Guys…

Dear Friends,

In cleaning out my digital desk drawer I ran across these recent posts to G+ and Facebook over the past week. They are disconnected but also sort of thematically related, or at least similar in tone. I have taken some care to edit and expand them where required.

This first post is in response to a lady’s opinion about males and their worthiness for affection and admiration. She was talking about actors on the silver screen.

I'm pretty sure that there are only two guys that most guys with any sense of being a good guy, but a real guy, that any guy would emulate… Sean Connery and Carey Grant. I think that Grant takes top honors. Thanks for the lessons in guyness, Archie! Oh, Gary Cooper also makes the list. Almost forgot him.

Next, I stumbled back over this post in response to a fellow who felt he’d taken as much guff as women take online for the being male or female. I’ve had my share of bad weirdness in conversations between the sexes, but have not noticed that women are as apt to be as rude and domineering as men online. I felt that the guy that I responded to was whining and just plain wrong.

I've sort'a sat on this topic for a bit, but have to respond to K. Our male shoulders are wider, our voices are deeper and we've got the leverage in both the physical and social arena as males. I'm sporting a couple of nice scars and a broken thumb from dealing with crank-drenched freak trying to rape a little woman and then kill me. Fine. Let the women hurl angry words at you along with the spice of shame. I think they've earned a certain privilege in that arena. It's what little leverage they typically have where it comes to male to female confrontation amongst us big brained naked Great Apes. Let them have at it while we try to listen to the message behind the sputtering anger. Screw it. I'd rather sleep safe in the arms of an angry lady that might forgive me when the sun comes up than sleep alone and lonely.

Then the topic of our inborn natures as men, women and individuals popped up in another to and fro.

I think I was born under a bad sign and marked from the day that I was born. Still, we are very plastic in our natures and proclivities. I was blessed with clever, tolerant parents and thus was nurtured to live beyond that selfish, mean spirited, puking and pooping being that I was created. I somehow became a more tolerable individual. I, at 57 years old, have not pooped in my diapers in months, seldom vomit on my bib, do not (sometimes to the dismay of my spouse) fondle a woman's breast at every opportunity, and I'll actually share with others (if there's something in it for me). Now, I was born with an apparently innate understanding of gambling. That is why I seldom play games.

You don't gamble without controlling the odds and never, ever, under any circumstances at any time bet against yourself. I haven't been in but two physical altercations and have the busted nose and a fancy scar above my left eye to show for that. So, I stay out of fights other than verbal jousts where the dignity of a female that I am trying to woo is at peril.

Okay, so the last time I did so, I got that fancy scar and a concussion and the girl left me on the pavement as she moved on with the other guy. Right. Whatever. I still do lie when I have to. "No, Officer, I do not recognize anybody in this line up. May I go before you let that big guy with the Ace Bandage® on his hand out of his cage?" Yes. This watch was a gift from my grandmother and I have an alibi. You can't prove anything. Um, can you spare a couple of bucks, maybe five until I get to the, uh, money machine? I'm good for it. Really. Okay. Two bucks?

Thence I moved on to physics and lawyers and experimental space craft hidden in secret bunkers under a mountain in correspondence with the same woman as the post before. She has now really provoked my imagination, though not in the way you are likely imagining.

Well, Ms Smarty Pants, if that's your real name, I know some people who know some people who probably know your people but my people's people have their own UFOs and their own ray guns. Why, one of them youfoes is hovering right along side my castle floating in the sky at this very moment in time. So, just watch yer step, Missy. You don't want to tangle with a passel of lawyers from The Secret World who are so hungry that they'll work for $2.83/hr.

Those seven legged buzzards in bad suits, brief cases over stuffed with briefs (incontinence is a typical challenge for deep space/near-luminal travels in anti-gravity vessels) know something about something and they'll tell you what! Oh, crap!!! I think I just hit the button for the Chemtrail Evacuators instead of the Space/Time Dilator. Dang! I'm stretching into an infinitely long line drawn from an infinitesimally small point in the future, present and past. Okay. Okay. It's all perpendicular from here. I'll be fine.

Somewhat back on track, the conversation turns to a mutually admired old fellow, a fine player of the mandolin. His name is Grisman and he is a good man. He is certainly no Grant, Connery nor Cooper. He’s actually pretty homely. But, he does know well how to make the women smile and swirl. Thus, I shall add him to my honor roll of guys who know how to work their racket and do it right. I wrote this after listening to some of the fine old-timey tunes that he created new but sounds like they’d always been with us. That is a rare talent that few along the line are capable of. There was Garcia, Robert Hunter and just a few others that came up out of the fifties to make brand new old music. Of those, only Hunter and Grisman remain to stomp this tera in their considered way.

