Cigar Wrapping

I grow and roll my own cigars from seed.  Here is my rolling process:

Cigar Rolling 2018

1.    As the growing season ends, pick individual leaves and separate them into “Binder/Wrapper” (large) and “Filler” (smaller).

2.    Attach 5 or 6 leaves together with a rubber band and hang from a drying rack (clothing rack) with a paper clip.

3.    Allow them to dry to a tannish/brown color. (Possibly a few weeks)

4.    Spray the leaves lightly with water.  For each cigar, use enough filler leaves to pack fully but not tightly (estimate by comparing with a commercial cigar) and one B/W leaf. You may press the B/W leaf within two smooth tiles. Allow ten minutes for the moisture to spread to the entire leaf.

5.    Using a pizza cutter, gently remove the center stem from all leaves, both filler and B/W.  Half the B/W leaf can be used as your binder, the other can be the wrapper.

6.    Form the filler leaves into a cigar shape, place this bundle on one end of the binder leaf, gently roll it up, upper side of original leaf to the outside, veins running the length of the cigar. Secure with a dab of paste (flour and water).

7.    Repeat the process with the wrapper leaf, gently smoothing out any bumps, folds, or wrinkles.

8.    Allow to dry for a day in the open air, then store in a humidor or Baggie.

2035

And in the end, America (that once immaculate country which sloppy tongues call “Murka”) was not destroyed by Adolph Hitler or communism or by guided missiles or bombs.  Its demolition was fomented during the Clinton administration, when a small group of radio talk-show hatemongers realized that they could enjoy a very lucrative career by replacing vision with vitriol, by sacrificing sensitivity and common sense for dollars and cents.

Their success led to the emergence of hate-filled television personalities, and then entire networks, and eventually to top-tier politicians who used the same technique.  Each of these entities plumbed the depths of our nation’s stupidity, but no one ever managed to hit bottom.  These bottom feeders would go on to dine at lower and lower depths, they got fatter and fatter. The water grew darker, cloudier, dirtier, thicker, murkier, slimier, but no firm footing was ever reached.  Just more bile-soaked muck and urine-saturated manure.  Shit stains became badges of honor, to be celebrated and then cashed in.  For profit and power.

Secretly, these cabalists met in their mansions and on their yachts and they whispered to one another, “The people can’t be this stupid, can they?”  But the people were.  “They won’t possibly fall for this latest crap we’re dishing out, will they?”

But we did.

&&&

“They say that patriotism is the last refuge

To which a scoundrel clings.

Steal a little and they throw you in jail.

Steal and lot and they make you king.” –Bob Dylan

The Oncoming Flood

Mainstream publishing houses still control the power, prestige, and publicity of the industry, but that “main stream” they are standing in is called technology, with its rushing current quickening and gaining strength every day.

Destruction looms.

Now, those indies you see fishing and swimming along the shoreline won’t get washed away by the water. Empowered, they will still be there tomorrow and tomorrow, unlike the bloated Don “Status Que” Fanucci in Godfather II, who chants “domani, domani, domani,”before being annihilated by the new wave.

 For nearly ten years now, BROWN FEDORA BOOKS has been gently side-riding that new wave, giving those beachfront authors the opportunity to publish their books—books printed with pixels, printed on paper, printed with care and love.  None of us have gotten rich (as of yet), but there are a million other authors out there in the blogosphere doing the same thing we are, and the money exchanging hands far exceeds that touched by the big publishing houses.

Of course, the money doesn’t matter, it’s the books.  Admittedly, most of the tidal wave of books coming out of indie publishing rank as drivel or worse, but hidden within those stacks of paper and packs of pixel are the best books being written.  The absolute best.

We happy.

LEARNING BASIC ITALIAN

This morning let’s learn some basic Italian:

“Mi dispiace che il tuo vomito sia caduto nelle mie scarpe”

means

“It displeases me that your vomit has fallen to my shoes.”

Our Country as a Cigar

In my many years as a cigar roller, I learned that any good cigar needs three elements: 1. the filler, the countless little leaves that are the real guts of the product; 2. the binder, which holds everything together; and 3. the wrapper, the outer cover for extra flavor and appearance.

It seems to me that our country these days still has great filler— millions of caring, good people. And all the politicians are battling to be our wrapper, to show off their flavor and image. But no one is willing to be the binder, that out-of-sight, unappreciated, hard-working little piece that makes the whole thing into one good, solid, piece of humanity.

To All Frustrated Writers

To all frustrated writers:

Two literary critics were talking and the first one said, “F. Scott Fitzgerald died a broken man, because The Great Gatsbywas a commercial and critical flop.”

And the second said, “Yeah, but he knew he wrote a good book.”

Don’t let those agents and acquisition editors and big house publishers get to you.  They’re mostly nice, overworked people, but they’re 20^thCentury dinosaurs, breathing in the volcanic ash of technology and slowly going extinct.  Fugetaboutit.

Technology has set us free.  Just go to somewhere like Amazon KDP and publish your book. It’s free, easy, you have complete creative control, the royalty rates are great, and you get immediate worldwide distribution.

Why are commercially successful writers like Lee Child and James Patterson and Stephen King still giving publishing houses a cut of their spoils?  I have no idea.  Loyalty maybe?  Inertia?

No, you won’t be the next King of book sales. You won’t get reviewed here in The New York Times and you probably won’t get rich and famous.  But you might.  I have a friend who publishes independently (Don’t call it “self-publishing,” it’s Independent Publishing) who has sold over 30,000 books.  Another friend often gets on The Timesbestseller list.  Another has had a major movie made from her book.

