Discretionary spending

 

Thanks to a supremely generous friend, I have an extra $50 to promote my work, enough to print four volumes and send them to a book reviewer somewhere. I scanned an old list that I compiled years ago, shrugged at three newspapers that might still exist and might tolerate cis-gendered romance, which is asking a lot nowadays. Syracuse? Wichita? Tampa? It would be a lot better if I wrote grisly accounts of Delta Force heroism to kill evil tribesmen who outlawed gays humming Broadway show tunes.

 

I discarded the idea of depositing a legacy for safekeeping at the British Library (I'm not British) or at the Philadelphia Free Library (doubtful they shelve paperbacks). Silly to waste $50 on my hometown public library to honor a 12 year old kid self. Dead certain that my novels would wind up in the trash, maybe a special trip to the municipal incinerator. I come from an enclave of well behaved small town burghers, and I broke every one of their rules as a juvenile delinquent, kicked out of high school at age 15.

 

No point in sending books to Barnes & Noble or Curtis Brown.

 

Hmph. Here I am with $50 burning a hole in my pocket, and I can't think of an institution or a prominent public person who might conceivably take time to read my collected novels and stories, say something nice about Partners or Escape or privileged white rascals Chris and Peachy.

 

$50 would buy a hell of a lot of good whiskey, but I'm too old to drink, and the problem of a permanent archive of my work is as parched as a three day drunk. I need to think more creatively about publicity, maybe Australia or Finland. When I search "wolf devoon" on Google, I'm baffled that most of my titles were indexed by booksellers in Taiwan, India, Germany, Japan, Holland, and South Africa. I've sold more books in England than in America. Probably had buyer's remorse. Urgent to find a kindred spirit. Tucker Carlson? Mike Rowe? Too busy to read novels. Elon Musk? Yeah, sure, nothing else to do except launch rockets to the moon and Mars, run a global car company, and bid $44 billion to take over Twitter. Rand's fictional Central Park hotel developer Kent Lansing told Roark that the shortest distance between two points was a middleman. I need a well connected social butterfly to plug my work.

 

A female? Not ideal, although they run NY publishing and literary conferences coast to coast. It would be awkward to pitch a female agent or editor, but I've had more five-star female Amazon reviews than any other kind. Men generally snarked with 1-star exasperation, except for Erik who showered lavish praise on my convoluted plots and trick endings. Good joke on Erik. He's a better writer than I am.

 

So, who are the women I admire?

 

Heather MacDonald, a busy journalist. Camille Paglia, the lesbian pop culture critic, probably 80 years old. Maria Bartoromo, Fox Business superstar working 12 hours a day. Becky Quick at CNBC. I haven't heard much from Anne Coulter recently. I wouldn't mind being dissed or ignored by the perpetually amused Coulter. She might have time to read a few pages.

 

So be it. My 10 best stories to Anne Coulter. Or Alice Cooper.

 

 

 

Government

 

We need to face facts. When our creek bridge cracked and eroded, fell apart in a flood, FEMA paid to replace it. They built back worse. Now it floods in every rainstorm. The culvert they specified under five tons of concrete is too small to handle the creek flow. It jams with floating sticks and organic crap.

 

$1 trillion wasted in Afghanistan, to be defeated, abandoning a strategic airbase. Captured U.S. rockets, MRAPs, body armor, and night vision goggles fell into the hands of Taliban IED terrorists released from Baghram prison. They annihilated the Northern Alliance, killed every man, woman, and child. Corrupt U.S.-salaried Republic of Afghanistan officials and U.S.-trained Republic of Afghanistan pilots stuffed suitcases full of dollars and fled to Uzbekistan in helicopters that we gave them.

 

$2 trillion wasted in Iraq. Several billions in cash went missing. Thousands of U.S. troops killed, tens of thousands horribly maimed, hundreds of thousands of Iraqi dead. Saddam had nothing to do with 9/11. No nuclear WMD. We gave Saddam chemical weapons to help him fight the Iran-Iraq War. His stockpile was exhausted long before we went on an insane hunt to find nothing and lay waste to Iraq cities. We funded a new Republic of Iraq, trained a new Iraqi Army. They ran from battle and lost half the country to ISIS, a new enemy to attack, more U.S. special force butchery. Millions of refugees. Russia bombed our Kurdish proxies in Syria and established Russian bases to defend Assad. Lebanon was destroyed as a civil society. Total failure of U.S. diplomatic and military strategy throughout the entire region.

