BLAS LEAVES RACE! NO ONE AFFECTED!! FILM AT ELEVEN!!!!

Mayor Bill De Blasio of New York has ended his bid for the Democratic Party's 2020 nomination for President of the United States. This has caused next to no consternation at all among millions of people who did not know he was running for the Democratic Party's 2020 nomination for President of the United States, that he was (and still is) the Mayor of the City of New York, or that he is a tall man who likes to drive to Brooklyn to go to the gym. In short, he is the political equivalent of William Hughes Mearns' man who wasn't there.

Yesterday, upon the stair,
I met a man who wasn't there
He wasn't there again today
I wish, I wish he'd go away...

When I came home last night at three
The man was waiting there for me
But when I looked around the hall
I couldn't see him there at all!

Go away, go away, don't you come back any more!
Go away, go away, and please don't slam the door... (slam!)

Last night I saw upon the stair
A little man who wasn't there
He wasn't there again today
Oh, how I wish he'd go away...

Enough said.

GOP UNDER ATTACK!!! FILM AT ELEVEN!!!

Yesterday in New York City, Antifa vandals vandalized, which I think goes without saying, the one following the other like bread and butter, time and tide, and my brother asking me for money and my saying no--yes, the object of this sentence is coming, I promise--the headquarters of the Manhattan Republican Party, a building that also houses the regional headquarters of the New York State Republican Party. The vandals announced that this was the beginning of a series of actions against the GOP for their crimes against humanity and for disagreeing with the Antifa movement, which is unconstitutional and doubleplus ungood and more than vaguely un-American, it seems.  I find this event interesting in that I didn’t think that there were any Republicans in Manhattan to speak of, much less their being a group of them large enough to conduct actions against; my mind actually boggled at the concept when I read the vandals’ declaration in the paper. 

What caused my bogglement, assuming that bogglement is the word I am looking for here, was that I was certain that the last native-born New York Republican was a man named Hezekiah Smith, who died when I was a boy of six or seven[i], despite the best efforts of doctors and naturalists to save such a rara avis.  Mr. Smith was a hardy old soul of about 107, I think, and he could remember Abraham Lincoln’s funeral cortege moving up Broadway in 1865 and how a very portly stockbroker from Cincinnati, Ohio almost killed him when he (the stockbroker) landed on the sidewalk in front of him (our rara avis) after leaping from a fifteenth story window on the day the market crashed in 1929.  Mr. Smith escaped death by stopping for a moment at a street cart to buy a pretzel with too much salt on it, a flaw that bedevils street cart pretzels in New York to this very day. Mr. Smith took a bite out of the pretzel and stopped walking down Wall Street long enough to spit a large chunk of salt from between his teeth onto the sidewalk.  A moment later the stockbroker arrived at Mr. Smith's feet, causing him (Mr. Smith--I don't believe that the stockbroker was contemplating the saltiness of New York street pretzels at that instant, no matter how portly he was) to lose his appetite almost immediately. In any case, being the last of his species, the American Museum of Natural History insisted on having Mr. Smith stuffed and mounted so future generations of New Yorkers could see what a native-born Republican actually looked like. And so it came to pass. Mr. Smith is still on display at the museum, in that long gallery where the curators have the wildlife of North America dioramas, and so children on school trips from all over the city can come and gaze with astonished eyes upon his kindly countenance and wonder how such an extraordinary creature ever found a home in New York City.

As for the New York State Republican Party, I was unaware that such an organized entity actually existed; I was always under the impression that New York State Republicans were more or less like a herd of caribou wandering aimlessly over the length and breadth of the Vampire State, especially in the vast areas of political tundra  above Interstate 84, and doing nothing of any great importance, albeit doing that nothing with a much better wardrobe than your average caribou has—those horns really have to go; they are just so last year, you know—and that every so often one of them got lucky and found themselves elected to high state office or under indictment, conditions that often go together in these parts.  So this declaration of antifascist jihad against the local GOP seems a little far-fetched to me, unless the point of vandalizing innocuous buildings in New York is to drive the tenants out so the vandals can rip the copper piping out of the walls to sell for drug money or to avoid the complications that are apt to follow should the violent left attempt to wage its drum-beating, slogan-shrieking, baton-wielding war in places like Texas, Alabama, or Mississippi, where the Republicans are a fairly well-organized bunch and whose membership includes large numbers of people who possess their own firearms. I am only guessing here, but I suppose that a good many of these antifascists are not keen on doing anything in any state where they have to worry about sucking chest wounds or a ventilated liver as a side effect of their freeing the world of fascism. So this might be why New York is stuck with an inordinate number of these little punks, although I must say that the bagels are better in New York than in Houston or Montgomery, Alabama, and that could be a reason a wary protestor might want to stay in the neighborhood and annoy the unarmed passersby here as they try to get to work through the moron-induced traffic jams. Lucky us.

