MELANIA What’s the matter, honey? Are you all right? Come back to me.

TRUMP (fuming) As anyone of normal or better intelligence might figure the f*** out, I’m all tied up inside about the midterm elections.

MELANIA (maternally) Oh, hon. The people still love you, as I do. Everything will turn out all right. I’m sure of it. Come back to me.

TRUMP No. I’m going to the Lincoln Bedroom. I’ll watch some gay porn…No, no! Kidding! Or a slip of the tongue. Or something. I’ll compose some informative truths for Truth Social and do some reading. I’m almost halfway through The Art of the Deal, but if anybody asks, tell them the Bible.

Not long thereafter, the president wakes in the Lincoln Bedroom and nearly jumps out of his skin on realizing that ghost of his elder brother, Fred Jr, is watching hm form one of the suite’s William Morris velvet-upholstered slipper chairs.

FRED JR Yo, what up, champ?

DJT: The jig. Maybe you’ve heard about the midterm elections. The people don’t understand how much I’ve done for them. I’ve given up so much to serve the country I love, Freddy. And what do I have to show for it?

FRED JR A few billion bucks, as I understand it. And immunity from prosecution for most of the unbelievable criminal shit you’ve been involved in.

TRUMP Like you wouldn’t have been involved in it too if you hadn’t drunk yourself to death, Mr. Big Airborne Bus Driver.

FRED JR Same old Donald. Well, let’s do this again soon. Like halfway through your ninth term, in what 2050-whatever it’ll be. That’s a joke by the way, but I understand your sense of humor’s a match for your empathy in terms of non-existence.

The president wakes and nearly jumps out of his skin on realizing that the ghost of his mentor Roy Cohn is standing over him, looking disgusted.

COHN I’ve got a bone to pick with you, hot shot.

TRUMP Roy! Am I glad to see you. Should we give each other one of those little one-arm hugs and one tap on the back with the other hand like the athletes’.

COHN The one that dispels any doubt about a guy being straight? Well, that ship has sailed, hot shot. That rally where you went on and on and on about that Ohio senator’s muscles! I laughed so hard I almost came out of J. Edgar’s cornhole. Why don’t you just get a rainbow flat tattooed on your forehead?

TRUMP Hey! Does somebody who’s not 150 percent straight want somebody like Natalie Harp around him every waking minute?

COHN Yeah, right. But I didn’t come around her to talk about fag hags. I’ve got a bone to pick with you, hot shot. When I died, I was pretty sure my place in the forefront of the great villains in American political history was assured. Now, thanks to you, all anybody talks about is Stephen Miller. And he isn’t even a homophobic gay hypocrite! And who, may I ask, are his Rosenbergs?

TRUMP So you sent a couple of Jewish spies to the electric chair. So you and McCarthy ruined a lot of innocent people’s lives. What with ICE, Steve makes you look like…I can never think of somebody off the top of my head.

COHN It won’t surprise you that I know that I’ve got kompromat — little joke there! — on everybody worth knowing in Hell, hot shot. All I can say is you’d better hope you live forever.

Terrified, the president cries himself to sleep, only to realize that now his father’s ghost is standing over him, exuding fury.

FRED SR Wakd up, Donnie. Wake the fuck up — now!

DJT Pop. OMG! It’s so great to see you.

FRED SR I wish I could say the same. Do you have any idea how much f***ing embarrassment you’ve caused me? What did I tell you about being a loser?

DJT I’m president of the United States, Pop! How can you not be proud of me? My name — our name — is on a million hotels and apartment buildings. I’m the world’s most-talked about man. I’ve stopped 18 wars. I’ve got a Nobel Prize!

FRED SR And how many times have you gone bankrupt? How many casinos did you screw the pooch with in Atlantic City? How many felonies have been convicted of? Which of my sons was found guilty of sexual assualt in a f***cking Bloomingdale’s try-on room? Who was kissin’ f***ing cousins with the most notorious pedophile in American history? Who poses for pictures with f***ing N-words? And who is almost universally blamed for what a f***ing disaster you are as a human being? I do! And now you get up in front of dozens of people and f***ingrave about some other man’s tush? What the f*** are you thinking, to whatever small extent you might be seen as capable of thinking?

DJT (wailing) I’m sorry, Pop! Please don’t be disappointed in me, Pop!

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There’s a knock on the bedroom door. A night-shift aide and Natalie Harp enter looking ashen-faced.

AIDE Is everything all right, sir? You sounded distraught.

DJT (furiously) I don’t f***ing get “distraught”, whatever it means. Real men don’t show emotion! (To Natalie) My loyal little blonde angel. Print something out that’ll get me through the night. Wait. Where’s your little printer?

NATALIE It’s a bloodbath at the polls. The Democrat candidates have won nine of the 13 Senate seat. They’ve gained 28 seats in the House. You’re toast, sir. Hopelessly f***ed. And why am I addressing you as “sir”? D’oh!

DJT So Talarico won, and El-Sayed? And whoever was running against Lindsay’s idiot little sister, What’s-Her-Face?

NATALIE They and six others. Listen I’d love to keep chatting, but I’ve got a breakfast date with Don Jr. and I want to look my hottest.

DJT You can’t! He just got married! That Russian oligarch paid for the after-party!

NATALIE Shall I call Laura Loomer from the Ûber for you…sir?

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It make me wonder — but not for long — what color dress Leslie P. Kenhart wore to my band’s audition for Warner Bros Records in the September of 1972. At the time, she had just begun…dating the pretty bass player in the band, who remembers her wearing a fringed leather outfit, while I, in my mind’s eye, see hervery clearly in a stretchy red dress in which she looked like a 227 on a 1-to-10 scale. Bass Player believes it was her famous fringed buckskin outfit she wore that night. I wasn’t there, but understand that it was at the Whisky that she unleashed the fringed leather outfit, and that her entrance was such that the band momentarily forgot what song they were meant to be playing.

Better people than I have misremembered things. In her 2009 Fresh Air interview with Teri Gross, the late Eve Marie Saint remembered that she and Marlon Brando weren’t killed in the On the Waterfront scene in which a truck barrels down a narrow alley on them, was that Marlon, bare-handed, broke the glass of a locked door that they were able to jump into at the last second. (The door was supposed to have been unlocked, but somebody — oops! — forgot, possibly as the result of a generous bribe from Johnny Friendly.) How to explain that we see the glass being broken from inside the room, one wonders.

While I’m free-associating, note how the Scottish might-have-been pop star Lloyd Cole pronounces the late Ms. Saint’s surname in his 1983 song “Rattlesnakes”. I have always been amused about how very fastidiously the British pronounce foreign names the foreign names they don’t make the slightest effort to pronounce properly. Note how Frenchly the English might-have-been pop star Lloyd Cole pronounces the late Ms. Saint’s surname in his 1983 song “Rattlesnakes”. But just find a Brtish football announcer who can pronounce “Carlos”, the Spanish equivalent of Charles, properly, even though there are 41 million English words that contain the long “o” sound in the second syllable.

