A Fight of All-Time, Intelligent Hell, and More

Journal Excerpt from Senior Week

Ocean City, MD

June 19, 1992

Anyway last night me and Fish hung out on the boards and what a time we had. It started when we went for ice cream (free) at Candy Kitchens but the girl who was going to hook us up said she couldn't because her manager was there. We caught up with Ken Lehman on the boards. He was eating his ice cream, and a big chunk of it plopped on the boardwalk. Ken just stood there like he was retarded or something and this group of seven or eight guys and a girl came up and were asking what was wrong with him. It was the funniest thing they ever saw. "He's fucked up! What's wrong with him???" Meanwhile the girl sits beside me, laughing her head off and putting her hand on my thigh and being way too friendly, and still everybody was asking about Ken. Me and Fish were laughing it up. I guess this girl had this boyfriend standing behind me who started to realize what was happening. He says, "come on, get up." They left. Fish and I stayed at the bench. Shortly after, a guy stepped right in Ken's ice cream in bare feet. We took off laughing. Not three or four minutes after we had all this fun laughing with that group of guys and that girl about the ice cream, we found them in a full-on brawl with two guys. Five guys were beating up one, and two or three were beating up the other. The one big guy of the group said, "chill man, come on, let's go." I saw a guy get hit right in the nuts. It was the best fight, like it was out of a movie. We couldn't believe what we were seeing. They were leaving because they didn't want to get caught. No cops were anywhere though. The two guys who were getting beat up started to get tough again. The group came back and some Puerto Rican guy came out of nowhere and punched one of the two in the side of the head. The guy was on his knees and this other guy did a roundhouse kick to his head and his head hit the boardwalk hard. Everybody watching screamed. They took off. There was no blood and the two guys walked away seemingly no worse for the wear. Me and Fish told the story to everyone we saw. We couldn't believe it.

...

Carl Jung- "I am not what happened to me. I am what I choose to become."

...

Is it too draconian to suggest that people who don't appreciate the significance of a holiday commemorating the end slavery, should maybe be enslaved themselves until they appreciate it? Yeah, way too draconian. Forget I ever said it. 

But they are generally the type of people who are into draconian measures, right? Unless they are hypocrites, they would want the same measures applied to them.

June 19, 2021

...

Bertrand Russell- "No man is liberated from fear who dare not see his place in the world as it is; no man can achieve the greatness of which he is capable until he has allowed himself to see his own littleness."

...

driving test by bukowski

drivers

in defense and anger

often give the

finger

to those

who become involved in their

driving problems.

I am aware what the

signal of the finger

implies

yet when it is directed

at me

sometimes

I can't help laughing at

the florid

twisted

faces

and

the gesture

yet today

I found myself

giving the finger

to some guy

who pulled directly

into my lane

without waiting

from a supermarket

exit.

I shook the finger at

him.

he saw it

and I drove along right on his

rear

bumper.

it was my first

time.

I was a member of the

club

and I felt like a

fucking

fool.

...

Kevin Drum: "Donald Trump has made plain what’s long lurked barely below the surface of American politics: it’s not so much a contest between liberal and conservative as it is between kindness and meanness. God knows, not every liberal is kind and not every conservative is mean. But that’s sure the way to bet these days. Republicans are mean and getting meaner. It’s now the foundation of their party, and Trump has decided to make it a selling point, not something to be ashamed of. They’re just plain mean and they’re proud of it."

You think Democrats are smart enough to run on that, after Trump splits up families, proposes re-instituting pre-existing conditions, raising rent on low income families, etc, etc, etc.? (They aren't.)

June 19, 2018

...

New York Mayor Jimmy Walker was born on this day in 1881.

"A reformer is a guy who rides through the sewer in a glass bottom boat."

...

Inspirobot- "Where wisdom ends, farts are born."

...

I've had my car 13 years and put 170,000 miles on it... always thought the AC was crap, but just today I discovered a control that makes it blast out.

June 19, 2017

...