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[i] This would be 1964 or 1965. You can work out how old I am by yourself; there’s no law requiring me to help anyone with mathematics.

Upstate, or Concerto Grosso in A Flat, not by George Frederick Handel

Upstate. What is Upstate? Why is Upstate such an important concept for those of us who live here in the Vampire State? And, most importantly, where is Upstate?  This last is a very important question, as many people in the Vampire State would rather have a body part removed without the benefit of anesthesia then have anyone they know think that they live or know anyone Upstate, and there are others who think wistfully that maybe they would be better off if somehow or other they could just get out of the New York City rat race and move Upstate, where the grass is always greener and the picket fences are always whiter and life is just easier somehow.  Sometimes, the same person can have both of these ideas about Upstate on the same day, but not usually at the same time. An event that cognitively dissonant will often cause apoplexy in laboratory rats, although whether it would have the same result with New Yorkers is unknown. Ingesting large amounts of caffeine is supposed to protect against such things, and if there is anything New Yorkers do better than almost anyone else is ingest caffeine. All right, maybe people in Seattle ingest more caffeine on a per capita basis, but there is no Upstate in Washington, so they’re not probably not the best people to ask about something like this.

Before we start defining Upstate, let’s define what Upstate isn’t.  The people in Buffalo, for example, do not consider themselves Upstaters; they live in Western New York, thank you very much, and they will have nothing to do with a faux geographical controversy that takes time away from them stuffing their pie-holes with spicy chicken wings at every opportunity. Similarly, the people of the Southern Tier don’t really consider themselves Upstaters either, given that they aren’t upstate from anything; you can’t really be an Upstater if the downstate involved is Pennsylvania. On the other hand, the people in Malone do consider themselves Upstaters, a choice forced on them by geography; you can’t go any further upstate than Malone without actually being in Canada.  People who live in Lawn Guyland are definitely not Upstaters and whether or not Westchester County is Upstate seems to be a matter of some debate, especially if you live in New York City; for Upstaters, on the other hand, Westchester and most of Rockland County are Downstate. Given that no one seems to know just where Upstate is, what is this upstate place that you hear New Yorkers go on and on about?

First, you must remember that Upstate is a state of mind. If you live in Greenwich Village, then everything above Fourteenth Street is Upstate. If you live on 125^th Street, then the Bronx is probably Upstate, even if your cousin Rosie lives there. Your cousin Rosie, of course, will argue that no way does she live Upstate and the people on the Upper West Side would probably agree with her; living in the Bronx makes you one of the bridge and tunnel crowd, which is the New York equivalent of the flyover people the coastal elites in this country don’t like to think about. Your cousin will think that the people in Westchester are upstate, largely because they don’t live in New York City, an entity that includes all of the five boroughs, as opposed to The City, which everyone knows means Manhattan. If you don’t know that The City means Manhattan, then very clearly you are from somewhere not only west of the Hudson River, but west of New Jersey as well, if such a thing is possible. But your cousin Rosie would be wrong about Westchester. The people there consider themselves Downstaters; Westchester and most of Rockland County are the city’s suburbs, filled with people who come from New York City and / or work in New York City and therefore cannot believe that they could be Upstaters themselves, not after spending their lives hearing that the people Upstate routinely hunt deer and rub deer dung on themselves to make it easier for them to hunt deer. They are commuters, after all, and not at all the sort of people who would gun down Bambi without so much as a second thought, even if Bambi is eating their hedges and their flower gardens and defecating all over their front lawns while knocking over their garbage cans. You know you’re an Upstater when you regard Bambi and his friends as a bunch of oversized hoofed rats and you have the will and the means [i.e. at least two hunting rifles, one for you and the other for the missus, or one carbon fiber hunting bow] of turning Bambi and his friends into venison meatballs, which are delicious with your spaghetti and a nice home-made tomato sauce. Yes they are.

