Denis Diderot enjoys Irish bag pipes

A small group of working class dilettantes, show horses, basically, the Asian Steven familiar without recognition, explained by his connection with First Presbyterian. I made eyes at Ray without intent, and Kate, his woman, marked her territory with a smile, and we made nice. I am too weather beaten to steal a sturdy part Scottish buck of that caliber, but it has been a very long time since real man cackled my air, and Ray was a protector, and knew that was how this weather beaten woman saw him. Show horses. Nothing to do with real power, and what is that? While I am beating my mortality on a laundry line: What I am doing, if I am doing it, this puerile defiance of Philadelphia socialism, has real consequences against my survival, and I am thus insane. I am not Stendhal, whose Julien learns to rise through hypocrisy. Then there was John (I think), who has spoken to Tony, and is disappointed the noted Mr. Stiles bypassed Pennsylvania's notorious urban welfare enclave, the city that birthed a nation. I can imagine Thomas Paine, roaring in quantum memory, with the anguish of a colonist rebel: "A welfare state wasn't what my pamphlets sought to invoke!" I am dying like he did, penniless pauper, but at least momentarily glad I showed up, and the Irish made a job of it, getting me in The Cafe, still a show horse myself. I know how to play white guilt, and code racism in my clever pout and tyrant manner, creating false hope in a cruel spring to recapture collegiate immortality. 

My emotional scars beat like molten quartz in my chest, thirsting to lap up power in the streets, like Lenin, like Adolph, like Mussolini, Il Duce, hung like a dog, sitting at tables with dilettantes, John and Chaim were the weirdest, the hint of the druggist suggested in their frames. Or AIDS, like what afflicted the psychopathy in my brother's life, a streak of Vulcan ferrous in the sky at dusk. Time to rest, make up my mind, if I am not really ready to fight the African American matrons beating me down ceaselessly for eight years, then, perhaps I bristle, perhaps comply, and imagine skulls, analogous to melons, their rinds split when cleaved, the masters those who have ownership. I own a small collection of Denis Dierot's essay fancies. Too abstract, absurd, for my taste.

Reminiscing Isaac

Many people consider Isaac Asimov to be a classic science fiction writer, perhaps even a great one. The panegyric may have some rough edges balancing itself on the fence, but yesterday retrieved in my memory the huge impact his Foundation Trilogy and works like "Nightfall" had on my psyche. Isaac's work, in other words, planted the seeds of my pessimism about our species. The classic tale can also serve as an analogy for what Hitchens wrote in one of his last reviews about the 20th century being the age, and tragedy, of the absolute idea. Nightfall is undoubtedly a narrative composed during the second global war, and its tropes, the clash between data and belief, can just as easily be interpolated to reflect the sense of doom brought on with the rise of National Socialism after the collapse of the aristocratic hierarchy.

What blew the plastic fluidity of my pre-collegiate mind, however, now feels like an overwrought ode to quaint beliefs about mass hysteria. Losing the sense of magic and wonder about existence is not always what it seems.