Living with the weird.....

Not what you think...

Contrary to what you might believe, when you start working the Google on "alien abductees" or just "extraterrestrials", you don't fall into a big roomy universe. Instead, you find yourself hunched over in a small airless world that probably smells like Fritos.

Yesterday, after a brutal day of looking at awful pencil drawings by abductees and patently rigged photographs, I got the uneasy feeling I could know everyone on the UFO-alien-Roswell circuit by name. Plus I saw the the same bewildered people, and rotten outer-space art, photo proofs, and those goddamned crop circles repeated unto eternity in various posts and websites. F'rinstance, in the extraterrestrial venues, the photograph above seems to be forever new and is always published as exciting actual proof of aliens: aliens among us, autopsied aliens, aliens who'll probe you, and aliens who come in peace. Actually it's a special movie effect, a head that floats bodiless in cyberspace, and at least it doesn't look slimy. Clammy, yes, but that's okay, and I really like its ears.

I did happen in on some unnerving 12 Step Groups though. There's the 12 Steps that will keep you from being abducted by teaching you to project a Christian white-light bubble around yourself. The drill's the same as with booze and dope: you admit you're powerless (over aliens), that your life has become unmanageable (what with the abductions), and you've come to believe that Jesus will protect you (from alien abductions) if he is sought, etc. Then there are the unfortunates whose parents somehow got knocked up by an alien, and wuddya know, had this big green kid. Eventually, due to social awkwardness and autistic habits, the offspring stumbles, as I did, into Adult Children of Alien Abductees. Same Twelves Steps, but instead of a generic higher power, they look to Diquad. There wasn't a picture of Diquad, but then there wouldn't be, would there?

Just my opinion, but the Adult Children of Alien Abductees seem like genuine froot loops. However, alien abductees do not. If anything, they exude a kind of mid-western Indiana-ish calm. One psychiatrist noted that they seemed oddly ordinary, if such a thing could be. Having lived in Iowa for six years, I know exactly what he meant. And, I remind myself, that most couples who "swing", ::wink:: wink::, also reside in the big blank prairie states.

Where little happens except the weather, and the population is stolid by nature, a vacuum seems to form, one that demands a high-pitched inner excitement. What might be cured by a crime wave or a good indie movie, instead converts to into peculiar longings. And it's such yearnings that can lead to sitting in rooms with other tattooed souls, praying to Diquad...or taking bondage photos of your wife wearing dog chains and a ball-gag.

So beware of boredom--especially the excruciating kind.

When they come for you...

Alien Abduction Lamp

Pretty cute lamp, isn't it? It's just the way I figure it happens when you get slurped up by outer world invaders. It reminded me that there's lots of info floating around in the atmosphere that I'm placidly unaware of: stuff about Miley Cyrus, Brazilian wax jobs, celebrity chefs, and destination weddings. It's when I get curious about some corner of the universe that I discover all these thorny problems lurking in the most benign places.

F'rinstance, it wasn't until I started poking around into extraterrestrial aliens, that I got reintroduced to the whole abduction scandal. About fifteen years ago, the same time that nursery school kids were being snatched for satanic rituals, there was a huge uptick in people kidnapped during their REM sleep and spirited onto space ships. Since I'm easily distracted, I was paying a whole lot more attention to the reported hordes of devil-worshipping toddler-eating ghouls, and pooh-poohed the sad-sack alien abductees.

I'm here to say it's still quite a problem, this getting grabbed by guys from outer space. What happens is...well, I'll let Michael Menkin of http://www.stopabductions.com website explain:

Since we are being invaded by an alien force from another world, we have a different kind of war. Our war with these beings is one of mind control, mind scan, and telepathic control... Until now, the creatures abducting us could do so at will: they could "switch off" people or render them powerless, manipulate people's thoughts and cause them to move against their will, project mental images to us, masquerade as a friendly or sexually attractive human, and scan our entire minds.

A big problem for all of us, Michael thinks, a veritable War of the Worlds. Michael, however, has come up with a solution for those who are repeatedly abducted, taken to a space ship, and then wake in the morning, all bruised and bleeding from odd places, and he has the testimonials to prove it. Check out this happy camper...

ALIEN ABDUCTEE FROM AUSTRIA WEARING A THOUGHT SCREEN HELMET SHE MADE FROM DIRECTIONS ON THIS WEB SITE.