 

$5 trillion wasted at home, pampering and multiplying savages who can't read, can't add or subtract, and get three meals a day at unionized zombie schools, a colossal social failure measured in riots, drug dealing, smash and grab, carjacking and gunfire on U.S. city streets. Colleges turn away good students with high test scores. They abandoned all admission testing to enroll more incompetents. Every word broadcast from the White House is a lie. They lied to us about lockdowns, masks, and MRNA shots. They lied to us about election integrity. CDC shut down baby formula production months ago and didn't care that it spawned a crisis. The boy who shot up a grocery store in Buffalo had threatened to shoot up his high school graduation ceremony. Total failure of "red flag" mental health laws, police incompetence, and "gun free zones" that killed children in Sandy Hook, Parkland, and Aurora. Families are fleeing New York, New Jersey, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle. Thousands of Chinese spies are quietly doing advanced studies at U.S. universities and cleared to work in top secret national laboratories.

 

Tens of millions of illiterate peasants and gangsters are pouring across the southern border, no longer in peril of arrest or deportation, released to sign up for welfare, free housing, multilingual public schools, drivers licenses, free health care, and ballot harvesting. "Privileged" white kids are being shamed and urged to destroy themselves by gender reassignment without parental consent.

 

No Federal, state, or local government employee can be fired. No Federal, state, or local official has ever admitted to making a mistake. Now they're playing cute with nuclear war. Putin had ample reason to be alarmed. U.S. special forces were equipping and training the Ukrainian Army before Russia gathered its forces at the border. We gave them Javelin anti-tank, Stinger anti-aircraft, and Harpoon naval rockets, supplied Ukraine with vehicles, ammo, drones, and satellite targeting in a war by proxy with the stated aim of militarily defeating Russia. Federal spending is out of control. Brainless U.S. monetary and fiscal policy crippled our economy. Sky high prices, fuel shortages, U.S. oil drillers handcuffed.

 

Government is not only stupid. It's suicidal.

 

Biden read an angry teleprompter in Buffalo about people shot by a teenage "white supremacist" who was previously identified as a threat and held for observation at a hospital, but Biden had no time for or concern about the Christmas Parade massacre in Waukesha — six dead and 70 injured, many seriously, hundreds of women and small children terrorized by a negro with a long rap sheet for violence.

 

 Joe's suicidal race relations policy? White people don't matter. That's why he threw the border open, flooded the country with Mexican gangsters and fentanyl that killed over 100,000 last year.

 

I've been warning about the evil of government for 25 years.

(Death To All Flies, 1997)

 

The opposite of government is private life. I arranged for my daughter to have competent professional training in gymnastics, violin, piano, orchestral composition, contemporary jazz ballet, aviation ground school, horse riding and jumping, video production and editing, and how to drive a full size GMC pickup in city traffic and highway speed. As an 11-year-old kid, she had gun safety training at an indoor range, became a good shot with a rifle, and practiced how to fight kitchen fires.

My wife is worried that electricity will skyrocket in price, then black out. She wants me to test a manual pump to lift water. I said I could build a wood-fired steam engine to generate power. Weird karma!

 

 

Hill walking

 

Steam Punk got put on hold. I spent a week reading Eight Ruthless Novels, Vols. 1 and 2, to judge what happened from 1987 to 2018. How long is that? A lifetime. Thirty years, not counting a previous 30 of camera experiments, kid plays, teenage comedy scripts, and Hollywood screenplays that didn't always make a great deal of sense, especially "The Guitar Player From The Black Lagoon." It was gestated in a Pacific Heights laugh riot among four stoned hippies and it became extremely bizarre in 3rd draft after meeting Dutch rock legend Herman Brood at a quiet restaurant in Spaakenburg, trying to help a talented tormented man ravaged by heroin. He was unable to eat a bowl of soup, escorted by a burly personal manager who got Herman on stage if he was well enough to perform.

