All posts by rexmerritt

South America, Tales Out of School

The Amoralists — Part Two

    Fabio could’ve taken lessons in deviousness from Celia. He should’ve. Maybe pointers from her might’ve prevented his now and forever pronounced limp. Probably not. Indifferent a student in youth as he had been, Fabio was not an old dog to be taught new tricks.

    Maybe ascribing Celia as devious is unnecessarily harsh. Driven. She was driven. At least that lends her a trait Americans can admire. Otherwise it would be too easy to call her manipulative.

    Celia grew up in Brazil’s Minas Gerais state. Once I asked her town’s name, and she told me, but I forgot it. Or misheard it. Likely the last. Sometimes having drank too much vitamin whiskey her accent thickened into incomprehensibility. And she couldn’t be understood either.

Continue reading The Amoralists — Part Two →

Tales Out of School

The Amoralists – Part One

            With severe apologies to Andre Gide …

    Does distance improve perception? Well, in my case perhaps 2400 miles have clarified a few escapades.

    Relocated now to Las Vegas (too early to claim “settled”), several scenes and the actors upon those now far away New York stages stalk under brighter light. Those acts having concluded years ago, they can today be reckoned through lengthy contemplation.

    Nothing has prepared me for the last two years. Disruption. Demise. Dislocation. Ready for such life occurrences as we swear, aren’t we forever caught out by these upheavals? Maneuver as best we can, coping is the best one can hope.

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Observed

Burn the Boat/Marginal People


 

    Ladies and gentlemen, the wages of sin are fairer than honest compensation. Years ago, such bombast might’ve been an exaggeration. Today, it’s not even laughable. In fact, such recognition deserves rueful acceptance.

    Any following these posts know the writer has decamped across America; from Northeastern suburban splendor to the Mojave Desert. As chronicled, abject neglect beyond my control has transformed me into an involuntary economic refugee of sorts.

    Imitating conquistador Hernando Cortez and his particular New World conquest, I’ve burned my boat. Truly, stranding myself was easier than Cortez’ and his band’s self-inflicted marooning.

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Pop Culture, South America

What Is Beat?

    Finally watched the film version of On the Road recently. Anticipating disappointment, Walter Salles’ 2012 effort lived down to expectations.

    I imagine when the project was pitched and possible directors were suggested, Salles emerged a natural fit. After all, the Brazilian had done a tender job helming The Motorcycle Diaries, the sort of movie that makes most American audiences eyes glaze over yet rewards patient viewers. You know, solitary figures sitting in the dark interested in more than excessive explosions and stunted adults wallowing in juvenile humor.

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Quarropas

From the Miasma

    August does not lend itself to cool reasoning. Heat and humidity alter senses. Fetid extremes don’t simply quicken our humors but agitate them.

   Somehow the ancients understood this. And somehow given current advances in science we today dismiss their view as archaic.

   We seek reason where none exists. When the answer fails fitting our box we prefer believing the dilemma “inexplicable.” Or worse, chop the matter down and stuff it into an approximation which mollifies us. “Close” suffices because “right” taxes us too much.

   Besides, getting it right just may upset a lot of comfortably held perceptions. Well, hidebound ones with which we’re comfortable.

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Quarropas

Down Time


    Ideally this post would flog Properly Stirred, the 2013 Slow Boat Media short-story compilation. The three interludes feature Paul Knox, a man who enjoyed his pleasures (okay, more than his fair share of pleasures), yielded to the demands of age and status, believed himself to have contentment, then got bushwhacked. 

    Better than a redo, Knox reverts throughout Properly Stirred. While not indulging in irresponsibility, he must no longer conform. Paul Knox has achieved an enviable state. He’s been released. And he returns to situations and conditions which had earlier occupied him to happy ends.

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Agitprop/Propaganda, Observed, Pop Culture

Frolic and Friction

    The initial subject of this post was to have flogged Properly Stirred, the 2013 Slow Boat Media explicit exploits extravaganza. (Properly Stirred is available through Amazon Kindle.) However, incipient background upheaval and a timely dovetailing of international relations with anecdotal observations favor the topical subject.

    President Obama’s recent cancellation of bilateral discussions with Russian President Vladimir Putin has set the “be afraid, be very afraid” segment of America into full peek in the closets/check under the beds mode. For them, the sudden spate of bug-out embassy and consular evacuations was soothing music. More sanguine Americans saw these closures as large scale security theater panic.

    Aware of history and the threat against our nation, menace cannot be discounted. Yet in the 21st century haven’t we yielded common sense vigilance to Bernard Breakdown instances of quivering uncontrollable fear?

    Similar to Breakdown, a Dick Tracy villain from the early 1980s, it takes little to disrupt the security apparatus’ coping mechanism.  

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Observed

Pebbles in the Pond

    With the increasingly maundering commemorations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki encroaching, it is once again time to loosen an unavoidable skunk upon the apologist/revisionist/revanchist picnic.
    
    Pearl Harbor. Isn’t it strange reading that location in August?

    No a-bombs apology from this corner. May one be an Arizona graduate who has attended mainland memorials consecrating that December 1941 day without agreeing why those detonations occurred 68 years ago this week?

    Every American of the Boomer Generation (and our successors) alive today should be grateful for Harry Truman’s orders. But too many Americans are not. Seems the percentage rises as the age lowers, too. One or two more generations and might we become what George Santayana cautioned?

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Pornography

Properly Stirred


    
    Paul Knox thought he’d squeezed all the wild-style ways out of his system. After buckling down, he settled down. Knox believed the remainder of his life aligned. Whether this satisfied him was immaterial. He’d plateaued upon a point where certain expectations demanded fulfilling. By him.

    But the good life threw Knox a curve. A big one so hard even Uncle Charlie would declare it a yakker. The kind that jolted Knox back to his previously unfettered manner of living. The nights and days when he personified Mister Party Room. Continue reading Properly Stirred →

Pornography

Twisty


            Below is an extract from the story that concludes Cool Brass, a Slow Boat Media e-book. Although Marianne Messing predominates throughout the three stories, this interlude features Paz Duarte, Caleb Abercrombie’s casual lover. The whole of Twisty may be read as reactions regarding how perceived outsiders create places in their respective societies as well as within their own skins.   Continue reading Twisty →