She goes on to say that she's been abducted for years, but that the thought screen helmet has definitely raised her quality of life. And then there's this gentleman...

ALIEN ABDUCTEE FROM KENTUCKY WEARING A THOUGHT SCREEN HELMET

"Since trying Michael Menkin's Helmet, I have not been bothered by alien mind control. Now my thoughts are my own. I have achieved meaningful work and am contributing to society. My life is better than ever before. Thank you Michael for the work you are doing to save all humanity."

I feel the same way. If a thought-screen helmet is what it takes for this guy to get out of bed, it seems pretty cheap and easy. What I always miss in these and other non-mainstreamy accounts is all the little stuff. Like, did the guys at job site give him a hard time the first time he climbed into his Caterpillar Paver, wearing his thought-screen helmet? Haw! Haw! Haw! Check out the WWI pilot! Whaddaya think you're driving? Did the Austrian woman's family sigh with relief when she sat down to dinner in her helmet? And what did she say to Bub, Sis, and Dad? No more pesky thought-grabbing, my cherished ones! And whatever happened to the classical foil-lined baseball cap? (Actually, I found out that foil-lining is so 1950. And with the advanced technology aliens are using, aluminum foil doesn't stand a chance.)

This alien abduction business, it's a rich vein all right.

More to come...

No progress here...

Combining The Cute And The Topical

Yesterday I shlepped downtown for jury duty at the same elephant-gray courthouse where Lee H. Oswald met his end. Glancing around, I sighed with recognition because, in the main jury room at least, it was still 1963. Oh, there were a few aggressive 40 and 50+ ladies with BlueTooths in their ears, and some impatient semi-retired guys with cellphones, but mostly we were all of a certain age, and all of us were reading. Some folks even had newspapers. No one was texting, no one was flipping through his iPhone apps, and everyone, I noted, had used lots of hairspray.

I begin this post with a fond backwards look since I've discovered that extraterrestrials belong to those dear dead days too. In researching men from Mars, alien abductions, and aliens in general, I'm sorry to report almost no progress in the appearance of creatures from outer space. Dating before the 1947 Roswell incident, extraterrestrials are generally portrayed as big-headed, skinny, bug-eyed, slot-mouthed beings with a greenish tinge. Although I did come across a picture of something that looked like a jelly-fish. It didn't have any arms though, so I couldn't see how it could grasp those bizarre shiny instruments aliens use in probing abductees.

Looking up "Roswell" on the Google, I looked at pix from A Real Alien Autopsy with something less than fascination. The alien in question lay on the slab, huge-headed, and with big googly eyes, while the "photo" itself looked a lot like those blatantly doctored up pictures of Bat Boy in the Weekly World News. Thinking of Bat Boy made me nostalgic all over again, so I went to the current online issue and came upon an article that listed 11 HINTS YOU MIGHT BE DESCENDED FROM ALIENS! The author, Erik Van Datiken, says in his flatly declaratory lede that humans and aliens intermarried 8,000 years ago, and so their descendants live among us now: http://weeklyworldnews.com/alien-alert/11451/11-hints-you-might-be-descended-from-aliens/2/. Check it out, if only for the heavily photo-shopped illustration showing that aliens evidently have evolved in some way, since they don't have noses anymore.

Among the 11 clues that spell out aliendom are: blue or green eyes set wide apart, narrow feet with longer than normal toes, big ears etc. In other words, sort of fetal-alcohol syndrome-ish, and looking mighty like the same old boring aliens we know so well. Ho-hum. I was way more interested in reading about the DUCT TAPE CAT and THE GIRL WITH X-RAY EYES. The story titled DALAI LAMA FIST BUMP and the one about Tom Delay's dancing with the stars, however, convinced me that the difference between actual journalism and the Weekly World News is: not much. The last two stories could fit comfortably in The Washington Post.

Dumbasses +1, Civilization 0.

The Ick Factor...

And isn't it time?

Given these troubled times I think we need to get back to basics, and by that, obviously I mean aliens. Yeah, those kinds of aliens. During the 90's, I'm sorry to report, my appetite for things extraterrestrial became dimmer and dimmer, until it was extinguished utterly. This had nothing to do with Clinton, and everything to do with The X Files. Used to be that stuff from outer space (with the exception of The Blob) was relatively clean and dry. Guys from other planets looked a bit leathery and green or, at the far end of the spectrum, they might have some scaley parts. Generally speaking though, you could count on a low ick factor (IF).