After many a long year trying to figure this stuff out, the consensus of opinion among moderate people of all races and creeds hereabouts is that Upstate either begins north of Interstate 84 or north of Poughkeepsie and that we should all learn to live together despite where we believe Upstate begins. Unfortunately, the debate between the fanatical adherents of each point of view tends to be loud and vicious in the extreme, with the Dutchess County Sheriff’s Office and the New York State Police often called in to quell the violence with truncheons, water cannon, and tear gas. The conflict arises because Poughkeepsie and the other towns along the river have many people who work in The City and so don’t really think of themselves as Upstaters, whereas almost everyone who doesn’t work in The City thinks of themselves as Upstaters. This is a very tricky situation for our local political class; they don’t want to alienate the commuter vote, who tend to have some money in their pockets, but on the other hand do not want to alienate the non-commuter population because they know that no Upstate politician has ever lost an election by running against The City. This is because all true Upstaters believe, in their heart of hearts, that New York State would be a much better place if someone in Albany could just figure out how to get rid of The City altogether.  This is economic nonsense, of course; the state would collapse completely without The City to prop up its finances; but many people believe economic nonsense; how do you explain the persistence of Marxism otherwise?

For my part, I think Upstate starts north of Poughkeepsie. I believe this for a number of reasons, none of which makes sense to the I-84 believers. First, the people in southern Dutchess County watch the New York City television stations. We are familiar with what goes on in The City whether we want to be or not. Second, Poughkeepsie is the northernmost station on the Hudson Line; if you want to go further north than Poughkeepsie, you have to take Amtrak. Third, the increasing suburbanization of southern Dutchess tells me that this area will be as firmly Downstate as Rockland County in a few years and we all may as well face that reality now. The idea will stick in the collective craw for a long while, no two ways about it, but some things, like death and sweaty underwear, are inevitable whether you like them or not. And so it goes.

Still nothing much to say

Even if the well is still pretty dry, it's hard not to wonder about the outcome of the upcoming Democratic primary for mayor of New York.  Will Weiner walk? What will Huma do? And what about Miss Leathers, who gets all hot and bothered listening to wonks debate health care policy? Actually, you really do have to feel sorry for Huma. Here she is, a proud warrioress of Islam, devoted to spreading the True Faith by any means necessary amongst the loathsome kaffirs who dwell in benighted darkness in the Dar al-Harb with their loose women and their thirty minute pizza delivery and their flush toilets, and she is stuck with this idiot Jew who can't stop showing off his tallywhacker to any woman who wants to take a look at it.  Taqqiya has its limits, after all.  Perhaps she thought a little rehab and a lot of hudna would help; the Americans have the attention spans of gnats, you know, and if she could just get this dopey son of apes and pigs to keep his weener in his pants, then all would be well and she could be well on her way to a position of great power and influence amongst the unbelievers, a position where she could aid the cause of Allah and His Prophet, may peas be upon him.  But it wasn’t to be.  Wiener’s weener is once again a topic of conversation throughout the length and breadth of this our Great Republic, and poor Huma, she is stuck with a pathetic loser who has not only turned himself into a joke, he’s made her one too.  Life is horribly unfair sometimes.

A DISTURBANCE ON THE CHAMBER FLOOR: Well, it was nice while it lasted, boys and girls, no two ways about it, but all good things must come to an end and I fear that our good thing is gone as well. For as long as living memory serves, we, the suffering citizenry of the Vampire State, have endured the rule of the three men in a room. For almost a month, we did not suffer from this particular ailment, as one branch of the state government had to disengage itself from their habitual gorging on the public trough long enough to figure out who the third man in the room ought to be. This is not a minor or an academic question hereabouts, indeed it is not, because I can best describe the government of this state as a three-legged stool; should any one of the three legs falter or fail, the whole malfeasant edifice becomes instantly unstable, quickly dumping the dumbass who tries to sit on said stool on his dumb ass.

How, you may be asking yourself, did things ever come to such an ignoble pass here in what used to be the most important state of all the states comprising this our Great Republic? This is an excellent question, filled with chills, spills, and adventure enough for the entire family, and one for which most of here don’t have a damn clue. I shall, however, attempt to provide some insights into the matter, as my not having a clue has never stopped me from having an opinion before and I see no reason why it should stop me now.

