Elliott Ness Rifling Through Melania’s Panty Drawer

I am reading Sometimes a Great Notion v-e-r-y s-l-o-w-l-y because the prose is dense and filled with rapid POV shifts.

Hey! It’s a post-modern novel.

I’m now at the scene when Lee comes back to Wakonda, and Hank and Lee are speed-boating across the river to the hulking, weirdly constructed Stomper manse—you wanna talk Jungian archetypal houses? Man, this is it—and they cannot communicate at all.

Lee is like Hamlet, filled with simmering Oedipal resentment toward the brutish half-brother who (as he sees it) seduced and abandoned his mother.

Hank actually has some affection for Lee, but he can’t express it in any way but as a kind of relentless savage teasing because in this ultra-macho milieu, this is how men express ❤️LUV❤️.

The scene really impressed me because I, too, am a teaser.

A decade or so back, I decided sarcastic humor was a form of aggression, and I resolved to strike it from my repertoire.

But I still like to tease, and I don’t think teasing is a form of aggression.

Teasing is a verbal form of puppy play, an innocent tumble and regroup.

I think puppy play is a good thing. Elizabeth Bennett teases!

If I tease someone, and they have a negative reaction to it, of course, I stop.

But I also make a mental note of it: You’ll never be friends with this person.

###

Anyway, my mood has snapped back to normal—which is to say, infinite bemusement as the world continues to play a series of (mostly) diverting tricks on me.

This isn’t due to any sudden insights or sartori moments.

It’s due to the fact that the heat wave broke.

I Remunerated.

I tromped five miles.

I gardened.

My tomatoes look like shit:



This has been a most unsatisfactory gardening year.

###

I avoid reading anything at all about national news.

The Mar-a-Lago raid got high-fives from the progressive faithful, and I got a good chuckle out of Elliott Ness rifling through Melania’s panty drawer.

But I think it has a high probability of backfiring unless the Dems are clear about what exactly it is they are looking for.

I worry the raid may have accomplished the impossible—i.e. turning Mister “Grab ‘em by the pussy” into a bona fide victim.