Much as I liked the two X File stalwarts, Scully and Mulder (Scully more, Mulder a lot less), the two of them found the stickiest extraterrestrial glop I'd ever seen. Sometimes the whatever was covered in a coat of slime, sometimes it was just a blob of cosmic goo and, every time I could stand to look, my stomach would heave precipitously. After too many shows starring various types of gunk, mire, mucus, and sludge and despite my girl crush on Scully, I had to abandon the X. I couldn't stand one more autopsy scene, with Scully and her rubber gloves bent over some spotlit nameless pile of ooze.

Is this an alien evolution? From dry well-groomed 1950's Roswell cast-offs to the slovenly gummy outer-space guys of the late 20th C. and early 21st? If so, give me the retro stuff.

But lately, in my insomniac throes, I find myself up to the armpits in Monster Quest. I love watching crytozoologists measuring huge plaster footprints, and nodding affirmatively. Sasquatch lives! I just knew it. Sasquatch not only lives but s/he attacks! Cue the shaken locals who spotted him/her/it peeking at them through the kitchen window. It's something I'll never get over, says Mary Smith, 72, a spry homemaker from Manitoba. Cut to the remains of a half-eaten steer. I don't care what the experts say. Wasn't man or beast did that.

So far, despite motion sensors, tranq darts, and cages that drop out of trees, the cryptozoologists haven't caught Big Foot, a mutant canine, Birdzilla, or Stalin's Ape. But it would be totally okay with me if they did, since all of these creatures have an extremely low ick factor, except maybe the Giant Squid. Even Nettie, the Loch Ness Monster, appears to be a jolly rubberized leviathan.

So given my happy hours of goggling at the Swamp Beast and Creatures of the 4th Dimension, what I think is, I might be wanting me some aliens.

But not the gooey kind.

Civil discourse cont....modern discussions....

A deeply flawed syllogism

Or maybe we can just say that here's a fab example of arguing towards a cherished conclusion, a cherished party-of-one conclusion, that is. Notice the chick being magnetized has the freaked-out expression small animals get just before the car hits. So onward.

A flawed syllogism is like saying Obama, being a black guy and all, should not be president (::duh:: how obvious is that?) so therefore he was born in Guam or Nairobi or Kenya or some hot place without 48 oz. Coke slushies and shouldn't be president atall since he's not An American Citizen, so there. And since it's 2009 and we live in the age of bountiful crap, there's a huge consumer range of awful conclusions to choose from. Obama is a Nazi? Nazis everywhere? Gotcha covered. Death panels/check lists/whatevs administered by shadowy bureaucrats? You bet. Forced abortions? Absolutely. Internment camps for white people? Honey, we're there.

But let's just invoke the law of parsimony and call all of it for what it is, this "discussion" that's making the rounds, this populist tidal wave of 2m or 1m or 750k or 40 gazillion-trillion souls, depending on your news source, who showed up in DC last weekend. It's racism and it always was racism. (A tip o' the hat to Jimmy Carter for spelling it out and I second the emotion.) The world is not what it was. It's doubtful we can go back to those dear departed days of Klan marches, poll-taxes, and colored-only everything. It's not only the negras who've gotten uppity, it's the ladies too (most of them currently supporting their hunky guys), plus those little brown health-service-grabbing immigrants taking all those great American jobs. The celebrated era of the white guy is over and, in case you live under a porch or a rock, it's been over since about 1964.

But one thing that confounds me about stupidity in general, is this tendency to roar to the polar opposite of any argument. This AM, I'm currently brooding over No Impact Man: the movie, the book, the talk show. And yes, idiocy also comes to the progressive left on little cat feet. Here's this fella and his wife, plus hapless child, with a cushy income-level, who decides to give up everything for a year. It's kind of Walden Pond without the pond, the good writing, the ideals, and the 19th century, but you get the idea. So they have a pan of worms in the kitchen to compost their garbage, they walk up 40 billion flights of stairs every day, they squint under candlelight at night, and play charades for funsy. What I wonder is why they fled to this inflated dystopian vision of non-consumer life.

When I was a shirt-tailed tad, we kept our compost outside and when we lived in an apartment complex, we didn't have a compost pile. We had electricity too, and even used it at night to no ill-effects. For giggles and grins, we went separate ways to our singular amusements. I read comic books, my little sis babbled into her toy telephone, and my parents played bridge. As Terry Allen says, It weren't art but it weren't bad.