For many years now, for decades, in fact, the two major political parties have shared power in the state legislature: malfeasant Democratic peculators dominated the lower house, the Assembly, whilst grafting Republican boodlers ran the upper house, the Senate. The governor, of course, could be of either political persuasion; no one much cared what party he belonged to so long as the gravy train ran on time and everyone could go back for seconds, thirds, or as many ordinal numbers as they felt they could handle without a grand jury noticing. This bicameral arrangement of official goniffdom reflects the political geography of the Vampire State. The Democrats’ control of the big cities has given them the majority in the Assembly ever since Grover Cleveland hung his first villain, but as you venture away from the metropolis and the various micropoli along the river, the political naïf wanders into that strange land known as Upstate, where even the mice are Republicans, a situation that leads to the GOP’s control of the Senate. And so we all lived in a state of happy dysfunction for ages and ages. The state’s three men in a room was complete: the governor, the Senate majority leader, and the speaker of the Assembly ran the state while the members of the two houses voted the way their leadership told them to vote in exchange for the right to loot the public treasury on a regular basis. Only the bills the speaker and the majority leader wanted to pass ever came up for a vote and all a state legislator needed to do was vote yes. In the Assembly, the leadership brought this process to its logical conclusion: all assemblymen voted yes on every bill unless they were physically present to vote no. Since their actual presence was unnecessary, if not downright distracting to the Assembly staff, assemblymen could spend their time in more worthwhile pursuits, such as learning to play badminton or operating auto repair shops on the side while they waited the next election cycle. In 2006, however, this happy state of affairs came to an abrupt end. The Democrats, for reasons best known to the voters of the state, took a two-seat majority in the Senate. This means that all three men in the metaphorical room are Democrats, a state of affairs that hasn’t existed for a while here, and what’s worse, it means that all three men in the room are from…THE CITY!

It would be difficult, at best, to describe the depth of the loathing that many Upstaters have for The City and no upstate politician has ever lost votes denouncing The City as a prodigal Sodom and Gomorrah that wastes the money hard-working Upstaters earn on fiscal fripperies. Some Upstaters, lost in the fever swamps of their loathing for all things concerning The City, have even been known to voice a favorable, if sotto voce, opinion of the Boston Red Sox on occasion, as difficult as you may find that to believe.

In any case, since the beginning of the year the state capitol has resounded with the disconsolate cries of Republicans bewailing their lost power and influence, and the shrieks of paranoid Upstaters convinced that The City and all of its minions were going to spend the state into bankruptcy and not share the graft while they did so. What to do, what to do, has been the plaintive wail from the state legislature for the past few months, a cry that is now, frankly, annoying in the extreme and makes us, the inhabitants of this fun dystopia, want to smack these guys across the face a couple of times and tell them to pull themselves together, for crying out loud. And then, it happened.

No one is sure why it happened; the astrologically inclined say that Jupiter and the moon were in the right alignment, while a good many Marxists say that this affair was the product of a classic rift in the ruling classes, or they would if there were a good many Marxists around still calling themselves Marxists, and then there are the cynics, a plentiful tribe here in the Vampire State, who know that the whole thing was little more than a case of thieves falling out. What did happen, in whatever manner you choose to describe the reasons, was that two Democratic state senators, one a man with residency issues—he apparently doesn’t live in the district that he represents—and the other a man accused of allegedly beating his girl friend, announced that henceforth they would be voting with the Republicans, thereby giving the Republicans control of the state Senate, in response to which event the Democrats closed the Senate chamber down and hid the keys so the Republicans couldn’t get inside (this, strictly speaking, is illegal, but what’s a little illegality between friends?). The Democrats threatened to sue, declaring the coup illegal, and the Republicans threatened to counter-sue, demanding the recognition of the new majority and the legislative session continue. And so the nastiness continued unabated for weeks at a time, the crisis only solvable in either one of two ways—the rebels either stayed with the GOP or returned to the Democratic fold—but this being the Vampire State, where deviousness and rank stupidity form the basis of our political culture, our dogged crew of solons found a third way to solve the problem, which, of course, did not solve the problem and only made things worse than they already were, if you can imagine such a thing. I know I couldn’t, but then, I lack imaginative facility.

Now, the Democrats did not submit meekly to the will of the new majority, but then you already knew that, didn’t you? No indeed, the Democrats has waited for decades for Senatorial perks, privileges, and pelf, and they were not going back to the bad old minoritarian days without a fight. They went after their two Judases, promising them the entire world right up to the state line if only they would return home. After a couple of weeks of this, one of the senators, the one with the residency problem, announced that he would return to the Democrats forthwith, the better to figure out just where he was coming from; the other distinguished gentleman, on the other hand, refused to return, leaving the Senate in deadlock, with each party having 31 votes.