Bass Player broke it off with Leslie for reasons not clear to me — she wasn’t just gorgeous, but also smart, funny, generous, and kind — and she returned to Miami. When she returned to Los Angeles several years later, it was as the bride of the scion of a wealthy Queens, New York, schmatta baron. His Majesty the Baby. who believed himself to be the next Lorne Michaels, but I can’t hold that against him, as I believed myself at the time to be the next Rod Stewart. He was a spoiled little dickhead, and when I found out that Leslie was considering leaving him, I wooed her fervently. When, shortly after I launched my charm offensive, she had a horrific rollerskating accident en route to her art gallery sales job on Santa Monica’s Main Street, her first call was to me. I dared dream big.

We wed and had a daughter and lasted six and a half years, the first four really good and the last 30 months worse and worser. Decades later, it occurred to me that in many ways I hadn’t been an improvement on His Majesty the Baby. Lobsterhead, as I began calling her a few weeks into our courtship, got herself a rich third husband, the scion of a Swiss German electronics company. The sight of the two of them walking our daughter toward Rich Third Husband’s car after they’d pick her up at my little apartment in San Francisco on the occasional Sunday afternoon absolutely tore my heart out. The thought of Rich Third Husband, nice guy though he seemed, taking my place in daughter’s life even four days a week tortured me. As I write this, my daughter hasn’t spoken to me in 24 years.

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You might imagine that Cincinnati was derived from a word that meant “big tree near river,” as most American place names of aboriginal origin did, but it was actually named after a drinking and transvestism club to which Continental Army officers belonged after the Revolutionary War. The club in turn had been named after Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus, who gave up farming for two weeks in the 5th century BC to become the benevolent dictator of Rome during a period of frightful turmoil. Once having righted the proverbial ship, he sighed, “Well, that was fun, if a little stressful,” except in Latin, and returned to his plow, sort of like the narrator of Elton John’s “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road”.

I have considered rebranding myself as Johnny Friendly, but like so many of my other terrific ideas, this one will probably wither and die unrealized.

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This here’s a song I wrote in 2025 under trying cirumstances. Last weekend I invited a passel of neighbours (we live in SW London, where it’s spelt (!) that way) to come over for weiners and beer. Several brought their musical instruments and corn liquor they’d distilled their own selves, and things got a little rowdy. We walked across Ham Lands and had a heck of a lot of fun baptising (in SW London it’s spelt (!) that way) each other. Then those of us still able to walk returned here and harmonised (in SW London it’s spelt (!) that way), a little dissonantly at times, far into the night.

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Baloney, or, if you insist, bullshit.

What one is morally compelled to do is work toward unjust laws being rescinded.

Two friends of mine used to be animal rights extremists, by which I mean they felt called upon to break into places of business in which they believed animals to be mistreated, and trash the place. They hadn’t the slightest trace of doubt that such intervention on behalf of creatures without a voice was their moral duty.

I don’t want to live in a society in which fervent sincere belief that you’re right and the victim of your actions wrong confers license to harm. Those who stand across the street with a rifle from a doctors’ office in which abortions are performed has no doubt in their mind that they’re on the side of the angels — that abortion is murder, and the not-yet-born deserve to be protected, exactly as the animal rights activist believes the animals need protection.

Both sincerely — and, indeed, fervently, believe their causes just.

What moral person would condone murder?

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I began smoking cannabis at 19 years old. For almost 50 years, I sincerely believed that cannabis’s being forbidden while alcohol and tobacco were not was lunacy. I’ve been alive when it was illegal for a black person to use a lavatory reserved for the use of those of lesser melanin, or for a gay man or lesbian to enjoy sexual intimacy without breaking the law. Laws can be inane, or even pernicious. At the risk of repeating myself, I still don’t want to live in a society in which fervent sincere belief that you’re right and the victim of your actions wrong confers license to harm.

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I give you AI Slop, the term the meager intellect crowd is now letting fly as prolifically as they once did “We ain’t a democracy. We’s a republic.”

Speaking graphically, AI’s a tool. Just as a paintbrush, it can be used to make something glorious, or a piece of shit.

A few weeks ago, inspired by a succession of pretty, rampantly inaccurate maps of southern California, I successfully urged Grok Imagine (the last prudish of the lot) to concoct a comparably colorful, ridiculous map of SW London, where I live. It happily obliged:

I posted it on Next Door, with the expected result. “AI slop!” snarled the local idiot whose day was made last year when the local council…cancelled the gorgeous graffiti someone had painted on the side of a little grocery store on Ham Street, not visible to passing motorists. Where that gorgeous graffiti could briefly be glimpsed there is now a hideous black rectangle, the council having apparently run out of white paint.

I’m unashamed to use AI a lot in my creative work. I am, as we speak, making a video — a reel — for my song “I Am Loved”. Mr. AI Slop is sure to see it and believe I just typed in a few syllables and clicked a button, but no such thing is the case. For one segment, I curated photos of Donald G. Trump with several of his favorite fellow despots. I removed the backgrounds in Photoshop, replaced them with dramatic clouds, and then got Grok to make six-second (predictably, I’m on the cheapskate monthly plan) in which the two men make out feverishly. I’d done the same with a photo of Marilyn Monroe meeting Maria Callas the night Marilyn sang Happy Birthday to John Kennedy in a dress she had to be sewn into. I then made a montage of the photos in Apple’s motion graphics program.

Another segment features cartoons. A couple of weeks ago, I happened on a Pinterest page depicting endearingly awkward (and other) couples from the ‘60s. I curated a bunch of them, and then induced Grok to render them as pop art, with saturated colors and black lines, as in comic books. Later today I will laborously make another montage of them.

I didn’t simply type in a little prompt and click a button. I used AI as a tool.

I will also acknowledge that I used Logic Pro’s Quantize feature to rhythmically smooth some of the instrumental tracks on “I Am Loved”. This, of course, is a form of cheating, but I suspect one might be able to argue that, since neither Diana, Flo, nor Mary actually played the bass, the Supremes’ producers were cheating by bringing James Jamerson in to play it. Or maybe the more apt invocation would be of George Martin bolstering the Beatles on piano.

The artist uses the tools at hand. It’s the art that counts, and not what tools and strategies one used to produce it.

The other day, I watched one of those [So-and-So] Finally Identifies the Bands He Hates! clickbait videos, in which Ronnie Wood condemned Ian Anderson for playing a flute when a flute isn’t a rock and roll instrument.

SMH.

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I’m likewise reminded of how the rock-n’-roll-dude [notice the Guns N’ Roses homage?] community condemned synthesizers as somehow…unmanly. A guy playing a guitar with particular pickups through an amp whose specialty is a certain type of rich distortion, with an array of effects pedals on the floor before him was one thing, something noble and meritorious, whereas someone playing a synthesizer? Wim-PEE, dude!

Give me an hour or two, and I’ll show you 20 Substack essays that are substantially enhanced by AI illustrations conceived by the author, and which the author in many cases surely had to coax Grok or one of its rivals through half a dozen iterations before getting something suitable.

This past spring, I swooned on discovering that if I fed in even the cover of the sort of fetish-oriented girlie magazine I used to adore as a teenager, it would remove all the ugliness and place the model in a beautiful watercolor painting. I spent weeks curating grist for Grok’s mill, and then took advantage of the platform’s ability to animate the images. I could rescue the brave women who’d enflamed me as 14-year-old, and bring them to life! What a very wonderful world we live in!

Just typing in a prompt and clicking a button, my ass.

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[See a full-sized version of this on YouTube or Facebook.]