I won Dan Zerbe's baby is a very, very poor spur-of-the-moment bet he made with me. Thanks to my goodwill though, the story has a happy ending. I said he could continue to take care of her for me. (And every day he has one chance to win her back- by guessing the pattern on my underwear.)

June 19, 2013

...

Accompanied Sloth to his farm to capture 50,000 bees huddled in a mass in a tree. I stayed 100 yards away. He climbed up, caught them, and didn't get stung.

June 19, 2012

...

Hard to imagine being a slave, legally freed for two years, just not told. This is the day in 1865, that the last slaves found out.

...

A van swerves back and forth as it climbs a hill. The driver is reaching into the backseat trying to keep a rottweiler named Bullet from getting into a cooler of meat. He left his other rottweiler, Pistol, at home. Just after cresting the hill he hears a thump. He thought he hit a deer but there's a bloody pair of glasses on his front seat. 

Sound like it could be a beginning to a Stephen King story? Well, it was almost the end of the Stephen King story. Those are the details of him getting hit by a van on this day in 1999.

King later bought that van for $1,500.

His glass frames were bent but the lenses were still good. He had them put in another pair of frames, a statement on the fragility of life.

In an odd coincidence, King and Smith each have the same middle name- Edwin.

He said of the driver, who had 11 DUI's in the previous 10 years:

"This is a guy who only has a little bit of brains to begin with. I mean I have fantasies of confronting him, but Bryan Smith is like Gertrude Stein said about LA "There's no there, there". Call it fate, call it God ... But what you're left with is this guy, who has the IQ of a tomato soup can. An empty tomato soup can. And he hits me at the one blind spot on a long road, no one else to hit for miles, when, say NASA can't get a missile to land on Mars with all the brains and technology in the world, then you think there's something odd going on. Or maybe NASA should just hire Bryan Smith."

As the driver waited for the ambulance he told King's broken, twisted body- "Ain't the two of us just had the shittiest luck." He later told police he was out to get "some of them Marses Bars they have up to the store." The van driver died in his sleep on King's birthday the following year. He was 43.

You can see elements of Misery, Cujo, The Body, Christine, and I'm sure there are others.

...

French mathematician and philosopher, Blaise Pascal, was born on this day in 1623.

"All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone."

"I have only made this letter longer because I have not had the time to make it shorter."

"Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction."

...

Bruce Chatwin, The Songlines- "Pascal, in one of his gloomier pensées, gave it as his opinion that all our miseries stemmed from a single cause: our inability to remain quietly in a room. Why, he asked, must a man with sufficient to live on feel drawn to divert himself on long sea voyages? To dwell in another town? To go off in search of a peppercorn? Or go off to war and break skulls? Later, on further reflection, having discovered the cause of our misfortunes, he wished to understand the reason for them, he found one very good reason: namely, the natural unhappiness of our weak mortal condition; so unhappy that when we gave to it all our attention, nothing could console us. One thing alone could alleviate our despair, and that was ‘distraction’ (divertissement): yet this was the worst of our misfortunes, for in distraction we were prevented from thinking about ourselves and were gradually brought to ruin."

...

Moe Howard, was born on this day in 1897.

"Our genius ain't appreciated around here... let's scram!"

...

Film critic, Pauline Kael, was born on this day in 1919.

"Citizen Kane is perhaps the one American talking picture that seems as fresh now as the day it opened. It may seem even fresher."

Some criticism is not based strictly on opinion, sometimes critics uncover truth.

...

Salman Rushdie was born on this day in 1947. Nobody knows more about offending people than him.

"What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist."

...

Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were executed on this day in 1953. The first sentence from Sylvia plath's The Bell Jar.

“It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn’t know what I was doing in New York.”

...

Koko the Gorilla left us one this day in 2018.

“I am gorilla… I am flowers, animals. I am nature. Man Koko love. Earth Koko love. But man stupid… Stupid! Koko sorry. Koko cry. Time hurry! Fix Earth! Help Earth! Hurry! Protect Earth… Nature see you. Thank you.”

