she is locked up, beaten, and flung about the room

April 13, 2018 | A major donor with close ties to the White House resigned on Friday as deputy finance chairman of the Republican National Committee after the revelation that he had agreed to pay $1.6 million to a former Playboy model who became pregnant during an affair. The deal was arranged in the final months of 2017 by President Trump’s personal lawyer and fixer, Michael D. Cohen. Under the terms of the deal, the Republican donor, Elliott Broidy, would pay the woman in installments over the course of two years, and she would agree to stay silent about their relationship, two people with knowledge of the arrangement told The New York Times. The deal was first reported by The Wall Street Journal. From The New York Times.

I look at this man--everything that seems visible about him: the insistent PEPPERDINE photo-op backdrop; the poor physical and social health evident in the skin color, the mirthless pools of black that are his eyes, the grimace which at some point forgot to disguise itself as the signal of a pleasure in the world, which is to say, as a smile, rather than the wincing expression of a forbearance of, a steeling against, the world; I look at that "haircut"--I look at this man and I feel sorry for the "Playboy model," who, with those two words, is surgically caricatured into nothingness, into dismissal, as the barely described but overly present sine-qua-non--the that-without-which--pretext for the humiliation, the failure, the weakness, the desire of another, the barely described pretext for the humiliation of a man, who, as we well know, is the only another, the only other, that matters.

I look at this man, and I see the women not on his arm, in this frame or in any other frame: no surplus of disappointed wives or expensive mistresses or disappointed, expensive mothers will ever be enough to make him believe that he is a success, that he is a man, that he is alive, that he is real, that he is a real boy, alive, and not someone else's fantasy of a man, not some father's fantasy of a boy, not some father's fantasy of himself, made of painted wood and string, a fantasy whose lies are forever revealing, forever announcing, the degree to which they arouse him by his shameful erection, which is as clear as the nose on his face. 

It is, of course, the height to which he has risen; the richness of his investment and achievement; the scope and number of his responsibilities; the reputation and the dignity of--the admiration for--his family, both up (parental, ancestral) and down (spousal, childrel: inherital), which is to say, his very name, its currency and value, its reference and intelligibility; his ability, his dependability and responsibility, his ability to influence others, which is to say his word; his respect, his solidity, his fearsomeness, his strength, his resolution, his intensity, his fecundity, his power, which is to say, his maleness, his manhood, his sex, itself, all coming into question; it is the threatened or actual loss--even just the news of the threat of the loss--of these things that makes the story tragic, that gives it any value at all, that makes the story worth knowing or repeating, because the story's very iterability isn't affected at all by it's depressing and clichéed reiteration that it is news if/that/when a man falls from grace by partaking of his association with a [insert any two words here that describe a woman, but in this case:] Playboy Model. Every time, the loss, the tragic fall, the story occurs to, the story is about, an individual, a subject, a person of interest, or notoriety, of value, a person in whom I should be interested if only by dint of the fact that someone has decided to repeat the story of his loss of value to me. In the story, in his story, the (actual/potential) loss of his status--his value or usefulness in politics, industry, finance, faith, or law; his value as a leader or thinker or role-model; his value as a husband, father, son, and man--is presented as though it hadn't just happened to this other asshole yesterday, it is presented as though it were happening for the first time, when, depending on the timing it is only just happening for the first time today. And the lady--all the women, of course, for the most part--but the lady in question is just the stock character of Fallen Woman, just a two-word dismissal as a description, because it doesn't matter who she is, she doesn't have a story, she doesn't need a story, she is not important, except in one way and one way only: as the pretext for the (threatened, perhaps actual) loss of a man's status, family, fortune, word, name. Her presence in his story--because she doesn't have a story, she doesn't need a story, and no one cares about her story, except that there must be some suggestion, some hint, some suggestion to the suggestible, that she's just the least bit tawdry, or a shopgirl, or a divorcee, or an actress, or working class, or a coed, or a latina, or a european, or a prostitute, or a woman--signals his loss and is the cause of his loss. She exists--she serves--merely as a function in his story. She exists to serve. 

Certain kinds of psychoanalysis have a word for this state, which is often translated into English as a state of "abjection": she is abjected--in truth, before the story is told, she is already in an abjected state, always already--humbled and rejected, ejected outside of accepted, acceptable, informed, available, permissible or possible discourse. He is not. He has many more than two words to apply to his highest level of attainment, or any attainment, in the social spheres. He has many more than one sphere, he has many more than one title, many more than one role, and more than one name by which to call him, but his names, titles, roles, and spheres and his ability to move among them, capitalize upon them, and use them to his advantage and others' is damaged by his association with the storyless, abjected lady in question. Her story is unavailable and unimportant because she is abjected, and she is abjected because of some now-unimportant but singular detail of her now-unimportant and abjected story: she has no story, and it is as though his story, he, himself, takes on some contamination, partakes of some contaminating quanta of her abjection, and thus becomes, in some sense, abjected himself. So, gents, beware of Fallen Women.

But if we're really honest with ourselves, it is not difficult to see that the abjection of which Fallen Woman takes is not due to her fallen state, but due to her state as woman, as her hypothesized-but-the-hypothesis-is-enough fallenness is hypothesized on her hypothesized unreliable, unstable, untrustworthy, weak, flighty, fickle, faithless, unteachable, ignorant, dissembling, dangerous, dark, mysterious, unknowable womaness. The hint of falleness is the addition that is not an addition because it serves to call out what we all know women already to be, or be capable of, which is tacitly the same. The Fallen Woman is all women. She doesn't have the same value as a man, and her as-few-details-as-possible story only exists as a non-story to affect the story of a man. Woman is the property of someone else's story. She is property. That is why she is paid less on the dollar than a man for the same job; that is why she doesn't have her own name but has the name of her father or her husband; that is why she is defined most powerfully by her relationship to men, as daughter, wife, mother, mistress, widow; that is why when she is raped it is because of the way she was dressed or because she has had more than one sexual partner or any sexual partner, or because she is a lesbian, or a woman; that is why our vice president does not allow himself to be alone in a room with a woman who is not his wife; that is why when she is beaten by her husband it is because she must have done something to cause it; that is why we have difficulty encouraging or imagining women in physics, chemistry, mathematics, medicine, law, law enforcement, the military, sports, music composition or in leadership roles in these fields, or any field; that is why she cannot be elected president because she seems cold, seems untrustworthy, seems ambitious, and doesn't smile enough; that is why, in Virginia Woolf's memorable formulation in A Room of One's Own, she is locked up, beaten, and flung about the room. 