 

See? I know everything about the raw guts of life and nothing about an ideal man, which I'm supposed to etch in the heart of hard handsome Billy Larko, a casino owner. Don't ask. It has to be that way. Ideal men are free, empowered, untethered, independent. Told to lock down, Larko opened a Testing Lab in the Bowery. A real enough laboratory, entrance to a three-story speakeasy with gaming, a showroom and private parlors, expensive top shelf drinks and reasonably fine dining from 11 pm to 5 am. Out of work Broadway actors wait tables, earn good tips, and the showroom has a house band with nationally known vocalists on occasion and a showcase of starlets doing torch standards, Love For Sale.

 

I don't want to write Steam Punk, and I have little choice in the matter. Either I project an ideal man and illustrate precisely what ideal means in Larko's demeanor and actions, or ... or nothing!

 

I can't back down without attaining a summit, which is called a cairn in Scottish hill walking. It sounded okay to me, how hard could hill walking be? So I went hill walking with my snooker partner John Oliver, a cheerful little Scot who owned a corner shop. We "walked" almost vertically up Ben Nevis. It took over three hours of strenuous nonstop effort and it nearly killed me, staggering, gasping for air. That's what has to happen with Steam Punk, a murderous hill walk that will take multiple years I might not have.

 

Here's the deal with hill walking or writing a big literary novel. It matters every time you ascend another angular step. You do not have the luxury of leisure, or level steps, or predictable results. All you know for certain is Don't Slip, pay attention to every inch of a misty clouded mountain.

 

Kicking around ideas for the third act. Maybe it's the cairn. I have to create a new style of writing, slave to a silly rock song: "She looked at me with her big brown eyes and said, you ain't seen nuthin' yet."

 

 

My dog snores

 

I think he tolerates constant haircuts, back, sides, flanks, belly, neck, face, paws, because it's cooler and more comfortable in hot weather. I also gave the front drive and barn entrance a close haircut with the weed whacker, to have a better chance of seeing snakes. He's been bitten by copperheads twice, five years ago and again nine months ago, terrible episodes that could have killed him. He was run over by a FedEx van a couple years ago, and a decade earlier I rushed him to a dog hospital in Houston because he gobbled up poisoned meat on a routine dog walk, a medical emergency when he collapsed unconscious. $2000 later I told him that he used up his entire lifetime health care budget, which wasn't enforced very strictly. I don't want to calculate all the dough I spent on this stupid intellectual dog that I adopted from a shelter. I remember the day we met. "What are you doing in jail?" I asked him in disbelief.

 

He and I are about the same age, both of us suffering skin lesions and reduced mobility. I can't guess which of us will die first. Shihtzus live relatively long lives. The showdog version looks like a horizontal Cousin It with beautifully brushed silky hair that undulates when it prances proudly.

 

Tooie is 2/3 anarchist who thinks that he's a guard dog in a battle zone, which is an absurd fantasy. He's terrified of gunfire, fireworks, and household fly swatters. If I swing at a fly, he jumps up and tries to run through a closed door, distressed because the doorknob is way the hell up there and can't be opened with a paw. Absent gunfire or fly warfare, when he doesn't get his own way, he snorts at me.

 

The other thing that's odd about his breed, aside from stubbornness and routine refusal to acknowledge lawful human authority, is a tragic and often fatal belief that shihtzus can fly. Too many of these idiots have jumped from multistory patios and windows to their deaths. They originate from Imperial China, where they slept with the Emperor to warm his feet. Mine insists on taking most of the bed and slams his weight against me. This is not always desirable and I push back. He grumbles with exasperation and jumps down to sleep in the laundry basket or in front of the refrigerator, both of which he regards as dog equipment, which they most emphatically are not! Go away. Go sit down. Go!

 

We have a big vocabulary. Stay and wait. Come here, you need a sweater. One paw. One other paw. Wait a minute. Okay, let's go. Ready? Go. Come on. Hurry up. Good dog. Come with me, go for a walk. Are you all done? Come on, it's cold out here. Good boy. Come here. Let me see your dog eyes.

 

Other shihtzu owners have done terrible things surgically to their eyes, because they are prone to weep goo that hardens into rocks. I deal with it by frequent wiping and yanking dry rocks from his lashes and eyelids. It's tiresome to trim the stupid dog. Gigantic piles of hair on the floor or the grass outside in fair weather. He dulls scissors. Feeding him and keeping dog treats handy is a weekly grocery bill.