In ordinary times, this would not pose any sort of a problem. In such cases, the state’s lieutenant governor would cast the tie-breaking vote and ensure one party’s misrule over the other’s. These, however, are not ordinary times hereabouts. The Vampire State is, at this juncture, singularly lacking a lieutenant governor. As you may recall, the Federal authorities found the previous governor of this state with his socks on and his pants off in a hotel room discussing civil service reform with a young woman hired for the occasion. The first instance of said reform being the previous governor’s resignation, the then lieutenant governor became the governor, leaving his previous sinecure unoccupied. Unlike the Federal constitution, which goes into great detail about the hows and whys of presidential succession, the state constitution makes no provision for electing, appointing, or looking through the want ads for a new lieutenant governor, or, at least, this is what the Attorney General of the state says, a man who is himself angling to replace the current governor just as soon as the next election cycle comes rolling around. Why he wants to be governor is anybody’s guess; it is certainly beyond my poor powers of comprehension.

And so it went for almost a month. The governor, understandably upset that no one was going about the state business of spending money faster than a full keg disappears at a frat party, threatened to call a special session of the legislature and to keep everyone in the capital through the summer months and to dock the senators’ paychecks until both sides ended the stalemate, but neither threat worked. Modern air conditioning plants have made the capital a barely tolerable place, even in the summer, and I am fairly certain that the good senators have other sources of income available to them, he said with a completely straight face.

In the end, all good things must come to an end, and the senatorial stasis was no exception to the rule. Our alleged girl friend beating senator went to the mountaintop and communed with the spirit of Andrew Jackson, and then in a blaze of remorse and publicity returned to the Party of the People. That his confreres immediately raised their prodigal son to the dignity of deputy majority leader caused some cynics, including the governor, no less, to conclude that the whole affair reeked of illegality and quid pro quo, a charge the Democratic leadership angrily denied. The governor’s response was curious, though; after a lifetime spent in the noisome pit of illegality and quid pro quo that constitutes the political life of this state, you think he’d have gotten used to the reek by now. The rest of us have, unfortunately.

ONLY IN DREAMS, IN BEAUTIFUL DREAMS: Hi there. As you have no doubt noticed, especially if you are a constant reader of The Passing Parade, I am going through yet another in a long series of dry spells. I’ve often wondered how the constant readers put up with the less than constant writing here; it must be annoying to have to read the same old stuff over and over again, and I do feel guilty about it, but then I console myself with the thought that there are a lot of other blogs out there that do what I do here and are mercifully short on the writer’s block.

As for subject matter, I thought that the nation’s attempt to solve its economic problems with a good stiff application of the Peter Principle would provide no end of grist for the psychic mills, but the former junior Senator from Illinois has done nothing so far except propose a national diet of treyf, which, as a Democrat, is hardly newsworthy. Democrats, as if the populace needed any reminding, have not had an original idea since 1937 and even that one was wrong. At that time, John Maynard Keynes was still alive and already famous for telling people that they could spend their way out of a depression and that most politicians were in the ideological thrall of some dead economist. Now that Keynes is the dead economist of his bon mot, he would be happy to know that his ideas are enjoying a resurgence, thanks to the Democratic Party, who regard Keynes and his ideas as the perfect intellectual cover for their long-standing practice of bribing the electorate to vote for them with the electorate’s own money.

But I fear the current travails of the former junior Senator from Illinois or of the tax troubles of his minions or even the ongoing attempts of Minnesota’s Democratic establishment to foist a man only slightly more qualified than Incitatus upon the United States Senate is simply not opening the sluices here. So let us speak of something else. Specifically, let us speak of dreams. Not my dreams for this our Great Republic, which center largely on finding the reincarnation of Ronald Reagan, a task the GOP ought to outsource to the Dalai Lama and his compatriots, given their expertise in such matters, but rather a dream I had the other night, the meaning of which is eluding me.

I don’t usually remember my dreams; they slip away almost as soon as I awaken, leaving not a wrack of wribs behinds; but this dream has stayed with me. For one thing, the dream occurred in a church, which even in my sleep I know is a bad sign; it means a nightmare is on the way. Like a good many Irish Catholic boys who have drifted away from the strict observance of the Faith with time, I know that deep in my psyche there is a level where I know that I will have to pay for my sinful ways and that the Lord sends me these nightmares as a way of returning me to the bosom of Holy Mother Church. These nightmares, which look like the cinematographer who did The Godfather movies was moonlighting, all take place in extremely Baroque churches complete with hooded Spanish Inquisitors who have never heard of the comfy chair chanting Gregorically as they prepare to pop my arms and legs out of their sockets with what looks like a very complicated clothesline. At least, I think it was a clothesline; that would explain all the laundry hanging from the thing. So even in sleep mode, I knew I was in for trouble, a lot of trouble.