Yeah. I figure most of us earn every sparkle of silver and each scar as we shuffle on. Still, dang, that Grisman fellah can still play a good game of "Catch Me if You Can" on his little music box. The notes drizzle sugar water and flower petals here and then gone into silence. He gets done with them and then they only exist 'tween our ears. In that way, it's a simple project that he has undertaken for goin' on six decades. Yup, the guy seems to have figured out why he was put here on our pale blue dot that spins like a dust mote in the vastiness of Eternity.

So, that’s it. My digital drawer is all cleaned out for this week.

Hic Finis Est,

SCS

Dear Friends,

I’m trying a little experiment in self publishing an eBook as a PDF viewable on any mobile, tablet, laptop or desktop web browser. Anyhow, here’s the deal. See the following rundown of the book, a short novel of about ninety pages in print that mashes together hard science fiction with fantasy and mythology. If the following description intrigues you, ask for a digital copy and send your email address. If you get a giggle or perhaps a little insight from it, USPS a check to the address below for the amount of $8.99 or whatever you deem appropriate.

It’s the gleeful story is set in a gloom-benighted future where Earth is a dimly remembered myth, now a sterilized cinder reeling out of a most distant spiral arm of its home galaxy. In this present, Humanity is no more that a collection of cultured genes amalgamated with those of other species; they no more than weeds, melded to components of nano-machines and synthetic life-forms. Our hero, if you can call him that, is a haploid male born of no mother. His name is Saurian LUX. Saurian is a contraband runner caught up in a conspiracy that will either destroy or rescue the galaxy in the face of a perhaps implacable force known as The Flux.

Saurian’s love interest, APES2CB, possesses exceptional emotional intelligence and physical dexterity, as well as photosynthetic, glistening skin. She has several irises in her engineered eyes and can see her lover’s heart beat as well as exploding gamma ray bursts in the great heavens. She is likely doomed. The two are made for adventure and born for trouble.

Yes, the plot is also full of booby hatches in time and space providing for unlimited sequels, prequels, a movie franchise, television series and video games.

I am at S. Solomon, 20 Hampton Ave, Suite #315, Northampton, MA, 01060. My email is ssolxy@gmail.com. Just ask and you’ll find that PDF in your in box.

Res Ipsa Loquitor,

SCS

Compulsive Writing?

Dear Friends,

I’ve been thinking a bit about my compulsive writing. If I didn’t write each day, I think I could not understand myself nor others. I might be diagnosed as somewhere on the autistic spectrum. Whatever.

My incessant writing is something like self-therapy. It puts into play feedback loops from my external world of experience and my internal world of desires and imagination. There are loops in loops in the process of writing; basic neurology. They strengthen and inform each other and drop their output into my mind and those of others at the end of the production line that vanishes yet continually reappears at the dawn.

It is also an escape from the external world. For some moments at a time I dwell only in my mind and some precious notions delivered by other writers. I find rhymes in my mind that syncopate with experience. My thoughts dance. I know something that I had not imagined before. Words bring those notions to form and my synapses and dendrites swirl with them.

Writing is also a meditation. I can go into the Sanctum Sanctorum within my skull.

Writing is a discipline that requires concentration; a commodity much undervalued in this world. Focus is a blessing and a curse, but there it is.

Writing is the Dragon in the Dark Cave. Head on in. That Dragon favors a writer not as a meal but a companion well equipped to tell a bed time story.

Hic Finis Est,

SCS

Our Pale Blue Dot…

Dear Friends,

See if you can detect the pale blue dot in a sunbeam. There is in this image our Earth seen from 6 billion miles away by a robot, Voyager 1, that was launched from Earth in 1977. Our home world is only one pixel in the image. Those of you with still keen eyes might discern a spot, a dust mote, a piece of cosmic lint stuck in the middle of the orange band of Sol's light beaming across the right of the frame. That is us and all we have ever known, both our cradle and perhaps our grave as a species.

This link will take you to a fine summary of the situation that is our present, past and future. It is recited in eloquent terms and precise cadence by a clever fellow by the name of Sagan.

Please do pass this on. Encourage your friends and neighbors to look to the stars and into each others' faces, to look down at the ground beneath their feet. You might suggest that we all put what we can see ALL together and arrange our affairs with a little more kindness as we circle 'round the sky.