But then Jeth discovered country music, as played by Chet Atkins, and decided he enjoyed playing it more than histrionic rock. After playing for audiences of 350 with a histrionic band, he’d head for the town’s country bar and sit in with bands playing for 60. Word spread quickly, and the queen of country music poached him for her own band.

A lot more women had found a way to get backstage after the histrionic shows, but Jeth generally found those at the country queen’s shows more attractive. They were generally older, and dressed more attractively — less provocatively, to be sure, but a little understatement went a long way for Jeth. In many cases, the histrionic girls would have far more tattoos than he thought becoming, and seem a little desperate, as in huge false eyelashes. He and the pedal steel player, who’d recently turned 61, were the only tattoo-less members of the country queen’s band.

The country queen and Jeth had a thing going on for over a year without either anyone in the band or her husband knowing about it. That she wouldn’t leave her husband for Jeth drove him to drink, and after breast cancer took her at age 43, his thirst became a problem.

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By age 33, he’d been in and out of rehab twice, and been hired and dismissed by two country superstars’ bands and three histrionics. He swallowed his pride and signed on with a One Direction tribute act called Wand Erection, and stayed sober for seven years though he didn’t find the music very challenging. He joined a country rock band he wished didn’t call itself Kneel Young, and was eventually able to lose the Young.

Two days after his 37th birthday, Kneel headlined at the Topeka Performing Arts Center. They’d rarely played to a more adoring audience. A young woman who looked unnervingly like the late country queen, except not as…ample, came backstage and made a beeline for Jeth. It was clear that if he invited her back to the Courtyard by Marriott, she would avidly consider their getting intimate. On the way back to the hotel, though, he realized that sleeping with the young doppelganger might put him back on the road to addiction. There was no knowing for sure if he’d be overwhelmed with guilt for having been unfaithful to his wife Bethie, so he called the whole thing off.

The doppelganger obviously felt hurt and humiliated. Jeth promised that he’d phone her at tour’s end, and fly her out to see him, but he would up resigning from Kneel and supporting himself by offering lessons at the local music store. It meant that Bethie would be the household’s principal breadwinner as the secretary of the local school’s district’s superintendent, but she and their daughters might be happy having him home more.

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Speaking of tattoos, here’s a poignant but very pleasant song I wrote in Malta in 2025, or thereabouts. Darryll du Toit, originally of Pietermaritzburg, South Africa, plays guitar

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Yesterday afternoon, while exercycling my way to fitness, I watched some of the Netflix documentary Becoming Led Zeppelin, and was surprised by how much I enjoyed the first part, which was mostly the three surviving former members talking, interestingly and articulately, about the paths that led them to each other.

Then there was a segment featuring a very early performance (as the New Yardbirds) in Sweden, or somewhere, and I was reminded of why I couldn’t stand them. I hated Plant’s screeching. I hated the lack of melody and that the lyrics were almost entirely about how treacherous women are. I especially hated Page’s guitar playing, which seemed to express only how dexterous he was.

And how sloppy. I’m no guitarist, but his playing often sounded very sloppy, and arrythmic. I was reminded of having written that a solo he played on the first Joe Cocker album seemed to have nothing whatever to do with the rest of the song, and how Joe’s producer, Denny Cordell, tried to get me to take that out of my review. (“If he sees that, Pagey may not play for me again,” he fretted. “And there’s apt be a downside too,” thought little 22-year-old I.)

Being only dexterous as a musician seems to me to be roughly equivalent to a writer being really good at grammar. So…? I’d far sooner be moved by eight notes than impressed by 64.

Most of all, I hated the self-indulgence, which I found no less numbingly tedious as a very old man than I had as a very young one.

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A few times every decade since the publication of my Rolling Stone review 57 years ago, people have asked if I’m embarrassed about disparaging the group that many regard as the greatest in rock history. I have traditionally replied, “My feelings have indeed changed. I hate them more than ever.”

Not so many years ago, I discombobulated former NME (New Musical Express) star writer and the gal he loves by asserting that, if asked to choose between Billy Joel and David Bowie, I’d take Billy every time, not that that I’ve ever owned any of his recordings. But four bars in his song “The Longest Time” are a small master class in the craft of songwriting.

I don’t care what consequence it brings
I have been a fool for lesser things

Thoughtful, interesting lyrics — not about the treachery of women, mind you! — exquisitely married to the melody whose passenger they are. Than that it gets no better, not in the Cole Porter canon, nor in Rogers & Hammerstein’s nor Stephen Sondheim’s.

On the Bowie side of the ledger, we have his celebrated cut-up technique, on which — watch this! — I frown. Oh, do I! The easiest thing in the world for a songwriter is to not make sense.)

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A much earlier, pre-rock example of the craft at its best: Yip Harburg’s lyrics for “Somewhere Over the Rainbow”. In the little pre-coda section at the end of the song, composer Harold Arlen presents the Yipster with the wee dilemma in the meter of the melody following “If happy little bluebirds fly…” Had he been Stevie Nicks (“Dreams"), or Ray Davies (in “All Day and All of the Night”, Yip, wanting to repeat the song’s title, would have accented the second syllable of “over: — o-VER — which would have been monstrous. So what does a master songwriter do in such a case? He doesn’t tell the melodist to change the melody, bu finds a word that both fits rhythmically and has the right meaning — beyond. That’s craft!

I had a small shouting match this past week with one of those who regard Bowie as a golden genius. It was his point of view that both Bowie and Prince had done nothing less than invent new kinds of music. I guess he hadn’t heard of James Brown, Stevie Wonder, the Ohio Players, Edith Piaf, or the Brill Building songwriters of the early 1960s, your Carole Kings and so on.

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Substack doesn’t display Reel-dimension videos at their, uh, real size. Don’t blame me.

Scribbler’s Bipolarity, you see.

In any event, one thing I’ve always excelled at as a novelist is finding reasons not to be working on the novel at hand — not when there are snacks to be made, email to be checked (every 45 seconds), and Facebook reels to be enjoyed.

Lately, as a result of my having been mesmerized by the music of the Bournemouth band name NAEMA and the who-knows-wherefrom Space Acre, Facebook has decided that I want to see a great many reels featuring unknown musicians telling me that such-and-such record company turned them down because harmonicas, banjos, and [reader’s choice] aren’t what modern audiences want to hear any more. The stars of the reels are dependent on kind people such as you and I to help keep the wolf from their doors, which we can do by copying the link to their video.

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What have I got to lose? I have now copied more unknown musicians’ links than there are grains of sand on D&W, the favored just-north-of-LAX beach of my youth. The remarkable thing is that I find myself liking almost everything I hear, from a Jam-like threesome from Southampton that not very imaginatively calls itself South Street to a morbidly obese young female singer called Siibii from some weird island somewhere, who sounds like the distillation of all the sadness in human history, and whose name you want on your side when playing team Scrabble, to clones of Aerosmith and AC/DC.

And I loathed the Jam and Aerosmith!

Yesterday, though, when I should have been polishing Cartel Tale or The Komodo Dragon Burrito, it was by a series of remarkable AI-generated videos of allegedly sexy young women in provocative attire (garter belts a-weigh!) performing at comedy clubs that I was distracted.

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But don’t take my word for it!

https://www.facebook.com/reel/2545472052599488

https://www.facebook.com/reel/1455561073192203 https://www.facebook.com/reel/1425565953084674

https://www.facebook.com/reel/1405917637914076

https://www.facebook.com/reel/2676061612841385

https://www.facebook.com/reel/1790083285241937

Is Facebook now back in da house, or what?