I don't know, I'm a bit suspicious.

My post from that day:

From this morning.

Ben- "Oh no, bad news. Koko the gorilla died."

Emma- "I bet Penny is very sad."

Ben- " I don't think so. Koko killed her in a murder-suicide. Did I forget to tell you that part?"

I stand by that joke. And maybe, just maybe, Koko would have found it funny too.

...

Oh my God, James Gandolfini died. That can't be, can it?

June 19, 2013

...

The Hill, June 18, 2018- Bipartisan group of governors denounces Trump move on pre-existing conditions

OK, so the downward trend has continued and unemployment is about 4%. But how many of the 96% have good enough jobs to pay for their pre-existing conditions out-of-pocket? That seems like the type of question that wouldn't cross the president's mind.

http://hill.cm/VB2FLDL

June 19, 2018

...

Oh my goodness. Proceed with caution. Raises an interesting question about Martin Luther King and Louis CK. Could have Dr. King continued?

https://youtu.be/K_pWtlIwgTM

June 19, 2021

...

From Skeptic Magazine

Top 10 myths of popular psychology

Myth #5: Hypnosis is a Unique “Trance” State Differing in Kind from Wakefulness

...

Gena Rowlands was born on this day in 1932. Tennessee Williams had this to say about her:

"Well, she's ours, all ours. There will come a time when we will not believe that we had access to what she can do. She arrives with talent, not a message, so she is overlooked in a way that is enraging. There is longevity in her talent and her beauty. There will be surprises. I would like to be the author of at least one. Failing that, I would like, at the very least, a good seat at the unveiling of this surprise--and the patience of one good friend who will sit with me while I watch it, over and over again."

...

Other notable birthdays- Lou Gehrig (1903), Paul Dano (1984)

...

The Ultimate Warrior- "NOW YOU MUST DEAL WITH THE CREATION OF ALL THE UNPLEASANTRIES IN THE ENTIRE UNIVERSE AS I FEEL THE INJECTION FROM THE GODS ABOVE!"

...

Pascal again: "I would prefer an intelligent hell to a stupid paradise."

...

Skateboarding how-to.

https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=pfbid02gE8Ftu5mdYwBq226zJrG2WB1LqvYxY1o7gTnibRRNpEUVXhFj9nXUSaQVpST3HU2l&id=741063511&mibextid=irwG9G

June 19, 2021

...

Alcaraz with a nonchalant ball trick.

https://www.facebook.com/reel/185948261013592

...

...

Mark Twain- "It's easier to fool people than it is to convince them they've been fooled."

...

Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy- "Man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much—the wheel, New York, wars and so on—whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man—for precisely the same reasons."

...

Seneca- "Men can be divided into two groups: one that goes ahead and achieves something, and one that comes after and criticizes.”

...

Jung- "In each of us there is another whom we do not know."

...

Pythagoras- “Learn to be silent. Let your quiet mind listen and absorb."

...

Adam Smith- "The learned ignore the evidence of their senses to preserve the coherence of the ideas of their imagination."

...

Hitchens, in a debate with Rabbi David Wolpe-

"Well first… you’re right that science has made many things more comprehensible to us and it’s explained things that religion used to take credit for. In other words, now we know there’s a germ theory of disease. Diseases are not curses or revenge from heaven. Same with earthquakes and so on. The stuff they used to teach us, and many of them still do is nonsense—evil nonsense as well as ignorant nonsense. But, it’s also taught us, just in my lifetime, an enormous amount more about how little we know. We’re much, much more ignorant than people who lived before Galileo. Because we have now an increasingly large idea of the fantastic expanse of the unknown. That’s precisely the moment at which to say that skepticism is what’s necessary, inquiry, debate, doubt. Where’s faith in this? Where’s the usefulness of faith there? There’s no use to it at all. Socrates, who, as far as I know, existed, but may well not have done, it doesn’t matter to me. No one will insult me if they say, “Socrates, your great hero, didn’t exist.” Try it on a Muslim, try it on a Christian that their prophets didn’t exist, or tell people that Moses is a myth. They start hurling themselves about making menacing noises very often. Socrates said you’re only educated when you’ve understood how ignorant you are. And you’re only going to even find that out by doubting everything all the time. There’s all the difference in the world between that outlook and that mentality and the mentality of faith."

