Month: June 2026

The Flacci Conspiracy

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The Flacci Conspiracy

I’m not going to lie. I’m getting frustrated trying to find an agent for my novel Too Much Trouble. I’ve visited dozens of literary agency websites. They might consider a manuscript involving serial-killer Cub Scout den mothers, dragon-riding interior decorators, sexually repressed werewolves, psychosocially damaged hydro-therapists, or emotionally available Navy SEALs; however, none of them are interested in a coming-of-age novel featuring three college-freshman navigating first love, family, friendship, and loss during one unforgettable Christmas week in 1972.[1]

So the hell with it. Farewell, Too Much Trouble. Hail, The Flacci Conspiracy.  

Here’s a brief synopsis of The Flacci Conspiracy.

Following the aftermath of a world-wide pandemic and four years of godless communistic rule from a doddering old fool who blinks his eyes a lot, voters without college degrees flock to the polls and elect an evangelist-backed charismatic felon[1] obsessed with spicing up Washington DC’s stodgy neo-classical architecture with some Rococo glitter. His grand vision includes a White House ballroom, a Triumphal arch, and a restored Reflection Pool.[2]

However, the former leader of NIAID[3], Antonio Flacci, is hell-bent on sabotaging the President’s beautification projects. He decides to start small by ruining the Reflection Pool restoration. There’s a problem, however. The pool is monitored by a half dozen mobile security stations and at least nine camera sets. 

Working around the clock, the evil scientists at NIAID come up with a diabolical formula resulting in a potion that when ingested turns people invisible for four hours. 

Armed with box-cutters and packets of fertilizer, four invisible Antifa ninjas slit the Reflection Pool’s lining and seed its pristine Bessy Ross blue water with fertilizer, resulting in a virulent outbreak of alga and widespread negative media attention.

I’ll admit I haven’t quite figured out how truth justice, and the American way will be restored, but it will come to me as I’m writing. As my late friend Starkey Flythe, Jr. used to say, “The pen leads the mind.”

Anyway, the very thought of this has restored my will to live.

[1] Picture a combination of the wrestler Gorgeous George and Liberace.

[2] What do you get when you subtract the letters i-h-a-l from Triumphal?

[3] the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases

[1]Too Much Trouble does feature a serial killer, but the murders take place “off-stage,” and John Henry Wade dies of natural causes (i.e., a case of the flu) before the police can capture after in a high-speed chase through Dorchester County.

Oh Shame, Where Is Thy Blush

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Yesterday afternoon, Caroline and I met Cathy Coulter and Chuck Sulliavan at Lowlife to celebrate Chuck’s 83rd birthday. As so often is the case, Donald Trump, our most Liberacean[1] of presidents, elbowed his way into our conversation because earlier in the day at the G-7 conference in France, he made such an egregious ass out of himself that it would have been downright unpatriotic not to mock him. 

After arriving 30 minutes late for a meeting, rather than apologizing to the heads of state assembled there for inconveniencing them, Trump declared himself “the Boss”— a not-so-subtle fuck you to allies we should be at least polite to in public. I guess you could say it’s ironic that someone so obsessed with décor (cf. Liberace) would lack all sense of decorum.

A day earlier, in a slurred speech that lasted over one hour, he called the presidents who preceded him “dumb sons-of-bitches.” Of course, the so-called speech was essentially—like all of his speeches—a tirade, a catalogue of paranoid grievances punctuated occasionally with braggadocio so outrageous that it would make the Wizard of Oz blush. 

As we sat there at the bar, it occurred to me that Trump’s family must not really love him. Otherwise, they would stage some sort of intervention. He’s a shambling wreck of a human being, the most insecure person on the third planet from the sun. Let’s hope if there’s an afterlife, his mother and father are howling alongside the likes of Stalin and Lucretia Borgia in the sulphureous flames of everlasting perdition. 

It’s ultimately their fault, his hideous parents’ fault, who look like freaks from some long forgotten Twilight Zone episode (or worse, mishappen demi-demons crammed into a corner of one of Bosch’s canvases). Obviously, they didn’t love him, and that black hole of neglect has fueled his gargantuan insecurities so that it’s now a requirement at cabinet meetings for cabinet heads to perform oratorical fellatio on an obese diaper-wearing wrestling promoter incapable of speaking in coherent paragraphs.

Oh shame, where is thy blush!

Anyway, Chuck said that Trump would never allow an intervention, which is no doubt the case, but if Ivanka, Eric, Donnie, Jr.  genuinely cared about him they would. 

I suspect that the only person who really loves him is his communication director, Steven Chueng, who loves him the way Odd Job loved Goldfinger, i.e., stupidly.

[1] Liberacean, adj. resembling the flamboyantly gay pianist popular in the previous century. 

A Dead End Hedonistic Septuagenarian Foresees His Death

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A Dead End Hedonistic Septuagenarian Foresees His Death

for Chuck Sullivan

The years to come seemed waste of breath,
A waste of breath the years behind.

I know I shall meet my fate one day,
while crossing Second Street East,
neglecting to look both ways . . .

A MAGA JACKED UP PICKUP TRUCK

. . . not with a bang, but with a whoomph,
and a thud, and with something louder than a whimper.