Will this happen to you?  Probably not.  I know it hasn’t happened to me.  But that’s not important.  There’s only one thing that matters:

You wrote a good book.

THE OLD MAN AND THE SEA

From my forthcoming book, WEAK WINGS AND OTHER STORIES:

THE OLD MAN AND THE SEA

a story by E. Hemingway of Polyps

Editor’s Note:  From the year 1940 up until the time of his death and a few years after that, the American author E. Hemingway resided in a Cuban estate which he called Finca Vigía (which translates into the English as Finca Vigìa, with that little slash over the I leaning the other way).  E. shared this manigua-thicket covered palace with thousands of cats, each of whom had only three toes, and along with many wives, who had generally managed to hang onto all ten of theirs.

What most literary scholars and researchers fail to recognize is that E. also spent a summer in the small precancerous village of Polyps, Vermont, where he wrote an earlier and much more meaningful draft of one of his greatest stories.

            He was an old man who fished in the waters they called Joe’s Pond and he had gone forty-seven years without getting a halfway decent entry in the Molson Fishing Derby.

            "He is unlucky," the others said of him. They used the terrible woodchuck word for unlucky.  Snake-bit/horse-shit.

            "No, this is not true," the boy said. For the boy was loyal to him.  "It is not that he is snake-bit/horse-shit, it is because he does not use the bait.  He is an old one, one who has old ways.  Last week I saw him cutting up some used Bag Balm tubes to place upon the hook."

            "Yes," the others agreed, "and we have also seen him using globs of Ben and Jerry's on the hook.  He said it is the food for the Big One.  Yet the ice cream was weakened, and it melted much, and caused stains upon the water."

            "So you see," the boy said, "it is not a question of bad luck, it is simply that he is such a frolicking asshole."

            "Well, to be born an asshole is to be unlucky, is it not?" they asked.  And the boy was silent.  Later he thought, “Perhaps the old man is just snake-bit/horse-shit after all.”

            Everything about the man was old, except for his eyes. He awoke with the sun, thanking God for his ocular transplant surgery.  He used the eyes of a twenty-year-old to look around his shack.  The walls were made of royal palms they called guano, but the boy had told him, “You know that guano is just bat shit, right?”

            The flour sack that was his sail was folded neatly on a shelf.  Perhaps, he thought, he should use a bigger sail, that might help.

            On the wall was a picture of the Virgin of Guadalupe.  And of the great DiMaggio.

            The two were pictured in the back of a taxi cab, sharing their lust.  It was obviously Photo-Shopped by the sex shop in Nogales where he had picked it up for a buck.  The old man could not afford the hologram version in which the figures actually moved.

            As he walked down to the ocean and to his boat, the boy called to him, “You know, you old snake-bit piece of horse shit, you may never again catch a fish.  Canned sardines don’t count.  Nor do polliwogs.”

            “Don’t you worry about me,” the old man answered him, “for I have many tricks.  Here, reach into my pocket.”

            “Oh no,” the boy said.  “You’ve used that trick before.  There is no pocket.”

            It was the third day of the Fishing Derby. The old man could sense the Big One, two hundred feet beneath the sea, licking at the Ben and Jerry’s on his hook. “I wish I had left on some of the cone,” he said aloud.

The Big One took the hook, and as it pulled the old man out beyond the inner bay, out past the island they called Mud, he remembered the years that had passed, and what had happened.

He remembered the lions on the beach, up by his camp in West Milton.  They had taken much of the garbage from him, and from the can which had held it.  He had loved the lions, for they made him feel young, until his wife pointed out that it wasn’t lions stealing the garbage, only raccoons that sort of looked like lions in the dusk.  After much beer.

            Later he had taken beer again and told this tale to his table mates at Vinny's Hot Spot, how the raccoons had fooled him by looking like the lions.  

And each of those at the table had said to him as one, "Not to me they don't.  You are such a frolicking asshole."

            He said to them, “Perhaps I am just snake-bit/horse-shit, did that ever occur to you?  Did the great DiMaggio get a hit today?”

            “Dead a long time,” they snickered.

            There were other things that he could not remember so clearly.  Had he run with the bulls at Pamplona, or simply gotten involved in a fracas with some Holsteins and hoochi-coochi girls at the beer tent at the Tunbridge World's Fair? Perhaps they were the same. Perhaps it had not happened at all. And yet, there before him was the lawyer's bill, stuffed in the front pocket of his bib overalls.  Right next to the bail bond receipt and the court date summons.

            The Big Fish continued to tug the boat to the east.

            "I will take you, Big One, you will be mine," he said to the fish, "and then I shall be able to rest.  Then it will be time for the retirement community."

            There he knew that he could still be a man, because they offered to him twenty-four-hour nurse supervision, and ESPN.  But would there be those who would get down and wrestle with him on the rug in such a place?  And could he bring along his pontoon boots and his “Rocking Throbulators” tapes?  These things he did not know for certain.

            On the fourth day, the sea was a powerful woman. She did not forgive, she did not forget, she brought troubles to man.  Sort of like Roseanne Barr.

            The Portuguese Man of War floating on the surface of the waves was a cruel mistress.  One contact would leave the skin with purple welts and painful sores.  Sort of like Roseanne Barr.

            The Big One towed him to the east for ten more days.  “I bet the junk mail and catalogues are piling up,” he said aloud.

