Me-Moeurs of a Superfluid Manhood

If for whatever reason an inmate but recently escaped from among my state's institutes of higher straitjacketing were to suggest I write my own memoirs after Albert Jay Nock - for almost seventy years later, I could hardly be said to begin writing them before him, now, could I? - I should set me at once to do it in the form of a blog post to settle the matter for once and all.

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Since it now appears that several strains among the sands in the cracked hourglass that is my brakeman's nightmare of a runaway carcass have thoughtfully seen fit to inform me at all hours, more often than not in the black of screaming night, of their solemn intention to ape an upended can of Morton's with a greased chute, I might as well make my imaginary inquisitor among the interlocutorily insane happy while I still have time and hurl at my reader what little I have in the way of thoughts recollected in what for me passes for tranquility, before a hemidemisemiquaver-ing world that, I can only hope in assuming, cannot quite be described as waiting.

Chapter One I should task with the chronicling of how I, like Nock, taught myself to read from stray bits of paper about the house, and in turn to question not just all others' specific pictures 

of the world and especially of my assigned place within it, but why I should believe in their self-assumed moral standing to enforce the obedient binding upon me in particular of those world-pictures in the first place, demands which to me even then wafted about them in each case more than a little of the tang of actual derangement, of sorts that might well prove 

fruitfully actionable in advanced clinical settings. Periodic turns in attempted and failed correction of attitude within various school administrative offices, in spending entire class periods in solitary in a desk in the hallway, and, in one memorable instance I'd haply relive even - or, rather, especially - today in savage lung-ripping retribution, in the seventh grade at 

the end of a wooden paddle, far from melting my obstreperous chip into the relentlessly-kneaded societal dough-mass, only served to copper-plate my resolve, never in danger of wavering, to discern to my unfailing advantage any and every opportunity for smile and style in trial, for fashion amid fascism, the better to make from their public Hitlerity my private hilarity, in that just as I on occasion in class was, much like my father when with my mother, known to fall asleep when staying awake would have made the getting of an A or its analog in the respective cases much more likely, my teachers had little choice other than to dream on if not quite sleep within each such class with both eyes open, as even I seldom had the slightest notion what might come tumbling out my mouth or my pencil, whether it be a blazing end-of-year denunciation of my long-since-dead (takes bow) seventh-grade algebra teacher on a course evaluation form, or, in recitations in French class, my translation into our mother tongue of those French words that, when read phonetically, formed perfect homonyms for English stylings of the female pudenda*

*Gallic nominations of the male "pudenda", I can only assume, I left to the discretion of both my tender verbal conscience and the implicit warnings against erotic excess afforded me by the unforgettable examples of both of my grandmothers, stories for which the world, and thank heaven for it, is not yet prepared

of sorts even ruder than those rendered in the more louche among the Hampstead hair salons.

The chapter on high school ought to include that process by which, as I read more deeply in history and in current events, I ceased to identify with the Americans or their government at any level, an extension of my having from my first walk down the block to kindergarten ceased to identify with my classmates, my teachers or any among the eight schools in which I served my thirteen-year sentence. As of my fifteenth birthday or so, nationalism and 

patriotism of the proverbial sorts had ceased to make any more sense to me than that Sky God in which - not "whom", thank you - I cannot recall ever believing, however outward my ritual bows when suffering those church services during which, in the case of one set of parishioner ears, the church organ and its player's gown found themselves replaced on tone-armed cue by the flute and the cod-piece, in the form of selected tracks from memory over the discography of Jethro Tull, a then-obsession; had I been five years younger and the year been five such later, Joe Strummer would have succeeded Ian Anderson, in which case the organ would have returned once more in the form of "The Sound of the Sinners", the gospelline opus closing Side Three (of six) of Sandinista!

My chapter on college would depict that process by which I gradually ceased to identify with the divers "libertarians", avatars of divers notions of "freedom" each of millimeter depth, with whom I for five sapling years in a passing phase of self-education had flirted, a utopian fold I 

sooner rather than later amid the depth of the world's riches elsewhere came to find absurdly 

reductionist, creepily crass, wince-makingly uncultivated sectarian zealots, moral and ideological eunuchs, and, above all else, source in gratitude ever after of many a retrospective and very wholesome laugh. They await their Groucho Marx and their Mel Brooks, though self-parody, in the end, may with justice and for all time stand for the scripted sort. I had never, however, felt any attraction unto their sometime brethren the conservatives, though I suppose I owed them, too, a debt of no small thanks for having persuaded me to leave the thimble-sized right-wing college down whose campus pumps I had flushed my final two teenage years prior to packing it in and packing up for a bigger school to the east. This chapter ought not omit that process, already begun in the high school pages, by which I had ceased to identify with the belief, amounting to a near-universal catechism within these most pious among shining shores, that attending college or university is, for all of those with the "opportunity" to do so, an all-but metaphysical requirement for what is sometimes referred to by those of precarious psychic hygiene as The Good Life.

Later chapters would be tasked with rendering the process by which, in extension of my teenaged detachment from the company of the Americans, I had ceased to identify in any way, save for that of sporadically-honored visitor, with that race sometimes styling itself, and even on occasion proving itself, human, exchanging any residual allegiance therein for one to, for a time, the entire kingdom of sentient creatures, thence to the entire biosphere, and finally to any random congeries of carbon molecules under the sovereign sway of the Second Law of Thermodynamics. 

The final chapter, far and away the most difficult of all to write as it still unfolds itself by the terrifying hour, would detail my struggles with the abolition of my own imperialist and all-conquering ego, the full story of whose darker impulses may prove as unfit for a world still thought to contain humans still wishing to live within it as it has so far proven, alas, for its author-in-drafting.

My me-mouer, as I conceive it, would rehearse itself throughout under the footlights of comic-book opera, illustrated, of course, to boot the reader's slumbering arse, eschewing any tendency toward subscriptional preaching or lumbering abstraction, leading instead with 

plenty of hell-and-hair-raising anecdotes,

jaunty flashes of dagger-clenching derring-do,


assorted gallantries,

Oriental intrigue,


renderings into savory prose poetry and into tone of the spirit of my favorite songs and musicians, 

tenderly loving descriptions of my favorite foods 

and drinks 

and smokes 

and powders, 

and nothing whatever of my "personal" life as I do not know, Master, what you mean by that, though I gather it signifies yet another among those things I was expected to take up, and in sufficiently public view of all those presuming to Know What's Best For Me so as to submit its intended harvests to regular and ratifying referenda regardless of psychic cost to him who alone might haply be said to bear the crushing burdens entailed by the serial suicides of self-sovereignty so sustained.

If I had but space enough I should include speculation as to why I might well have done best to have run away with the circus, as either fat man or barker or backstage fluffer of both animals and people.

Or, in an ideal world and circus, no doubt, all three. 

For I am extra large, I contain multidudes.