photos of Prince Harry and Megan Markle on CNN, enjoying the latest celebrity news. The have been rejected -- finally, and according to the press, somewhat fatally -- by The Royal Family. And we are supposed to be unhappy for them. It’s important to note though, that all this has little to do with celebrity. It's simply about race and sex (isn’t everything these days?). I have always thought Prince Harry was good enough to eat, and been astounded by his ability to somehow escape the inherited, time-released ugliness which plagues the other men in his family (is he a bastard?). But what I propose is simple. Could our fascination with this couple have less to do with royal politics than miscegenation, our racist obsession with the pesky, pornographic image of his ginger penis being enveloped by her dark vagina? I see this partially to shock of course. But also partially because it is only through shock that one can reveal a deeper truth, which in this case is that we are all hypocrites. It is this hypocrisy that is putting me to sleep right now, and attempts to steal my life away. I was born in a deeply hypocritical time— the 50s -- an era to which we have returned, no doubt. There was another image on CNN this morning -- this one of a family whose house burned to the ground during the Texas freeze-up, and the patriarch of the family had only just recently died of COVID-19. Such an image of course predicates prayers to a merciful God. But we all know that COVID-19 is not just a natural accident. And this, of course, comforts us immensely. It is a matter of bad people; of separating the wheat from the chaff, the maskers, from the faces of evil. It doesn’t matter that images of the now dead father suggest he was morbidly obese -- something that would have had an enormous affect on his health. This doesn’t matter because we prefer a moralistic universe where -- as Oscar Wilde said -- 'the good are rewarded and the bad are punished, that is what fiction means.' How much more comforting it is to cry for this poor innocent Texas man, felled by, well possibly -- your next door neighbour (because you saw him the other day, making another unnecessary trip to the grocery store not wearing a mask) -- instead of by a deadly and irrational disease! We would rather live in a world where we are punished for our sins than one in which God has meant us to die needlessly; as this might cause us to either hate God or imagine he doesn't exist. The origins of my sheer exhaustion with moralism -- and its corollary, my obsession with shock — go deep. I was in the closet for 28 years. No one can really figure out why, as my family was not particularly religious. But I was a sensitive child. And when I say sensitive, you must not imagine that I am extolling my virtues, though I am perhaps the most sensitive person that ever lived. No, I do not care about others excessively nor am I concerned over their feelings, but I will be overly and somewhat neurotically anxious about whatever 'vibes' others project, and instead of trying to understand that reality, I will spin off into my own world, projecting onto them fantasies of what they might be thinking and feeling -- which probably have no relation to reality (hence; I am a writer). So don't doubt that I, as a sensitive child -- picked up on the moralism that lurked around my American 50s household; it was like a disease back then, in America. One was responsible for everything, there were no excuses. I have a friend who is dying right now of a particularly virulent form of cancer, and I watch every day as another bodily function deserts him. There is no justice in this -- though he is somewhat of an alcoholic, an angry Communist, whose sympathies always lay with Cuba. I do not think he is beginning punished for his sins, but rather --like the tide or the wind -- something is happening. I honestly wish I could be different; that instead of being traumatized by moralism, I was hypnotised by it, instead of being repelled by it, I might be granted the glorious erection it bestows on the rest of the world. If so, I would be in heaven right now, for all arts and entertainment has been, these days, co-opted by preaching. We dutifully turn on our digital spies -- or little errand boys of capitalism -- every day, only to be reminded once again that the world is simple, there are good people and there are bad. We are, of course, happy to confirm that we are among the good ones, that we are not like those noxious celebrities who party all night and will most certainly come to a bad end, that we are not like those horrible people who challenge COVID-19 and don’t wear masks. And we know that if we do die of COVID-19, we will be die -- suffering and alone -- but still nobly -- and all our friends and relatives will speak glowingly of our martyrdom. Thus we make peerless deaths of mundane lives. I spent most of yesterday pondering a trip I took to Provincetown with my girlfriend when I was 28 years old. The irony of this trip is not lost on me; I was a closet homosexual (that’s what we used to call them back in 1970) and endured perhaps two weeks -- which seemed like an eternity -- having joyless sex over and over again with a lovely girl who I didn’t want to have sex with, in a town filled with rampaging, sinning, ass-obsssed, penis-adoring sodomites. It’s no wonder that years later, I'm slightly embarrassed to say, I cried when I took the ferry on my vacations to Provincetown, and spent weeks there in various damned guest houses being serviced by -- and also servicing -- various beautiful young men. This is my tragic life, and from its detritus I try and bring to you these observations, which today swirl around the fact that this COVID-19 thing has left me so bored that I could slash my wrists. But it is the Manichean Binary of it all which has me clawing the walls more than anything else. I watched a documentary on HBO called The Lady and the Dale, about Elizabeth Carmichael. Her life was certainly fascinating, but what was much more fascinating was the way this politically correct piece of trans propaganda managed to turn her into a God. She was merely a person -- and like all of us, particularly flawed ; being a crook (there’s no other way to put it), the worst kind of liar (there are good ones; they are called artists), and a cheat, and a proponent of the fascist ideology of Ayn Rand. I am not trying to demonize her; I think I would have quite enjoyed Ms. Carmichael as a person. She reminded me a lot of my mother -- and of myself -- but to deify her is to put her on a pedestal, to bow before that idol called ‘morallity’ which if it doesn’t kill the whole world first, is liable to kill me.
