Then loudly cried the bold Sir Bedivere:
‘Ah! my Lord Arthur, whither shall I go?
Where shall I hide my forehead and my eyes?
For now I see the true old times are dead,
When every morning brought a noble chance,
And every chance brought out a noble knight.
Such times have been not since the light that led
The holy Elders with the gift of myrrh.
But now the whole Round Table is dissolved
Which was an image of the mighty world,
And I, the last, go forth companionless,
And the days darken round me, and the years,
Among new men, strange faces, other minds.’
And slowly answered Arthur from the barge:
‘The old order changeth, yielding place to new,
And God fulfils himself in many ways,
Lest one good custom should corrupt the world.
Comfort thyself: what comfort is in me?
I can tell you that the twisted mind behind this one is never visiting me.
Some years ago I was visiting an old friend in Florida. This pal (A large man who is actually “a sensitive little forest flower.”) loves boats and boating and maintained two, count ‘em, two homes in Florida set up for boating.
The first home was his main base in Ft. Lauderdale. It was a three-bedroom two-bath operation with a swimming pool, an office, and a long boat dock where he kept “the Big Boat.”
The second home was a smaller house set up on stilts down in the depths of the Florida Keys twenty miles above Key West with two bedrooms, one bath, and a boat dock on a canal where he kept “the Little Boat.”
Since he used the Keys house only now and again throughout the year he decided at some point to rent it out. After careful, cautious advertising he did rent it out for a year to a well-vetted man. When I visited him that lease was up and he and I went to the Keys house to check it out. A day or so before we arrived my pal had a house cleaner go in to change all the bedding and spiff up the rest of the house.
When we got there I went into the guest bedroom to unpack my things into the chest of drawers. …
Gerard van der Leun remembers partying with Hunter Thompson back in the Day. Good times!
Warren liked to drink and spend other people’s money on himself and writers. Naturally, such a honey pot was going to attract Hunter Thompson. Thompson liked to drink, snort coke, and spend other people’s money on articles he might or might not write. A favorite item from the day was the time Hunter rented a car on Scanlan [Magazine]’s credit card. He then parked it next to one of his North Beach Beatnik bimbo’s apartments and went to and fro with it for a number of months. When the time came to return the car it was discovered that the rental fee would be much much more than Hinkle and Scanlan’s wanted to spend. Their solution? After a night of beer, bourbon, and bongs, they drove the car out to the end of a pier in San Francisco, stepped out, and let it drive itself into the bay. Then they reported it stolen.
Beer. Bourbon. Bongs. Bay. What can I say? Good times.
Sometimes the small staff working with me at Organ and the larger staff working the con with Warren at Scanlan’s would decide to drink together. We liked to drink at our bar of choice up at the end of the alley, Andre’s.
One night, when Hunter was in town, we all went up to Andre’s for a non-stop night of drinking.
Andre was an elegant French-Canadian who ran an elegant bar and restaurant. He was old-school and could mix any drink anyone could name and it was always perfect. He was polished, polite, and a good listener. But he was a pro and usually knew when you’d had enough. Then he politely asked you to leave. If you ignored him, he had a very large mallet with a three-foot handle behind the bar and you didn’t ignore that.
So there we were, eight or ten of us I think, hanging around and drinking with “Hunter S. Thompson, man!” And, as they would, Warren and Hunter got into a drinking contest — sort of like watching a match between Ali and Frazier in their prime.
It went on and on long past the point where I could or would keep up. It was getting late and Andre announced to the assembled cross-eyed drunks, that he was giving us our last round. The regulars took him at his word, but Hunter had to push the envelope. Except with Andre, there was no envelope. Just a polite, “Non.”
The next thing I know there’s a gun in Hunter’s hand and three rounds blasted into the ceiling of the bar. (Did I mention that there were apartments where people were sleeping above the bar?)