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— Donald G. Trump
Mosinee, WI, September 2024

It wasn’t my fault I was running late. The Client had decided that the social media advertisement I’d designed needed just one tiny additional tweak. Alan, the creative director, felt foolish asking me to do it because he agreed that it was going to upset the visual balance of the ad, but the taste of The Client is infallible.

I’m not one of those people whose ears start emitting steam if somebody’s a single-digit number of minutes late, but Bob Heydenreich, who coaches Timmy’s Pop Warner team, isn’t going to win any patience awards. If they’re late at all, the boys don’t play the following weekend, and Timmy, as the team’s star running back and linebacker, pretty much lives to play. Once having collected him and his classmate, best friend, and Pop Warner teammate Jayden at school, getting them to practice before steam came out of Coach Bob’s ears was probably going to involve running a red light or three.

You can imagine how stressed I was by the time I pulled up in front of Timmy’s school and saw no trace of him or Jayden, but five girls where the boys would ordinarily have been waiting for me. As I pulled into view, two of them broke off from the others and came over to my Forester. One opened the door and got in the back seat. The other got in the front beside me. “I don’t have time for games, girls,” I said, “I’m here to pick up Timmy Rossi and Jayden Whose-Last-Name-I-Don’t-Know.”

The one in the front seat giggled and said, “No need to stress, Daddy. We won’t be playing any more football.”

What the f—? Timmy hadn’t addressed me as Daddy since he was around seven, at which point I’d become Pops, and how did this…girl…know….

Oh, my god.

“Timmy, what are you doing? Coach H is going to be beside himself. I’m already beside myself!”

“Chill, Mr. D,” the little girl in the back said. “Me and Selena are so over all that.”

Selena?

It was Timmy, feminized almost to the point of not being recognizable, in the seat beside me. I turned for a look into the back seat. It was Jayden, transformed, comparably feminized. But God knows they weren’t the Timmy and Jayden I’d hurried over from work to take to football practice. I found myself incapable of speech.

Timmy put his…No. Selena put her hand gently on my forearm. She was wearing half a dozen friendship bracelets. I know what they were because the agency had pitched to develop a campaign for a company that sold them. “You’re confused, Daddy. I get it. Who could blame you. But it’s like totally OK. Really.`’ My god. He…she was the spitting image of…her mother, my wife, Debbi.

If she knows about this and didn’t tell me, I thought, Debbi is going to wish Steve, my father-in-law, had never met Jeanette, my mother-in-law.

“Do you think we might be able to like stop at Cute Panda on the way home, Mr. D?” Jayden, or whatever he, or she, was calling…fuck this!…himself said from the back seat. “I would absolutely adore a bubble tea right now.”

“Ooh, yes!” my son, the former star linebacker of his Pop Warner football team, cooed affirmatively, smashing my heart into a thousand shards.

Someone was tapping on my window. A guy with long hair and a little nose ring, a denim work shirt and a tie that he obviously didn’t like having to wear. I rolled down my window and his hand came through it, for shaking. “Mr. Rossi,” he says, “Eric Drummond, acting vice principal. Awesome to meet you. Do you have a minute?”

My two passengers seemed to be discussing a Taylor Swift song I of course didn’t know, being more of Foo Fighters/Metallica guy. My son Timmy had loved Nirvana and a bunch of retro classic rock bands he’d discovered on Tik Tok. “Would you mind telling me what happened to my son?” I asked Acting Vice Principal Drummond.

“Absolutely not,” he said, so brightly I nearly reached for my Wayfarers on the dashboard. “We’ve made CRT optional for fourth and fifth graders this semester.” He noticed my uncertainty. “Critical Race Theory.

“After Drag Queen Storytime, where we introduce the kids to Das Kapital, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, some Toni Morrison, and other great works of literature, a fourth or fifth grader can either learn in greater depth about America’s systemic racism, or explore his or her gender identity. Is it cool with you if I say ‘they’ instead of ‘he or she’?

“Cool,” I said. I don’t think he realized I was mocking him.

“Awesome,” he said. “As I was saying, if a student opts for gender identify investigation, or GII, as we call it for short, they become eligible for gender reassignment after passing the written test and being approved by one of the school district’s roving gender affirmation specialists.”

I kept waiting for him to burst into laughter, but his expression only got more earnest. “It’s the District’s feeling that a student who’s comfortable in their own skin is going to be a more attentive, more socially engaged student, and eventually a more productive member of the community.”

It took every bit of strength for me to ask the question that was the elephant in the room. “Is surgery involved?”

“Not one little bit,” he said, seeming delighted to be doing so. “That’s for middle school, or when our GAS so advises. Maybe even high school. In the short term, we just administer puberty-blocking hormones. You’ll probably find over the next few weeks that Selena’s voice will get much higher, that she’ll spend most of every evening exchanging text messages with girlfriends — the confidante type, not sexual partners — about cute male classmates, and that she’ll want to be allowed to wear more makeup and more revealing clothing than you and Mom may be comfortable with. In rare cases, your new daughter will, through sheer force of will, succeed in menstruating, but that’s nothing to be concerned about. Our advice is that you encourage her in every way you can to embrace the stereotypes of her new gender identity.”

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“So about that bubble tea, Mr. D?” the former Jayden, bored with friendship bracelets, chirped impatiently from the back seat.

“It just so happens,” I told Drummond, my confusion becoming umbrage, “that Mrs. Rossi and I were perfectly happy with Timmy being a boy. We already have two daughters.”

Drummond’s grin morphed into a sneer. “Well, you know what, Mr. Rossi? The District doesn’t believe that’s your choice to make anymore, OK? It’s the student’s. Why don’t you go buy these two lovely young ladies a bubble tea before I file a complaint with the DGA?

He shook his head at my confusion. “Do you not read or watch the news? The Department of Gender Ambiguity. A branch of the Department of Education, which Mr. Trump was going to eliminate before it came to this, but so-called progressives like you voted for this instead.”

I drove over to Cute Panda, and let Selena — to my amazement, or maybe self-protectively, I was already getting used to the idea — order for me. She and the former Jayden excused themselves to flirt with some boys their age, who I was pretty sure had been born with Y chromosomes. There were soft little specks of something in my drink, and I spat out my first sip. When I complained to the cashier inside, she rolled her eyes, and explained that they were tapioca pearls, made from the starch of the cassava, a tropical shrub known for its starchy roots.

I’d never felt I had less of a clue what the world was coming to.

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TRUMP What the fuck, Natalie? Your phone’s been going to voicemail all morning.

NATALIE I’ve been talking to people. It’s 9:30 at night.

TRUMP How would I know that? Have you forgotten that I don’t f***ing know how to tell time?

NATALIE I guess I did, yes. Sorry.

TRUMP “Sorry, SIR.”

NATALIE Whatever.

TRUMP And where’s Melania during all this?

NATALIE You don’t want to know, I don’t think.

TRUMP Answer me!

NATALIE She’s dating Leonard di Caprio.

TRUMP Tell me you’re f***ing kidding. Say, “I’m kidding you, sir.”

NATALIE Sorry. No can do. Actually can do, but no wanna do.

