A Farewell to Dinosaurs
Psychedelic colossi made of concrete
The Rowdy Beaver is up the street from the cathouse
The Christ of the Ozarks Meets John Agar Meets Tyrannosaurus Rex
Is a fallen Kong still King? Is any royal ape, once disarmed and rendered recumbent, deserving of the title of King? Is it still even royal?
These are my questions, as I shimmy up King Kong's flanks, scaling the fallen Eighth Wonder of the World. The forty-foot statue of the Great Ape ― once the largest in the world ― was toppled a few years ago, losing the limb that once held an effigy of the Ayatollah dangling from a noose. This Kong can’t stretch necks anymore. His right arm broke off in the fall. He holds his left arm close to his body, as if cradling a chest injury. The red eyes once lit by "Psycho Lights” from RadioShack are vacant now, gazing skyward. In this ruined Ozymandias-like state, the supine Kong looks scared, not scary.
I suppose Kong knows. Some part of him knows that for him the end is near, as it came for all but the concrete dinosaurs, here at the former home of Farwell's …
Eight Dollars
A hayseed’s adventures in the old Times Square
Robbed in an elevator by a straight-razor-wielding dwarf
Double the pleasure in adjoining dental suites
Times Square in the 1970s was in some sense the heart of Grub Street, “the world of literary hacks, or mediocre, needy writers who write for hire.” The New York Times, which lent its name to what was then the world capital of cheap porno theater seediness, was the voice of Grub Street, grown rich, obscenely complacent, and obliviously self-assured.
Now picture a Caucasian hick in his early twenties, hayseeds in his socks, with a 60s Canadian haircut and a Maoist-issue canvas proletarian man-purse, moving to NYC to pursue a literary career without a college degree, or high school diploma, friends, or work experience outside the Forest Products industry. The choice might seem imprudent, but such decisions, like going fishing, or on a crusade, are never rational. If my decision to move to New York was motivated by any form of sentient reasoning, it was the product of a self whose desires and fears …
Fox Insurrection
Wily foe battles Postal quartet in Battle of Rochester NH
“An attack on one is an attack on all”
Medical privacy concerns vetted as dire portents suggest that not all is well with our Union
The US Postal Service is an unsung bastion of our democracy. In all sorts of weather, day after day, to people of every background and description — even during pandemics — it delivers! But lately this most essential institution has come under attack.
In Rochester, New Hampshire in October, a brave quartet of local postal workers was set upon by a subversive foe: a vicious, stubborn, curiously resourceful, and possibly rabid fox. The assailant did not attack just once but four times, a siege whose details remain necessarily vague, in part due to medical privacy concerns and in part because such details might reveal vulnerabilities in a system crucial to our well-being as a nation.
The first stage of the onslaught occurred outdoors and came, it seems fair to conclude, as a surprise. The threat posed by unruly domestic dogs is well known to postal employees (a modern unionized workforce firmly …