Then I think there was a blur of Andre, in suit and tie, coming over the bar with the mallet. Then more blurs and everybody is out on the street dragging a semi-conscious Hunter back down the alley mumbling something about getting his gun back. After that I don’t remember much and, frankly, haven’t thought all that much about Thompson in the nearly 50 years that have intervened.
Gerard van der Leun updated the Beatles hit song “Help!” (1965) for Joe Biden’s contemporary America.
When I was younger so much younger than today
I never needed anybiden’s help in any way
But now these days are gone, I’m not so self assured
Now I find I’ve lost my mind and voted for the whores
Help me if you can, I’m feeling broke
And I do appreciate you being ‘woke
Help me get more money all for free
Won’t you please steal for me?
And now my strife has changed in oh so many ways
All my freedoms seem to vanish in this maze
And every now and then I feel just like a whore
See I need you to work so I can cop and score.
Help me if you can, I’m feeling brown
And I do appreciate you fucking ’round
Help me get more freebies by the pound
Won’t you please, please steal for me?
Vanderleun visits the University neighborhood in Seattle, and is moved to morose reflection.
There is, indeed, a University in the Seattle University District, even if big business is bugging out of there, and a lot of other areas in Seattle, as fast as they can. The University District is pretty much like all the other college and university districts in medium to large American cities today. It provides a living to a small fraction of genuine scholars, as well as workspace and research facilities and salaries to a host of useful scientists and necessary engineers. But more and more, the main function of our University Districts from coast to coast is to provide a safe haven for the homeless, the useless, the addicted, the soul-dead, the communist, and other politically perverted poltroons and PC pussies of all stripes.
In addition, the university at the center of these districts currently provides employment for, and benefits to, a host of latter-day hippy professors whose twisted politics, depraved morals, and incessant dreams of the destruction of America would make them each persona non grata in most American communities outside of “university districts.”
Saturday was an especially good day for seeing the University District as it really is. It was Street-Fair Saturday and, as I remarked to my friend after strolling a couple of blocks, the streets had been transformed into what can only be described as an open-air Moonbat Mall. Read the rest of this entry »
Vanderleun tells how he used to drink with Hunter Thompson.
I used to run a magazine (Organ) in San Francisco back in the 70s. I ran it out of the basement of a firehouse in North Beach under the offices of Scanlan’s magazine. Scanlan’s was the scam magazine of Warren Hinckle, a man whose record of conning money out of Bay Area millionaires stood unbroken for decades until the arrival of David Talbot and Salon and silly philanthropists that mistakenly married fanatic feminists.
Warren liked to drink and spend other people’s money on himself and writers. Naturally, such a honey pot was going to attract Hunter Thompson. Thompson liked to drink, snort coke, and spend other people’s money on articles he might or might not write. Sometimes the small staff working with me and the larger staff working the con with Warren at Scanlan’s would decide to drink together. We liked to drink at our bar of choice up at the end of the alley, Andre’s.
And so one night, when Hunter was in town, we all went up to Andre’s for a non-stop night of drinking. …
Some years ago I was visiting an old friend in Florida. This pal (A large man who is actually “a sensitive little forest flower.â€) loves boats and boating and maintained two, count ‘em, two homes in Florida set up for boating.
The first home was his main base in Ft. Lauderdale. It was a three-bedroom two-bath operation with a swimming pool, an office, and a long boat dock where he kept “the big boat.â€
The second home was a smaller house set up on stilts down in the depths of the Florida Keys twenty miles above Key West with two bedrooms, one bath, and a boat dock on a canal where he kept “the little boat.â€
Since he used the Keys only now and then throughout the year he decided to rent it out. In time he rented the house for a year to a well-vetted dependable man with good references. When I visited him that lease was up and he and I went to the Keys house to check it out. A day or so before we arrived my pal had a house cleaner go in and change all the bedding and spiff up the rest of the house.
