dressing late at night in his uniform, summoned to the base unexpectedly. Women and children choke me up. I write love stories and pay for it in spades. Much easier to fictionally kill people and break things, keep emotion at arm's length, something I can't seem to do.

Huge laugh. "I'm half a man," I said in Tin Barn Philosopher, p. 78

I think what happened is that my emotional life was battered and disowned many decades, starved and crippled. I need to be embraced and loved and honored, need to laugh and play, which seems distant and vague. Courage isn't enough. I've been sufficiently courageous to risk life and limb and humiliation repeatedly. I'm not unhappy about that, but the loneliness hurts. "You're on your way into hell, Howard," Rand warned. Were there two Ayn Rands?



A brainy anorexic wrapped in a sturdy Russian thrill seeker in 1948, after she snaggered a handsome actor (stuck her foot out and tripped him on a movie set) to become a U.S. citizen by marriage, launched The Fountainhead, buttered up C.B. DeMille, monkeywrenched two publishers, finished the novel and sold the screenplay for six fat figures in today's money.

Girls have an unfair advantage, damn it.

I have a lot of respect for Ayn Rand, did my level best to honor her repeatedly (and skewer her legendary emotional trainwrecks in Heaven). Rand's debut novel We The Living was a truth soaked truckload of dynamite, so graphic and tragic that I didn't want to read it twice. Atlas Shrugged changed my life, recounted in First Feature. The Fountainhead sent me to prison, and in the years that followed I read nearly every word she wrote. I met four of her least respectable looters -- Nathaniel Branden, John Hospers, Alan Greenspan, and Tibor Machan -- and at a NATO summit I witnessed the unshakeable power of courage that Rand bequeathed to Margaret Thatcher. "There is no such thing as society," Mrs. Thatcher said in recognition of reality, which instantly ended her political career.

That puts me in mind of today's brainless chatter, everyone talking about reviving the U.S. economy, as if "the Economy" was an anonymous animal that has to be fed and spanked by political whim. There is no economy in a totalitarian state, which is precisely what the United States has become, fulfilling the dystopia of Atlas Shrugged, a moratorium on brains, power centralized in bureaucrats and media morale conditioners, farmers dumping milk and killing livestock, unable to sell or store them. The people transported by aircraft are government officials and tame "essential" journalists forbidden to criticize psychotic Democrats.

Fortunately, I didn't have the tragic karma of Ayn Rand. I was drawn to the hard boiled tales of Raymond Chandler, a private eye investigating buried secrets. Pretty funny that Miss Rand read Mickey Spillane for relaxation, praised his literary style, and she liked James Bond. My kind of stories, with a red hot, unapologetic sexuality that Ayn Rand lived in reality, as I did likewise. A photo of Rand at age 70 would reveal the emotional price she paid, like me.

No comparison of stature intended. All I did was defend liberty and plumb the philosophy of law, a minor technical matter that the Russian and her phony acolytes never explored.

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