 

We're been together a long time, traveled together by car 3 or 4 thousand miles, a dozen interstate trips and numerous motel nights. He knows what elevators, concrete stairwells, and gas station walks are.

 

The only reason I have Tooie is distrust that anyone else could care for him. He needs a lot of attention between long bouts of elderly snoring, and he has to sleep indoors or in a safe area outside, because he's defenseless, an old alpha dog with missing teeth and no army to lead (my situation, too). Twelve years ago we lived in a townhouse complex near a neighbor who had two shihtzus. The female often got loose and made a beeline for my front door, barking madly for admittance. When all three ran as a pack in a park, Tooie was top dog, always in front, a blur who could run 20 mph in his youth, maybe 3 or 4 years old at the time. By arithmetic, he's 15 or 16 now, and his "run" devolved to a lame hop, a slow walk, or a slightly out of control downhill trot. His eyesight is terrible, cloudy at best. Ears and nose still work. The literature claims that among all dog breeds, shihtzus are genetically closest to a wolf. What awful karma! A wolf cut down to a dustmop by a wonky gene, pack behavior intact. He adopted me as a pack brother, disputes my fitness for leadership, and never smiles. Cass knows all about the breed, calls them dragons. I am not prepared to find him dead or unresponsive some morning.

 

Oh. Okay.

 

Hugh Hewitt says (5/12/22) don't worry, the market goes up and down. Happens all the time. It'll bounce back and go higher, like it always does. Never sell. Maybe a few companies were overvalued, and everyone is trying to figure out how to deal with inflation. America is still the most productive society on earth, Hewitt affirmed confidently. Six days later, the broad market fell another 5%.

 

If smart people don't sell, why are equities sliding? Did traders go stupid at Goldman Sachs? Oh, duh, I get it. They're shearing sheep, advising clients to sell on the way down and secretly buying cheap option contracts to make giant profits on the way back up. Happens all the time, right, Hugh?

 

So far it cost pension funds 20% of assets. Diesel is in short supply.

 

Dennis Prager was amused. He said there is an ancient Hebrew proverb — every 1000 years someone arises to kill all the Jews. (Not just a few million?) Puts me in mind of a foreign policy film clip solemnly honored by scholars, when John F. Kennedy exclaimed to thousands in Berlin: "I am a jelly donut!"

 

Stay tuned. A mountain lion was spotted in the neighborhood, and I want to source a spare clip for our Remington 522. Some varmints have to die. The girls' big young boxer has been barking urgently, afraid to engage. My kid was trained to shoot and keep shooting until it runs dry. I need to get her a spare clip pronto, to double the odds of successfully defending her chickens and aforementioned guard dog. The 2nd Amendment, precious metal, and ammunition are a hard backstop to losses. If shit comes to holler, they have a couple pounds of silver I gave them years ago, but it's no substitute for bullets.

 

Meanwhile, I'm beginning to believe that elderly radio talker Bill Cunningham, syndicated nationally on Sunday nights, has a screw loose somewhere in his noggin. Tonight he proposed to have Biden build two 6-ft diameter pipes to pump water from Cincinnati to Lake Powell, Utah, about 1,500 miles up and over the Rockies. Cunningham says that the Ohio River is 30 feet deep in Cincinnati, "uselessly" flushing fresh water into the Mississippi. What kind of goof thinks this way? The Ohio River borders six states. It has a system of locks and dams to sustain farming, commercial navigation, and drinking water for millions of people in Louisville, Evansville, Owensboro, and Paducah. It would take 800 million gallons to fill two 6-ft pipes from Cincinnati to Lake Powell, using hundreds of electric pumps to push it across Indiana, Illinois, the Mississippi River, hilly Missouri, all of Kansas, then over the Rockies, maybe two or three decades to complete. It would be cheaper to build a hotel on the moon.