TRUMP Do you know that I’ve got maybe two more weeks’ worth of f***ing Diet Coke down here, and maybe even less of McDonald’s? I’m down to my last three f***ing Filet-o-Fishes.

NATALIE Filets-o-Fish.

TRUMP You ought to know by now I like my Diet Coke ice cold. I’m drinking it warm. It’s the Big Macs and Filet-o-Fishes that are cold.

NATALIE Why aren\t you using the microwave?

TRUMP Too f***ing complicated. Can’t figure it out. And that explains the cold Big Macs. What about the warm Diet Coke?

NATALIE Be brave, dude. Do you think those arrested by ICE get Diet Coke in their concentration camps? They don’t. Sometimes they have to drink toilet water.

TRUMP Animals! You know, when I hear Dumocrats dancing upstairs in the beautiful ballroom I built for America, it’s like a f***ing knife in my heart.

NATALIE President and Mrs. Ossoff are wonderful hosts. Everyone says so.

TRUMP Where’s that rancid little fuck Stephen Miller now that I need him?

NATALIE Belarus just hired him to be Vice-Dictator for three times what you were paying him. He said he has to think of his family.

NATALIE And JD and f***ing Little Marco?

NATALIE Secretary Rubio’s down in Brazil, doing what Steve’s doing in Belarus. Vice President Vance, Peter Thiel, and Elon Musk bought New Zealand. Most of the tech giants have moved down there.

TRUMP I worked so f***ing hard for the country I love. How can it treat me like this? How can I have wound up hiding in a f***ing corner of the bunker under the ballroom? Has any president ever been treated this unfairly?

NATALIE Man the f*** up, big guy.

TRUMP Who do you think you’re talking to, Natalie? And how many f***ing times do I have to tell you to put “sir” at the end of every sentence?

NATALIE I get my paycheck on time, you get “sir”. The September one’s nearly two weeks late.

TRUMP So talk to f***ing Junior or Eric.

NATALIE No can do. Junior moved to Moscow. Unlisted phone number. Last I heard Eric was trying to get a plastic surgeon to make him look like a Maori so he could go to New Zealand too.

TRUMP For what I’m paying you, I ought to be getting cold f***ing Diet Coke, hot Big Macs, a TV, a f***ing laptop, or at least the latest iPhone, and all the f***ing “sirs” I want and deserve. A million f***ing bucks a week!

NATALIE Peanuts to somebody who made $2 billion on crypto in 2026. And you can always hire somebody else. Why don’t you see if Laura Loomer’s available?

Anyway, gotta run. I’m seeing Sen. Cruz tonight.

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What with his eloquent celebration of the buttocks of particular Republican senatorial candidates, many have been wondering recently if President Trump might have a delicious secret. This essay will be of particular interest to said many.

I like to imagine that, in Rock N’ Droll,, I have written the least authoritative rock reference book ever. Get a copy for your own personal self by contacting me via the Comments. Hours of intense reading pleasure impatiently await!

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Did you neglect to read these? If so, are you aware that your carelessness is going to be noted on your permanent record?

It has come to my attention that you have neglected to read my recent stab at poetry, a tsunami of vitriol inspired by The Abomination. https://johnmendelssohn.substack.com/p/some-lines-just-for-you-sir?r=7yu5q

https://johnmendelssohn.substack.com/p/with-whom-would-you-like-to-see-president?r=7yu5q

https://johnmendelssohn.substack.com/p/i-just-deposited-my-5k-tariffs-dividend?r=7yu5q

https://johnmendelssohn.substack.com/p/the-donald-g-trump-caucus-of-political?r=7yu5q

https://johnmendelssohn.substack.com/p/with-whom-would-you-like-to-see-president?r=7yu5q

https://johnmendelssohn.substack.com/p/the-monsters-pursedog?r=7yu5q

Mama told me once that the only thing the maternal grandpa I never met, the Ukrainian-born Jewish turned rich liquor wholesaler, ever complimented her on was her beauty. I think Mama, probably the self-loathingest gal in Minnesota, if not in te entire Midwest, if not in the solar system grew up believing, or at least feeling, deep down, that since she had beauty, it must be the least anyone could hope for. Throughout my 18 years with my parents, when someone would appear on TV, she would reflexively embrace or condemn them on the basis of their looks — and, in the fellows’ case, height. (God help the unattractive shortie!)

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Mama loved me gigantically, and Papa too, in his way, but the rest of the world sure didn’t, and I grew up feeling ugly. In junior high school (which I have come to regard as one of life’s four or five fiercest challenges) those few classmates who knew I was there with them merrily informed me that I looked like the children’s TV personality Soupy Sales.

I entered adulthood a hopeless dweeb, but when I began making megabucks, the fashion sense I’d inherited from Mama kicked in, and I bought at anglophilic boutiques the sorts of suits Rod Stewart was wearing so alluringly and got $15 haircuts (that would cost $325 in 2026 money).

I had two universal-object-of-desire girlfriends, the first of whom made Sharon Tate look like Ernest Borgnine, and then the UOD first wife depicted below.

At 33, I went through a remarkable period during which women seemed to find me, the former Soupy Sales lookalike, a UOD. Pulled up at intersections, I would see that the woman in the car beside me had written her phone number backwards in lipstick on the inside of her window. A pretty woman in a restaurant in San Francisco scrawled her own number on a serviette and handed it to me when I returned from the gentlemen’s room.

I have always wanted gorgeous women and handsome male friends because I thought the world would see me with them and think, “Maybe he’s not so bad after all. I mean, look who his lovers and friends are.”

The world seemed to continue to find me reasonably attractuve for almost two decades. Strangers at airports, mistaking me for a rock star whose name they couldn’t quite recall, would stop me and say, “You are somebody, aincha?” (I would customarily affirm that I was indeed.) Life Parter 4, the zoo keeper, thought I looked like Prince. Others said Paul Stanley, presumably without the makeup.

And then the laughter turned to tears. I’d been told at 14 that I looked like Soupy Sales. At 52 I was told three times in one year that I looked like the Seinfeld character Kramer. I hadn’t realized how good I’d had it with Soupy Sales!

As I write this, as I hurtle toward 80, I’m an eyesore. I’m not pot-bellied, but the lovely concave tummy of my daily-going-to-the-gym days has gone saggy, as have the pecs for which I worked so hard. My prolifically creased and saggy punim (boat race for Brits, and face for my fellow none-Jewish Yanks) contains countless dark splotches in the shapes of various Central American and African countries. I’ve got inch-long white eyebrow hairs. I’ve got bags under my eyes and the Combover Club keeps inviting me to join. Pretty women on buses offer me their seats. I can’t bear to see photos of myself. I am horrified by the sight of myself in mirrors.

But one thing hasn’t changed. I am still Mama’s boy, and still prefer the company of the gorgeous, as I still prefer the company of the non-elderly. “No,” I overhear myself thinking, “I am not one of…them,” they being my cohort. But it’s no longer the case that I’d be uncomfortable being seen with someone funny, kind, intelligent, and homely unless they were hot in the bargain.