            On the fifteen day, he ate a tuna fish sandwich that he had packed.  It had mayo, which he knew should never be eaten in any month that contained the letter R, but it smelled okay.  “Never again will I go out fishing without Fritos,” he said aloud.

            His left hand began to cramp into a claw, like an eagle.  It became a useless, humiliating whore.  Then his right hand did also.  Both hands were useless now.  He undid his trousers anyway, and he wished that the boy was with him.

            At dusk of the sixteenth day, he looked back at the harbor lights.  He was at least fifty yards from shore.

            The big fish jumped and came out of the water endlessly.  Its eyes were the size of home plate, its sword the length of three baseball bats.  Its tail was like the right field foul pole, and it had fins like the tarpaulin they used to cover the infield when it rained.

“I’m going to need a bigger boat,” he said aloud.

 He remembered arm-wrestling in Havana with the giant Negro who only had one hand.  The match went on for many days, and there was much betting.  The old man cried out, “No fair!  No fair!” when the Negro began twisting his hook into the old man’s palm.  “That hurts!”

Finally the Big One was taken, and so he lashed the fish to the side of his skiff, for he did not like its smell.

            "Now it is you and me, Fish," he said. But he used the old word for the fish, the good word.  He called it "Phish.”  With a P H. No F.

            “We are brothers, you and I,” he said to the Phish.

            “Half-brothers,” thought the Phish.  “My mother was a sturgeon, our father was a pervert.”

            "Now, Phish, it is you and me against the dreaded lamprey eel," he said. "For I must not let them destroy you, as they have destroyed many others.  These devils will latch onto you.  Then they will suck at you harder than Paris Hilton in a homemade porno video."  He smiled and reached for his can of “Eel-A-Way.”

            The sharks came.  They were blue and silver, smooth and handsome, with noses like shovels, and lips like strawberry wine.  “I wish the boy was here,” he said aloud.  “I could toss him over and keep the sharks busy for a while.”

He took his oar and batted at the sharks like the great DiMaggio, but finally had to take two and hit to right.

            Then he had an attempted bunt and a strike-out looking.  It was humiliating.

            Back on shore, there was nothing left of the Great Phish but the thin pole of its spine.  No wait, that was the boat’s mast.  He guessed the raccoons must had taken the skeleton.

            He was tired like never before.

He slept well that night.

He dreamed of lions on the beach, raccoons in the garbage, the great DiMaggio at the plate, Roseanne Barr, Paris Hilton, and for some reason, Rosie O’Donnell.

A man can be defeated, but not destroyed.  So the next morning, in a shocking plot twist, he got up early to head up Bernie Sanders’ political campaign.

-30-

To Frustrated Writers

To all frustrated writers:

Two literary critics were talking and the first one said, “F. Scott Fitzgerald died a broken man, because THE GREAT GATSBY was a commercial and critical flop.  And the second said, “Yeah, but he knew he wrote a good book.”

Don’t let those agents and acquisition editors and big house publishers get to you.  They’re mostly nice, overworked people, but they’re 20^thCentury dinosaurs, breathing in the volcanic ash of technology and slowly going extinct. Fugetaboutit.

Technology has set us free.  Just go to Amazon KDP and publish your book.  It’s free, easy, you have complete creative control, the royalty rates are great, and you get immediate worldwide distribution.

You won’t get reviewed in The New York Times and you probably won’t get rich and famous.  But you might.  I have a friend who publishes independently (Don’t call it “self-publishing,” it’s Independent Publishing) and he has sold over 30,000 books.  Another friend often gets on The New York Times bestseller list. Another has had a major movie made from her book.

Will this happen to you?  Probably not.  I know it hasn’t happened to me.  But that’s not important.  There’s only one thing that matters:

You wrote a good book.
Enjoy yourself.

My Interview with Creative North Shore

The Write Space is a monthly Q&A series from Creative Collective covering a local writer and a North Shore space(s) s/he associates with writing. 

Give us your best writerly bio.

I started out in crime fiction but have spread out during a long life of writing—mainstream novels, literary, humor, history, stage plays, even some “poetry” and one goofy cookbook.  My books have been praised by places like Publishers Weekly and Library Journal and Newsday, but I mostly treasure two blurbs:

 1. The great Boston novelist George V. Higgins, who wrote The Friends of Eddie Coyle, considered to be the greatest crime novel of all time, said about Duck Alley, “It’s a wonderful book, A Separate Peace in blue collar”;

2. A newspaper reviewer put down one of my books and wrote, “Wow, that was good.”

That’s all I’m looking for.

All the twenty-five books are at my Author Page at Amazon.

None of them are best sellers, but if I manage to say something new, maybe use a sentence or piece of dialog that hasn’t been used before, I’m satisfied.

Tell us about a North Shore Write Space. (Space you associate with writing/words - can be inside your home!)

I get my best ideas when walking the Yellow Trail in Salem Woods, which is right out behind my condo.  Then I rush back to my writing room and punch in the words. Above my desk are letters from Norman Mailer, John leCarre, Elmore Leonard, George V. Higgins, and an envelope addressed by P. G. Wodehouse.  These guys all remind me that I have to get the words right.

When I’m in Salem, not writing, I’m …

My wife and I spend a lot of time with the grandkids, Jamie and Josie.  Josie calls us her “Merry Grampies.”

I love walking the woods with my grandson, and taking both of them to the arcades at the Willows.  I enjoy the 1930’s feel of the place, Josie goes nuts when those prize tickets start reeling out of the machine.

We’ll also fly kites at Nahant Beach, and there is always so many great exhibits for both adults and kids at the PEM.