When we got there I went into the guest bedroom to unpack my things into the chest of drawers. As I opened the bottom drawer I found the renter or one of his guests had left some underwear and t-shirts in the bottom drawer. Under them, the same person has left behind a large, realistic, and battery-powered dildo in a plastic bag with some suspicious smears on the inside. Moving the switch around inside the bag without touching the dildo I determined that the batteries were, to say the least, fresh. Like Elvis’s King Creole that dildo was “jumpin’ like a catfish on a pole.â€
Even though he is a manly man my pal is also a very sensitive little forest flower. The least hint of some sort of object that had spent party time somewhere inside a person’s body fills him with shivering, visceral loathing. My pal took one look at my “discovery†and walked shivering into the kitchen. He returned with his hands in rubber gloves holding a pair of kitchen tongs.
He gingerly picked up the bag containing the dildo with the tongs and then, holding it as far away from himself as possible, walked down the stairs to the carport and dropped the offensive package into the garbage can. He then dropped the tongs into the garbage can. He then removed his rubber gloves, dropped them in the can, and then – still shivering with loathing and muttering to himself — went back upstairs and took a long hot shower followed by an emergency cocktail. Like I said, “sensitive.â€
Because I was an old friend who understood and deeply respected his “dildo issues,†I promptly snuck down to the garbage cans, retrieved the dildo in the bag, switched it to off, and hid it in my luggage. …
The Trump effect is a good thing. He is doing exactly what he said he would do and exactly what people elected him to do. Newsflash to the Beltway establishment: Americans who elected Trump do not worship the current gods of the city. They know you’re responsible for killing the old ones and they wish to return the favor now. We want your gods dead. That is sort of what “drain the swamp†means. And, as Trump points out repeatedly: in America (at least in the middle part) we don’t worship government; we worship God. As in the one true God.
Think of the glory of it all. This is the fight we have been waiting for. This is the turmoil we need.
Today I swung my front door wide open and placed my Remington 12 gauge semi-auto shotgun right in the doorway. I put 9 shells beside it, then left it alone and went about my business.
“While I was gone, the mailman delivered my mail, the neighbor boy across the street mowed the yard, a girl walked her dog down the street, and quite a few cars stopped at the stop sign near the front of my house.
“After about an hour, I checked on the gun. It was still sitting there, right where I had left it. It hadn’t moved itself. It certainly hadn’t killed anyone, even with the numerous opportunities it had presented to do so. In fact, it hadn’t even loaded itself.
“Well you can imagine my surprise, with all the hype by the Left and the Media about how dangerous guns are and how they kill people.
“I must be in possession of the laziest gun in the world.
Gerard Van der Leun (very old bio here) recently published a nice essay about moving out of Manhattan to a small town somewhere in the (rural & gun-owning portion of the) Pacific Northwest.
By the time I left the Hive, whatever had once bound me to it had long since frayed away. The upward pace of a “career” seemed more and more like a pointless marathon, a mere job. Long days spent striving to “exceed corporate goals” came to resemble a game of pick-up-sticks played with cows. Efforts to save an enterprise that one didn’t own came down to admitting that the enterprise had no intrinsic worth other than maintaining the vulgar lifestyle of an aging monomaniac who could no longer reason his way through two and two to four. It all combined into a vast cloud of wind-spun detritus that obscured the plain and simple fact that while government employees were working 24 hours a day printing more money, nobody anywhere was printing more time.
And so, at last, “Man, you gotta go.”
Jack Kerouac, Bard of the Road, wrote “Man, you gotta go.” Then he went home, lived with his mother again, and died a drunk. Not my road.
Okay. Fair enough. But go where? Here? Maybe. But where, exactly, is “here?”
Today, for a week or so, “here” turns out to be a small town up on the northwest edge of the nation. In size and composition, architecture and attitude, it is just about the exact polar opposite of the Hive.