We didn't get a book deal out of it though.

No Impact Man has remarked in interviews that his vision of things was informed by Zen Buddhism, to which I call bullshit. The hardest part about Buddhism is that middle-way thingie. Extremes are easy. Hate to diet? Jump on the Anorexia Express and starve instead. Been a consumer pig? Give it all up, put on scratchy loin cloth, and hunker in the dark. The nicest part about being a total contrarian, is that you can give your brain a rest. There's no uncomfortable doubting or deciding moment to moment.

But, thankfully, extremism of any kind is always a two wicked candle. It burns like a mother while it burns, but it burns out fast.

Don't even try to light my fire. I'm here for the long haul.

Civil discourse cont...The Howling Mob

Knock, knock, knockin' at your own back door

Not to put too fine a point on it, but our Founding Fathers weren't nuts about dumb-asses either. In fact, the stupidity problem was one they recognized early on in pre-Revolutionary times and wrote long quarreling letters about it in their gorgeous curly handwriting. Sam Adams, an uncomfortable precursor of Glen Becks everywhere, thought that the Howling Mob, as it was characterized, could be put to noble service by siccing the rabble onto Loyalists and redcoats. Cooler heads, like John Adams, however, saw a lot to be wary of, like, f'instance, some rabble might be mongoose crazy and get all scary and unpredictable, and it was just possible they could get out of control completely. Which, of course they did, several times and to no one's benefit.

Thomas Jefferson thought that, in the interests of democratic thinking, one should mix with the dumb-butts and even, as he said, Lie on their stinking cots. But Jefferson had his trippy moments and who knows how he truly felt. He didn't lie on any reeking beds, that's for sure. He was mostly home at Monticello slugging down part of a truly exceptional cellar. George Washington wrote a little etiquette book in his twenties that was like many of the time: obsessed with the presentation of the self and with self control, plus exhorting his readers not to blow their noses on their fingers in the drawing room and not to pick lice out of their hair in church. On the mob side of things, I think we can vote him a quiet shudder.

So it's curious to me that we even give these poor teabagging souls a glance. Another blogger, The Rude Pundit, said that the 9-12 demonstration was the Special Olympics of protests and I tend to agree. Except that I can't overlook the fact that the howling mob is a part of America, as is their unvarnished racism. I don't know if their anger can ever be quelled, I don't know if they can be made happy; this country, even during its most somber midnights, has never done much for them. They are often constricted and deformed by poverty, whether it's a poverty of the soul, poverty of education or, the least ruinous type of poverty, financial. And yet, every so often, some strange personage arises from them, like a fabled feathered creature. Like Andrew Jackson say. Or Sam Houston. Or, in many ways, LBJ.

I've never been a believer in abreactive therapy: that it does a body good to blow his cork. Anger just begets more anger and its expression doesn't release anything, it just intoxicates. So I see these groups egging one another on and, I believe, no good will come of it. I know I'm not particularly good with idiots and it's better for me not to get furious about them, with them. But I think somehow they need to be engaged, and recognized as the part of America they've always been. It's the expression of that recognition I'm searching for.

Maybe George Washington's etiquette book has a clue.

I'm not seeing anything else that does.

I Forgot

Lest We Forget

Well, here it is, the tag-end of 9-11 festivities and I forgot how much we love us some weepy holidays. America gets more like my family with each passing day. My family loved death and all its stylish accoutrements so passionately that certain members were known to bring their wills to the dinner table. Others brought memo pads and tiny pencils so they could jot down their pallbearers, then whack them off that self-same list in a fit of pique. "Are we all a bunch of goddamn Egyptians?" I hollered at one Thanksgiving. "What is it with the funeral plans?"For that, unsurprisingly, I received the collective lemon-sucking face given to such outbursts. If Keats was, ...half in love with easeful death, my family was downright horny for it.

Now I know that, as usual, my mom n' pop n' relatives were true visionaries, foreseeing what this country would become. The older I grow, the more America hankers for frequent tearful memorials. How long did we all hang by the TV, sniffling over Michael Jackson, whose death was not hugely unexpected? It seems like we drooped around for six months, watching CSI guys trudge off with big green plastic sacks packed with mad industrial-strength pharmaceuticals. And for Uncle Ted, God bless him, we're still carrying on like timber wolves in heat, and buying up all those special slick jumbo editions of Time magazine etc., engorged with every manner of Ted K. pix. But that's what we like.

