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.

OD-ing on Confederate Jasmine

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OD-ing on Confederate Jasmine

Down here in the Lowcountry of South Carolina,
I’m suffering the odiferous overload
of Confederate Jasmine in full bloom mode.

It smells like a perfume that Edgar Alan Poe
might pour all over his Lost Lenore,
way too sentimentally sweet this scent

of lost causes thankfully lost,
an overpowering aroma that
makes the sweetest, sweet tea seem tart.

Strunk and White on Steroids

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Strunk and White on Steroids

Hypocrite lecteur,—mon semblable, —mon frère!

Baudelaire, “Les Fleurs du mal” 

Last night I did something mildly perverse: I fed a commercial Facebook post into my ChatGPT—the same one I use for research, copy editing, and tech triage—and asked it if the copy had been generated by AI.

BTW, I refer to my ChatGPT as “Chad,” not because I think it’s human, but because it’s easier to say (and type) than ChatGPT.

Anyway, Chad conjectured that the Facebook post had been produced by AI and then provided these telltale signs of AI authorship (as if Chad were human, and didn’t engage in the same techniques itself).

            The first indicator is that AI produces balanced sentences. [1]

Three-part structures. Nicely paced. Very composed. Humans do this too, of course—but we’re sloppier about it. We interrupt ourselves. We go long when we shouldn’t, or bail out early.[2]

e.g., “Stay alert, stay ready, and don’t talk your way out of the moment.”

The second sign of AI-generated prose Chad calls “hinge sentence moves”—phrases like

“Because it does happen” 

“And here’s the part that matters”

Those little turns feel less like thoughts arriving and more like pre-installed signposts.

The third characteristic of AI writing Chad cites is its tendency to engage in “emotional generalities instead of specifics.”

            “move your life in a direction that feels right”

That’s technically fine, but it floats. A human writer—especially you— tends to ground emotion in something tactile or slightly odd.[3]

Phrases like “move your life forward in a direction that feels right.”

No one ever missed a bus in these sentences. No one spills anything. No one says the wrong thing.

            Number four is “controlled charm.”

“Your dog, who is clearly the decision-maker.”

That line has been focus-grouped by the internet into harmlessness. It lands, but it doesn’t leave a mark.

And, finally, number five: evenness of tone.

No spikes. No awkward sentence that makes you pause and reread. No moment where the writer sounds just a little off—and therefore real.

Humans leave fingerprints. AI wipes the glass.

And here’s the twist: The more people read AI copy, the more they’ll start to distrust fluency.

So, there you have it. ladies and germs, the AI Style Sheet: Strunk and White on steroids. 

Stay tuned. My next project is plugging some Faulkner into AI to see how it would rephrase the opening paragraph of Absalom, Absalom.

[1] I’ve italicized Chad’s direct quotes.

[2] Note the self-referential pronoun “we.”

[3] Chad doesn’t mention this, but AI-prose loves them em-dashes. I’m assuming the “you” in the sentence refers to Wesley Moore III.

Mental Jukebox Tourette’s Syndrome Disorder (MJTD)

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Yesterday’s being 4/20 and all, I committed a cliche— got confunctificated on cannabis.[1]  

As I made my way home on foot from Chico Feo, East Erie Avenue was blessedly empty, which meant I could recite out loud the lyrics looping in what I’ve come to call my mental jukebox. Saying the words—or singing them—is therapeutic, much preferable to merely letting them swirl unvoiced like dust devils in the attic of your frontal lobe.

No doubt I’m not the only one who suffers from this niche obsessive-compulsive disorder, but I suspect it’s extremely rare. I can’t find anything about it on the internet, so I’ve had to name it myself—Mental Jukebox Tourette’s Syndrome, or MJTS.

Playing in my head on the walk home was a Beach Boys cover of the Hollywood Argyles’ song “Alley-Oop,” a silly novelty tune inspired by a comic-strip caveman.

There’s a man in the funny papers we all know
(Alley-Oop, oop, oop, oop-oop)
He lives way back a long time ago
(Alley-Oop, oop, oop, oop-oop)
He don’t eat nothin’ but a bearcat stew
(Alley-Oop, oop, oop, oop-oop)
Well, this cat’s name is-a Alley-Oop

Here’s what got stuck in my head and what I voiced aloud as I walked along:

There he goes.
Look at that caveman go.
Ride, Daddy, ride.
Switch them blades.

The only way to exorcise these jukebox demons—at least for me—is to listen to a recording of the song. So when I got home, I cued the Beach Boys’ version, and lo and behold, I’d gotten the lyrics wrong. After “Ride, Daddy ride” comes “Heigh-ho, dinosaur,” not “switch them blades.”