Where Central Park in the Hive is a large, long oblong of struggling overused green in the center of an immense slab of asphalt, steel and concrete, the central park of this town is about 25 yards on a side. It’s a pleasant patch of cool grass studded with picnic tables and ringed with oaks that drape it in a shawl of shade. At the east end is a brick and cedar bandstand where banjos, guitars and fiddles sing out on odd afternoons and evenings. You’ll hear some country and some rock, but mostly you’ll hear the strains of bluegrass brought down out of the old Alleghenies and carried far west to these higher, more distant and demanding mountains.
On the west side of the park is a five-foot by three-foot marble faced granite slab in the shape of two tablets donated and erected there by the local chapter of the Eagles. Carved into the marble face in polished script are the Ten Commandments, King James version.
It would seem that whatever local chapter of the ACLU exists in these parts has chosen to ignore this blatant eruption of the Christian tradition in the secular town park. One might suppose the ACLU has done this simply because it hasn’t gotten around to it. It would, however, be much more likely that the organization is aware that in this town an ACLU suit to remove the Ten Commandments would be answered not with a five year legal argument, but with 30 rounds of semi-automatic rifle fire into the offices and automobiles of those seeking its removal. Since, for all its posturing, the ACLU has devolved into a refuge for moral and physical cowards with law degrees, it’s not difficult to see why this stone, largely unread and unnoticed, has been given a pass.
This is a heavily armed part of the nation and, as a result, it is a very civil and polite part as well.
The late Susan Sontag, in her personal journals (undated 1957 lecture note, p.151), observed that modern leftism does not only, like Milton, make Satan into a hero, it actively embraces his cause.
One of the main strands in modern literature is diabolism — that is, self conscious inversion of moral values. This is not nihilism, the denial of moral values, but their inversion: still rule-bound, only now a ‘morality of evil’ instead of a ‘morality of good.'”
Gerard van der Ginsburg, at American Digest, pays tribute to the American party of diabolism with a new version of a familar beat poem, titled Growl.
What Socialist Party of cement and aluminum bashed open American skulls and sucked out their freedom, brains and imagination?
Democrat! Darwinist Solitude! NEA Filth! Pelosi Ugliness! Recycling Cans and unobtainable dollars! Children screaming silent under the D&C! Boys sobbing for Big Daddies! Old men weeping in the parks!
Democrat! Democrat! Nightmare of Democrat! Democrat the loveless! Gone mental Democrat! Democrat the heavy aggregator of girly-men!
Democrat the incomprehensible African-American plantation! Democrat the skull & crossbones soulless Senate and Congress of sorrows!
Democrat whose buildings are Fascist overbuilding with gun slits! Democrat the vast bloating stone of Deficit! Democrat the broke government of the pauper nation!
Democrat whose mind is pure machinery! Democrat whose blood is running tax money! Democrat whose fingers are in your wallet!
Democrat whose breast is a transexual dynamo! Democrat whose mouth is a smoking tomb! Democrat of the atheist thumb pulling out a plum and saying what a free to be bad boy am I! Democrat whose only god is Dracula!
Democrat whose eyes are a thousand broken windows! Democrat whose empty skyscrapers smolder in the long Detroit streets like endless Molochs! Democrat whose brains dream Utopia and choke in the fog of their flatulent dementia! Democrat whose smoking bongs and facial piercings crown the crapulous cities!
Democrat whose love is endless lube and lust! Democrat whose soul is welfare and affirmative racism! Democrat whose poverty is perpetual servitude to the government salad bar, no seconds!
Democrat whose only true Doctor and Cure is Kevorkian! Democrat whose foreign policy is a cloud of glowing Iranian hydrogen! Democrat whose whore is BABYLON THE GREAT, THE MOTHER OF HARLOTS AND ABOMINATIONS OF THE EARTH!
Democrat in whom I once sat lonely! Democrat in whom I once dreamt the New Jerusalem! Crazy in Democrat! Sucker of crock in Democrat! Lacklove and deballed in Democrat!
