Planet of the Apes

Prehensility is a product of evolution. It's the thing that distinguishes so-called hominids from other animals. Toolmaking enabled agriculture but also the making and ideating of things. Darwin famously described "drawing as thinking." The advent of consciousness is described as one of two great, as yet insoluble mysteries. The other is the creation of the universe itself.  However, it's fun to imagine what certain homo sapiens would be like at an earlier stage of evolution. Imagine Kim Jong-un on all fours peering over a martial display in Pyongyang's Kim II Sung Square. Is it possible for an ape to goose step? And how about the Commander-in-Chief of these not so United States, threatening to bomb Iran back into the stone ages, as his "assistant," not-to-harp, is also reduced to being on all fours--and no longer able to use social media to convey her message.

read "The Great Bonac Footrace of '83" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

Project 2027

1) Increase ICE detention centers to include room for those who are citizens.

2) Create a vaccine policy equivalent to the Volstead Act

3) Sue all institutions of higher learning who don't raise the bar on income eligibility (to attend Harvard a student's parents will have to have an income in excess of $500,000 per year or prove membership in the Hasty Pudding Society).

4) Declare all elections rigged, unless the winner is a Republican

5) Executive order that DJT may shoot anyone on Fifth or any other Avenue, in the light of the Supreme Court's executive immunity ruling

6) Open Immigration policy for all supporters of Apartheid

7) Encourage insider trading by the President based on Truth Social decrees

8) encourage all forms of cronyism which Make America Great

9) all first born sons should be named Donald (or face being slain) and all surnames, by executive order, will be turned to Trump.

10) all buildings and businesses must be called Trump, thus the Empire Trump, the World Trade Trump

11) All men's room will be named Donald and all women's rooms Melania)

12) All natural sites must include the name Trump thus Niagara Falls would be Trump Falls, same for Viagra 

13) Hear ye,  "Three No Trump" is no longer a legal bid in contract bridge

14) All billionaire men may touch women's private parts, without their permission 

15)  Thew Constitution and Bill of Rights are suspended, immediately

read "The Great Bonac Footrace of '83" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

Insults

Ekaternia Rybolovleva

There are lots of people who are going to tell you to take a long walk off a short dock, albeit not in those words. There are insults to the flesh and just plain insults. On this latter you can insult or be insulted. If you level an insult you experience guilt for which you court punishment by some piece of maladaptive behavior. You might prefer to be insulted and thereby forego self-undoing in the face of your abjection. There is only so far down you can go, unless you're in Berezniki and fall into one of the sinkholes created by. Dimitri Rybolovlev's potash mine. You may remember Ekaterina Rybolovleva, Dimitry's daughter once paid a record breaking $88 million for Sandy Weil's 15 CPW penthouse in December 2011. Now that's crumbs compared to some of the prices commanded on those big needles that sway on 57th Street.

Read the "The Great Bonac Footrace of '83 by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

Breathless

Have you ever had the experience of having nothing to say? Perhaps you're dining with long lost friends, who you haven't seen in ages? You could bad mouth Trump, which is now a commonplace salutation tantamount to a French woman giving the Platonic kiss on each cheek. But what comes after? Where to begin? It's similar to facing a blank canvas or page. "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy" are the words Jack Torrance's wife is horrified to find repeated on his typewriter page in The Shining. That's, of course, no default unless you want to let your friends know you're going mad. In medias res means "in the middle of things." It's easy to pick up where you left off, but harder to create a narrative out of the blue. Making conversation is a form of therapy to the extent that the first words spoken are often the most revealing, pointing to the subliminal reason why you have bothered to exhume old faces and memories from the attic anyway.

read "The Great Bonac 10K 1983" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

Please Mr. Postman

 

The Marvelettes

"Please Mr. Postman, look and see (Whoa, yeah)/Is there a letter in you bag for me?" The refrain from The Marvelettes l961 Motown hit is something a lot of voters are likely to be uttering as they wait fruitlessly for mail-in ballots which won't arrive, in the aftermath of the SCOTUS' ruling on Trump's executive order. Will the ballots get out before the damage is done? Will lower courts still be able to intervene since the question falls under the rubric of "state's rights." Remember what a nasty word that was during the segregation era? Apparently 1000 Trump appointed election monitors are being deployed to polling places. Then there's the DHS. Don't be surprised if the truncheons used by these segregationist state rights people might now be used on voters.

The Benzodiazepine Family

Laura Delano (NYT)

Many people calm themselves down with benzodiazepines like Klonopin or Ativan, but Anxiety serves a purpose.  It's an alarm clock that wakes you up. SSRIs are prescribed for depression. Psychopharmacology is the branch of psychiatry which uses medications to treat these affects. There are people who have been medicated so long that they don't even remember a life without pills. In "Bitter Pill" (The New Yorker, 4/1/19) Rachel Aviv describes the case of a high achieving Harvard student, Laura Delano, who attempts to get off the medications that she has been prescribed, willy-nilly for her entire life. Aviv's piece is included in her collection Strangers to Ourselves. Delano herself is the author of Unshrunk: A Story of Psychiatric Treatment Resistance. You may remember Soma is the drug which rules Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. There are people who take pills to go to sleep, pills to wake up, pills to give them erections, and shots of adrenalin to prevent the necrotic tissue resulting from Priapism."GLP-1 Syndrome" attends the taking of a popular diet drug which literally transforms personality. Anhedonia is one of these and it's not surprising in a pill designed to dull appetite.

Yorick

"Hamlet and Horatio" by Eugene Delacroix (1839)

                                       

photo: FLevy

Imagine the very moment when you'll longer be sentient. If you’ve been in a coma already, it’s one thing, but there are people for whom it’s more dramatic, tantamount to being in a theater watching a movie at the time of a black out, well not exactly since if you’re still alive you can hold onto your partner’s hand until one of you can employ the flashlight on their smartphone. Remember once the theater or life goes dark there are no gadgets. It’s nice to think think someone is going to have a last say either you from the great beyond or someone still waiting by Charon’s bark on the shore of the Acheron. Hope springs eternal. Maybe there's a two way highway allowing voyagers one trip only.