I was going to say that I kind of wish The Devil existed, because then we would know that truly horrible people would eventually face damnation, and in a way it’s nice to imagine that cosmic justice could exist.

“No, no, no! Do not come to Texas! Texas is full!”

Meanwhile, Texas:

It’d be worse than that. We don’t share a border with North Korea. We will not like what happens if we initiate endless blood feuds with our next door neighbors.

Star Trek would have been very different under Harlan Ellison.

So we went to the commissary and shoved in around the Writers’ Table.

What I did not know was that the Writers’ Table was right behind the Producers’ Banquette. That was my first big mistake. As it turned out, it was also my last big mistake.

Oh, what fun, sitting there with intellectual companions, cutting up touches and laughing at the drolleries! Born again: the Algonquin round table. Wit beyond compare. And, naturally, as the youngest member of the group, striving to make my mark as worthy of their camaraderie, their respect, I suggested a droll, witty lunchtime conceit . . .

Two things you must know. First, I do a terrific Mickey Mouse imitation. Absolutely phonographically perfect. If the publishers of this book had the money, they ought to bind in a record, one of those little plastic jobbies, so you could hear my spectacular Mickey imitation. When I tell this anecdote in person, it really enhances a lot. But just pretend you can hear it, okay?

The second thing you need to know is that the Producers’ Banquette had filled up with Roy Disney and the other heads of the studio, behind me; a fact of which I was unaware; a fact no one bothered to impart.

At the top of my voice I suggested, “Hey, listen, what a kick! Why don’t we do a porn Disney flick?”

Everyone smiled. “It’ll be terrific,” I said. Loudly. “I mean, everyone knows, for instance, that Tinker Bell does it . . . what they don’t know is how she Does It.” They all looked at me expectantly. “She flies up the head of the penis and flaps her wings like crazy,” I said, proud as hell of myself at this bit of fantasy. Everyone chuckled.

I went on, oblivious to the sudden hush all around me in the commissary. “I’ll be Mickey, and I’ll be the director; John, you do a good Donald, so you can be the male porn lead, sort of a duck-style Harry Reems; Mary, you can be Minnie, the female lead; and Albert, you can be Goofy . . . and Goofy, of course, is the producer.”

Their smiles were frozen; the way the smiles of bit players get frozen when they see the monster creeping up behind the hero in a horror flick.

“Hey, gang!” I squeaked in my terrifically accurate Mickey voice. “Everybody ready to shoot the ultimate Disney flick? The film that rips the lid off the goody two-shoes hypocrisy that lies sweltering beneath the surface of G-rated true-life adventures? Okay, you guys, let’s get that hand-held Arriflex right down there between Minnie’s legs! I wanna see closeups of quivering labia!”

A silence as deep as that at the bottom of the Cayman Trench.

I went on, oblivious, carried along by my enthusiasm. In Donald’s quack I said, “Goddam sonofabitch! Pluto, get outta there, you’re steaming up the lens!”

As Goofy, in the dumbest voice possible, I said, “Yuck, yuck, yuck . . . hey, fellahs, I’m a highly-paid, extremely-inept producer person . . . c’n I play, too?”

As Mickey: “Fuck off, Goofy, fuck off! Get those Seven Dwarfs in here . . . I don’t care ff they don’t wanna gang-bang a mouse, tell 'em they’re under contract . . . and fer chrissakes, Minnie, will you take off those damned shoes?!”

The meal came. Everyone addressed their plates like inmates of the Gulag Archipelago. When lunch was over, everyone vanished very quickly. I was confused, but felt good. What a nice little shtick I’d invented. Wished they’d joined in. Oh well.

Went back to my office. Noticed first that my name had been whited-out in the parking slot. Upstairs, the secretary and her paperback were gone. On my desk: twelve sharpened #2 Dixon Ticonderoga pencils and a pink slip.

I had been fired after working for the Disney empire for a total of four hours, including lunch.

The lessons here cannot be avoided.

Big business is humorless.

And . . .

At Disney, nobody fucks with The Mouse.

Fun Toy Banned Because Of Three Stupid Dead Kids

See that little stream — we could walk to it in two minutes. It took the British a month to walk to it — a whole empire walking very slowly, dying in front and pushing forward behind. And another empire walked very slowly backward a few inches a day, leaving the dead like a million bloody rugs. No Europeans will ever do that again in this generation.”

“Why, they’ve only just quit over in Turkey,” said Abe. “And in Morocco —”

“That’s different. This western-front business couldn’t be done again, not for a long time. The young men think they could do it but they couldn’t. They could fight the first Marne again but not this. This took religion and years of plenty and tremendous sureties and the exact relation that existed between the classes. The Russians and Italians weren’t any good on this front. You had to have a whole-souled sentimental equipment going back further than you could remember. You had to remember Christmas, and postcards of the Crown Prince and his fiancée, and little cafés in Valence and beer gardens in Unter den Linden and weddings at the mairie, and going to the Derby, and your grandfather’s whiskers.”

“General Grant invented this kind of battle at Petersburg in sixty- five.”

“No, he didn’t — he just invented mass butchery. This kind of battle was invented by Lewis Carroll and Jules Verne and whoever wrote Undine, and country deacons bowling and marraines in Marseilles and girls seduced in the back lanes of Wurtemburg and Westphalia. Why, this was a love battle — there was a century of middle-class love spent here. This was the last love battle.

–F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender is the Night

Michael Burnham

Jayne Cobb

Willow Ulfgood

Ask John Bolton how that worked out.

Destroying National Landmarks for Fun and Profit

I have a graduate degree in psychology

You would know better than me, but just from personal life experience, I tell people “Don’t try to ascribe rational motivations to irrational actors, because the effort will just make you crazy in turn.”

There’s only one way to find out if you’re right or wrong. Let’s release those files!

Cockroaches do a lot of litter cleanup out in nature. I worry about what might happen if they vanished. But those malaria mosquitoes can fuck right off to Hell as far as I’m concerned.

The white supremacists are losing the numbers game, so “something must be done before it’s too late.”

I’m not going to lie, sometimes I have fun in my car by just practicing various maniacal Joker laughs.

We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news.

Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”

~ John Ehrlichman, Assistant to the President for Domestic Affairs under President Richard Nixon

Ralphie

and Verne

and Neville

Perhaps you could get AMD to pay you $35 billion for the hypothetical potential of amusement later on.

Libs HATE it when strong MAGA men cut their own dicks off!

For my friends everything, for my enemies the law.

–Oscar R. Benavides