 

Heads up. Big rigs breaking down, no parts, no tires, drivers quitting. Target and Walmart hurt by supply chain problems, port of Shanghai shut for 10 weeks, Chinese factories idled. Diesel fuel and fertilizer doubled in price, hitting U.S. farmers especially hard. Rising interest rates are going to bankrupt home builders, investors and savers. CDC is warning of another covid panic to screw us with mail-in ballots in midterm elections, pushing booster shots for children. On balance, it would be a good idea to shut the schools again. Transgender classroom propaganda was destroying kids. Adolescent mental illness has doubled. Cops are quitting. It's becoming urgent to bug out, learn how to shoot.

 

 

 

Vacuum tube punk

  

Childhood matters, formative experiences that shape what we seek in life. I guess I was in 7th grade, and it was my turn to say something in front of the class. I drew white diagrams on the blackboard, explained current flow, vacuum tubes, amplification, and tuned circuits that used a coil and a variable condenser. Bored kids complained. I didn't care whether they liked it or not. I had discovered radio and built a Boy Scout crystal set that worked, then a Knight Kit transmitter (pictured above). I have distinct kid memories of two bands of metal pinching my hair, uncomfortably hard earphones with woven cloth wires terminated in a banana plug. Top 40 tunes and the smell of solder. It was a short hop to 1/4" tape recording, then multi-track studio recordings, pro 24-track analog in Europe and pro 24-track digital in California. I used an infinity of video formats, film cameras and editing systems, physical, analog, and nonlinear. Everywhere I went in life there were waveform displays (vectorscopes and oscilliscopes) that tossed me back to a 7th grade blackboard, excited about electrical events measured in milliseconds. It was deeply satisfying that pro recording engineers all over the world liked the guts and gusto of vacuum tube vocal compressors. Guitarists used vacuum tube amps and analog magnetic pickups.

 

This is a photo of Pete Sears, a musician I filmed in 1995. Pete looks a little like Billy Larko deep in the third act, older, retired, or on the lam, in disguise — interesting concepts to kick around. Larko had an intensely challenging boyhood. He liked hot machines. My 9th grade science fair project was an electromagnetic rod that launched an aluminum ring high in the air. Larko built a steam powered donkey engine that winched a heavy block of lead across the floor without wheels or grease to reduce friction. Larko and I are completely different men. He knows how big commercial boilers make steam, unafraid to get his hands dirty to attack a dangerous problem. Billy Larko is tough and resolute, never lost a fistfight. I have to do some spade work to make that stick, to render the life and times of an ideal man. I'm confident that I can do it. Like I said in 2018: "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!"

 

 

Not good news

We're in an inflationary period, product shortages and price hikes, too much money chasing too few goods. Purchasing power comprises home equity, stock portfolios, cash savings, and net income after taxes. The big problem is a downward slide in Supply. Fewer imports, zero U.S. industrial development, shortages of oil, car parts, agricultural inputs, airline crews, etc. Consumer spending is strong despite negative GDP. Mortgage refinance is being used as an instrument to raise cash. Retirees and voluntarily idle consumers not in the workforce have been receiving more government benefits, rent moratorium and PPP money. Democrat consensus is to forgive student loans and hand out cash for child care, EVs, affordable housing for the homeless, and unarmed social worker responders instead of police.

 

This will draw to a close in the next six months for two reasons. Interest rates will rise sharply, and Wall Street will crash. Layoffs. Bank lending and purchasing power gone. If you have a variable rate mortgage or a big credit card balance, you're screwed. Government will attempt to spend more and discover that no one wants to buy Treasury bonds or agency bonds or municipal sewer and water bonds. Biden sees himself as a second FDR, which is a pleasant delusion (minus FDR's ability to speak without stumbling). Roosevelt made the Great Depression more painful, drove America into worsening industrial paralysis and bread lines. Cue Woody Guthrie, John Dillinger and Baby Face Nelson.

 

 

Hey, relax! I'm probably wrong. Just a crackpot hippie living in a tin barn. It's not like there was a serious war threat in Europe. I have to hand it to cold blooded Democrat strategists, a six month bubble bath of personal consumption expenditure and a groovy summer of love before the midterms. Joe will ride his bike to an ice cream parlor, and White House press will ask which flavor he got? (Odds on chocolate.) There will be no other news unless approved by the DHS Disinformation Moderation Board. Consumer inflation will be adjusted downward by BLS for "hedonic gains" in new metaverse skins and 5G wifi.

 

Hedonic gains understated inflation for decades. Look it up.