Aa an adult, I feast off Salem’s incredible writing community, much of its supportive atmosphere trickling down from the Salem State professor, J.D. Scrimgeour.

Another adult hobby: When we lived in Vermont, I grew my own cigar tobacco and rolled my own cigars.  I’m trying to do that again here on the deck of our Salem condo.

What are you working on now?

When I finished my comedy novel about Neo-Nazis, HITLER’S NEW TENANTS, I planned to work on a serious novel that begins with the line, “In 2012, drunk, I ran over my twelve-year-old son and killed him.” Heavy stuff.

But I just couldn’t get myself depressed enough to make a run at it, so instead I am putting together a collection of my humorous short stories through the years.  The book’s working title is Hacking Around.

The first story in the group is called “The Killer Duck Demands Butter.”  It’s loosely based on the time I was showering in our old Vermont farmhouse and the kitchen drain backed up.  I looked down to see a Sloppy Joe mix oozing up from the shower drain and engulfing my feet and ankles.

And finally - share a paragraph or two of either something already published, or something new! Feel free to situate the piece first (background, etc.).

Here is the first paragraph of the second short story in the Hacking Around collection:

Zia Bimbagulia was a quasi-aunt of the family, an ancient Italian woman who looked like Mother Teresa, could cook like Mamma Leone, and had a disposition like Ma Barker.  Zia Bimbagulia is best remembered as the relative who kept digging up her husband's remains and re-burying them somewhere else so that her daughter Archangela could not honor her father’s gravesite with a visit.

  Learn more about Jim at his Amazon Author Page.

My Fifteenth Summer, a story of sexual gratification and sparkling, twinkling ennui

My Fifteenth Summer

A story of sexual gratification mixed with sparkling, twinkling ennui

It was during my fifteenth summer that I turned fifteen for the first time.

She was much older, but that did not seem to matter to us.

Barney Ühlüûrch was fifteen too, but I didn’t know him and we would never meet. Yet I envied him those little squiggles over all his U’s.  She told me she didn’t know him either, but I once found some briefs in her bedroom monogrammed B Ü.  She denied everything, and tried to convince me that the Ü was just a smiley face.

Fifteen. And hot.  I can remember that it was so hot that year you could fry eggs on the sidewalk.  A pedestrian couldn’t go three feet downtown without stepping on a fried egg. The yokes and whites dripped off boot-heals like warm tofu, but with more cholesterol. Short order cooks filled block after block with Sunny-Sides and Over-Easies.  Nearly every street corner held pile after pile of soufflés. Omelets lay like fields of wheat, stretching to the horizon.  Street-sweeping machines stalled to a halt, their mechanisms clogged with bacon and sausage grizzle that had been lifted from the fat-smeared gutters. Technicians were flowed in from neighboring towns to strip clean the greased gears of the machinery.

Slices of toast lay wrinkled up against the sides of buildings; jelly-smeared postal boxes stood like soldiers awaiting their orders.

And we were hot, she and I.  She was still beautiful and I remained fifteen.

&&&

         She was an older woman, so much more mature than I—and the most beautiful creature I had ever laid eyes on.  And I was so young.  

Only fifteen.

She said to me, “Five years ago, you were only ten years old, and I was forty. I was four times older than you. Now you’re fifteen and I’m forty-five, just three times older.  In fifteen years, you’ll be thirty and I’ll be sixty, just twice as old.  You’re bound to catch up with me pretty soon.”

         I told her that I felt like I was standing in the middle of an Abbot and Costello routine.

         “You are,” she said. Then she added, “And I am standing there with you.”  Then she added as an extra bonus, “Perhaps, we all are.” And she nodded her head with what we both felt was an air of wisdom and sagacity.  As she often did back then.  Many, many times, she did that.  Nod, nod, nod, all the time.  It was only later that I realized those so-called nods of wisdom were in reality twitches of early-onset Parkinson.  But not that early.  She was so much older than me.  I was only fifteen, and I hoped she didn’t have anything catching.

I did not know back then that she would be the one to stand forever in my memory—the protean turning point of my life, the casting mold for my own persona, the stewardess on my fog-bound flight to maturity.  I knew none of these things.

         We had sex only three times that summer. And never at the same time.

         She told me that she found all sexual liaisons to be draining, demeaning, and dry.  I tried to convince her that it still beat Pickle Ball.

         I would enjoy undressing her with my eyes, except when my eyebrows got caught in her zipper and she started to walk away

         At fifteen, the only things I noticed about her were her incredible beauty and the fact that she stood before me crying.  A stranger to me really, crying to no one, with her tears falling like rain drops.

         So many tears, so many rain drops.

                                                      &&&

         Each of my senses was swamped by her beauty that fifteenth summer, as I luxuriated in the sight of her muscles, the feel of her soft skin, the smell of her perfume, the taste of her key lime pie.  Only my sense of hearing was immune to her charms, because I had somehow gotten both my ears stuffed with beans that summer, causing a season of blocked inner-ear cavities and near total deafness.

         In the fall, my mother used a pair of needle-nosed pliers with yellow plastic handles to remove each of the beans.  As she struggled with those beans, my Mom told me, “At least you didn’t get a baseball card caught up your nose,” while giving my brother a dirty look.

         “It was only a Bob Cerv,” my brother offered in his defense.  “I had doubles anyway.”

         Bob Cerv was a reserve outfielder for the Yankees that summer, and he hadn’t been having a very good season, so my brother had folder his baseball card in half once, then again, and again, until the thickness of it nearly equaled its length and its width, like a child’s block, and then he had stuffed the card up his nose.

