Monday, August 31, 2020

Thinking abou Russian site Q-Anon

 

What's on my mind is this: Q-Anon is a Russian site, meant to confuse the easily swayed. Lyin' Trump is gonna love it, of course, because he is depending on Putin's help to rig this election like he rigged the last one.
I don't like this bs at all. But the part that really hurts is that some people who used to have a heart and brain have gone down the rabbit hole and completely lost themselves. And they have no idea that they are being led by some pimply 16-year-old at a computer in a basement in Moscow. That just hurts my head and heart.

A Story from a Recent Interview Michael Sung Did with Me

 

Peter Gorman, an award-winning journalist and author of "Ayahuasca in my Blood" and "Sapo in my Soul," recounted a few colorful experiences with me from his 35+ years of living, traveling, and working in and around Iquitos and the Peruvian Amazon Rainforest:
_________
Peter Gorman: "I remember seeing Julio [Curandero Julio Jerena] get knocked off his stool once in the middle of an ayahuasca ceremony. He must have flown 3 feet. He was a tiny little guy, and it was like watching a sitting Aikido move. Suddenly, he went flying like he had been thrown and just lay there on the floor afterwards. His daughter then told me to start singing, and there were other people mareado in the room."
"I did not have any icaros to sing. Remember, this was before I knew about dietas and all this other stuff."
"So what could I do?"
"I started singing Alberta Let your Hair Hang Down Low. Good Golly Miss Molly. Devil in a Blue Dress. Because that is all I knew. I did whatever I could do. I must have sung for 1.5 hours. I just kept the shacapa shaking, singing, and blowing mapacho smoke."
"Julio finally got up, grabbed the shacapa, took the mapacho from my hand, and continued the ceremony. He was mad at himself the next day, telling me he was weak and was unable to keep outside influences from interfering in the ceremony. I never thought he was weak, but he was around 90 years old at this time."
"Julio would not really talk about brujeria [black magic] with me though. When I would ask him about it once in a while, he would just say: "Forget it, forget it. The less you know about it, the better. There is nothing good that comes from brujeria. Leave it alone."

Sunday, August 30, 2020

A New York Story

 

So I found Patti Smith's M Train book on the kitchen table when I was cleaning it up. My friend Claudia V, whom I have known for 40 plus years, gave it to me. I liked Smith, not just for her music but because she and her then-boyfriend Robert Mapelthorpe, lived in New York City's Chelsea Hotel at about the same time I did. I think they were a year earlier or two years earlier. And I was only there for 5 weeks or so, after my breakup with CL.
Smith talked about Maplethorpe falling in love with hustling his ass on 42 street, with his friend, the poet-songwriter Jim Carroll. Both became famous: Carroll for his poetry, songs,and the book The Basketball Diaries.
Maplethorpe became famous for his photos of the extreme homosexual life.
So I was talking to my daughter Madeleina about Patti Smith and the Chelsea Hotel, and that led into a discussion of Maplethorpe and Carroll, which led into a discussion of the chicken hawks who plied 53 Street and Lexington Ave at the RR train station line, which led to talking about my gay cook at my The Cold Beer Blues Bar in Iquitos, Peru, who was fine until he tried to kill my son Marco -- def a pain in the ass -- with a kitchen knife, and then Madeleina said my story was getting too confusing and could she excuse herself to go to the bathroom.
I let her, of course. But damn, if I just had another hour, I could have brought that story back home....hahahaha. Sometimes I just take too roundabout a path. Darn it. I know it was all connected.

Saturday, August 29, 2020

The Way It Is

I am being pushed a little. Two of my friends evidently believe in PizzaGate, which, if we lived in another world, would justify my separating their heads from the rest of them. Yes, two friends of mine believe Hillary Clinton, Oprah Winfrey, Jim Carry and others are killing children to drink the essence of their third eyes.
if those friends were my livestock I would put them down out of mercy just because they are that stupid.
Other people I know listen to trump's farts and believe that Biden caused the depression we are in and is responsible for the civil unrest. I wish I could put those stupid people out of my misery as well.
There is no Pizzagate. Trump caused more than 125,000-150,000 deaths from the pandemic, he is responsible for the fucked economy, and he caused all the civil unrest. If you or anyone you know cannot see that, they are horrifyingly stupid.