For her to be acceptable, she must be the paragon of fidelity, fealty, faith, compromise, kindness, supportiveness, selflessness, nonexistent opinions, disregarded thoughts, and uncomplaining labor: In the terms of King Lear, she must only be Cordelia, whose back is a bridge for men, for men and children, for male children, a bridge for men; otherwise she is those monstrous other sisters, Goneril or Regen, it seems, by default. It would be best for everyone if she died in childbirth. For there will always be another woman to marry--as they are interchangeable--who will teach the daughter her place, or beat her into it, because she can be counted on not to love her as her own. Because we must always force women into competition with other women, for everything, but especially for the attention of the Man, who is the hero of the story, the narrator, the author, the publisher, the bookseller, the critic, and the reader. And he has made the notion of Fallen Woman--precisely because there is no real distinction from Woman, precisely because Woman is, at every moment, in danger of submitting to her nature, like a scorpion--to distinguish interchangeable women from one another. If you believe that the purpose of sex is not pleasure, a dimension accorded only to men, but solely for the reproduction of men, sons to carry the name only they may keep and to safeguard the property only they may inherit, upon your body, which is the purpose of your body, by the man you were given to by a man, through the painful labor of your body, which is the only labor you are to be allowed; if you are Cordelia and make an incubator of your body, a bridge of your back, and suffer beautifully with your muted voice and your cramped agency, a jealously restricted purview that is mostly the execution, reinforcement, and extension, as their agent, of someone else's interests, desires, prejudices, and will; if you defer to, maintain, celebrate, supplement, and anticipate those interests without question, because they are, and must be, your own; if your every action and expression is toward keeping things the way they are, then you will be called "respectable"--a precarious high-wire act of a designation--and your origins, your class, your poverty, your ethnicity, your foreignness, your sins, your past, your woman-ness will not be held against you. You will not be fallen.

On the Current Antisemitism

Okay, so this must be the proof in the pudding. 

Since the election, the United States has seen a spike in reported hate crimes and violent acts against a whole array of people--this is reported, countable, legible, provable, and obvious. The high-profile ones are on the national news, but you can see them in your local newspaper, on your city news broadcasts, you can hear about them on the radio, and you sometimes witness them in person, when you are not the victim of them. This is happening.

Obviously, Muslims--or people perceived to be "Muslim"--would be the first recipient of this local (but also executive and, thus, national) aggression: mosques, individuals, islamic organizations.

Then "immigrants"--but not all immigrants, really, just immigrants of, shall we impolitely call it, in that charmingly, antique phrasing, a "duskier hue": apparently that's Indians (from India), Sikhs (turbans: because turbans are exotic and the exotic is unfamiliar and the unfamiliar is frightening and what frightens us is automatically dangerous), anyone suspiciously Latin (i.e. "illegal Mexican" rapist/murderer/au pair/gardener), and anyone else with brown skin ("Go back to your country!"). 

Then we have African-Americans--you know, "Black people"? You've probably heard of them.

This comes as no surprise, since targeting black people is a national pastime and seems to be written into our national DNA, when it is not written into our national Constitution. (The horrible words, the curses, the slurs, the lies, half-lies, statistics, the violent words uttered against African-Americans, Blacks, People of Color, and Negroes in this-great-country-against-itself, need never be repeated again, to my way of thinking. We have all heard them, far too much, in our minds, in our homes, in our beds, on television, in books and magazines, and on the street.)

Okay, there's been a spike in violence against gay people, particularly men ("Trump won! Get used to it!"), which is not that weird, considering the kinds of people we're talking about, and how late the gay have been to the party of even tacit or expected "tolerance"/"acceptance." 

But the one I really can't wrap my stupid, fucking, American mind around is the spike in antisemitism everywhere, and against long-established synagogues (Sure! Why not attack a neighborhood place of worship? Synagogue=Mosque) and Jewish community centers.

When people are clearly other by skin color, the cowards go after them, sure.

Muslim, immigrant, dirty Mexican rapist, black man--I get it. It's asinine and repugnant, but I can at least follow the ham-fisted, racist logic at work, here. 

With our Jewish friends and neighbors, we enter into a strangely different territory.

This is not just because these individuals and communities have been here, on our shores, for so long (Black people, after the First Nations and Native Americans, after the Dutch, are the people who have lived here the longest: yes, they were slaves in New Amsterdam), but because of Jewish assimilation to American-ness, especially during the postwar period; their imbrication with American culture; their strange invisibility and presence--their frequent ability to pass, especially after entering the current period, where black Irish, Italians, Greeks, mediterraneans, and so on, were no longer considered "animals," in America--and the long, difficult history with and against antisemitism in the United States; our experience and non-experience/our knowledge and non-knowledge/our non-complicity and complicity in the Holocaust; our relationship politically, imperially, territorially, and culturally to Israel: for all these reasons, the sudden temerity in the attacks against Jewish cultural centers and people in the U.S.A., after the election, really pulls the mask off the clown.

Oh... It's YOU!

And, even if all the people committing the violence aren't motivated by the same animus, they are each being animated by each others' animus. 

And so, the oldest--the foundational--bigotry in Christendom; that most European of christian hatreds; that two thousand-year-old, murderous rage rises again, after being told to settle down for so long: Jew-hatred; Jew-murder; God-murder; Antisemitism: two-thousand years of death, pogrom, exile-in-exile, status-without-status, nationality-without-nationality. This? Again?

To my mind, this is how we should know it's serious.

What would Jesus do?

Fourteen Points about You, Me, and Everybody Else

I, actually, don't look anything like this.

So, I've been meditating on the last few days for the past three months.

And I have a couple things to say about it:

1.
If you wanted "CHANGE," Honey, you are about to get some REAL CHANGE, for real. 

I hope it's to your liking.

2.
I never thought the day after an in-inauguration would move me more than the day itself. The day after became a new kind of the-day-itself, and I thank each and every one of you for making that happen.

3.
The Law is something we subscribe to--and when it is often wrong--we resist it. The United Republican Democratic States of the continent of north America only exists because of resistance, dissent, and revolution. 

Never forget that while we agree to disagree, we disagree in order to agree. We build consensus out of dissent. But you have to know shit in order to disagree and then change your mind. 

Know shit. Be educated, nuanced, sophisticated, smart, and compassionate. 

Listen. Know more later than you know right now.