         Our mother had used those same pliers to remove the Bob Cerv.  During both extractions, she attempted to put our minds at ease by reminding us of tragedies much worse than these.

         For instance, Queenie, our silver-dollar sized pet turtle, had choked to death on a clump of wet (fish) food. There were no food processors back then—which could have prevented the clumping, and there was no Heimlich maneuver—which could have neutralized it.  And the trusty needle-nosed pliers with the plastic yellow grips were just too big and clumsy for successful reptilian tracheal extraction.

         “These pliers are too big,” my mother said to me.

         “What you say?” I said. “I can’t hear anything.”

         “I said these pliers are too big, for Christ sake.  What, you got beans in your ears?”

                                                      &&&

         That older woman, that love of my life, as far as I know, had never used a pair of needle-nosed pliers on me or on anyone else.  But she may have, once or twice, before our lives had joined, before I turned fifteen.  As far as I knew, she remained plier-less, mostly a stranger to me, crying to no one, with her tears falling like rain drops.

                                                      &&&

         Boy, she was stillstanding in front of me crying.

So many tears.  So much rain.

         Pedestrians ran for the cover of balconied store-fronts and canopies.  “If it’s not the fried eggs, it’s the rain-tears,” they would complain good-naturedly, as the teary water washed into the storm drains like melted butter.

Our local television weathermen predicted more precipitation, more eggs, and with a grin he would take the good natured ribbing from the guy at the news desk. “Hey, I just predict the weather, I don’t cause it,” the weatherman would chuckle and repeat, many times per week.

         He insisted that he wasn’t just a weatherman, but a college trained meaty urologist.  He didn’t look that meaty to me, with those flimsy arms and turkey neck.  Plus, he couldn’t come up with a remedy for the blisters on my scrotum, even when I wrote in.  What kind of urologist is that?

         She swore to me she had nothing to do with my blisters.

         I also wrote the weatherman asking if a fifteen-year-old boy should be dating an older woman, but all he seemed to care about was the tears falling like rain.

The farmers of the Great Midwest remembered the parched earth and fried eggs of just a few days ago, and their faces relaxed, and they thanked God.  It would be all right now.

         In Idaho, a dam let loose and destroyed a trailer park. Displaced residents squatted blank-faced on the banks of the newly-formed river and fished for dinner and household utensils.  One lucky man found a pair of pliers.  They weren’t needle-nose, but that didn’t matter to him; he had no children with beans in their ears or baseball cards up their nose.

         Back in town, my woman’s tears mixed with the dirt on the sidewalk and flowed brown and thick toward the gutter, taking with it the tired eggs, now turned thin and watery.  Egg prices jumped geometrically as hard-pressed locals turned to alternatives. Middle-aged men with high lipid levels stooped to the sidewalk to retrieve products with names like “Egg-So-Fine” and “Not-Egg-Zactly.”

         A visiting housewife who could not swim was almost saved by lifeguards, then had her lungs pumped out.  The autopsy uncovered mucus and albumin.

&&&

She and I were to encounter each other many years later in Barcelona and Madrid. She was in Spain.  I’m not talking about me and the woman with albumin in her lungs, I meant me and that older woman from my fifteenth summer.

         She walked by me across that sunny Valencia sidewalk, asking strangers in English what city she was in.  I was studying the ukulele at the time and failed to look up.  If I had, I would have seen a decrepit but still beautiful woman. Except for around her eyes and face. And body.  And hips.  Her ass was nothing to write home about either.

         She ordered a double Saviourgin, but the carwash said they were all out, so she had her undercarriage super-waxed instead.

         We sat together at the café and thought back to that summer we had shared so many years before.  I had been just fifteen.  She asked me if I still had my paper route.  When I told her no, she suggested we go around and try making collections anyway.

         She told me she had a daughter, and I asked how old.

         “She’s fifteen.”

         “Fifteen, really?  Wow, that’s really, really interesting.  Do you think I could…?
         “Keep it in your pants, Humbert.”

         She asked me if I still had my ennui, but she spelled it N-U-E.  I told her N-O.  Well, maybe just a little.  Actually, my ennui is still quite debilitating, but I didn’t care.

&&&

         That is just about everything I remember from my fifteenth summer.

                                                      &&&

         Oh, and there was something about English muffins, I remember.  What was that?

         And one time my ankles got so cold I had to put on wool socks.

         And I had a dream that the Mona Lisa mooned me, but my therapist said it didn’t mean nothing.

         “That’s a double negative, Doctor, does that mean is really doesmean something?”

         “What?”

                                                      &&&

         But that’s about all I remember of that summer.  I really mean it this time, that’s it.

-30-

         

         

         

YouTube

You can check out my other short, goofy videos on the Jim DeFilippi channel on YouTube.

The GR4 Movement

This chapter from MERKA: A VARIANT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES:

The Gunz R4 Movement

The GR4 Pussies Movement was begun in 2020 by a disgruntled and previously ungruntled and disgraced Right Wing newspaper columnist and current bloggist named Malcolm Pearlmutter.

To this very day, the GR4 Movement continues to grow and burgeon (which is the same thing), and is said to be within a couple baby steps of wiping out all gun violence in the country forever.

