ENDGAME: Lagging Half Bits And Dollar Books

After writing this blog for a year and much of a second year, I've figured out that when you post something of note at the end of a month, it has a shorter shelf life than when posted earlier in a month -- being the 12th post in September is difficult to see when readers are scanning October, so one should post the prime bits early, and let them sit for a good month before they go bad.  So then.. ENDGAME will be the half-completed frags of the month, the throwaways that might be gems not yet fully recovered from the ground.  This page is chock full o nuts.

PICS: Limtucky Proper

BRG/TNL/500:13. Henny Penny

Oliver.

13. Henny Newton stole her out of NY, and had made of their romance a lucrative comeback in the world; when we met later he told me he was finished in pictures, and had stumbled badly pitching a picture about Bridge and Tunnel Day.  They're still counting bodies, he's painting the re-creation in ninety minutes.  Do you know how they got the subways, Maggie?  How they hit so many?  On Bridge and Tunnel day?  Hack Bridge and Tunnel boys set the explosives.  They've covered all that up by now, but that's who did it.  Nineteen Tacticals: A, Q, B; ding, ding, ding.

Somewhere, not far from here, a man named Elric Schmidt sang his last song as the Q caved in and sucked him down.  The song was "Oneida", about a girl who leaves him for the slick promises of a con artist.  Therese was in France with the Henny Newton convoy when the island shit itself.

PICS: Breakfast Sammich!

There's just one thing holding me back from stardom in the world of phone.photography: an obsession with power lines and telephone poles.  I can't deny what people are saying, (these people went to a different school), What's with all the pictures of nothing  framed by power lines?
Well no more!  Now all my pictures will be of breakfast sandwiches!

ON: The Best 90's Movie

Take Private Ryan and shove it.  
So too Titanic, GoodFellas, (I said it!), and Pulp Fiction.
The best movie of the 90's is a little something called Immortal Beloved.

ON: Politicians Oil and Roads

Republicans aren't conservative, republicans are politicians, there's nothing sublime in the world for politicians, just the expansion and cultivation of power.  Politics are dull and venal: when there are more homosexuals in the country than there are christians, republicans will be for gay marriage, and democrats will stop fake-going to church.  They're all bean counters.  That we can work with these people (either party) as some sort of social human growth hormone to speed up the fixing of cultural inadequacies is to me as useful as praying to the gods for rain.  If you look to your political representation the way you look to your accountant, than you feel me.

AUDIT: Huttle Puddle and Nearly Canada

PICS: Sep2Rem

ON: Low End Conservatism

There is this generation, generation and a half, grown up with divorce the norm, the absentee fathers; without church, family, strict schooling -- latchkey kiddos now waking up at 30 with a craving for the grooves of discipline from an earlier time cut into them.  But alas, they're pock-free.  And here is where the reversal, youthful conservatism, is born.  Instead of looking beyond the injustice of the present to a dreamy optimized future, skipping back generations to paradise lost.

Not given the opportunity to be shamed and disciplined by the evils of religion and conservative upbringing, freewheeling trailer kids with lotto ticket parenting never benefited from the code as those who did grow into adulthood with the natural step of questioning that code.  You understand that finding out your parents are wrong about everything they taught you is an advantageous position to being taught nothing.  So when you try to figure out from why libertarian uprisings catch on with young poor people, you must understand there is an underclass trying to go back in time to something they had no opportunity to take part in and then reject.  It's sweeter stuff than the utopia.  It's Fantasy not Sci-Fi, both equally ridiculous.

ON: Counter-Culture

I wish I knew some priests who looked like Karl Malden and taught the kids in the neighborhood how to box.  This is too many movies and having been raised without religion. 
I know there is a shallow and spiteful conservative streak in me from having no foundation of others' conservatism to question in life; no belief system to work out an opposition to.

I craved order.  It showed itself in an immediate and visceral distaste for counter-culture; reasoning that counter-culture is square, that counter-culture can only exist by the obscene success of the culture they counter, and the would-be counterists I knew seemed less like they fought the power, and more like the beneficiaries.  I was poor.  I rooted for soulless rubes in movies.

ON: Game Of Thrones And Middle Earth

There's no more devastating undercut to the success of fantasy genre writing than to be compared to Lord of The Rings.  The acclaimed works of this genre tend to self-consciously set themselves apart from that turgid old bible of orcs, wraiths, and Balrogs; so far apart as to negate their worth.

ON: Michael Irvin

Many NFL fans have disliked Michael Irvin for twenty years.  As a Dallas Cowboys fan I rooted for him for the reasons sports fans root for players of questionable morality: he won games for the laundry I pledged allegiance to, (that being the white shirt, the silver pants, the blue star).  That's basic sports fan math: your bad guys aren't as bad as the bad guys on the other team -- rooting interest.  But I love Michael Irvin; I love the idea of Michael Irvin.  I love him for the reasons fans who romanticize code words for white players like "grit" "toughness" and "smarts", hate him: he's the ghettoest motherfucker that ever played.  A man who had the "grit" "toughness" and "smarts" to go from the Lauderdale black ghetto to Miami to Dallas to Canton.