Actually, the line “switch them blades” comes from another cover on that Beach Boys album, “Hully Gully.”[2]

‘Hully Gully” is a 1959 tune recorded by the Olympians, one of those songs that celebrates a dance. It was covered by, not only the Beach Boys, but also Buddy Guy, Chubby Checker, the Grateful Dead, and the J. Geils band—among others.

Here’s how it starts:

Well, there’s a dance spreading round like an awful disease
Hully, hully gully
You just shake your shoulders and you wiggle your knees
(Play it like it is!)
Hully, hully gully
Well, there’s a dance spreading round from coast to coast
Hully, hully gully
Well, when me and my baby do it, that’s how we do it the most
Hully, hully gully.

And here’s the bridge:

Hully, hully gully
Do it with your left shoulder
Hully, hully gully
Do it with your other shoulder, now
Hully, hully gully
Switch your blades
Hully, hully gully,

Not “switch them blades,” but “switch your blades.”

Even though I was wrong, you have to admit: “switch them blades” sounds much better.

Anyway, like its ugly distant cousin tinnitus, I’ve learned how to live with MJTS. So don’t worry—I’m not going to hit you up with a GoFundMe request.

[1]I first heard “conjunctificated” from a Black co- worker in 1977 at Whit-Ash, a furniture store in Columbia. This cat rarely said a word ever, but one day—out of nowhere— he proclaimed, “This place is conjunctificated,” and I knew exactly what he meant.

[2] The album, Beach Boy Party, a 1965 studio recording of mainly covers played with acoustic instruments and overdubbed with chatter to make it sound as if it was recorded at a party. The one hit from the album is “Barbara Ann.”

The Old Testament Ain’t the New Testament, But It’s Pete Hegseth’s Testament

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The Old Testament Ain’t the New Testament But It’s Pete Hegseth’s Testamentthe

air without refuge of silence,

    the drift of lice, teething,

and above it the mouthing of orators,

    the arse-belching of preachers.

Ezra Pound, “Canto XIV”

One of the most puzzling paradoxes of the Trump era is the veneration he receives from evangelical Christians—those Bible-thumping Pharisees who once considered Bill Clinton’s dalliance with Monica Lewinsky the Marianas Trench of moral decrepitude.

Here’s Franklin Graham in 1998: “The Bible says we’re to pray for our leaders—but it also says we’re to hold them accountable. When a leader lies and deceives, that’s a serious moral failure.”

And here he is twenty years later: “We’re not electing a pastor. We’re electing a president.”

I mean, hypocrisy of this magnitude makes Tartuffe look like Atticus Finch.

Of course, unless you’ve just emerged from a two-week coma, you’ve seen the above illustration posted on Truth Social by none other than Donald Trump—the same “gentleman” who famously suggested that “pussies” are there for the grabbing.

Trump, of course, claims he didn’t interpret the image of himself miraculously healing one of the eight white figures as Jesus, but simply as a physician.

Graham concurs: “There were no spiritual references—no halo, no crosses, no angels. It was a flag, soldiers, a nurse, fighter planes, eagles. … I think this is a lot to do about nothing.”

Hey, somebody remove the scales from Frankie’s eyes. There might not be a halo, but either the recumbent man (Jon Stewart? Jeffrey Epstein?) has a king-hell high fever, or the divine touch of Trump has transferred the light he’s holding to the man’s body. When’s the last time your physician made a house call in flowing first-century robes?

However, my favorite Trump-administration foot shot belongs to Pete Hegseth, who paraphrased Jules Winnfield’s monologue from Pulp Fiction at a monthly prayer service.

Here’s Jules from the movie:

Ezekiel 25:17. “The path of the righteous man is beset on all sides by the
Inequities of the selfish and the tyranny of evil men. Blessed is he who, in
The name of charity and good will, shepherds the weak through the valley of
Darkness, for he is truly his brother’s keeper and the finder of lost
Children. And I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious
Anger those who attempt to poison and destroy my brothers. And you will know
My name is the Lord when I lay my vengeance upon thee.”

Here’s Hegseth’s rendition:

So the prayer is CSAR 25:17, and it reads—and pray with me, please— “The path of the downed aviator is beset on all sides by the inequities of the selfish and the tyranny of evil men. Blessed is he who, in the name of camaraderie and duty, shepherds the lost through the valley of darkness, for he is truly his brother’s keeper and the finder of lost children.”