4.
We are all immigrants to this land..

No human life took hold in the western hemisphere, until immigrants, who crossed the Bering Strait/Sea, long ago, in our prehistory, settled it.

After that, the settlers were all people from across either of the oceans that nestle us in "the West," some of them, even in the earliest days before the Republic for which the American flag stands, brought here forcibly to labor without pay and to make more people, their children, who would also be forced to labor without pay, and to foster grandchildren, great, great-great, and great-great-great, great-great-great-great grandchildren, to be ensnared until the present day, and after, in American law and the "Justice" system, to be imprisoned, paid lower wages, to be denied the franchise, and to, on the average, die at a younger age, unless they were made to join the lowest ranks of the armed forces as cannon fodder or, often unarmed, shot dead by the police.

We are all immigrants to this land. This land, which is your land, this land, which is my land, from California to the New York Island(s), from the redwood forest to the Gulf Stream waters. This land, which, in point of actual fact, was not made for you and me, but which is a land upon which we are all living, so, we certainly had better start figuring out how to get along better, because none of us is going anywhere. Except for the very old, who tend to vote Republican.

We are all immigrants to this land.

5.
Respect people who came here because they had the temerity to believe in The American Dream. A Dream that still exists in those foolish enough to believe in it. Do not let them down! Respect immigrants. We are only a land only of immigrants.

6.
Jews are actually people.

Muslims are actually people.

Women are actually people.

Women's rights are human rights.

And black lives actually do matter, too.

Why is this so hard to get through your skull? Black lives mattering is not about all lives not mattering, it's about the fact that, heretofore, it didn't seem to matter to much of anyone not black that lives lived by black people matter, too. Not just your bullshit. This isn't that hard. Stop resisting it. It's called normalization, motherfucker. It's called Brown vs Board of Education, motherfucker. It's called Loving vs Virginia, motherfucker.

Could we, please, put a stake into that insidious vampire, in my lifetime? Please? It just makes you look like an ignorant asshole. And you're probably not that ignorant or that much of an asshole to completely disregard reason.

The point isn't that black lives matter more than all other lives when they're black, it is that lives actually matter when they're not white.

Honestly, this is so American basic. It's something even a racist could understand. In America, all men are created equal, even when they are black, even when they are women. And yet black men are disproportionately killed by the police and women are disproportionately underpaid, even when they are white, and even in Hollywood. The evidence is epidemic; the evidence is moribund.

Black lives matter, too.

I guess there's only one way to find out.

7.
Corporations are not people. People are people.

Any questions?

8.
Money is not free speech. 

If you have more money that does NOT give you more speech.

And THAT is the American way, okay?

Any questions?

9.
I'm sorry you grew up in coal country--or oil country. I'm sorry your fathers and mothers killed themselves to give you life, clothe you, feed you, and do everything they could to make your lives better than theirs. They were good people doing good things in this life. But the fossil fuels are fossils. 

We have to move on from fossil fuels. If your local, state, and national governments haven't done all they can--and I am certain most of them have done very little--to help your communities with jobs, most especially in the renewable energy sector, then blame THEM and vote them out of office. 

The canary in the coal mine isn't that big business found lower-wage workers to do the job you used to, the canary in the coal mine is that no one gives a fuck about funding a proper public education for you or your children, or figuring out a way to help you find a job.

You're not lazy. PS Black and brown people aren't lazy, either, Cracker. But we pay taxes to the government to make our lives better, not worse. I will happily pay all the tax dollars you let me to get your kids an education, get you healthcare, get you off drugs without incarcerating you, get you a job you like that will make you solvent enough to feed yourself and your kids, pay your rent, buy your home--if you want to--and live life for sunsets, dancing, laughter, friendship, love, music, reading, philosophy, pleasure, family, joy, education, civic duty, goodness, and NOT doing unto others as you have them NOT do unto you. 

We are our sisters' keeper. And our brothers', too.

10.
Rich people do not know more than we do and do not, as a function of their wealth, make your life, my life, their lives, or anyone's life better. Wealth only takes away some of the harm that life deals out to you, personally. Wealth doesn't make you happy or smart.

If anything, wealth just makes you better at taking advantage of other people.

And is that who you really want to be?

11.
The canary in the coal mine isn't a canary, it's the whole fucking environment telling you to stop burning fossil fuels. When the planet is dying from the fumes--instead of a tiny bird--I'm pretty sure it's time to pay attention.

12.
Educate yourself--because the Republican-led government doesn't care about your mind or body, male or female, white or black or brown. Speak truth to power. Volunteer; not just for religious groups--the world actually includes things beyond religion--and in this country, we're supposed to have a separation of church and state, which is a good thing. And here's why: it may not be your church. Are you really willing to take that chance? Stop trying to get your government to enforce your religious details and get them to embody the compassion that Allah, Adonai, Jesus, God, and the Buddha have been telling you to embody for the past ten centuries.

Vote. Run for office, locally. For Christ's sake, believe in something that doesn't only include you.

13.
I lived in the same city as Donald Trump for twenty-two years. If you voted for him, I feel sorry for you. But you probably didn't live in the same city with him for twenty-two years.

Because, if you had....

14.
The perfect is always the enemy of the good. 

Strive to be good. Strive to be happy. I bet no one told you it was very important to strive to be happy. Strive not to be angry. Strive not to be anxious. Strive to be compassionate. Do some yoga. Strive to be happy.

That's it. So, anyway.
Please, have a great day.

Angoisse

Angoisse

Every day, I awake
To a litter from dreams
Of cans and shelves,
Appointments and bills,
Politics and non-politicians,
Debts monetary and emotional,
Scattered across the
Floor; too distracted
For sleep, too tired to
Get out of bed,
I wade instead
Into a small, private
Pool, the temperature
Of cooling urine or
Vomit, just for me,
Cold enough to
Make you shudder, but
With the warmth of a
Mild fever, which makes
You feel treacly, nauseous.
And that is how I
Start my every day.

L. Steve Schmersal, Angoisse, January 2017

I Post Song Lyrics: Black & Blue

It seems fitting for the day after MLK, Jr., Day.
I saw it as an uncomprehending child at my father's behest on PBS in South Jersey;
I have tried to begin to comprehend it in my adulthood. Witness the spellbinding original cast, Nell Carter, Charlane Woodard, Armelia MacQueen, Andre Deshields, Ken Paige:


Black and Blue

Cold, empty bed,
Springs hard as lead,
Pains in my head,
Feel like old Ned.