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It has come to my attention that you have neglected to read my recent stab about poetry, a tsunami of vitriol inspired by The Abomination. https://johnmendelssohn.substack.com/p/some-lines-just-for-you-sir?r=7yu5q

https://johnmendelssohn.substack.com/p/with-whom-would-you-like-to-see-president?r=7yu5q

For the great many Aenablers unlikely even to be invited in for a job interview, I have a wonderful entrepreneurial idea — the Former Trump Enablers’ School of Sycophancy, with campuses in all your better [oxymoron alert!] red states. With malice toward none and charity for all — well, actually, maybe malice beyond quantification — I have even devised a curriculum. Every day the ranks of American Billionaires swells, and no few of its members are sure to be looking for potential hires just like accessories to The Abomination’s countless crimes!

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Rewriting history

As noted above, The Horror wasn’t your fault, former enabler. You were duped, lied to, steered wrong, were you not? It could have happened to anyone! You honestly thought you were serving the country both you and The Abom love! Since when is patriotism a crime? The glowing things you’re on record as having said about him? They’ve been taken out of context! And even if you did say them, you were saying them for your family. How can someone as noble and decent as you be persecuted? It’s so unfair!

Abrogation of morality

There are monetizable lessons galore to be learned from those whose inner voices bellowed, “How the fuck can you be part of this?” but nonetheless reported five days a week to work for a corrupt idiot fascist monster whose don’t-call-it-Gestapo kicked in brown people’s doors, and handed over those it didn’t shoot dead for detention in concentration camps until deported to foreign hellholes.

Jettisoning of self-respect

Sure, your prospective billionaire employers are crass, criminal, and wholly repugnant, but they’re who’d be signing your check if there were still such a thing. Refresh your ability to glow admiringly and exclaim, for instance, “Great idea!” at inanities.

Let’s get physical

Now that your morality’s fully abrogated, ask to accompany your new employers to the restroom the next time nature calls. Once they’ve done their business, ask them to leave exposed that part of themselves on which they sit long enough for you to walk up to it, as the Shangri-La’s ordained, and give it a great big kiss.

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You’re absolutely hurtling toward your black belt in sycophancy now, you vile, soulless little pustule!

Once at your new place of employment, you’ll be halfway up your client’s large intestine by this point. It’s both dark, olfactorily excruciating and generally mega-icky up there, but you’ve got little Brendan’s and/or Kayleigh’s private christofascist school tuition to pay for, so put your former high regard for hygiene in the same locker with your morality, and slither even higher, secure in the knowledge that, having served The Abomination, you’ve already disgraced yourself as awfully as you ever will!

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If it gets around that you neglected to read these last week, everyone is going to think less of you. Have a little self-respect! Don’t allow that to happen!

(Can you imagine how the rest of the world would mock us if it were confirmed that we had twice elected a corrupt, imbecilic pedophile to lead us? But instead of thinking him for forestalling such mockery, the short-sighted keep braying for the files’ release!

Jesus weeps.)

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Brilliant though she may have been as an attorney in China, Katie Zacharia lacked Karoline Leavitt’s flair for fluent and emphatic prevarication, and has now been encouraged to spend more time with her family. We hear also that President Trump blames his forthcoming humiliation in the midterm elections on chief of staff Susie Wiles. Given that she’s not hot and blonde as Zacharia, Leavitt, and Sean Spicer, but positively oozes gravitas, is it not as clear as the suppurating warts on communication director Stephen Cheung’s face that it’s none other than Susie who ought to replace Zacharia?

If President Trump decides to allow Wiles to retain her position, how about former ambassador to Greece Kimberley Guilfoyle, about whose ability to be window-rattlingly emphatic there can be no doubt. In the event that Kim has decided to devote herself to writing a tell-all memoir (suggested title: It Was All Greek to Me!) and spending more time with her family (that is, son Ronan, depicted above), how’s this for bold, out-of-the-box thinking?

Cheung.

Let’s see how ballsy and provocative the men of the fake news media are when they’ve got The Man Who Looks Like a Thumb glowering at them from behind the gilded podium!

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If you missed any of these, now’s the time to play Ketchup®!

It has come to my attention that you have neglected to read my recent stab about poetry, a tsunami of vitriol inspired by The Abomination. https://johnmendelssohn.substack.com/p/some-lines-just-for-you-sir?r=7yu5q

When I go to the trouble and (intellectual) expense of devising an amusing and provocative poll, and you proceed not to respond to it, Jesus weeps. https://johnmendelssohn.substack.com/p/with-whom-would-you-like-to-see-president?r=7yu5q

A lot of radical left lunatics are asserting that President Trump is just kidding about sending everybody $5K if the Dumocrats don’t regain the House. Well, guess again, RLLs! https://johnmendelssohn.substack.com/p/i-just-deposited-my-5k-tariffs-dividend?r=7yu5q

If you thought that President Trump would be content with his Nobel Peace Prize and Board of Peace, guess again, brighteyes! https://johnmendelssohn.substack.com/p/the-donald-g-trump-caucus-of-political?r=7yu5q

Just for fun, let’s pretend that you get decide whom to allow to share President Trump’s leaky South Sudan-bound dinghy. Whom will. you choose? https://johnmendelssohn.substack.com/p/with-whom-would-you-like-to-see-president?r=7yu5q

Many folks regard Speaker Mike Johnson as a ghastly little pustule on America’s rear end. I have composed a little poem about this unfortunate sentiment. One day it will be taught in public high school English classes! https://johnmendelssohn.substack.com/p/the-monsters-pursedog?r=7yu5q

Sort of Las Vegas crossed with Tijuana, Benidorm may be the most garish place on the Mediterranean coast, and surely the best place to buy neon-hued T-shirts proclaiming Lick My Pussy, My Friend > Is Gay, or Please Tell Your Boobs to Stop Staring at My Eyes. I bought the pussy one, and am looking forward to wearing it for grocery shopping in Norbiton next week.

What Benidorm does have is the highest concentration outside Great Britain of braying, bellowing, beer-bellied British bozos in the solar system. They are drawn to the city by its very cheap beer prizes — you can get yourself a bucket of five bottles of Amstel for less than you’d pay for a pint in any pub in London, barring Wehterspoon’s, which you probably wouldn’t want to patronize because it’s where the ugliest people in Britain go to get pissed (that is, inebriated). and the carpets are the most hideous in the history of floors, according to a friend that the Brits call sick and you and I call puke won’t be so noticeable on it, and a what a very long, deeply satisfying sentence this has been!

Aside from the booze, the bozos and their ghastly misshapen (in many, but not all cases) spouses are also attracted by the very wide range of tribute acts on offer in the ‘Dorm, as no one has ever called it. You can see tributes to everyone from Ed Sheeran to Tina Turner to Macklemore, and I’m just joking about Macklemore. of whom — let’s fact it! — you hadn’t even heard until he had the career-making idea of quitting the recent Sheeran concert tour because Ed hadn’t denounced the Israel-perpetrated horror in Gaza loudly enough.

Just on the final night of our most recent visit, we saw a Debbie Harry impersonator, a Justin Bieber impersonator, and a tribute to the three acts (Depeche Mode, Yazoo, and Erasure) for which Mr. Vince Clarke has written wonderfully melodic songs that he made sound trivial with immoderate synthesis. We had seen the Vince Clarke tribute five years before, and the only thing that seemed to have changed was that the male singer seemed to have been inhabited by the spirit of Tom Jones, of all people. We did not, this time, see the remarkable Neil Diamond tribute in which the impersonator, having performed the show 45 million times, falls asleep in the middle of “I Am, I Said” but keeps right on going because: muscle memory.