The roots and basic philosophy of the movement were encapsulated in Pearlmutter’s very first blog on the subject, posted in his “The Mutterings of Pearl,” an on-line blog (previously a newspaper column which was syndicated in over three hundred dailies daily, back when there were actually over three hundred dailies nationally):

What follows is the full text of Pearlmutter's initial rambling, semi-coherent blog:

O ye teary-eyed, strong-hearted friends of mine, our palms must now be pressed down upon that hated, heated, frying pan of fate, with its cooking oil percolating up to scalding temperatures, with both the dermis and epi- to be scorched by facts to be faced, starting out with this one doozy:

This beloved country of ours has turned itself into a gun-powdered and dildo-ed nation, ready for nada, willing to perforate others but unable to perform.

You’re too young to remember this, but our Sweet Prince of a Boy, a sacred spot that both we and Irving Berlin referred to as “The Beautiful,” all decked out with his top-hat and tails—red, white and blur—once strode proudly out of the ashes of the Brown Shoe War with both guns cooling but still hot to the touch from all that blazing—the Prince himself, all primped up, pimped and powdered, pump-action pumped, lacquered with sweet-smelling musk and perfume, nobody’s fool or equal, doing all right in school and okay in bed.

Since then however, things have deflated down to the worse, and now to the worst.  Presently we are comprised of a wearied and weird populace of boner-starved misfits, schlumping back East across the plains, shoulders hunched and as weak as dishwater, pretending to be in possession of a stellar pair of John Wayne’s Guadalcanal-baked coyotes and hauling a dick with the length and power of Sergeant Alvin C. York’s M-1917 Enfield rifle, but in reality unsure of what to do if we ever found Betty Grable splayed out on our table.  Or anywhere else.

So, instead of plying our trade against some slanty-eyed, buck-toothed Yips (played by a runt-sized Sessue Hayakawa—runty yes, but tending to fight back, tending to fight on, not giving in or up until hell froze over into a hari-kari crust of crud), or else some Nazis (who tended to be harder-hearted and harder-headed than us suburb-bred, white bread boys, the black boys being segregated into separate but equal death platoons), nowadays these freedom-isn't-free faggots get their rocks off by hunting down four-year-olds in pinafores and shooting hot bullet-heads into the flesh of tots who are hanging upside down from jungle gyms like targets in an arcade.

So here’s the ploy, boys and girls:

In order to stop the slaughter on our schoolyards and public playgrounds, we must convince the all of them, the all of us, from the fairly sane to the bat-shit and beyond—that entire lumpy proletariat—that all guns, ALL GUNS, are for pussies.

You heard me right: Gunz R4 Pussies.

And that, my friends, is the name of our campaign.

Look, you losers of the Left and anyone else who thinks you can control the amount of guns and of moronic lunacy floating around the countryside—It’s too late, and too big a blister, for that Band-Aid.

Too late.

 The operative figure—only slightly suspect—is this: Over one-point-one million people have been killed by guns since John Lennon bravely took the lead, and the lead, back in ’80 (you can pronounce the “lead” or “lead” either way, works in both directions). 

That’s.  One.  Point.  One.  Million.  That’s more people than claim to have been at Idlewild Airport when the Beatles landed here for the first time.  There are three hundred and ten million guns in America; we could line up every man, woman and demented offspring, give them each their own gun, with ammo supplied, and still have enough left over to arm Yugoslavia, or whatever the hell it calls itself these days.

And so, since it’s obviously too late in our nation’s looney history to get guns out of the hands of the morons and the lunatics (this being obvious to everyone but those lenient lovelies of the Left who think a mimeographed application form to “Buy and Possess,” followed, if not followed, by the wet noodle slap across the wrist and trigger finger), before they rush into our schools with their noses dripping and their guns blazing, let’s convince these lunatics that their guns are not macho or manly, nowhere near that edifying, never have been, never will be, but are instead nothing more than fairy dust for the butterflies.  This applies to gang/killers too.

Guns are only needed by pussies, so only pussies have guns.

Let us finally admit that handguns—all guns— are nothing more than nut-sacks for the neutered, guts for the gutless.  Let’s make everyone see that.  Let’s convince these future baby killers that their pretty little blue-metal weapons are nothing more than a scam tool to be worshipped by the weak and the wasted, the wussies of our world. 

Waddayasay, let’s convince these sick-o-phants that a real man can hunt by using just his hands and a bow, he can protect his home and family with just his fists and a nightstick.  Let’s convince these salivating remedial morons that strapping on a gun takes the same amount of valor and verse as strapping on a prosthetic schwantz between one’s legs.

Let’s force gun manufacturers to admit that the whole sheboygan of its upper level management is just a neck-tied lineup of dick-less wonders, that there isn’t a real man among them, and that money is not only the bottom line, it is every other line too.

Let’s look back.

The 1980’s saw the gun industry quaking in its boots.  Not because of fear that a baby might be shot through a nipple and left for dead, but because gun sales were down.  The Charter Arms Company had died, Colt Manufacturing went bankrupt.

Then, thank God, thank the loving God of useless slaughter, along came the 1992 Los Angeles riots.  Those dirty, black thugs out in the street had a shitload of anger and torches and youthful energy going for them.  The cops were retreating, hiding behind their shields and Teflon.

But We the People had our guns, and we weren’t afraid to use them.  Eastwood could blast a hole through some young thug who was flat on his back and crying out for mercy.  The chickenshit was sob-faced twisting and thwarted by that Big Swinging Dick From Above.

And so, twenty-year-old white kids have been feeding the kindling between their legs with that image ever since.  Dressed all in their camo, face blackened, with a heavy, loaded “equalizer” strapped to the hip.

