“It’s silly to go on pretending that under the skin we are all brothers. The truth is more likely that under the skin we are all cannibals, assassins, traitors, liars, hypocrites, poltroons.” — Henry Miller, Op-Ed page, N.Y. Times, September 7, 1974
(Gosh, this quote is actually making me all misty and wistful for my kinfolk in faraway Fresno and other deplorable, felonious points beyond…)
WORD.
“Art is either plagiarism or revolution.” — Paul Gauguin
“This isn’t right. This isn’t even wrong.” — Physicist Wolfgang Pauli, on a paper submitted by an apparently inept colleague
As I sit here all alone in a hotel room — far from home — and write about my family and myself and my past…I am looking at photographs of the magical, tragic, fabulous kin from whence I came — including my Grandfather, Thomas (far left, pictured here with his two brothers) — his thick, beautiful hair, his charming, lop-sided, little boy bow-tie, his chin defiantly tipped up ever so slightly, his left hand holding the tiny hand of his baby brother, Louis.
That little boy, my Grandfather, the son of two Italian immigrants, grew up to be a Vaudeville dancer and performer who died in his mid-20s, not long after my father, also Thomas, was born — breaking my Great-Grandmother, Maria’s, great, rollicking, magnanimous heart forever.
So, here I sit in 2016, gazing into my grandfather’s eyes and smiling back through time at his little face — so young, so hopeful, his whole life ahead of him — a life that would turn out to be far too short. I wish with all my heart that I could have known him. I wish with all my heart that I could speak to him now. And, so, I sit and look and listen, reaching back in time to him…to see if I can hear his voice reaching forward towards me.
That little boy’s face is where my wondrous, improbable, ridiculous story begins.
Oh, my stars. Every couple months, when I remember that it even exists, I like to pour myself a mighty cup o’ joe and sit down and read that weird, inexplicable “message requests” option in my Facebook messages. Apparently it’s from people who you either blocked for one reason or another or who didn’t meet your standards/make the cut on your friends list in the first place.
HOLY SHIT.
THE DANGEROUSLY IMBALANCED CRAZY MOTHERFUCKERS are actually almost beautiful and poetic in their SHEER UNHINGED INSANITY. Along with all of the usual lunatic Christian fringe types who love me so much, I even had a young Leftist Liberal broad in there this time trying to tell me that it is actually REALLY AWESOME that everybody is offended by every fucking thing all the fucking time and anybody who disagrees with her just needs to shut up.
I guess HER crazy had already offended ME at an earlier date, because when I ran a systems check on her, I discovered that I had already blocked her months ago. It was probably her ANNOYING, PRETENTIOUS, OFF TRACK habit of using the trendy term “problematic” several times in her unhinged missive that made me wish her into the motherloving cornfield with my mousepad.
When I hear “problematic”, it honestly makes me wanna KICK ASS! It is just SO reflective of everything that I rage against right now. PHONY. PRETENTIOUS. DETACHED. CONDESCENDING. ANNOYING. PASSIVE-AGGRESSIVE. SHOWBOATY. MEANINGLESS. OUT-OF-TOUCH. INSINCERE. ACADEMIC DRIVEL. HORSESHIT. Don’t say that something is PROBLEMATIC in your bored, assholish, intellectual voice. If something is OFF TRACK, don’t stand back, lock your grad-school jaw, and beat around the bush. Just fucking CALL IT. Just fucking SAY IT.
I am so done with all this nonsense.
Anyway, it’s so weird. It would never even OCCUR to me to go on a stranger’s page or to send them a message chastising them for their very own opinions that they have posted on their very own Facebook pages. Such insanity. Two words:
BAD FUCKING FORM.
Okay, that was three. So kick me in the taco.
At any rate…you know the drill:
FUCK OFF, LADY.
HA! DEAD. ON.
Like I always say, it’s NOTHING short of a goddamned miracle that any of us with siblings even survive into adulthood with all of our fingers, eyeballs, and brain matter intact MUCH LESS SURVIVE INTO FUCKING ADULTHOOD. When we were home alone, my ten brothers and sisters and I used to TEAR THAT SHIT UP.
A couple of months ago, I rewatched the movie, Titanic — and in doing so, discovered how very much the years have changed me.
I was surprised to find that I wasn’t nearly so caught up in the romance between Jack and Rose, as I was obsessed with the fact that steerage or not, poor Sicilian trash or not, locked down in the bowels of that doomed ship with all the other filthy, stinking, garlic-breathed, godless bilge rats or not — I woulda gnawed straight through the steel hull of that motherloving rig with my goddamned teeth to get out. There wouldn’t have been any of this noble, white-people, pinch-lipped, can’t-fuck, honorably-going-down-with-the-ship-to-the-glorious-orchestral-strains of Nearer My God, To Thee horseshit.
FUCK ALL THAT.
No matter what, please rest assured that MY FAT, SCRAPPY, SCANDALOUS ASS WOULD HAVE SURVIVED — and if the only way to have done that would have been to ruthlessly surf onto shore on the dapper back of the bloated, stinking, nattily-dressed socialite carcass of Mr. Benjamin Guggenheim…well, YOU CAN BET MY FATASS WOULDA BEEN SHOUTIN’ COWABUNGA, MOTHERFUCKERS!
AN OLD FRESNO WHORE WILL SURVIVE.
A couple of weeks ago, Gregory and I were lying in bed watching “Woodstock”, the documentary — and although I tried my very best to get into the spirit and the beauty, I was just not getting anything either stardust OR golden up in this motherfucker. All I could see were vast legions of undulating white people with greasy hair, filthy iceholes, and ZERO FUCKING RHYTHM — although ol’ spastic Joe Cocker definitely rocked the living shit out of With A Little Help From My Friends.
I get that it defined a generation and all…but, ultimately, that movie just makes me want to go baby wipe my undercarriage.
Inane Muff Fact #427:
When I was a little girl growing up in Fresno, California, I really and truly and with all my heart thought that Foster Farms was a home for unwanted chickens. I would always PLEAD with my mother to buy the Foster Farms brand chicken because I genuinely believed that they had already been rejected by their own mothers and forced to live in a chicken foster home…so the VERY least we could do was bring them home with us.
That’s a true story.
muffy bolding 