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I had been unaware of the remarkable depth and breadth of the Justin Bieber catalog. Not so, apparently, his hoodied young impersonator, who inspired tears of joy from a 14-year-old boy who watched his whole performance from the edge of the little stage, lip-synching along and at one point bursting into tears of joy. ’Twas a sweet thing to witiness, and for once I am not being flippant.

On our previous visits, the missus and I had noted with amusement that the promenade that runs along the beachfront was clogged with old folks in mobility scooters. We rented one of our own, I being old and decrepit myself lately, and unlikely to get much cuter as the years whoosh past, and what fun it was driving along shouting at pedestrians, “Make way! Make way, I say, for Ms. Joanna Lumley!” During her recent visit to the United States of America, you see, a fellow patron of a singles bar advised Mrs. M (she prefers the same initial that I do) that she resembles the former co-star of Absolutely Fabulous, and we were moving a speed at which none dared pronounced the comparison inappropriate.

Many must be thinking, “If Benidorm is so grotesque, why do they keep returning?” Well, our dear friends The Dazzinator and Ana live just up the road a piece, in the largely Dutch l’Albir, and we’d planned on Bucharist, but the Romanian ultra-budget airline that was going to get us there and back went out of business 96 hours before the fact.

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Don’t forget to read (or re-read!) these before you click yourself into another’s adoring embrace:

If you thought that President Trump would be content with his Nobel Peace Prize and Board of Peace, guess again, brighteyes! https://johnmendelssohn.substack.com/p/the-donald-g-trump-caucus-of-political?r=7yu5q

Just for fun, let’s pretend that you get decide whom to allow to share President Trump’s leaky South Sudan-bound dinghy. Whom will. you choose? https://johnmendelssohn.substack.com/p/with-whom-would-you-like-to-see-president?r=7yu5q

Many folks regard Speaker Mike Johnson as a ghastly little pustule on America’s rear end. I have composed a little poem about this unfortunate sentiment. One day it will be taught in public high school English classes! https://johnmendelssohn.substack.com/p/the-monsters-pursedog?r=7yu5q

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A guy we’ll call Will, but who might as easily be called Rusty, has been surfing at Sunset. He pulls up behind her in his Prius XLE with hs oddball sense of humor, which, before he reaches her, has him toying with the idea of asking for her driver’s license and registration.

At first, she rolls her window down only three inches. He asks, “Anything I can help with?” He is 51 and in good shape. He goes to the gym five days a week, and does a 90-second plank every night before retiring. He is the divorced father of a 13-year-old daughter.

The woman, whom feminists might call Sara, says, “My car began making a disturbing noise. I thought it best not to push my luck.” She’s a member of the Auto Club, but is afraid she’s called them so often in the past year, after her car was vandalized by Elon Musk-haters, that her membership may be in jeopardy.

Will says, “Gotcha,” and suggests that she pop her hood. He took auto shop in high school all those years ago, and there’s a slim chance he’ll be able to spot the source of the disturbing noise. But everything looks OK. He returns to Sara and apologizes for seeing nothing wrong. She says, “Get in the car.”

He chuckles and says, “Sorry?”

“You heard me,” she says. “In the back.”

He gets in her back seat. She addresses him in her rearview mirror. “I want to have sex with you. I want your tongue. You in?”

Will’s flabbergasted, as who wouldn’t be? He chuckles, “Well, this isn’t something that happens to me every day, or has ever happened to me, to be honest.”

“You’re kind,” Sara sighs. She dislikes having to explain herself. “And you seem to take care of yourself. I like kind men. I’m guessing something like 20 people have driven past me, but you took it on yourself to see if I needed help.

“You’re probably wondering why I don’t go about this in a more traditional way, like with a dating app. I’ve certainly tried that, but I find that most app men wantonly misrepresent themselves. They send photographs from when their bellies were flat, and in most cases just want to get laid. So, you in or out?”

“Wow,” Will says, sweeping his hand through his thick sand-colored hair, with some gray, but it doesn’t really show up that much because the rest is sand-colored. “Right here in the car? I’m not so sure that…”

“A friend lives a couple of miles a mile past the supermarket,” Sara says with dwindling patience. “She’s out of town. Not to be a bitch, but don’t take up any more of my time if you’re not into it.”

“Who says I’m not into it?” Will chuckles a little nervously.

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Here’s a song I wrote in Wisconsin in 2008, when it seemed it couldn’t get worse than George W. Bush. How very mistaken was I! Justin Bricco of the Blueheels played rhythm guitar.

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SECRETARY All right, …sir, Somebody finally answered.

TRUMP About f***ing time! Who?

SECRETARY He has a foreign accent,…sir.

TRUMP They’ve all got f***ing foreign accents! Of all the hot blonde secretaries I could have brought down here, I get one of the lowest-IQ ones!

SECRETARY Oh, the irony! The stupidest man ever to be elected to public office in a Western democracy impugning someone else’s — anyone else’s! — intelligence. And do you know that “impugn” has a g in it,…sir?

TRUMP Kind of like the b in dumb!

SECRETARY Oh, my. Maybe I underestimated you. In any event, keep your manboobs on, will you,…sir? Give me a second.

She comes back on line.

SECRETARY Something…ukulele? But he doesn’t sound Hawaiian. Oh, here it is. Bukele, of San Salvador.

TRUMP San who? Never f***ing heard of him.

SECRETARY You sent a lot of supposed illegal aliens down to his country, …sir, even after the Supreme Court told you not to.

TRUMP Put him on,

SECRETARY Say, “Please”,…sir. Oh, never mind. Here he is.

BUKELE Yo, what up, Porkpie.

TRUMP Who do you suppose you’re talking to, you little weird-name loser punk?

BUKELE The constitutionally deposed former president of the US of A, dawg. Hiding in his bunker beneath the big-ass ballroom that the Democrats just voted to turn into the Joseph R. Biden Presidential Library, refusing to come out.

TRUMP I hear music and laughter in the background. Who are you with?

BUKELE Ain’t nobody told your ass, dawg? It’s a Board of Peace convention, at Sunny Beach, dawg, on the Black Sea coast. Wish y’all was bein’ here — not!

TRUMP This is outrageous. How can you have a Board of Peace convention without the person who f***ing thought up the Board of Peace?

BUKELE …and charged everybody $1 billion to be on it. And named himself chairman for life. I’m going to hand your fat ass over, Mr. Fartsalot, to my homey Alyaksandr Lukashenka,

TRUMP? Who the hell is…?

LUKASHENKA Is that you, cuz? Listen, I’m putting you on speakerphone. I’ve got with me Prime Minister of Armenia Nikol Pashinyan, King Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa of Bahrain, and Ilham Aliyev, who’s…I don’t know?…president, I suppose…of whatchamacallit…Azerbaijan. We’re the new generation, and we got sumpin’ to say, and it ain’t, “Hey, hey, we’re the Monkees.”

TRUMP It better f***ing be, “We’re sending a rescue party to get you out of there and over to Moscow.”

LUKASHENKA Dream on, golden boy. [To the others with him:] Ready, everybody?

CROWD Kiss our asses!

TRUMP Do you low-IQ shithole country…what’s that word?… despots really think you can talk to me that way?

CROWD Yes!

AKHANNOUCH: Aziz Akhanouch of Morocco here. We do indeed think exactly that, you flaccid fat son of a whore and a donkey.