What did I do
To be so black and blue?
No joys for me,
No company,

Even the mouse
Ran from my house,
All my life through,
I've been so black and blue.

I'm so forlorn.
Life's just a thorn.
My heart is torn.
Why was I born?

What did I do,

To be so black and blue?

I'm white inside,
But that don't help my case.

Don't you know it, brother.

'Cause I can't hide
What is on my face,

Oh!

I'm so forlorn.
Life's just a thorn.
My heart is torn.
Why was I born?

What did I do,
To be so black and blue?

Mercy. Mercy, mercy.
Looka here, looka here, looka here.
Well, all right.
Hey, there. Hey.
Here it'is.

Just feelin' black
And blue.

I'm white
Inside,
But that
don't
help
my case.

Don't you know it, sister.

'Cause I
Can't hide
What is on my face,

Oh.

I'm so
forlorn,

Life's just 

a thorn,

My heart
is torn,

Why was
I born?

What did 

I do,

To be so
black

and
blue?

(What Did I Do to be So) Black and Blue, Ain't Misbehavin', 1978; lyrics by Andy Razaf; music by Thomas "Fats" Waller and Harry Brooks, 1929

And now, for the video:

Happy Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, Everyone

I see the past three presidential elections--but let's include the midterms, too--as working out interesting and strange oppositions; as exemplifying sometimes murky notions of investment in somewhat murky abstractions. So--if you like, if you want to get really barbaric about it--you could say, if you wanted, that it came down to Change trumping Hope.

I don't know if I feel that the Obama administration ended up fulfilling its hope for Hope, partly because Obama let me down in his aggressive deportation program, his continuation of the W. Bush surveillance of the American people, his support of TPP, and other programs. However, and it is a BIG HOWEVER, while his administration oversaw the strengthening and stimulating of our economy, while it succeeded in bringing unemployment down, most of his actions--not just the positive ones, like the Affordable Healthcare Act, while not wholly successful, was hardly a failure--were stymied, sabotaged, brought up for repeal, and/or stopped by the Republican-controlled houses of Congress: everything from ambassadorial and cabinet nominations to, well, everything else, including his last Supreme Court nominee.

So, my question is this: if you wanted Change, why did you re-elect Republicans to control Congress and your state legislatures and governorships, when they have not only proven to be the source of our federal gridlock and brinkmanship, but said eight years ago that that is exactly what they were going to do?

Or was the "Change" you meant something traveling under a different name?

Happy Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, everyone.

I hope you're allowed to--or have thought to--celebrate it.

Trump is an algorithm.

Trump is an algorithm. He is not a politician, not a really a person, except to perhaps embody the faults, flaws, and dangerous inclinations of what it means to be human.

He will maximize every loophole to his advantage, because that's the only thing he knows how to do.

I lived in the same city as that creature for twenty-two years. It's not about you; it's only and always will be only about him. He will blunder into fascism without even knowing the word.

Pence is a known category. I can fight that category. 

Give me President Pence.

I don't know why you're listening to me...

The subtlety of my argument is guaranteed to irritate you. My argument is not subtle for that reason, and it irritates me that subtlety is the problem that stands between us and an understanding. But I will not cede that ground to you.

Small things are large, and it's not my problem that you can't see that.

It has always been, and it always will be, your problem. Even when, and as, I always lose.

On Hillary Rodham Clinton

.
I recently had the privilege of participating in an incredibly rich exchange about our current political scene on my friend D's Facebook page. My friend, P, wrote the following:

I am not going to pretend all of a sudden I adore Hillary - Who's going to buy that? What I do say is simply this: "You may hate Hillary, I'm not happy with her either, but any damage she does can be undone relatively quickly. The damage Trump does? We'll be decades. And everything we want from Single Payer to a much-narrowed gap between rich and poor? That will be pushed back for generations. Think tactically."

I've been holding back for some time on the topic, but this was my reply:

While I endorse this view--and I do--I also think there is a Third Way, and that way is to actually acknowledge and embrace Clinton's very real, very important, and often overlooked positive aspects and her long history of entirely endorsable work in the real world, especially her--from the start of her career in public service (and her career is one of public service, as such)--advocacy for low income people and of course children and women.

I am a political radical and a Marxist. And while incrementalism has had some marked successes, it also poses a dangerous stasis, especially on the American topic of race. Clinton has often depended on triangulation and Real Politik for decision making. I am disappointed in the way that the Clintons skate on this side of propriety without seeming to be able to see how much it damages them in the media and the eyes on it. Nonetheless, she has never been even charged with a crime--despite enormous industry and money spent trying to do so, usually on the public dime--and is listed by Politicfact--and others--as one of our most honest politicians. The endless attempts to discredit her are simple misogyny through and through. I say this as someone who also didn't like Clinton for a very long time, but when I took the time to look at her record and read a wider sample of opinions about her, I found someone I could believe in. And like. Yes, I fucking like the bitch.

I have had enormous problems with Obama's administration, but for all the bad, Republican-courting choices and extensions of the last Bush Presidency, we have a kazillion missed opportunities made so by the Republican Congress. Will Clinton provide an Obama extension? Sure. Probably for the exact same reasons, but the thing is this: warts and all, Clinton is a from-the-start public servant. She's tough, she's smart, she's industrious and tenacious, she's been through it all, the only other presidential candidate who could possibly have been more, or equally, qualified than her was George H. W. Bush. Yet she keeps putting herself through this media/opinion nightmare to really try to make a substantive difference. It can't be as simple as greed as her detractors more than imply, or simply state. This woman has to really give a red rat's ass about our country to go through the wringer like this again. It matters to her, in an way that it doesn't to Donald Trump. He's a shady real estate developer and casino owner, who has devoted his life to making as much money for himself as possible while grifting the system, buying politicians, and bilking the working men and women doing the actual work for his company as much as possible. Whereas she has spent the entirety of her adult life, from the beginning, trying to make the world better for those less fortunate than her. She has made some poor choices, but having a private email server, which both Colin Powell (whatever he may or may not have said to her) and Condoleezza Rice--both former Secretaries of State--also used, is interesting on the one hand, but an over-analyzed, non-starter waste of time on the other hand, especially when compared to Trump's long trail of bullying, not paying, or underpaying his contractors, day laborers, wage slaves, and even his lawyers, The trail of Trump's legal adventures that were settled out of court--or not settled out of court--would fill a book many times larger than the unsuccessful attempts to make something remotely similar stick to Clinton. It's a matter of legal record, which anyone can look up.