I was so at odds with myself today, what with the weird muggy about-to-do-something-awful weather and all the 9-11 hoohah pestering my unconscious, I almost fled to CuteOverload, then realized a baby hamster in a sweater wouldn't do it for me. Not today. Today I was blindly impelled to the Cake Wrecks site. When life is so ghastly that teddy bears piled in memoriam on the fatal crash site just won't get it, here in America we order us up a cake. I knew someone would have constructed a Twin Towers cake and, indeed, they had. A cake so lousy and moronic that I refuse to show it here. Look it up your own bad self. The creepy sleeping (I hope) toddler cake is shown in its place. And without further ado, let me share a few more cake wrecks.

I can't think of the occasion for these but, uh, I'm sure it's wildly celebrated somewhere in the deep gritty South.

Onward to the...

As the website chortles, "Now everyone can have one in the oven. " Ba-rump. A pause for all the trolls and ogres to chuckle and for hilarity to ensue.

More? Okay, okay.

You whined and kvetched for the Twin Towers cake, so here it is in all its ad hoc glory, fashioned from glued-together cupcakes. I don't even want to know how that black frosting was made.

Happy now? Me neither.

Civil Discourse cont.: Freaks and Freaking

The Romance of Freaking

Back in the day...that would be my day, not yours...those who fried their heads with massive doses of hallucinogens and were still able to talk were sometimes called freaks. However, when they flopped around on the ground and made warthog noises, this was not referred to as a freak-out. In my neck of the woods, which was the urban East Coast, we called such events a horror show and, if we lived in Boston, a wicked horror show.

All this is ancient dull history, of course, and you can judge how ancient it is when I tell you it was once possible to behave badly. It was even likely among those of us who were very young, hip, and busy grossing out our parents. That we succeeded in appalling the older generation simply by growing out our hair is just one indication that the collective zeitgeist had a massive broomstick up its ass. The 50's and early sixties were starchy times.

However, by 1966 or s0, even among our admittedly lax peer group, lousy behavior was noted. A white person with a permed Afro, carrying a copy of The Fire next Time would likely be chided for co-opting our cultural suffering. Hang on to a joint too long and your bogarting would be rebuked. Some worry-warts tormented themselves over the need to kill their parents, come The Revolution, since mom and pop wouldn't be happy in our balmy Socialist utopia.

And now, proving they don't have an original idea in their roomy yet empty heads, the Republicans are aping their constituents' wretched behavior. I'm referring to last night's Joe Wilson blaring "You lie!" to a sitting president in the middle of a policy speech. I would label this a Category 9 Wicked Horror Show but, seemingly, everyone has shrugged it off and mumbled something about how it's time to move ahead. Well, and so it is, but ahead to what?

Joe Wilson, this Joe Wilson, not the unfortunate Other, is what I would call a freak, not in the counter-culture sense but giving it the black meaning, as in, I dunno. He's a freak. Here freak is used to convey a kind of weirdness not worth figuring out. A beloved and dead aunt of mine would have said Joe behaved inexpensively, and I'll go along with that too, while still mourning the loss of civility.

The nice thing about manners is that they save so much time and trouble. You don't have to make it up as you go along. When observing a fat-ass wearing a fisherman's hat festooned with Lipton's teabags and waving a Hitler poster, you don't agonize over how to deal with this person. A blank smile will suffice, and if pressed, you can murmur ambiguously, "How utterly delightful," an all-occasion remark I find quite useful.

As Judith Martin notes in her Miss Manners guise, "Etiquette doesn't have the great sanctions that the law has. But the main sanction we do have is in not dealing with (odious) people and isolating them because their behavior is unbearable."

I wonder how we forgot that.

Hitler Does The Darndest Things...

Gratuituous Hitler Cuteness: A Liddle Kitler

Those of you who have hung in with me since my days of posting about Death Row Brides and Commie Fags (actually a brand of cigarettes), will recognize my perpetual fascination with Hitler and the jerks who love him. Since then, I've become acquainted with Godwin's Law, to wit:

Formulated by Godwin way back in 1990...the law states that: As an online discussion continues, the probability of a reference or comparison to Hitler or to Nazis approaches 1. For those of us who have forgotten our math course segment on probabilities, that means somebody is sure to call somebody a Nazi. (italic emphasis all mine. AW.) By RICK CASEY, HOUSTON CHRONICLE, Aug. 13, 2009, 8:51PM

I'm so glad I found out about this, since it's something I intuitively suspected. When your opponent has bankrupted himself of awful names and accusations to hurl at you, he plays the Nazi card. Also the Marxist card, I notice.