OSMANI Vjosa Osmani here, President Fartsalot. What are you going to do, annihilate us?

MIRZIYOYEV Shavkat Mirziyoyev of Uzbekistan here, feces-of-swine.

TRUMP Ooze-what?

MIRZIYOYEV Never mind, knucklehead. Oops. Gotta skate. Our guest of honor, Mark Carney, just arrived.

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It has come to my attention that you have neglected to read my recent stab about poetry, a tsunami of vitriol inspired by The Abomination. https://johnmendelssohn.substack.com/p/some-lines-just-for-you-sir?r=7yu5q

When I go to the trouble and (intellectual) expense of devising an amusing and provocative poll, and you proceed not to respond to it, Jesus weeps. https://johnmendelssohn.substack.com/p/with-whom-would-you-like-to-see-president?r=7yu5q

A lot of radical left lunatics are asserting that President Trump is just kidding about sending everybody $5K if the Dumocrats don’t regain the House. Well, guess again, RLLs! https://johnmendelssohn.substack.com/p/i-just-deposited-my-5k-tariffs-dividend?r=7yu5q

If you thought that President Trump would be content with his Nobel Peace Prize and Board of Peace, guess again, brighteyes! https://johnmendelssohn.substack.com/p/the-donald-g-trump-caucus-of-political?r=7yu5q

Just for fun, let’s pretend that you get decide whom to allow to share President Trump’s leaky South Sudan-bound dinghy. Whom will. you choose? https://johnmendelssohn.substack.com/p/with-whom-would-you-like-to-see-president?r=7yu5q

Many folks regard Speaker Mike Johnson as a ghastly little pustule on America’s rear end. I have composed a little poem about this unfortunate sentiment. One day it will be taught in public high school English classes! https://johnmendelssohn.substack.com/p/the-monsters-pursedog?r=7yu5q

I know I am no Enrico Caruso, Paul Robeson, or Jon Bon Jovi. I have made peace with that. Now it’s your turn.

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It has come to my attention that you have neglected to read my recent stab about poetry, a tsunami of vitriol inspired by The Abomination. https://johnmendelssohn.substack.com/p/some-lines-just-for-you-sir?r=7yu5q

When I go to the trouble and (intellectual) expense of devising an amusing and provocative poll, and you proceed not to respond to it, Jesus weeps. https://johnmendelssohn.substack.com/p/with-whom-would-you-like-to-see-president?r=7yu5q

A lot of radical left lunatics are asserting that President Trump is just kidding about sending everybody $5K if the Dumocrats don’t regain the House. Well, guess again, RLLs! https://johnmendelssohn.substack.com/p/i-just-deposited-my-5k-tariffs-dividend?r=7yu5q

If you thought that President Trump would be content with his Nobel Peace Prize and Board of Peace, guess again, brighteyes! https://johnmendelssohn.substack.com/p/the-donald-g-trump-caucus-of-political?r=7yu5q

Just for fun, let’s pretend that you get decide whom to allow to share President Trump’s leaky South Sudan-bound dinghy. Whom will. you choose? https://johnmendelssohn.substack.com/p/with-whom-would-you-like-to-see-president?r=7yu5q

Many folks regard Speaker Mike Johnson as a ghastly little pustule on America’s rear end. I have composed a little poem about this unfortunate sentiment. One day it will be taught in public high school English classes! https://johnmendelssohn.substack.com/p/the-monsters-pursedog?r=7yu5q

After we won the lottery, the glad-handers descended on us like flies on feces, which probably isn’t how I want to put it, as it suggests that we’re distasteful, And we’re not. We’re very tasteful, except on those occasions when I choose to be otherwise for comic effect, As now, in fact. But I do that less and less often as I get older. It’s one thing to for a cute 27-year-old man to stand up in the middle of a jam-packed Tube carriage and try to get everyone singing “Do Wah Diddy,” but quite another for someone pushing The Big [I won’t Say It!]-0.

And don’t think it hasn’t occurred to me that many of my fellow passengers are too young to have heard the more recent, more familiar version of “Do Wah Diddy Diddy, ” that featured in the 1981 Bill Murray vehicle Stripes. It would be like expecting me to know the most-requested song in the repertoire of Bill Banana & His Bunch, who used to open for Rudy Vallee, by which I do not mean Frankie Valli, who still performs the great hits of the Four Seasons at age 102, if you call standing there totteringly on stage clearly having no idea where or who he is performing. Or why, for that matter, not that it’s reasonable for us to expect our pop stars to be philosophers.

But anyway. The flies on feces. A great many of those who’d have our phones ringing off the hook if they weren’t Google Pixel smartphones have been trying to sell us Spanish real estate. The one who caught my eye, Fiona Something, didn’t phone, but emailed, “How low are you willing to go when buying a new home?” That amused me to the point of my chuckling aloud. I wrote back, “To the earth’s molten core,” and we became friends to the extent that someone who makes her living schmoozing and a schmoozee can ever truly be friends. We went to lunch a few times, to brunch once, to dinner four times and “for drinkies”, as the Brits think it adorable to say. so many times that I lost count. Of Monte Cristo, or Basie, or even Dracula, but don’t get me started on the subject of our aborted visit to Bucharest.

I may have won the lottery, but old habits die hard, and I simply wasn’t prepared to spend half as much on round-trip airfare from Heathrow or Gatwick at reasonable hours as I might have for an all-inclusive week in Egypt. I mean, sure, if you want to travel a million miles to Greater London’s two grottiest airports, Stansted and Luton, to catch a 6:10 a.m. flight on an eastern European airline you’ve never heard of, you can, but no thanks! And then there’s the fact that Sharm-el-Sheikh is very popular with very obnoxious Russians, the kind who, in the dining room, whistle impatiently at the busboys or whatever Egyptians call them, and push ahead of you in the various buffet lines.

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Fiona had a property on Spain’s little-known (and thus secluded) Costa Negra that sounded too good to be true. 27,000 square feet. (Our current abode, on the northern edge of Surrey, is 889 square feet.) Six bedrooms and eight bathrooms. Servants’ quarters, servants included. (Jorge and Rosa, Basque separatists, don’t speak English, but were required to download Google Translate as a condition of their indentured servitude.) His-’n’-hers Olympic-sized swimming pools. A hot tub. A small mountain range. A larger mountain range. Views of the Mediterranean from one side of the house, and of the Caribbean from the other. And our neighbors would include Cliff Richard, who was sort of the British Elvis at the beginning, and is now sort of the British Frankie Valli, but no philosopher.

I have been distrustful of indentured servants since my first marriage. My mother-in-law, who detested me from Moment 1 — and it wasn’t as though I carried a photo of her in my wallet in an age before photo-library-containing smartphones — wore dentures that didn’t fit well, and spoke sloshily, if you will.

One major problem I have with NPR is that I’ve now heard the spot advertising an interview with Willem Dafoe, he of the weirdly high laugh lines, 11 million times. In the spot, he admits to being a bad liar, and the interviewer muses that lying is what actors do, whereupon Willem giggles and says, “Maybe I’m not a good actor.”

Your words, Bill not mine. Nor the Academy’s!

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I’d like to dedicate this next song, which I composed in around 2006, to Secretary of Christian Nationalism Pete Hegseth. This is the swanky AIFF version, on which you can hear the vocal.

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