In my opinion, if a person can't find a way to see Clinton in a positive light--whatever her or his original or earlier political allegiances or investments--then I feel that person's opinion lacks nuance and lacks a healthy curiosity, an open mindedness, and is influenced more by the dimension of our overwhelming, nearly monolithic, unreconstructed, sexist, news-culture industry, which is better characterized by FOX News than MacNeil/Lehrer.

If you can be open to her actually being a good thing, instead of a nose-hold-voting bad thing, it will make your argument stronger. And in the unbearable torture chamber of this election, we need strong arguments, more than anything else. We have to flip this script, not because it's a tactic to evade Trump in the White House, but because the script is just flat-out wrong.

It's really true. #imwithher.

My sister replied:

Well said! Thanks for expressing so many important points. Thanks also to P. Everyone, think - and more importantly vote - tactically!

I replied:

I do endorse P's perspective, entirely. I really, really do. I respect it, and I understand it. And if that is the most positive-thinking mindset toward Clinton that a person gets to, then I support the hard struggle they've made to get there--which we are all, as (hopefully) thinking participants, in this election, making: a hard struggle. I invite Trump supporters to also think tactically and deeply--I want everyone who is passionate about his or her candidate to get out and vote and encourage others to do the same.

But I will say this: I did not decide to vote for Hillary Rodham Clinton because she is the lesser of two evils, the slightly less unlikeable of the, as the media endlessly insists, two most disliked candidates in the history of American politics. By the way, I find this comparison facetious and preposterous: Clinton and Trump do not even belong in the same sentence much less the same category, despite the fact that I have put them both in the same sentence, here. :o)

I decided to vote for Hillary Rodham Clinton because, despite her faults, and she has them, I think she would make a good President for us. For all of us. And I think she will honestly work hard to do so, make mistakes, some of them stupid ones, and then continue to do her very best and work hard to be a good President for all of us.

That is what I honestly think.

What do you honestly think?

Before you answer, and before you vote, though, think. Think honestly. Don't just feel and react. Think.

Have a great day.

The World Looks Like This

In the teeny-tiny economy of the baby, the world looks like this:

I get milk.
You get shit.

Think of that overwhelming joy of the infant when it finally is able to give something to The Breast! To give something "back." Indeed, the only object it can give. I made this for you! I love you!

This is why Freud so perceptively equated shit with gifts and money. And, of course, vice versa.

My Problem

Hi. I wanted to explore some of my problems. This won't take up much of your time, but that is my problem.


My Problem


My problem isn't you, my problem is me.


I want you to listen for more then thirty seconds or 250 characters. That's MY problem.


My problem is that I want you to not get bored when it's not about you.


My problem is that I want you to enjoy nuance, difference, difficulty, and long sentences, inclusive of commas and semicolons.


My problem is that you fear the unfamiliar.


MY problem is that you neither know what you want nor have ever explored why you want it.


I don't care why you're overwhelmed by your job, my problem is that you are overwhelmed by the fact that you're overwhelmed by your job, don't have the tools to talk about it, and pretend that you are not and that you do.


My problem is that you are so afraid of the truth about your life that you cling to demonstrably absurd "truths" about your life that hurt and destroy others, daily, rather than consider any alternative.


These are my problems.


What are your problems?

Liebestod/Schadenfreude

In the man's own hand, supposedly. In that Wilde hand.

It really comes down to the question of which you love more: the thing you love or ruining the thing you love or ruining the love for the thing you love or ruining the love of the thing you love. Unfortunately, all of these things may be the same thing. 

In a funny way--both in a way that amuses and a way that is strange; when apprehended with both senses, perhaps in an ironic way, in an uncanny way, which is not to say, in a queer way--this explicates Schadenfreude better than any literal definition, since, of course, the joy we feel when touched by the knowledge of the misfortune of the other must only be an echo of the joy we feel when touched by our own satisfying, familiar misery. For misery loves its own company, as we are told.

I Post Song Lyrics Sometimes: When Doves Cry

When Doves Cry


Dig if you will
the picture,
Of you and I engaged
in a kiss,
The sweat of your body
covers me,
Can you, my darling,
Can you picture this?

Dream if you can
a courtyard,
An ocean of violets
in bloom,
Animals strike
curious poses,
They feel the heat,
The heat between me and you.

How can you just leave me standing?
Alone in a world that's so cold?
   So cold
Maybe I'm just too demanding,
Maybe I'm just like my father, too bold,

Maybe you're just like my mother,
She's never satisfied,
   She's never satisfied
Why do we scream at each other?
This is what it sounds like,
When doves cry.

Touch if you will
my stomach,
Feel how it trembles inside;
You've got the butterflies
all tied up,
Don't make me chase you,
Even doves have pride.

How can you just leave me standing?
Alone in a world so cold?
   World so cold
Maybe I'm just too demanding,
Maybe I'm just like my father, too bold;

Maybe you're just like my mother,
She's never satisfied,
   She's never satisfied
Why do we scream at each other?
This is what it sounds like,
When doves cry.

How can you just leave me standing?
Alone in a world that's so cold?
   A world that's so cold?
Maybe I'm just too demanding?
   Maybe, maybe I'm like my father?
Maybe I'm just like my father, too bold?
   Ya know he's too bold?

Maybe you're just like my mother?
   Maybe you're just like my mother?
She's never satisfied,
   She's never, never satisfied.
Why do we scream at each other?
   Why do we scream, why?
This is what it sounds like

When doves cry.
   When doves cry.
When doves cry.
   When doves cry.
When doves cry.

   When doves cry.
Don't cry.


Prince Rogers Nelson (June 7, 1958 – April 21, 2016)
Prince & the Revolution
When Doves Cry
Purple Rain

That Time, That Time, in Six

That Time, That Time, in Six
by Calvé Shelmstress


It was that time. That time
When nothing made sense, when
Time was not time, that time
When time was no time. He
Brought a boyfriend upstate
To stay with an ex-boy-

Friend. It was that time just
After he'd found a job,
That time when he'd thought that
He, perhaps, had lost his
Mind. Brilliantly, he
Had not. "Who is he?" his

Ex had asked. "I don't know,"
He had replied. It was
That time, when walking down
The street, he would just cry,
For church bells ringing. Church
Bells. "Who is he?" his ex

Had asked. It didn't matter.
He had just needed some
One to hold at night, some
One warm and real enough.
He cried real tears when he
Wrote this. He cried real tears.


Calvé Shelmstress, That Time, That Time, in Six, 1979.