And yet. Yes, even as I prepared for the worst, I knew that something was different this time. First of all, the deeply Baroque cathedrals where I suffer for my waking mind’s casual disregard for the dogmas of the Church wasn’t. Instead of the Baroque, I got the parish church in the Bronx where I received my baptism, my first Communion, and my Confirmation. Now, this church was big and gloomy—at least I thought so when I was a kid—but Baroque it was not. And then there was the pizza.

Non-Catholics may not believe this, but Catholics do not, as a rule, eat a lot of pizza in church. Strange but true. Pizza plays no part in the Mass, which is not as strange as it sounds—chocolate ice cream, salt-free potato salad, and orange Jello with chunks of pineapple in it play no part in the Mass either; and so the sight of me and several of my classmates eating pizza while we stood in line near the confessionals hinted at an outcome somewhat different than the usual, and by now somewhat hackneyed floor opening up beneath my feet and me, like Faustus, repentant too late, hurled downwards flaming in adamantine chains and penal fire into the darkness visible of hell. I think that may have been the oregano talking.

Then there was the wedding. This, strange as it may seem, was not at all out of the ordinary. I can remember any number of times when my classmates and me lined up at the confessionals along the church’s walls while a wedding went on in the middle of the church. Our presence always seemed to confuse the ushers, who usually wanted to know if we were with the bride or the groom’s family, and when we told them neither one, that we were here to go to Confession, would then try to shoo us out of the church. This never worked; there was always a nun nearby ready to disabuse any power-drunk usher of the notion that the life of the Church was going to come to a halt just because someone they knew was getting married that day.

And finally, there was the congregation. They were black. I realize that some people might regard my bringing up the racial composition of the congregation as something shocking these days; African Americans have as much right to pray in a Roman Catholic church in one of my dreams as anyone else. I bring up the matter up because at that time I attended this particular church that church was still a bastion of Irish Catholicism. There were many Italians and some Poles and even the occasional Puerto Rican or two, but the church did not accommodate itself to them. This church was of, for, and by the Irish, who turned out in droves every Sunday in their best clothes and often nursing (ethnic cheap shot alert!) their best hangovers to praise God and damn the English and all their nefarious deeds. It’s not like black people couldn’t pray at our church, but as most African Americans are Protestants, why would they want to? But in my dream, there they were. Even in my slumbering state, a phrase that sounds like it ought to be the state nickname of North Dakota, I could tell that this was a bit out of the ordinary.

The groom arrived in full male marriage rig, including the top hat and morning dress, I think it’s called. He went down the aisle slowly, shaking hands and saying hello to everyone like he was running for office. He took his time getting to the front of the church, and when he did, his pockets looked like the congregation had stuffed them with ballots and campaign contributions. I don’t remember much about him; he looked like the plastic groom on the top of a wedding cake, to plagiarize Alice Roosevelt Longworth, which is something I haven’t done in a while and neither have you, I’ll wager, and because I don’t think he had a face, but that may be my memory playing tricks on me.

Everyone stood up then, and the bride and her father came arm in arm down the center aisle as the organist played Mendelssohn’s Scherzo from A Midsummer’s Night Dream; not a piece I would have chosen, of course, but then there’s no accounting for tastes. The bride looked as happy as any bride can look in a wedding dress made from white heavy duty plastic garbage bags, but the dress did fit her very nicely, even to my admittedly inexpert eye. They reached the altar, where the bride kissed her father and then stood next to the groom. The minister came out of the sacristy, something you don’t see every day in a Catholic church, and then began the service with those well-known words, ‘dearly beloved,’ as mandated in the Book of Common Prayer, the prayer book of the Church of England, something no good Catholic schoolboy expects to hear in his parish church.

I was deeply confused at this turn of events and I looked all around, trying to reassure myself that I was in the right place. I was: along the walls were the Stations of the Cross exactly where they’d always been, the stained glass windows were the same as I remembered them, and, above the altar, suspended by chains, was a cross bearing the crucified body of Our Lord and Savior. As I stood there, trying my utmost to trudge through the soggy dreamtime swamplands of cognitive dissonance while stuffing my face with my fifth slice of pepperoni and sausage pizza, something happened at the altar. There was a collective intake of breath from the shocked congregation. I stopped chewing—I knew something out of the ordinary had just happened—and started to pay attention to the proceedings. The bride had, in what can only be called an unexpected turn of events, just said no. I could see that the minister seemed a bit flustered by this somewhat unorthodox response, so he repeated the vows about having and holding and so on and so forth, and the bride said she’d heard him the first time and the answer was still no, not now, not ever with this chump.

