I sometimes find it useful to write the unspeakable. Grain of salt time, folks.

Yesterday’s workshop writing prompt was a quote taken from the recent HBO series, Task: “Out beyond ideas of right doing and wrong doing, there is a river.” I posted the screen shot from the series as well (above). Central to the story is the idea that we sometimes do terrible things for good reasons. Villain as hero stuff.

Also of note: the workshop took place two days after 8MM Americans showed up in the streets to protest autocracy.

🦋🦋🦋🦋🦋🦋🦋🦋🦋🦋🦋🦋🦋🦋🦋

He was shabby and short and wanted to burn it all down. Sound familiar? John the Painter. Red hair, fiery temperament, a Scotland-born American enthusiast in England at a divisive time. “No Kings” the ultimate distillation of revolutionary thought then as now. Early in December – what year, don’t ask, I don’t know yet — he set fire to buildings near the wharves in Portsmouth.

I can’t focus. He didn’t burn ships as intended. It was ruled an accident. Does that mean James Aitken a.k.a. John the Painter failed? He was dubbed both a saboteur and a “frightened little man” and ultimately was executed.

I have a massive cloud in my forehead or I might be able to supply more details. If the “frightened little man” escaped, how was he put on trial? Ah — now I see he lacked coolness and guile and confessed.

Shabby little saboteur with red freckles and a fondness for arson, holder of big revolutionary ideals, lacking guile and coolness.

I keep going back to Luigi being captured in Pennsylvania while having breakfast at a Burger King. I think that’s what was but it could have been lunch at McDonald’s. Luigi also showed a lack of guile and you couldn’t help but wonder if he wanted to get caught.

Then there’s Jason Fairbanks, infamous murderer of Dedham, Massachusetts, who in 1801 after breaking out of prison stopped for a bite to eat at the ferry depot near Lake Champlain (or wherever) – long enough to be captured. He was executed. John the Painter was executed. Someone somewhere is calling for Mangione’s execution. Anybody and everybody who resists the post-capitalist order or the GOP is a domestic terrorist now, apparently.

Did it bother the little revolutionary, John the Painter, that the fires he set were deemed “accidental?” Meaning the only way to claim credit for his pro-American stance (was that even a stance then?) (make that: his “anti-Kings stance”) was to confess.

A man being little and being referred to ever and on as little, does things to a man’s psyche, none of them good. Refer here to Stormy Daniels’s comment about a certain pro-King’s appendage.

I’ve said two things so often that I’m sick of myself and they’re not incontrovertible, but here they are. One, if Trump had a big dick, we wouldn’t be in this mess, and two, if Hitler had been a talented painter, met with acclaim and reward, Poland’s genetic pool would be vastly more interesting today.

Say what you will, but we are at a “Sons of Liberty” kind of moment and I wonder just how long the peace will hold. Images in my mind – Liberty Poles (Fairbanks’ kin got in trouble for erecting one), the Liberty Tree near Boston Common where the Sons of Liberty would meet, now a mere plaque because the British understood its significance and axed it down. It was a time of ragtag collections of men, barely armed, of treatises proclaiming this freedom and that freedom, taxation without representation being called BS.

Does it always come down to money? Well, penis size and money and by the way to look at Jeff Bezos’s clobbering walk with his new bride is to perhaps see an overlap.

If only we wonder, we tired-at-times-hopeless-modern-day-liberty-lovers — if only we had atoned for the great sin of slavery. If spiritual and financial reparations had been made — where would we be now? Certainly not in the maw of backlash to an elegant, moral Black president who loves his wife and brought a dog into the White House, which is being shredded, even as I write.

The Liar-in-Chief promised he wouldn’t touch the structure, but promises be damned and by “promises be damned” I mean we the American people be damned. The aptest, most stomach-churning metaphor around — a power-crazed, mentally unwell man with a little penis is tearing down walls of the White House and in true autocratic fashion demanding that the press not show pictures of the demolition. They’re upsetting, those pictures.

But back to coin and cock. The issuance of tariffs has long had swinging dick energy to it. Why is this not commented on more? (You can’t swing a mushroom, but the point holds). 40%!! 60%!! You’re an ally and there’s no trade imbalance? 120%!! He’s hoarding the cash, circumventing Congress’s power of the purse in yet another outrageous fashion. Lest I sound too New York Timesey here, let me be clear: he is violating the Constitution, he is breaking the law, he is committing impeachable offenses. Daily, mind. Every god-damned day.

Back in the day, patriots were busy, doing things like founding Plattsburgh and casting a massive Liberty Bell in bronze and stitching up the first flag. Did they have less to lose, I wonder, or was it easier to take up arms against an occupying force when you’ve been slaughtering Native Americans for 15 years or more? Bloodshed normalized, and anyway if a stray bullet didn’t get you, the pox or yellow fever likely would.

General strike? Cancel Christmas? It’s hard for us Americans to imagine an uprising being effective without money at its center and it’s also hard for us to be inconvenienced.

Who is suspect? Whose lies get the biggest megaphone? Whose disgusting and sacrilegious AI tomfoolery gets put out to millions without consequence?

Armed revolt, I say. Armed revolt. Or poison, poison would be good. I’d start with Johnson, Trump, and Miller. Arsenic — a little at a time.

“Relax!” you say. “Relax.” You go relax. Go relax somewhere else, anywhere else, but not near me and now I’m out of time and maybe we are too.

[I was scanning pages from this book while writing]