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Myths & Mythmakers
Jun. 8th, 2025 10:14 amThe immigration demonstrations in LA right now are not the first time the National Guard has been called in to quell a protest.
I'm thinking about the People's Park protests in Berkeley. The National Guard advanced on us with rifles drawn & then the helicopters descended. Was it the National Guard or the helicopters that dropped the tear gas canisters? I can't remember.
I do remember fleeing across campus, pushing the then-toddler Alicia in her stroller, tears & snot streaming down my face. Maybe this is the reason why Alicia grew up to be such a bitch: Exposure to tear gas addled her unmylinated brain!
Still, it's always news when the gub'mint uses military-style force against white people.
And, of course, the People's Park incident happened in 1969. Which is to say a trillion million years ago. I was only 17, or I would have known better than to bring a toddler to a political protest. On account of skipping all those years of school, I actually started at UC Berkeley when I was sixteen.
###
Sadly, I will not be around for the NYC pride parade because it is Lew & Ed's wedding reception weekend, so I will be in Edinboro, Pennsylvania.
I avoided all those Pride demonstrations when they were just about marketing.
But this year, Pride has a political dimension so it has regained its gravitas. I'll go to as many Pride demonstrations as I can stuff into my schedule.
Anyway.
The Pinebush Alien Fair did take place yesterday—rather stupidly because yesterday it poured relentlessly whereas today, the scheduled Rain Day, it's not only dry but pleasantly balmy.
I grabbed an umbrella and drove on up.
The chief joy of the Pinebush Alien Fair is its costumes. But very few people wanted to wear costumes in the rain. I'm sure this dog didn't:
But its mean humans made it dress up anyway.
There were a couple of good window displays:
But mostly, it was just yr typical tacky upstate New York small town craft fair. Disappointing!
###
I went home & spent the rest of the day Remunerating. Because those fuckin' MacArthur Foundation people keep forgetting to send me my genius grant money.
Went for a looooong tromp—five miles!—when it finally cleared up at sunset.
Watched The Beauty Queen of Jerusalem. (Excellent if you don't mind low production values.)
Abluted.
Slumbered.
And then at 3 in the morning, awakened with a bolt & decided to try and read myself back to sleep.
Grabbed the first book at hand from the stack on my night table—Tracy Dougherty's remarkable biography of Larry McMurtry.
Which is even more remarkable on second read:
Consciousness: the sense of self, the voice chattering at us in our heads, the apparent awareness of a presence, a spirit, a soul inside us, distinct from our bodies and the electrical firings in our brains. Scientists and philosophers fall all over themselves trying to explain, define, or locate consciousness. It is like searching for darkness with a flashlight...
“I have felt largely posthumous since [my open-heart] operation,” McMurtry said. “My old psyche, or old self, was shattered—now it whirls around me in fragments … The heart-lung machine allows for biologic survival, but my own feeling is that the person, as opposed to the body, dies anyway … For a certain period of time one is technically alive but in another, powerful sense, dead. Then one is jump-started back into life, but the Faustian Bargain has been made: you’re there, but not as yourself. That self, that personality, lies back beyond the time when you were on the pump. That gap, in my case at least, has proven unclosable.”
I have heard that from several other open-heart surgery survivors, too.
And sometimes you can just look at people like Bill Clinton who've had the surgery & know that's what happened to them.
###
Larry McMurtry wrote one perfect novel—The Last Picture Show—and several flawed novels I have deep affection for—Lonesome Dove, Moving On.
And a whole lot of dreck.
It occurs to me that McMurtry's biographer Tracy Dougherty is a much better writer than McMurtry ever was.
What gave McMurtry the edge, I suppose, was that he was actively elegizing a dying mythology (i.e. the American West.)
Humans revere their mythmakers.
I'm thinking about the People's Park protests in Berkeley. The National Guard advanced on us with rifles drawn & then the helicopters descended. Was it the National Guard or the helicopters that dropped the tear gas canisters? I can't remember.
I do remember fleeing across campus, pushing the then-toddler Alicia in her stroller, tears & snot streaming down my face. Maybe this is the reason why Alicia grew up to be such a bitch: Exposure to tear gas addled her unmylinated brain!
Still, it's always news when the gub'mint uses military-style force against white people.
And, of course, the People's Park incident happened in 1969. Which is to say a trillion million years ago. I was only 17, or I would have known better than to bring a toddler to a political protest. On account of skipping all those years of school, I actually started at UC Berkeley when I was sixteen.
###
Sadly, I will not be around for the NYC pride parade because it is Lew & Ed's wedding reception weekend, so I will be in Edinboro, Pennsylvania.
I avoided all those Pride demonstrations when they were just about marketing.
But this year, Pride has a political dimension so it has regained its gravitas. I'll go to as many Pride demonstrations as I can stuff into my schedule.
Anyway.
The Pinebush Alien Fair did take place yesterday—rather stupidly because yesterday it poured relentlessly whereas today, the scheduled Rain Day, it's not only dry but pleasantly balmy.
I grabbed an umbrella and drove on up.
The chief joy of the Pinebush Alien Fair is its costumes. But very few people wanted to wear costumes in the rain. I'm sure this dog didn't:
But its mean humans made it dress up anyway.
There were a couple of good window displays:
But mostly, it was just yr typical tacky upstate New York small town craft fair. Disappointing!
###
I went home & spent the rest of the day Remunerating. Because those fuckin' MacArthur Foundation people keep forgetting to send me my genius grant money.
Went for a looooong tromp—five miles!—when it finally cleared up at sunset.
Watched The Beauty Queen of Jerusalem. (Excellent if you don't mind low production values.)
Abluted.
Slumbered.
And then at 3 in the morning, awakened with a bolt & decided to try and read myself back to sleep.
Grabbed the first book at hand from the stack on my night table—Tracy Dougherty's remarkable biography of Larry McMurtry.
Which is even more remarkable on second read:
Consciousness: the sense of self, the voice chattering at us in our heads, the apparent awareness of a presence, a spirit, a soul inside us, distinct from our bodies and the electrical firings in our brains. Scientists and philosophers fall all over themselves trying to explain, define, or locate consciousness. It is like searching for darkness with a flashlight...
“I have felt largely posthumous since [my open-heart] operation,” McMurtry said. “My old psyche, or old self, was shattered—now it whirls around me in fragments … The heart-lung machine allows for biologic survival, but my own feeling is that the person, as opposed to the body, dies anyway … For a certain period of time one is technically alive but in another, powerful sense, dead. Then one is jump-started back into life, but the Faustian Bargain has been made: you’re there, but not as yourself. That self, that personality, lies back beyond the time when you were on the pump. That gap, in my case at least, has proven unclosable.”
I have heard that from several other open-heart surgery survivors, too.
And sometimes you can just look at people like Bill Clinton who've had the surgery & know that's what happened to them.
###
Larry McMurtry wrote one perfect novel—The Last Picture Show—and several flawed novels I have deep affection for—Lonesome Dove, Moving On.
And a whole lot of dreck.
It occurs to me that McMurtry's biographer Tracy Dougherty is a much better writer than McMurtry ever was.
What gave McMurtry the edge, I suppose, was that he was actively elegizing a dying mythology (i.e. the American West.)
Humans revere their mythmakers.
