I don’t know that I’ve learned much, but it still seems true that trouble lurks in the thought that to be contradicted is to be persecuted. And lately it’s not a thought, worse, a feeling, rising steady like a tsunami and crashing deadly like a bunker buster.

Even the most homeless of the unhomed have found the Hobsons choice between all these pussified Darth Vaders stewing in their slogans, bile, and vituperative glee and all this unhinged Id with the tats and the dip and the wraparound gaterz, none of which is admissible at the protective order hearing.

By what inevitable degree does bent become inclination, inclination tendency, tendency penchant, penchant disposition, disposition fate? S.B.

I keep forgetting that a fundamental precept of post-world war II American life is that the government, in its functional and theoretical arms and as incarnated in the men and women of officialdom, is always lying and deflecting and covering up. I keep forgetting about Manufacturing Consent and the proclivity to be able to ignore facts, the acknowledgment of which would turn the lights off and the pantry barren. I keep forgetting about the Saturday Night Massacre and the specter of what wielding power does to intentions. I keep forgetting that situations and scenarios change in the particulars, but human frailty and avarice and the false trail of virtue signaling endures and deepens, extending its capillaries ever deeper and ever darker areas.

And so afflicted with all this amnesia, except the kind needed not to take too seriously the grandiose self and all its enigmatic delusions.

One minute in the skull and the next in the belly. S.B.

Oedipus wasn’t all that complicated really. He keeps living on and on in this false story about fate, and beneath it, in the white space, is a better story, told as farce. Vengeful daughters won’t let the men who killed their fathers be buried, just as vengeful but mortal demigods will drag their vanquished enemy for days behind fast-depleted horses. Alexander uncorked the wine the day after the day he woke to find he had slain his best friend in a blind drunk stupor and halted the army to fire the pyre in mourning. It’s not complicated unless it pays to be complicated.