Thank you, Dr. Sagan, Ad Astra

Res Ipsa Loquitor,

SCS

Waiting for Mr. Death…

Broke Down Palace

Dear Friends,

I was just talking to a former colleague from the street. I asked how he was doing and he said that he just came out of the hospital and learned that he was going to die soon. "I'm dying", he said. I admitted that I was also, but likely not going to beat him to the door when the bell rang to let us out of school early. He chuckled and admitted that he'd heard that this Death Thing was going around.

My friend stands a head taller than I. He looked down at me with watery, yellowed eyes. He winked and said, "Yeah, drugs and alcohol might have been involved." We both laughed in a way that let us both catch our breath and step back from the abyss of Hard Facts were his liver was ground into paste and his brain hammered full of soggy holes.

A moment later we fell into talking about our shared but separate, now long ago, travels in The Grateful Dead Show. I was happy to tell him about something that I recently learned.

There is among the Shinto of Japan a legend quite like that of the old Celtic and European stories of the Grateful Dead that one might meet on lonesome highways through the dark forest. The Road can be long or too short, but it connects us all in our solitary traverse of this Life and that mystical path spans our terran orb.

Anyhow, my down on his luck buddy pledged to stick around until I could write him a proper elegy. I am a writer and unfortunately too expert and experienced in hashing out such material. I’ll do my friend proud, but I'm in no hurry for the occasion.

Hic Finis Est

SCS

Your Correspondent

An Election Autopsy…

Willard "Mitt" Romney

Dear Friends,

It’s been a few weeks since the recent Presidential election. Now that we’ve had a chance to observe the aftermath, it is time to perform the autopsy on the Romney/Ryan/Rove campaign. What have we learned?

Well, most obviously, the GOP gets its revenge in losing by eating its own. Sure, they gave old Dick Nixon another shot at the prize, but we saw how that turned out in the blaze of deliberate, plain stupid and public self immolation of his career and reputation. They shan't repeat that sort of error. Yes, no sooner was Mittens sent to rut in humiliating defeat by a skinny black guy with bigs ear and a funny name, a lousy economy limping too slowly into recovery, the longest war in our nation’s history wheezing to an indecisive end at the hands of folks who make bombs out of camel dung and kerosene, Romney started to plead that he was just misunderstood and Obama outbid him for the approval of Americans. Then the PigFest® began.

Swiftly his own people were upon him, gnawing at his skull, shredding his carcass with their angry beaks until his viscera lay in the hot sun hanging over the merciless, dusty Desert of Losers. The flesh between his ribs has become dried jerky and the vultures plucked his pearly whites from slack jaws. His eyeballs and liver, of course, were saved as appetizers for the Big Donors, but more on that in a moment.

As to Ryan? He is finished. This freakish product of a Star Trek transporter accident that melded the corporeal forms of Eddie Munster, Eddie Haskell and the pathological, wounded mind of a child terrified by the knowledge of his own mortality while loathing all of those who represent the prospect of Birth that inevitably begets Death, everyone his senior or possessing a vagina. Paul knows that he is on The List. He’s lying low in his secret bunker. He’s reading comic books with a flash light under the bed covers. He is fervently praying that Mother, the Great Teat of The Grand Old Party, will not crash his own party and grind his flesh to paste under her elephantine hooves for his very poor grades in civics class and A.P. Pandering to numb skulls.

Paul "Puppy" Ryan

Then there is the matter of Karl Rove. I will now join with my good friends on the other side of the aisle and help toss the fat punk's carcass into the frier before throwing the bones boiled and shorn of flesh into the dumpster. The most admirable and reliable behavior amongst these thugs is how they detest the aroma of a loser, the stink of defeat, and will swiftly abandon their own after getting nothing but derision for the three billion spent trying unsuccessfully to buy a nation.

Karl "Porky" Rove

Qui Fueunt Sed Nunc Ad Astra, G.O.P.

SCS

Thoughts on Secession in 2012

Dear Mr. President,

I understand that a number of folks in several states in our union are unhappy that you won reelection to the Presidency. These states have citizens who have signed petitions to secede from our nation’s union. I’d like to help you out here. The following is a suggestion for an address that you might offer to our nation on this topic. By all means, do feel free to have the folks in the black suits airdropped from black helicopters seize all television, cable, radio and Internet operating centers to ensure that each citizen in our citadel of freedom has the opportunity to watch, listen to and digest this message.