That was the last I heard from the bride; the church exploded in a sudden roar of shouts, insults, threats, recriminations, crying, and a couple of ushers beating each other senseless with the collection plates. The parents of the unhappy couple sat immobile in the front seat as the chaos swirled around them and the organist played “This is the end,’ by the Doors. The cacophony grew louder and louder and the church shook with the roar until I feared that the stained glass windows would come tumbling down on the shrieking crowd below and the walls would crack with the vibration. The roar reached a hurricane-like crescendo and only ceased when Jesus shouted down from the Cross, “would you people shut up down there, dammit? I’m trying to get some sleep here!”

At that moment, I woke up, the dream having reached a completely unsustainable level of bizarrerie, even for an unconscious mind. This was annoying to the nth degree, I think; I really wanted to know what was going to happen next and the pizza was good, even if the sausages could have used a little more fennel. I was hoping to get another slice.

HELLO, I'M NOT MIKE WALLACE AND THIS IS NOT BIOGRAPHY: In the past few months, thousands of people haven’t bothered to ask me for any biographical information about myself and for all I know they intend to continue to not ask for biographical information about me well into the foreseeable future. Faced with this ongoing and, to my mind, completely understandable lack of interest, I have had to think long and hard about my long-time position on this sort of thing. I’ve long opposed releasing any information about my personal life in any forum; an artist’s reputation should rest on his work, not on his biography, but since I am not an artist my desire for anonymity has little to do with my work, such as it is, and everything to do with avoiding people who want to ask me for money. This is sometimes hard to do, as the majority of these people tend to be my relatives, most of whom already know where I live and have no compunctions about showing up on my doorstep at the most inopportune moments to borrow twenty bucks to tide them over until payday. You can always lie to the bill collectors, but getting rid of your family is an altogether much harder feat to accomplish.

I also know that it is next to impossible to be objective about yourself. If, as the old saw has it, biography are the lies other people tell about you, it stands to reason that autobiography then must needs be the lies you tell about yourself. So, to assuage the undying lack of curiosity about me and my background, I thought I would just do a short autobiographical timeline, thereby editing out the most excruciatingly boring parts of my life and leaving the merely mind-numbingly boring parts that the reader is already not at all interested in. So, here goes:

26th July 1958—I am born. I do not actually remember this, important as my arrival here in this our Great Republic was in terms of my long-term job prospects, and as strange as such an utter lack of empathy for my mother’s anguish might seem to the casual observer. The event occurred at approximately 7:30 in the morning, however, so I was in time for breakfast, unlike some other people I could mention here. I shuffled onto this mortal coil in the City of New York, during the administrations of the Honorable Robert Wagner, Mayor, the Honorable W. Averill Harriman, Governor, and the way more than a little dishonorable Vito Genovese, Boss, at the institution then known as Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center. This has always seemed strange to me; you wouldn’t think there were enough Columbian Presbyterians in Bogotá, much less New York, for them to support a hospital that size. They must all be very wealthy or very unhealthy to afford that level of care. The hospital has a different name now, though what that different name might be escapes me at the moment.

In any case, my links to a hitherto unpersecuted religious minority and its Calvinist heresies ended a few days after my birth when, at my mother’s insistence, I was baptized into the Holy Roman Catholic and Apostolic Church [hereafter, the Church and don’t you forget it, smart guy]. I do not remember this event, either, although I do remember thinking that this was a fairly strange bar, what with the bartender giving me salt but no lime or margarita, and then washing my hair without using shampoo or a blow dryer. I dislike this sort of occupational multitasking lest it breed it cause confusion among those consumers who think that going to a plumber for a kidney transplant is a reasonable idea. Needless to say, I did not tip the bartender.