On Hegel

Hegel founded reality by describing it.

-- Me. <--> I actually said this

The Shelmstress Poems III: Suicide Ditty

Classic Shelmstress! This one is very hard to find, but I was lucky enough that an old friend was looking out for it as well. I first read it in grad school at OSU and have been trying to find it again ever since--its Rodgers and Hart echoes, which occur throughout Shelmstress' work, keep nagging at me till I find them again.

Thank you, Armando, for sending this on.

Suicide Ditty

Hi. It's me again,
Hi, it's not me. Hell-
O, or hi. Hey. Ho.
Nobody writes his
Song for me, heigh-ho:

Who cares? Thirty-odd
Years demonstrating
Explanations and
Exhortations, some
Defense-formations;

Trying, showing, and
Trying to show what
Ever: things: any
Thing; in this place where
I don't think or know

Or want anything
For myself, in this
Place of my great un-
Knowingness, where I
Drop, with a ripple--

Or not--across your
Great knowledge, where you
Know everything, where
My me-ness is as
A nothingness, where

I sink beneath your
Wisdom like a stone.
You locked me in some
Safety deposit
Box, in the basement

Of a bank, on a
Shelf in your closet,

In some universe,
Where I don't exist.

Calvé Shelmstress, Suicide Ditty, 1977

On Paul Simon's "America"

Paul Simon's account of two lovers on a Greyhound bus journey. which in a few deft strokes of imagery juxtaposes the mixed-up emotions of young love against the passing scenery glimpsed through the window, transforming personal confusion into a metaphor for a country in search of itself. 

Toss me a cigarette, I think there's one in my raincoat. We smoked the last one an hour ago.... 

From its hushed, hummed introduction, through its near symphonic middle section, to its poignant, fading end, America is a true masterpiece.

-- Mick Brown, London Telegraph

I actually prefer the stripped-down (more) acoustic versions of this song to the overworked arrangement of the original, like this one from the 1981 Central Park concert, which I got on vinyl, while still in grade school, I think for Easter. It might have been Christmas. Anyway, I listened the shit out of the two disc set for years and have imprinted on my mind, forever, all the rotten patter ("Well, it's GREAT to DO a neighborhood concert....") with which Simon insisted on testing the audience's good will, all night. He's like an old comic, dying on stage, continuously, but too stubborn to give up on the promise of finally landing a line the audience is supposed to find funny.

Despite this recurrent, distracting, and cringe-worthily awful factor--which you keep trying to forget, hoping, even when you've heard the album a million times, that he'll get the message and just stop it--I feel that the Central Park concert album is a gem, recorded a decade after the guys split up in 1970, it seems, at Simon's insistence, (according to Garfunkel's recent, also cringe-worthy interview in The Guardian). I've always known, especially from the copious photographs in the liner notes and art of the old albums, that Paul Simon and Arthur Garfunkel had been best friends in high school, but sort of hated each other, in whatever present time in question currently under discussion, but despite the occasional affectionate reference to each other that I've gleaned from interviews--affection, which, of course, I'm looking for and want--my overriding impression of the two of them, after so many years, is that they're both impossible, wounded narcissists I would not want to share a meal with. I'm also okay with being wrong with this impression.

Anyway, I wanted to say something nice about this song. Kathy Chitty, Simon's Welsh girlfriend from his first London sojourn, accompanied Paul to the U.S. in 1964 when producer, Tom Wilson, required that Simon return to the United States to finalize mixes and artwork for Simon & Garfunkel's debut studio album, Wednesday Morning, 3 A.M.. Instead of working on his first studio release, Simon embarked on a five-day road excursion with Chitty, out to Michigan and back to New York, in September of that year.

One of the things I love about this song is the bittersweet--melancholic, really--diminution from the naively confident optimism of the opening declaration, which is filled with the knowingness and unearned magnanimity of the young, tying in a knot the nod toward traditional marriage which unites monetary fortunes; the thrilling unknown of their combined fates, which seem simultaneously full of the joy of infinite possibility and the acknowledged, but woefully underappreciated, possibility of adversity (or of banality or of boredom) that this compound Fortune may disclose or not; and the signal social rebelliousness and sexual freedom of the era, in which marriage is rejected as the bond between two people in favor of a looser, bondless bond, heedless and disdainful of the traditional contract, certain that their enthusiasm for each other, alone, can structure and sustain this relationship according to their own, probably not closely-examined, rules.

Paul Simon had a special knack for evoking the pensive, imprecise, confused and confusing, enveloping ambiguity--the unmooredness--that alarmingly discolors our understanding of ourselves and the world, ourselves in the world, when our certainty arrives at an entirely unexpected turn or insight, disappointment or unintelligibility. And we experience it, physically, as a nausea, as our emotions overwhelm the body by suddenly being so clearly not separate from the somatic in the way we have grown used to parsing them. The final moments of Mike Nichols' 1967 film, The Graduate--for which Paul Simon wrote much of the score--provide a vivid example of this kind of disturbing event, when Ben "saves" Elaine from her own wedding, barricades her angry family and all the wedding attendees in the church, and the two of them run down the drive of the church together, laughing, with Elaine in her white wedding gown, and jump on a dusty old bus, without paying, make their way to the back, sit down--smiles still on their faces--and then in a long shot that closes the film, regard each other, not knowing where the bus is going, or what they are going to do next, or even perhaps if they want to be with one another.

In America, the narrator and Kathy, set out with a somewhat blithe promise of commitment to each other, provisions in the form of cigarettes and over-sweetened junk food, and the notion of a, perhaps larky, adventure to discover America for themselves, together. But as the song progresses and builds, it all falls apart: the simple freedom of their "quest"; their easy certainty about--and ability to relate to--each other; meaning, itself; and all the things they took for granted when they started this trip. The journey, the whole experience, takes on an indeterminate cast of danger, recklessness, and an anxious loneliness. Jokes fall flat; the two protagonists--it might not be too much to suggest that they have, in a visceral sense, become antagonists--retreat inward and away from each other, as Kathy reads her magazines (not, certainly not, his magazines, an unexpressed distinction that also deftly articulates the yawning void between the genders, a hitherto unimagined reality for this young couple) as the narrator gazes wordlessly out the window. The narrator makes banal statements about feeling lost to Kathy, which take on a sudden profundity in the song, and not just because the time he confesses this to her is when he knows she's asleep. By the end of the piece, the alienation of our two protagonists has begun to represent a larger significance that includes the nation, America, itself, and its citizens. And so the narrator has gone from broad, bold declarations encompassing self-knowledge and love, the future and fate, to numbly counting the cars on the New Jersey Turnpike. I do not think it would be too much to suggest that we've all--all of us--been there, in one way or another, at one time or another.