Hey, listen, don’t get annoyed as I point all this out to you.  I personally volunteer to sacrifice my own good, macho name in order to give the movement a kick-start.  When I was busy serving my country in the United States of Wherever It Wants Army (that’s Vietnam era, son, back when our word to the world meant something, and the fathers of invaded countries had to lock up their sweet-smiling daughters as we unstrapped our gun belts and unbuttoned our flies—no zippered dick doors for us he-men back then), I qualified as an “Expert,” then as a “Marksman,” finally a “Sharp-shooter” with both the M-16 and a Police Special .38.

So now I volunteer to go around talking with a lisp and punctuating my words with a string of high, squeaking giggles and cackles.  I’ll even tell people that I think the cross-eyed guy on those Real Housewives shows is kind of cute.  In a way.  That way he has about him.

So, before this latest op-ette of mine (“op-ette” being a diminutive form of “Op-Ed” for those readers who would rather punt than pun) awakens that nest of squirrels often euphemistically referred to as my “readership,” before this GUNZ R4 campaign begins exploding like an IED in a firecracker factory, like an enchilada fart in a space suit, like a spark in the Hindenburg, I decided that I owed it to all the diaper-clad gun-nutz who read my stuff and can actually comprehend a bit of it, to actually visit a gun show, since that pleasure has been denied to me through seventy-two years of actually living a life.

So I did.

The show billed itself as “The Largest Gun Show North of Boston,” an obvious literary reference to the first collection of poems by Robert Frost, that California-bred, New Hampshire/Vermont native son who wrote the timeless, “Stopping by the Woods with My Assault Rifle Locked and Loaded on a Snowy Evening.”

Allow me to state my pre-visit prejudices about these type shows.  I admit that what I expected to find was an overheated and under-ventilated aluminum Quonset hut, packed sardine-tight with that type of malnourished weasels you see driving monster trucks but still need a booster seat to see out the windshield, with blocks on the pedals to reach the controls with their lift-aided combat boots, all wearing rumpled backpacks stuffed with giant tubes of Clearasil that obviously weren’t working.

And I was right, that is exactly what I did find.

I knew I was in the right place as soon as I noticed that my Ford Fiesta was the only vehicle in the parking lot without layers of dried, crusted mud, clear up to the windows, and mud-flaps showing cartoons of fake and flashy women, under-clad—posing as every wimpy boy’s example of a wet dream, while trying hard not to laugh until the john had left the room and maybe left his wallet too.

Inside, I saw hordes of young white men, each wearing different articles of  “Look at me” camo clothing (which seemed to defeat the original purpose of camouflage), but what do I know.  Well, at least I know more that this band of mentally deficient goofballs combined, and so do you, so does the average man in the street, even if the street has been exposed to massive amounts of brain-deadening toxic waste for the last forty years.

Speaking of toxic waste, the stench of B.O. in the place did not quite reach the sense-deadening level, which was a shame, and the thought occurred that marketing a spray deodorant in a canister designed to look like a Mauser C96 could make some money.

The lack of security would have flagellated the anti-gun-nutz crowd, but I found it somehow soothing and appropriate.  Also appropriate would have been a wet-bar that served moonshine and denatured alcohol along with the automatics and revolvers, but if there was something like that there, I didn’t see it.

Numerous gun manufacturer ads and logos were plastered about on walls and easels, all ads showing either pictures of attacking grizzly bears or tits (human, female).  The undercurrent of each of the ads was obviously: “Boy, grab yourself one of these weapons, a sidearm or a rifle or shotgun.  Bring it on home with you.  Whenever you find yourself incapable of producing a pole in your pocket, these here pieces of heavy metal are the next best thing.”

It stands to reason that there must be a gun enthusiast somewhere (they don’t like to be called “gun-nutz” because it hits too close to home, “home” being where they keep their gun-metal blue, heavy dildos, locked up tight in a storage cabinet while the firearms lie loaded on the couch and stuffed between the sofa cushions, for the kids to find and play with) who doesn’t consider his collection of child-killing weapons to be a subconscious extensions of that fleshy one he has hanging down there where his legs collide, but if there is, I have yet to meet him.

The crowd was exceedingly white and dirty, which I had expected and was ready for, but the young age of the participants surprised me.  Some young bucks who looked about twelve were accompanied by toddlers and infants that seemed to be their offspring, but my guess would be the babies were all sired by an older woman who has been allowing junior to visit at the cost of a pack of cigarettes.  Which continues to double every few years.

The crowd was so young looking that at least twice I was sure I spotted Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris strolling by, among all the other goofy-eyed gunsels who someday might have to kill just to get their cookies off, just like those Columbine twins did, just a pair of de-neutered dong suckers (if I were still writing my newspaper column, I would not have been allowed to call these boys “dong-suckers”—too close to home ) who just couldn’t stop jerking each other off until everybody around them was dead and cold, including them.  Them two too.  The difference between the shooters and their victims being the eunuchs already had that pair of whimsy dicks hanging uselessly between their legs even before the shooting started, while their victims were normal, up until their death by trauma.

It probably would not have been appropriate to hang a sign among the ads that read, “Numb Nuts = Gun Nuts” so I didn’t.

One sign that I did see explained that Switzerland requires its populace to own a gun and that country has the lowest homicide rate in the world.  This Swiss Miss policy seems to me to be the ultimate in the gummint’s intrusion into our personal liberty.  I could just picture former NRA Grand Pupa and demigod “Charlatan” Heston raising up a fist in a crowded convention hall and shouting, “The government can require me to possess a gun when they pry it into by cold, dead fingers.”