“And I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger those who attempt to capture and destroy my brother, and you will know my call sign is Sandy 1 when I lay my vengeance upon thee. Amen.’”

Okay, I’m willing to give Hegseth the benefit of the doubt. He didn’t say he was quoting the Book of Ezekiel, only that the prayer reflected it. Nevertheless, this is O.T. war-god Yahweh bellowing, not the Jesus they claim to worship—the Prince of Peace, admonishing us to love our enemies.

By the way, the aircraft that was shot down wasn’t dropping flowers on southwestern Iran.

Lord, help us.

                                                                                

The Joys of Invalid-hood

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When I was five years old living in Biloxi, Mississippi, I was fortunate enough to contract rheumatic fever, an autoimmune reaction to untreated strep throat that triggers the immune system to rev into overdrive, attacking healthy tissue along with invasive streptococcus bacteria. I say “fortunate” because the disease left no permanent heart valve or joint damage and no doubt changed the course of my life because, to echo Jagger and Richards’ “Street Fighting Man,” what’s a poor bedridden boy to do but play with puppets, put together picture puzzles, and be read to?  

Whether for good or ill, these lifelong habits have formed my character.

Spending a week in a hospital ward and another month in bed on Laurel Street in Summerville contributed to my becoming an avid indoorsman. Even in my young adulthood, I preferred the vicarious adventures reading provides —hunting down that great white whale with Ahab and the boys—to actual deep sea fishing, which I’ve done once but never will again. Not that it wasn’t interesting seeing flying fish skim across the surface of the ocean and that waterspout lazily twisting in the grey distance, but when all is said and done, Wordsworth’s nature just ain’t my thing.

Of course, I’ve moved on from picture puzzles of my pre-kindergarten hospital bed to more sophisticated pastimes like crosswords, sudoku, Wordle, Connections, and Spelling Bee.  Solving a set series of on-line puzzles has become an unalterable beloved morning ritual during my retirement. 

As far as puppetry goes, you can catch a video of a late life puppet show by hitting this LINK.

But more importantly, back in the day — the summer of 1957 to be precise— by mother read to me. I especially liked the Uncle Wiggily books, featuring a set cast of characters like Peetie Bow-Wow and Neddie Stub tail, the bear chap, and I also enjoyed Mother Goose and the brothers Grimm’s fairy tales.

Newtonian physics de damned!

Hey, diddle, diddle,

The cat and the fiddle,

The cow jumped over the moon;

The little dog laughed

To see such sport,

And the dish ran away with the spoon.

After I learned to read myself, I started collecting Classic Illustrated comic books in which the authors and artists attempted to jazz up novels like Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment with action packed illustrations that actually belie the dark claustrophobic interiority of the novel’s 720 some odd pages. 

Anyway, in retrospect, I’m okay with swapping two months of playing tag out-of-doors to the subsequent decades of living a life of imagination, and, of course, I know Ernest Hemingway, Cormac McCarthy, and my pal Jason Chambers have proven one can both love literature and the wonders of nature. Indeed, that love no doubt has deepened their understanding of how it all works.

C’est la vie.

Resting Ogre Face

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I’ve come up with the male equivalent of “resting bitch face,” that sexist slight used to describe women who don’t dutifully beam sun-splashed smiles as they slog through yet another day of taxing responsibilities. Unfortunately, my term for the male equivalent—resting ogre face—aptly describes—to echo Eliot’s “Prufrock”—the face I prepare to face the faces that I meet. In other words, I shuffle through my world looking like an angry old man, projecting an aura that conveys get out of my way, don’t mess with me, whoever you are.

Even when I should be attempting to look somewhat pleasant—for example, in a public interview at a book festival—I come across like a put-upon asshole. Take a look. Notice the interviewer’s cheerful demeanor. Now notice the expression of the man sitting next to him.

I don’t even know, at this late stage of my existence, if it’s worth the effort to emend this unfortunate aspect of my demeanor. After all, a genuine scowl, as opposed to an ersatz smile, might be preferable in today’s timeline, when our country is led by an amoral, narcissistic vulgarian who sports a white baseball cap at a solemn ceremony where he meets the families of slain soldiers in a war he started under false pretenses—apparently to distract the public from the almost assured likelihood that he’s a pedophile.

In any case, until circumstances improve, resting ogre face may simply be the most honest expression available.

Submission for Beeple Art Show

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I’ve submitted this one minute video entitled Edge Connections for an art show in Charleston. If accepted it would play in a loop projected on one of the walls of the gallery. The audio would be provided by the curator. The theme is Folly Beach Noir, the Edge of America. Click on the box below to engage, even if it’s black.