The song has an interesting--yet familiar, very Simoneon--structure of juxtaposition and non sequitur. And, after finding the lyrics, as posted on Paul Simon's website, I better understood its placement of attribution, which is--and should be and should remain--ambiguous when listening to it. For example, I have always heard the narrator ending his statement to Kathy in the second verse at "Michigan seems like a dream to me now." But Simon has it go to the end of the verse as:

“Kathy,” I said, as we boarded a Greyhound in Pittsburgh,

“Michigan seems like a dream to me now;

It took me four days to hitch-hike from Saginaw

I’ve come to look for America.”

In this case, we are presented with a conundrum, a mystery, in the switch from "we" to "I," and the clear attribution to the narrator in conversation with Kathy that he--and only he--took four days to hitch-hike from Saginaw. Perhaps they didn't travel to Michigan and back to New York together, or the narrator, is referencing an earlier trip Midwest and back compared to this one. The song was released in 1972. Kathy Chitty and Paul Simon took their road-trip in 1964. In 1966, Paul Simon played a festival in Saginaw. Is the Paul who wrote the song, at some point, perhaps almost ten years later, mis-remembering his post-Kathy roadtrip as prior rather than post another Saginaw excursis? I do not know. When listening to the song, this placement of "I" after "we" seems to signify a breakdown--as part of a gathering breakdown in the song--between the narrator and "Kathy." In reading Paul Simon's posted lyrics--which contain at least one spelling mistake: "Kathy, I’m lost," I said, thought [sic] I knew she was sleeping.--we fall into another territory, which we will fail to be able to parse here, in terms of biography, anyway. In terms of literary analysis, it will stand as an ambiguity.

While lingering over the thorny question of attribution, let us examine the other place where it remains unclear unless we look at the quotation marks Paul Simon has provided for us--who knows when? In the fourth stanza, someone--we assume the narrator--opens with, Toss me a cigarette, I think there’s one in my raincoat. Now, we may, or may not, attribute the next line to the same speaker, We smoked the last one an hour ago. Neither line is attributed in the heard text of the song, but Simon's web-published lyrics clearly assign the lines to two separate speakers by use of separate quotation demarcations:

“Toss me a cigarette, I think there’s one in my raincoat.”

“We smoked the last one an hour ago.”

Tradition--and certainly David Bowie, in his performance found below--gives the line to Kathy. But although the lyrics clearly indicate two people speaking, it is far from clear who is speaking which line. In any event, this is the only place "Kathy" speaks in her own voice in the song--excepting the observation about the man in the gaberdine suit, which occurs without quotation marks in the third stanza, interestingly, the bridge--we just don't know, in this case, which is the only case in which she speaks, which line is hers. Welcome to literary analysis, which sometimes is less about what we know than, very usefully, about what we don't know, but neither of which we can begin to ascertain unless and until we assess the knowable.

For myself, as a fan, a listener, and as a critic, I prefer the more ambiguity option. I am much more comfortable with not knowing who says what or where the quotations begin and end than I am knowing where the author placed those boundaries. When we listen to a song, we can't see quotation marks, except where they may be implied and where our imagination places them--and that placement is notoriously, and expansively, usefully, meaningfully changeable.

Very briefly, we will perform two two, perhaps three, breakdowns to explore some of the juxtapositions Paul Simon mobilizes in this song.

Let's begin with a cursory comparison of first lines, and they are:

“Let us be lovers, we’ll marry our fortunes together;" S1
“Kathy,” I said, as we boarded a Greyhound in Pittsburgh, S2

Laughing on the bus, Bridge/S3

“Toss me a cigarette, I think there’s one in my raincoat.” S4
“Kathy, I’m lost,” I said, though I knew she was sleeping. S5

Every stanza--excepting the bridge--begins with an address, two of them to Kathy by name. We assume that whenever quotation marks occur, that it is to Kathy the narrator is speaking--though the narrator is always speaking, throughout this song, and therefore the song is also addressed to us, or to anyone listening, which is therefore us. 

[SIDEBAR: Friends like to give me shit when I employ the plural. I am not referencing the "royal we," in these cases, nor would I, ever. That royal usage is reserved for persons or "presences" who have more than one body, which is much too complicated to go into here. The "we" one applies in scholarly situations, is a respectful acknowledgement that a person is writing to and from a community of scholars and/or readers and/or listeners. A private letter is addressed to an individual. In most cases a poem, a novel, or a song--particularly when it has been published to a wide audience--is addressed to a plurality, and once you have entered that plurality, it is humble and polite to denote your placement in that social space. The song is not addressed to me--or even Kathy, anymore--but to all of us. And while my observations may arise from a personal engagement with this piece, those meanings are available to us all; and therefore we say "we" when discussing them with others. I am stuck in the middle with you about these things; we are bound to agree and disagree with one another about them. This is acceptable, normal, and unavoidable. In fact, it is preferable, because without disagreement, we would never learn anything new.]

Each first line takes us into a slightly different world, and each world is one slightly further away from the other. This should be clear by the gulf we see between the sentiment of Let us be lovers versus "Kathy, I'm lost," I said--and the second lines take us even further into each world, in each case. This has been covered already, but it is worth remarking again on the movement from being lovers to being lost, and this is effected most powerfully in the change from "we" to "I" and with the placement of certain images.

Look at the progression--or regression or retrogression--from "we" to "I." There is only one "I" in the first stanza. There is only one "we" in the rest of the song, and it occurs in the fourth stanza and seems to be attributed to Kathy. The shift between the first and second stanza's last lines is already stark, if you pay attention to it, with the shift from 

we... walked off to look for America 

to 

I've come to look for America. 

The rest of the song is filled with I, she, I, and me. For the narrator, "we" has dissolved, not only into its constituent parts, but even more so into the narrator alone: to a loneliness that is a lostness, even though he is, tacitly, not alone. And finally, in the end, which is the chorus, this turns into "they" and doesn't even include the narrator or Kathy, anymore. The dislocation has moved outside of them, and outside the bus, to no longer include even them anymore. 