I left.

Okay, so even if you’re a moron, try to follow this:

Even if you hail from West Texas, down where nepotism begets incest and vice begets versa, follow this:

You heartland guys always seem to be a-worryin’ about the gummint trying to take your guns away, right?  Remember Jade Helm?  The U.S. Army was running some silly, insignificant, budget-bloating training exercises down there in that piss-soaked, goiter-choked neck of the Texas woods, when you and the boys decided it was an undercover gummint invasion.  A ploy so that Obama could confiscate all your firearms and hand them over to the Muslims.  With ribbons and bows and little note tags with quotes from the Koran.

Even great national heroes like Chuck Norris and your own Governor Rick Perry (who actually ran for the White House until he was unable to name the city that the White House was located in) were onboard with the counterattack.

So, Fuzzy Skeetz (may I call you Fuzzy Skeetz?), how many nights did you spend yanking on your pathetic braciole in a sleeping bag while lying on the cold Texas oil-soaked soil as a proud foot soldier and part of “Exercise Counter Jade Helm”?  Did you do your best to locate and track the U. S. Army soldier boys, and then forward all that intel by homing pigeon to some headquarters up in Arizona to be posted on some shit-stained, half-ass website up there?

The two-sided NRA argument goes both ways (as I suspect many of the members do also): 1. “Careful of the army, they’re here to take you guns”; but then turn around and say: 2. “Pearl, you say all gunners are fairies?  What about our brave soldier boys out there protecting our freedom, and our brave police officers, you want them to give up their guns?”

So let me logically follow this through for you, since you’re obviously incapable of doing it yourself.  Can’t you see, Fuzzy Skeetz, that the U. S. Armed Forces (and law enforcement agencies) should be the very ones you’re trying to dis-arm?  Jade Helm, right?  Why are you trying to protect these brutes in your imminent posts to me?  They’re coming after your guns.  You better get to theirs first.

Every gunnut website will gladly tell you the story of how Hitler got everyone to register   their guns when he came to power, just so he could confiscate them and only give them back to the S.S. so that they could exterminate Jews and invade Poland.  That entire story is bogus, of course, the Nazis actually loosened gun-control when they came to power, but the story reads well for the uninformed and the double-digit IQs and the generally all-around doltish.  Such as yourself.

Let’s face it, Bubba, the gummint is trying to take away your guns and you’re letting them do it by falling for the old, “Boys in uniform are out there protecting us with their lives and guns” argument.  Its enforcement arm for accomplishing this aim consists of Federal, state and local law enforcements agencies, but its most powerful enforcement tools belong to the Armed Forces (Army, Marines, etc.) Therefore these agencies should not be allowed access to guns.

In the interest of complete transparency, let me quote the eminent Walter Sobchak: “Duuuude, Duuuude, there’s nobody coming to take away you guns.”

So, in conclusion, not delusion, here’s a bit of some undiluted clarity:

If you use a gun, you are a pervert.

It doesn’t matter whether you are shooting at a range target or at a home invader or a gaggle of screaming kids in a school yard.  Doesn’t matter if you’re a whitey white with blackheads pockmarking your face or a Crispy Crip looking for protection and revenge.  You are a pervert, sending bullets through your barrel because you can only shoot blanks in the bedroom.  No, not even blanks, duds.  You are a dud.  Your whole life is a dud, a confused jumble of omni-racial incompetence.

You have found that weaponry is the one thing that gets your gonads a-galluping.

But the long and short, starboard and port, yin and yang, gin and gang of it is this: GUNZ R4 Pussies will become a tidal wave.  Soon, my surfboard and I will no longer be in control of our speed and direction.

If no gun were manufactured, bought or owned from this moment on, we would still be the most heavily armed nation in the world.  In the developed world?  In the world.  In the civilized world?  In the world.  We are already packing more guns in our homes and on our streets than the Ruskies, the Pakies, the Afghanistanies.  Drug cartels and gang violence might have the populace packing in places like Colombia and Mexico, but we got more.  More in total?  Yes, more.  More per capita?  Yes, we got more.  More than Somalia?  Yup.  More than the Congo?  Yup.

The cure-all for the slaughter of our children in our schoolyards and streets is not less guns—too late for that— but less macho iconology on our TV sets and movie theaters and video games.  Why can’t we just splash our screens with good old fashioned sex, and let that activity flourish from sea to shining semen.

Feel like shooting someone?  Jerk off instead.  Get a date.  Go to the prom, a drinking party, a frat mixer, a club, look around and see if you can get lucky.

Does that heavy piston in your hand make you feel like a man?  Replace it with something else.  Strip clubs are for winners, gun shows are for losers.  Show the country’s youth (those that survive the school shootings are the future) that if you’re packing as you walk into a strip club, it’s because you are ashamed at whatever else is there or isn’t there in your pants.

Count the dictionary phrases that stand for both guns and groin: ‘blaster,’’ “piece,” “rod,” “snub nose,” “six-shooter,” “hardware,” “heater,” “hog’s leg,” “stick,” “broom,” “pickle,” “hot rod,” “dagger,” “gun,” “rod,” “banger,” et, et, et cetera.

Let’s stop substituting firearms for the real thing:

Cocks, not artillery!

Pricks, not cannons!

Circle jerks, not shoot-outs!

Bazookas, not bazookas!

Piss shooters, not peashooters!

Remember:

The only thing more dangerous than a moron is an impotent moron, and the only thing more dangerous than that is an impotent moron with a gun.

///