With Warm Regards and Unflinching Support,

Steven C. Solomon

To: President Barack Obama

Fr: SCS

Re: Go F^*k Off Texas

Dt: 11/15/2012

Please pass this on to your staff, Mr. President. I believe it is a dandy concept, at least a sketch of a speech that needs to be made.

“My fellow Americans, I interrupt this baseball game (Kathy Lee and Hoda, soap opera, idiots yammering on Fox News, etc and whatever) to bring you an important message. It has come to my attention that a number of folks in several states of America are sore about the fact that a guy with a funny name and is supposedly black or not and born in America or Kenya, is an atheist and Islamic, a transexual married to a man and a woman, and is a communist who wants to kill your grandmother is still President. Okay. That makes total sense. Nobody likes to lose a race of any kind. Now you want to secede from the United States of America

In any case, I will focus my remarks today on the state of Texas for the sake of simplicity. I understand that you folks in the red states require any help that I can provide in terms of focus and keeping things simple. I am, after all, the Chief Executive of Helping Explain the Obvious to Cranky Idiots. So, here goes!

Now, Texas, you can petition the Congress to secede. I’ll begin with the upsides of letting you do just that. Then I will move on to the counter argument.

Well, first, please write Uncle Sam a check for your portion of the national debt. We’d also like the roads, bridges, ports and airports we built back. Pack up the military bases and all the folks that work at and for them. You have an outstanding account regarding your citizens’ payments to Social Security, FICA and Medicare/Medicaid since the date of your declaration of secession. You need to settle up on that. Oh, and what about the bills due on support for your substandard and ill administrated systems of higher and K-12 education. Also, we want all the food back that we bought for your poor, as well as the medication for the disabled since you decided to break up our relationship.

Then there is the matter of subsidies to your oil and chemical industries. They might prefer to move their operations elsewhere in a more profitable economic climate. Mexico might look good. On the other hand, maybe Mexico would prefer to just buy the infrastructure and move their workers up your way. Yes, we know how much you’ve enjoyed that cheap labor, but now those guys will be your bosses.

Oh, you do get to keep the Alamo in this deal. Well, unless the new landlords tear it down to build condos for drug kingpins and former Latin American dictators. That will be your problem and the rest of your former nation will see about a trillion dollars returned to the Federal government. Yes, we downsized as you wished and are financially better for it.

Now, there is another way to scratch this itch that you have, this desire to reinstate the failed Republic of Texas. Let’s look to history as the issue presently on the table is not new. Indeed, it was settled by Congress, the Supreme Court, another tall, skinny guy with big ears in the Oval Office, and the most horrific war up to its point in history. Remember the Civil War? I’m a professor by training, so I’m going to give you a history lesson in terms that even folks challenged by a public system of education that teaches that Jesus rode around on dinosaurs and that the world is 6,659 years old can understand it.

So, forget about Honest Abe as the President. He’s a short order cook in this presentation. Picture old Gus at the Mope On Inn Diner. He knows how to whip up an omelet in a jiffy; a three egg omelet. He knows that you got to break the eggs to make that omelet.

The first egg is a vision that dates to the founders of this nation, The United States. Those folks back in 1776 had a concept for a nation that would be a democratic republic and span the entire continent to serve as a beacon of freedom for the entire globe. They saw the resurrection of an ideal not executed in two thousand years: free people sharing their commonwealth (think about that word) and collectively executing the will of the majority without trampling on the wishes of a minority.

The second egg is the notion that what this nation is about will never be altogether achieved but always strived for. We will always work toward that more perfect union that remains forever on the horizon as a goal. The nation had to be united and the our states indivisible lest we might as well have just thrown away that first egg.

The third egg was delivering the People’s franchise in those first two efforts. Everybody, every man and woman of whatever race, religion or no religion, wherever they came from on this planet or in this land had to have skin in the game. Else wise, those first two eggs got busted for nothing. Half a million folks would die in bloodshed beyond what any in Lincoln’s time could have yet imagined and half the nation would lay in utter ruin for no purpose. Thankfully, Lincoln was a fine short order cook.

So, Texas, here’s your omelet. Don’t worry about splashing it with pepper sauce. You can have extra onions if that pleases. Some folks like their’s with beans and tangy cheese. You can have it any way you want it, but you do have to sit with the other folks that amble into The Mope On Inn and abide by their chatter.

Thank you and good tidings to all in our United States.”