Not in my day, however.

In those halcyon Woodstockian tie-dye-wearing days, you were more likely to be called A capitalist war mongering tool! by one side and a Commie faggot lesbo peace creep! by the other. We let the Nazi-stuff be, since, uh, we still knew a few things about Nazis. Like: the commies actually hated Nazis and, uh, slaughtered a bunch of them during that great Band o' Brothers war known as II. Also, some of us had dads who had fought in II and, uh, liberated the death camps. Those guys tended to be strangely quiet during Nazi discussions.

But here we all are, post-history, post-manners, post-rationality, with flesh-eating viruses, dead spots in the ocean, plastic-bag islands, loose nukes, and now dumb-asses without any filters on their brains. I can visualize them in their kitchens, a nourishing 14 lb. bag of pizza-flavored Cheetos at their elbows, hunched over their Walgreen's poster board, tongues clutched between their gappy teeth, holding a Magic Marker like a bread knife and inscribing: The Goverment Wans to kil Old Peeple & Obamma Iz a Natsi.

There's another theory around, promulgated on Daily Kos from time to time, that using the word Nazi is a substitution for the rightly-loathed N-word. And I entertained that notion for a while, except that I think our native fructose-bloated rabble are staunch enough to use the word Nigger! Nigger! Nigger! Nigger! Nigger! without shame or fear. Remember, I grew up in the 60's South,and discovered that lynch-loving Kluckers don't have a lot of inhibitions that way. Nope. Our very own white-trash mob figured out that the very word "Nazi" would, maybe, bring us latte-guzzling, tree-kissing, recycling types to our knees and then...Game Over.

This is what puzzles me, because those fact-free groups who turn out holding pix of Obama wearing a Hitler 'stache, are the very ones who would dearly love them some Nazi's. You know: Nazi-party politics, where you kill everyone you disagree with, wear great looking scary uniforms, and make the trains run on time, until the world gets sick of it. Then Dear Cowardly Leader kills himself and his sweet patootie in a bunker, is set on fire in a ditch, and the Allies march in to see for themselves what the Four Horsemen have wrought.

Can't see why right-wing nutjobs wouldn't love a little go-round with that.

They all seem to come from the same special basement.

Civil Discourse

I haven't blogged since March? Wow. Hard to believe but not hard to do (or not do). I eased into not-blogging like a champ and got better at not-writing as I went on. But now it's time. Time to saddle up and write some posts.

For my reintroduction, I include my facebook picture, which exhorts me or you or the world at large to be funky. (I'm so tempted.) Actually be funky is a web application that will convert whatever photo you choose into a cartoon, a stencil, Pop Art, or (ambiguously) Red, White n' Blue. It's idiot simple and a lot of fun. Once I tried it out, and then lived life as a 'toon, I decided it was too rough and tumble in toon-land, what with explosions, talking critters, and all that work at the Acme Writing Factory. So then, I decided to simply exist, placidly and serenely, as a 1950's Redbook magazine tempera illustration.

After all, it was a quieter time, when grown ups in suits ladled out the boring evening news; in the AM, we read the newspapers while munching our cornflakes and guzzling our Tang. And although we might have a few opinions on how things were going, we kept them to ourselves except when likkered up on dry martinis or schnapps, depending.

But hey, you watch Mad Men. You know what it was like.

When I've poked my 1950's head into the net or cable TV, I've seen that America, or some part of it, has gone stone crazy. It seems there's a faction out there, often fat, white, pissed-off, and draped in tea-bags, but a faction nonetheless, and one in possession of the Revealed Truth. The True Word being that Obama is a Nazi, who wants all of Amurrica for hisself, and isn't that just like a Negro? Selfish and uppity, taking over a whole country like that and turning everyone into a communiss, whether they wanta be a communiss or not.

When confronted with these folks which, thankfully is rare, as a 1950's magazine babe, I mumble, How nice for you. But within my bad-ass beatnik writer self, I can't ignore the fact that there is work for me to do: heartless comments to be made and snark to be spread.

It's good to be back.