...

Albert Einstein- "A foolish faith in authority is the worst enemy of truth."

Addendum 

I'm listening to Anthony Bourdain's Kitchen Confidential. I thought it was an expose on the restaurant industry, but it's nothing short of a literary masterpiece.

"Ten minutes into the shift, the cheap polyester whites we all wore would be soaked through with sweat, clinging to chest and back. All the cooks' necks and wrists were pink and inflamed with awful heat rashes; the end-of-shift clothing change in the Room's fetid, septic locker-rooms was a gruesome panorama of dermatological curiosities. One saw boils, pimples, ingrown hair, rashes, buboes, lesions, and skin rot of a severity and variety you'd expect to see in some jungle backwater. And the smell of thirty not very fastidious cooks their sodden work boots and sneakers, armpits, cologne, fungal feet, rotten breath — and the ambient odor of moldering three-day-old uniforms, long-forgotten pilfered food stashes hidden in lockers to which the combination was unknown, all combined to form a noxious, penetrating cloud that followed you home, and made you smell as if you'd been rolling around in sheep guts."

.

Departing cooks and favored waiters, on their last day of employment, were invited to nail their grotty work shoes to a Wall of Fame by Sammy's cellar office. As time went on, row after row of moldering work boots, shoes and sneakers were I pounded into the wall, a somewhat grim reminder of departed friends. On slow nights-and there were, disconcertingly, a growing number of these-we'd have fun with food color and sweet dough. Dimitri, it turned out, was remarkably adept at crafting life-like fingers, toes and sexual organs from basic ingredients. He'd fashion frighteningly realistic severed thumbs-skin rudely shredded at one end, bone fragments made from leek white projecting from the wound-and we'd leave these things around for unsuspecting waiters and managers to find. A waiter would open a reach-in in the morning to find a leaking, torn fingertip, Band-Aid still attached, pinioned to a slice of Wonderbread with a frilled toothpick. A floor manager would be called down to the kitchen in the middle of a dinner shift to find one of us standing by a bloody cutting board, red-smeared side-towel wrapped around a hand, and as they approached, one of Dimitri's grisly fingers would drop onto his foot. We experimented constantly, finding to our delight that not only did the sweet dough look like flesh when shaped and colored correctly, but it drew flies like the real thing! Left overnight at room temperature, Dimitri's fake digits could develop into a truly horrifying spectacle.

Eventually, when every member of the staff was thoroughly inured to the sight of a severed, flycovered penis in the urinal, or finding a bloody finger in his apron pocket, we moved on to even greater atrocities. One night, with his full cooperation, we stripped Dimitri naked, spattered and filled his ears, nose and mouth with stage blood, and wrapped him in Saran Wrap before helping him into a chest freezer in the dark, rear storage area of the restaurant, his limbs arranged in an unnaturally contorted pose-as if he'd been rudely dumped there post-mortem. We then called the manager on the intercom, asking first if he'd seen Dimitri. We hadn't seen him in hours, we explained, and we were worried. Then we asked the poor bastard if he'd be kind enough to grab a box of shrimp out of the freezer for us, as we were short-handed, Dimitri being missing and all, and four tables going out at once. I think you can imagine what the manager experienced: hurrying back to the dank corner of the cellar, a single, bare light-bulb illuminating the chest freezer; he lifts the lid, only to find the nude, fishbelly-white, blood-splattered corpse of our missing comrade staring up at him with dead eyes through a thin layer of plastic wrap, the beginnings of a light frost under the film making the already gruesome scene even more terrifyingly real.

We ended up having to give the guy a shot of ammonia inhaler; his knees buckled and he was unable to return to work for over an hour.