A moon arises out of nowhere in this song, over an open field--an empty field--reflecting suddenly the internal sentiment the narrator feels, we assume, after he and Kathy stop speaking about the last thing they had to share--a cigarette--which is gone. It packs a whallop, that pale moon over a darkened nighttime landscape. Such emptiness. Not the sun revealing all, but the moon revealing only its singularity and little else, just darkness, and that image discloses, reflects, reveals, and makes possible, the brutally confessional moment of being with the beloved, but lost. Lost, lost, lost. And the narrator counts the cars of the others he assumes have also "come"--not gone, but come--like them, like her, like him, like them, to look for America. He and Kathy and all those people on the turnpike have gone into America (perhaps from New York, or wherever), but they are in it now--they have come into America... and they can't find it, or themselves. 

The final sentiment seems to me to run something like this: 

I am lost, I say, to no one in particular, 
to no one awake or listening, except, 
perhaps, only to myself, perhaps,
if, even, I
can hear it.

America
by Paul Simon

“Let us be lovers, we’ll marry our fortunes together;
I’ve got some real estate here in my bag.”
So we bought a pack of cigarettes and Mrs. Wagner’s pies
And walked off to look for America.

“Kathy,” I said, as we boarded a Greyhound in Pittsburgh,
“Michigan seems like a dream to me now;
It took me four days to hitch-hike from Saginaw
I’ve come to look for America.”

Laughing on the bus,
Playing games with the faces.
She said the man in the gabardine suit was a spy.
I said, “Be careful, his bow tie is really a camera.”

“Toss me a cigarette, I think there’s one in my raincoat.”
“We smoked the last one an hour ago.”
So, I looked at the scenery, she read her magazines.
And the moon rose over an open field.

“Kathy, I’m lost,” I said, though I knew she was sleeping.
“I’m empty and I'm aching and I don’t know why.”
Counting the cars on the New Jersey Turnpike,
And they’ve all come to look for America,
All come to look for America,

All come to look for America.
Counting the cars on the New Jersey Turnpike,

And they’ve all come to look for America,
All come to look for America,
All come to look for America.

[Ed. Note: Except for the quotation marks, I have fudged with much of the punctuation and corrected spelling errors. Look for Paul Simon's version, here.]


Central Park Concert:




The original:




First Aid Kit on Letterman:




Sting, on tour in Philly:




The great Graham Nash:




David Bowie:




The classic Yes studio evidence:

On Watching "The Walking Dead" III

It's the end of the world. The Governor's come to stage a reverse-prison break and died for his efforts. Our team has been splintered into some of the most unlikely pairings as they search for one another, hoping against the worst. Beth--the good, little girl--and Daryl--the bad, good ol' boy--find a shitty, backwoods moonshine joint, just like Daryl grew up in. They get drunk, they share stories, they bond, and at Beth's suggestion they burn it down, with a stack of useless money and moonshine. And as they watch it burn, at Beth's insistence, the good girl and the bad man give the finger to the past. It is the sweetest most moving employment of the bird that I've ever seen. The Mountain Goats play Up the Wolves in the background.

Poetry/Jazz Appreciation Month II: Lilac Wine

Famously, there are at least two distinctly American art forms: the Broadway Musical and, of course, Jazz--I also include The Blues in this short, proud, list, and rock and roll, which is white Blues.

It is not an accident that Jazz derives from the Black experience on this continent and the Musical from a specifically Jewish-American genius, evolving out of operetta, vaudeville, and music hall nonsense into its own real thing. These two American art forms--Jazz and Broadway--revolve around each other, nourishing each other, making each other even better, more beautiful, more feeling, more sophisticated, more complex. For at least half a century, Broadway music was popular music in the United States, and Jazz ran and ran with it.

Then we have Nina Simone.

In the hands of a true genius--a real American genius, like Simone--a little Broadway ditty becomes a threnody, an In Memoriam: You; In Memoriam: Love; In Memoriam: Me. No one makes this song speak the way she does and no one else can pull Death, so certainly, out of it in this way.

And so we continue our exploration of Jazz Appreciation Month and National Poetry Month.

Lilac Wine
James Shelton

I lost myself on a cool damp night.
Gave myself in that misty light.
Was hypnotized by strange delight
Under a lilac tree.

I made wine from the lilac tree.
Put my heart in its recipe.
It makes me see what I want to see,
Be what I want to be.

When I think more than I want to think,
Do things I never should do,
I drink much more than I ought to drink,
Because it brings me back you.

Lilac wine
is sweet and heady,
Like my love.
Lilac wine,
I feel I'm steady,
like my love.

Listen to me.
I cannot see clearly.
Isn't that he,
coming to me,
nearly
here?

Lilac wine
is sweet
and heady.
Where's
my love?
Lilac wine,
I feel
I'm steady.
Where's my love?

Listen to me,
why is everything
so hazy?
Isn't that he,
or am I going
crazy, dear?

Lilac wine,
I feel
I'm ready
for my love.
Feel
I'm ready
for
my love.

Poetry/Jazz Appreciation Month I: How Long Has This Been Going On?

April isn't just the cruelest month but also National Poetry Month and Jazz Appreciation Month. What more could we want to commemorate them than the Gershwins giving us a bit of both by way of the titanic Carmen McRae with "How Long Has This been Going On" (1928)? A strange song about being taken by surprise by one's own feelings of love--an amazing song! an amazing lyric! "Where have I been all these years?"

Lyrics aren't necessarily poetry, and yet they also are. And the Great American Songbook is full of, not just flashes, but full on lightning storms of brilliance. The idea of asking the beloved how long "this" has been going on is just mind-reeling. To me, anyway. Enjoy.

How Long Has This Been Going On?
George Gershwin & Ira Gershwin.

'Neath the stars, at bazaars
Often I've had to caress men.
Five or ten, dollars then,
I'd collect from all those yes-men.
Don't be sad, I must add,
that they meant no more than chess-men.

Darling, can't you see?
'Twas for charity?
Though these lips have made slips,
They were never really serious.
Who'd have thought, I'd be caught
In a state that's so delirious?

I could cry salty tears.
Where have I been all these years?
Listen you, tell me do:
How long has this been going on?

What a kick, how I buzz;
Boy, you click like no one does.
Listen sweet, I repeat:
How long has this been going on?

Dear, when in your arms I creep;
That divine rendezvous.
Don't wake me, if I'm asleep,
Let me dream that it's true.

Kiss me once, kiss me twice,
then once more:
That makes thrice.
Come on, and let's make it four.

What a break, for heaven's sake,
How long has this been going on?
What a break, for heaven's sake,
How long has this been going on?