 

Sunday, August 16, 2020

One Time Only Bible Study

 

This is rare, coming from me. Full disclosure: I am a lapsed Catholic who was a great altar boy. In our parish the altar boys brought food to old people, read to them even when their homes smelled like urine, helped paint a house or two for poor people, that sort of thing. We weren't always great at it, but we tried.
That said, a friend of mine recently posted something about the New Testament of the Bible on FB, calling out the impossibly magikal stories that could not have happened. I agree, but for different reasons. If Jesus could, for instance, raise Lazarus from the dead because Lazarus' mother was so distraught, why didn't he raise others whose mothers were also distraught? I mean, what kind of superhero is that?
My personal favorite story in the various books of the New Testament is the story of the Loaves and Fishes. That's the one where Jesus was followed by a large crowd out of town and when he realized people were hungry took one loaf of bread and one fish and gave it to the first hungry person. But he still had a loaf and another fish, so he gave that to the second person. And he kept multiplying the loaves and fishes until everybody ate.
I grew up thinking what a wonderful miracle that was, until I realized that I didn't like it at all. First of all, who the heck plays pied piper with a couple of thousand people to drag them out of town in the freaking desert without having water available? Where were the concessionaires? Who planned that rally and why were they so darned incompetent?
I get that multiplying loaves of bread and fish is a cool miracle, but it doesn't seem like much of a miracle to me. My idea of a great miracle would be that when people were hungry and thirsty, Jesus would have known that everyone, or most, had brought a stash of food or water. That is fairly standard all over the world when going off the beaten track. But people are selfish with their stashes. If they thought to bring it and someone else didn't, there is a tendency to think "too bad for you for not bringing food" in such situations, and I have been in a lot of them in the jungle, or hitchhiking across the USA several times, or just hiking.
To me, the real miracle -- once you realized you hadn't brought anybody with a food stand -- would be to coax everyone at the event to take out their secret stashes and to share those. And there would probably be -- as there usually is -- more than enough for everyone.
Getting people to be selfless is a true miracle. You don't need superpowers, you just need enough love. And that's what I think really happened that day in the desert a long time ago.
And that is the end of Gorman's bible study, I promise.

Saturday, August 15, 2020

Questions for Donald Trump

 

The Huffington Post reporter who had the balls to ask Trump about lying to the American public tens of thousands of times a couple of days ago should win an award for honesty in reporting. I suggest a few follow up questions from other White House reporters:
Mr President, how do you feel about having cheated to win the presidency in 2016 and are you happy with your cheating efforts with the Ukraine, China, Russia and the United States Postal Service currently? Will your cheating put you over the top?
Mr. President: Are you happy with the $142 million in taxpayer money that your golf courses have accumulated while you were playing at them in the last 42 months, or do you think you deserve to rip the US people off for more than that?
Mr President: Being directly responsible for at least 3/4 of the Covid deaths in the US -- 125,000 or so to date that you could have prevented, is that enough for your blood lust or can we anticipate another several hundred thousand dead to keep you smiling?
Mr. President: Having organized and executed to the largest financial recession since the great depression -- and a good argument can be made that your recession is greater than the great depression -- are you feeling like you are Number 1?
These are a few of the questions I would ask if I was a White House reporter these days. And again, congrats to the HuffPost reporter who had the balls to ask about the 20,000-plus lies.


Thursday, August 06, 2020

Sickness and Societal Changes

Someone I know, a friend, was posting on FB about the media hysteria surrounding the current Covid-19 pandemic. He asked if anyone remember when the AIDS issue broke in the 1980s and said he remembered that it was going to kill everyone but that we were still standing. it was an idiotic comparison and I felt like just telling him off. I didn't. Instead i thought about it for a few minutes and think i came up with a much better response than telling him off. Here is what I wrote;

I think there is an important lesson or two to learn here. When AIDS hit, people were not certain about the cause. It wasn't a disease. It was a condition in which the immune system got overloaded and broke down. Mostly it got overloaded from needle sharing and unprotected sex with lots of partners. But some people got their immune system overloaded from blood transfusions — my friends with hemophilia, Barbara and Kenny Jenks were two of them — and others had their immune systems blown out by simple hepatitis shots. Of course, once the immune system is really blown out, your body can't defend against much of anything and even minor infections and viruses can lead to death.
    There was hysteria and it was warranted. Not only were drugs developed to help maintain the immune system, but the first needle-exchanges were established. People who had multiple sex partners, if they were intelligent, began to use condoms even if they hated them. And those changes were not only helpful in reducing those awful deaths, but were necessary across all levels of society.
    Now we have Covid-19 and there is some hysteria. It is warranted. There are medicines being researched that will hopefully help. Masks and social distancing might suck as bad as using condoms but they saved, and are continuing to save a lot of lives. Societal adaptations are always difficult, and met with skepticism, anger, denial, conspiracy theories. But in the case of AIDS, changing habits was necessary for a lot of people. Now, with a virus that does not care whether you are contributing to your illness with your behavior, those changes are even more vital. And they are not a big deal at all.

Tuesday, August 04, 2020

Here's a short one, finally

So a liar, a thief, and a narcissist walk into a bar.
The bartender says: "What'll you have, Mr. Trump?"