1958—1962: I am a prisoner. I am not sure what the charges were, but in some way—I may have been a victim of mistaken identity, like Cary Grant in North by Northwest—I became trapped in the labyrinthine snake pit of undercover Cold War politics. I was kept in a barbaric open air cell with no toilet facilities where people came to poke, prod, and make strange faces at me in an effort to make me talk. This does not happen; I made the determination early on that I wasn’t going to tell those no good Commie rat bastards anything, but I admit that on more than one occasion, I came perilously close to cracking under the strain of my captivity. To maintain my sanity, I translate the lyrics of Ira Gershwin into Bhutanese, no easy task when you don’t know Bhutanese, have no access to a Bhutanese dictionary, or even know where Bhutan is and if anyone actually lives there. The result, as you might imagine, was pure gibberish, comprehensible only to mentally deficient gibbers, who appreciate the true genius of the Gershwin brothers, and civil servants, who appreciate gibbering for the fine art that it is and wish that more people would take gibbering up as a hobby so the civil servants wouldn’t look so dumb when they gibber; one person gibbering is foolishness personified—five thousand people gibbering at the same time is our government at work. Sometimes I sang Sinatra songs backwards, too; it passes the time. I still miss Frank.

During those first few years of my captivity, the filthy screws tossed another two prisoners into my cell. They are turncoats, Benedict Arnolds of the worst sort. They constantly tried to curry favor with the guards by betraying my escape plans. I had to abandon three tunnels, including one that had almost gotten to the wall; the risk of discovery was just too great with those rats around. I waited for the Red Cross to come, but they never did. I believe to this day that my captors held me incommunicado so I could not pass on what I knew to our government. What did I know? I don’t know what it was, and if I did, I’d have to kill myself to keep it secret. That’s how important it was.

1963: The guards sent me to some sort of recreation facility. I spend my days plotting to bust out of there, but finger painting and Dr. Seuss keep me from going. There is deep philosophical meaning in Green Eggs and Ham, I think, and I am sure there was a coded message from HQ in there as well. I could not decode the message, however; my secret decoder ring broke after I got it out of the cereal box. This was not the brightest idea HQ ever had, but I took comfort in the fact that they knew I was stuck there and were planning assiduously to get me out of that awful place.

1964—1965: My captors stop playing around with me. They mean to break me, once and for all. They ship me off to a re-education camp for brainwashing and dance lessons. The dancing does not work out; I am rhythm deprived. This makes no difference to the camp administrators, who are mostly women in strange uniforms. They attempt to break my will by beating me with multiplication tables. They fail at this, as do I on a consistent basis, and so they beat me regularly. On the other hand, the ice cream isn’t all that bad and I play well with others.

1966—1967: I escape from the camp. Taking advantage of this opportunity, I join Magnum Photos as an associate wastepaper basket. I do not last long; the high-fiber/low protein diet all wastepaper baskets must endure sickens me and makes me unable to perform my duties. Worse yet, someone tosses a lit cigarette into my shoes after a long day at the office and I burst into flames, leaving me slightly singed around the edges. As there seems to be no future in wastepaper containment, I move on to other occupational opportunities. I decide to kill carp instead.

1967—1968: I do not kill carp for a living, due to the general lack of suitable carp in the Bronx. There is, and was, of course, plenty of carping in the Bronx; there always is when the Yankees aren’t doing well; but most of this carping is already dead on arrival. This revelation crushes me and snaps the last tenuous hold I have on my ratty sneakers. I have to glue them shut now, as there are no shoelaces in a five-block radius. Sneakers aside, this news annoys the hell out of me. No other species of fish would do for the full expression of my icthyocidal urges. I had no interest in killing tuna, flounder, swordfish, or even the deluded Patagonian dogfish; I only wanted to kill carp and then I learn that I was not even going to get the opportunity to wound one slightly with a slingshot. The best laid schemes o’mice and men, the poet Robert Burns wrote, gang aft agley, and no man ever spoke truer words, even if I don’t know what the hell Burns was talking about after he stopped making sense. You have to expect this sort of thing from someone who thought eating haggis was a good idea.

1969: My wife is born and immediately moves to Ohio with her entire family, where I will never see her again, thereby sparing me the cost of both marrying and divorcing her. I congratulate myself profusely when the news of her impending move reaches me; I know I’ve really ducked a bullet on that one. She took the kids too, I think, although I might have sold them to the neighborhood deli instead. The truth is I don’t remember what I did with the kids, and that’s the God’s honest truth of the matter, your Honor.

June 1969: My captors move me from the city of my birth to the wilds of exurbia. I am ten years old at the time. Nothing interesting has happened to me since.

I trust this satisfies the incessant lack of interest in my biographical particulars and I must hasten to point out that there will be no personal pictures available at any time in the near or distant future. I dislike pictures of myself intensely and I prefer the mental picture you have of me, as I am much thinner in your minds than I am in real life. Thank you and have a nice day.