Follow The Zig

What elevates The Singing Detective is the way in which these threads gradually intersect: individuals from Marlow's childhood memories appear in his pulp detective fantasy; characters from the detective fantasy emerge in the 'real' hospital ward.-- John Cook

Without being able to fathom how digitizing a video feed works, I realize shooting video through a cell phone is incredibly easy, so just as ATT's proprietary secrets from the eighties spawned the troubled tech giants we have today, once the Defense Department relinquished Internet technology for civilian use, images vanished from three dimensional space, even vanishing on the two dimensional surfaces on which they were printed, though I imagine digital films can be converted to celluloid reels suitable to run on older projection technology, and I may look into it for a future feature, because the fact that things have gotten too easy may be contributing to the violence inflicting itself on the collective crowd. YouTube and other systems like it offer the lowliest voices a place at the table. By the same token, we are all lost in the sheer volume. During the #deleteFacebook trend, I responded to a nice twitter user by tweeting the now 18 accounts linked to my FB stream do not read my posts tagged to a specific relative. I take it in good humor, but lone wolves seem to increasingly find it desirable to take it out in ways that have never been done before. However we classify it, the end result is the same, with varying ripple effects. Sandy Hook shook me terribly, but it wasn't Columbine. Orlando left me ambivalent, and had me reported to the authorities in a ridiculous case of grandstanding that unraveled into the physical anguish I currently endure daily. Paddock's goldfish bowl tactics sickened me, and with the Florida high school shooter, I rather gave the viewers who find their way here the finger-- granted this was a dubious rhetorical strategism, but going postal in the corporate headquarters of a video uploading service  constantly at war with itself over what is and isn't accessible seems a quintessentially American act, whether over a rationalization particular to the aggrieved, or a domestic violence end game, as authorities now speculate that it was.

If you are on the left, and want to rewrite the Second Amendment, then you wind up with innocent citizens like Andrew Finch being killed by military police, or, even in my case, if you want Google's Alphabet services to suspend this account because layers of injustice fuel an impotent anger, would I be determined enough to teach myself code and defend a domain like a hacker? Is it worth it because I allow myself to engage in shock jock syndrome? Do I deserve to be tortured with the best of intentions in a state run nursing home because my definitions are so bold, so formerly defiant? If I published franchised pamphlets instead of posts in the immediate aftermath, would that be different, or just another variation of Richard Spencer's fraudulent mystique, the "crazy racist" in the Daily Beast catalog? He can engage social media civilly when he wishes, but twitter's de-verification of his account illustrates the symptomatic stomach virus of liberalism. Verification is merely supposed to indicate to the follower that personality x is personality x. It isn't going to change Richard's thought crimes gymnastics. He doesn't impress me, but neither does Twitter's sanction. Either ban the man or let him retain the cult following. I can do a scatological and daring musical from a hospital bed gasping for breath on incidental orgasms too, shedding snake skins. That is what we're processing in the not but almost post-conglomerate Facebook era. My public television affiliate took its dose of mock courage to air Dennis Potter's daring foray into how creative non-linear thinkers process coping mechanisms. The regional backlash was so fierce that WHYY never aired a seminal work of such melodramatic English playfulness again, in a decade where both Potter and the dowager were relevant concerns.

The Ellsberg Anarchism

"Crimson and Clover"-- The Shondells

Normally, I automatically delete the majority of chapbook contests Allison Joseph transmits, but Brain Mill caught my eye, despite that it apparently overflows with generational neo-liberalism. I logged on to check the site for fees and to look for its open poetry series for the month of June, only there seems to be a contradiction between what the email instructs and the links on the site. My lack of sympathy for the five zillion MFA programs within the college of arts academies may be construed as my lack of success within it, but only in part. I am increasingly conservative, with more than trace elements of libertarian sentiment (despite free press antagonism to Peter Thiel) and most writing programs have wallflower multicultural codes already implanted within them-- not that they don't produce good writers, but, with varying exceptions, like David Mitchell, they're all the same, variations in style, technique, notwithstanding.

I have not had a good Monday, and left my key rope on the table because I became distracted, got back to Riverside, plowshared the office like an enemy combatant, exhaustively plopped on mattress sinkhole, today succeeded with my odd trick of getting up exactly on time for a program, and casually measured my emotional pain as self-mutilating, easing, mildly, with chili, burrowing in on the last of my usage before an overage.

It is not a good time to be me, the angry, race baiting militant. You might ask me what I want, within my episodic battles with the Presbyterian modus operandi I now mostly have what I want, being left alone, cleaning up after my dead Vinnie, battling kimmy's stubborn temperament, all apartment dwellings have tenant frictions, and before I inducted myself in Presby's sandpit, I was in Marie's row home, dirty and straggling as reverted to form in my fifties, dumping my commode stool in her back alley. The chip on my shoulder is over my lack of choice. I was this close to getting my own mortgage in 1994, and now, my only options are grin, bear it, or give my notice, then ask myself how I'm supposed to defecate when push comes to shove, if I turn myself out, hence Brain Mill's "Love & Mercy" theme caught my eye, in the turmoil of my own scourge:

I am going to write this, twitter and Google be damned: FBI director James Comey, the swarming liberal apologia for law enforcement's lack of willingness to behave like a police state with Mateen, can go fuck itself, royally. It behaves like a police state with me. I cannot move, and I've been stuck here thirty years, with a near insurmountable ability to restore my economic freedom. 

If The Pentagon Papers changed public perception to the extent Ellsberg's vindication would have it, we would have never fought the Iraq War.

Jack Cassidy's Covert Collaboration

"Get on and get up over your hill,"-- a poignant track to Stargate Universe, never viewed

The poet Laurel Speer and I had a brief correspondence of the old fashioned sort, type written, envelope and stamps, the last missive received, one of her essays, in which she conveyed the writer's worst enemy: the loss of words. I certainly never anticipated the spectre of weariness would begin to threaten the only thing I have keeping me on the ground and alive, my work, as a very minuscule author, if you like, as well as a journalist poet with a string of bylines a mile long.

Who am I to push back against Peter Thiel's power, or be distressed about where my next pitch is coming from, or going to? Assuming that Mateen had an objective to achieve something against homosexual liberation, tactically, yes, it was a strategic mistake, precisely because it was a spectacle, one which will ultimately give sexual permissiveness more power, not less, consuming the  media for an extra period of time, however long it may be. Reactionaries need necessarily be shrewder in the methods they deploy, the exception being with Muslims, regardless of who they are, where they come from. They need to be extracted, deported, from Europe, the US, Canada, and any other civilized society. They need to be fought, and defeated, and only then can the rest of us contemplate mercy. The struggle with evil can be an intellectual contest, reflecting both sides of the coin, but it can also be simplified, and I refuse, regardless, to have any sympathy for individuals who insist on applying a Mosaic mindset to the modern world, even as we continually unravel our boundaries, which if you'd bother to apply yourselves, you'd realize we all need.

I am conflicted, when it comes to the Cassidy family, whether I'm more enthralled by the debonair father or the inauthentic son, with his squeaky clean shag and ineffectual strum on his amps.