They Shine And Stink Like Rotten Mackerel By Moonlight, Plus

I wanna be sedated; join me on BlueSky

Photo by Weldon Berger

I’m weldonberger on BlueSky.

He is a man of splendid abilities, but utterly corrupt. He shines and stinks like rotten mackerel by moonlight.
— John Randolph on Edward Livingston

Maybe one of Trump’s nominees for this and that has splendid abilities in the ordinary sense, but in the main the splendid abilities seem to involve the stink of corruption and incompetence, along with a superb eye for the main chance. The Washington Post editorial board nevertheless endorsed all but four of the 23 cabinet-level picks they scrutinized, including all of the billionaires and most of the chancers.

The four who didn’t make the grade are Whisky Pete Hegseth to run the war department; Tulsi Gabbard to run the intelligence wing of the national security state; Project 2025 maniac Russell Vought of the office of management and budget; and Kennedy Junior for Health & Human Services.

Of the four, only Gabbard seems to have the odds against her at this point.

Among the weiners in the Post’s riveting storytelling for all America chart of cabinet-level nominees is Pam Bondi for attorney general. The editorial board says lawyers who know her say she’s serious, but not about what. This is the lawyer who, as we mentioned a few days ago, took a bribe as Florida attorney general to lay off Trump’s fraudulent “university,” spent a year trying to overturn the 2020 election results, and refused to acknowledge to the judiciary committee that Trump lost that election.

Like Bondi, the editorial board appear to be serious but who can say about what. Charts, maybe. More than a whiff of the mackerel about those jamokes.

Another thumbs up—literally; the riveting chart for all Americans uses thumbs up or down to indicate approval or not—went to billionaire Linda McMahon to run the education department, which she despises. McMahon is implicated in a grooming scandal from her time atop the professional wrestling world, she’s a documented liar about her educational bona fides, and she’s a reactionary billionaire who at least should be pelted with rotting fruits in the town commons.

Then there’s the housing and urban development guy, Scott Turner, about whom the Post says, “[t]he former motivational speaker has never run a big organization, but that is not disqualifying.” Neither does he appear to know anything about housing policy, but we already knew that wasn’t meaningful to Trump after he appointed a profoundly bewildered surgeon with bootstrap syndrome to the post last time around. Seems like it should be relevant to any serious evaluation, though.

Billionaire, tariff enthusiast, and Elon Musk fave Howard Lutnick for the commerce department is “a natural fit for a job traditionally held by a presidential friend.”

Does Trump have any actual friends? Maybe Kristi Noem, the homeland security nominee notorious for executing a rambunctious pup and a tired old goat (not Mitch McConnell). Executed these animals and bragged about it, which Trump would appreciate. “Dog jokes (!) aside,” say the sociopaths on the editorial board,” she’s definitely qualified. Maybe even because of the dog incident. She can make the tough decisions.

The Post’s new, square-wheelish mission statement as referred to above is “Riveting Storytelling for All of America,” in the most parochial sense of “America.” This will be seen to include Americans who despise the paper and wouldn’t read it for money—both on the hard right and the mild left, which means of course that the porridge is the perfect temperature—and including the expanding number of subscribers who have abandoned it, as well as the remaining subscribers who are either hate-reading it or think dipping a toe into the river Lethe would be swell.

The Lethe is tempting, but only the real thing, which brings us to

I wanna be sedated

I’ve been getting not-exactly-ketamine treatments for a while. Ketamine is dirt cheap and not very profitable so pharma firm Janssen, a division of Johnson & Johnson, uses mirror molecule s-ketamine in combination with a nasal spray, which is expensive and the only ketamine-ish treatment my gubmint-funded insurance covers. The stuff costs about $900 plus the office visit. I go to a psychiatry clinic where recently I’ve been stationed in a room also used by a child psychiatrist. It’s the Stitch Lounge, where I get high above the city.

I’ve had something of a rough year, twixt some cancer-related issues and the death of my mother—I’m old and she was older and ready to go, and her death was anything but unexpected, but I dearly miss her and our weekly video chats, which included my brother and, often, my progeny and grandchild from overseas—and some other stuff, so the past few months I’ve been going in every two weeks, to keep the brain things relatively smooth.

(I don’t know how much ketamine Elon Musk is using, or how often, but it’s either way too much or not nearly enough. The point of it for me is to fall into some music, stop the wheels from grinding for an hour so, and flush out the debris. That doesn’t seem to happen with him, as he becomes less a human and more a malicious executable.)

The procedure requires a pre-liftoff blood pressure check, followed by three applications of two snorts each five minutes apart, another blood pressure check 30 minutes on, a check-in with the psychiatrist an hour after the final snorts, and a last blood pressure check at two hours.

I’m usually well involved by the third application. I made a playlist before my very first session (more than two years ago) and have only slightly modified it since, in the partially-realized hope that I could imprint upon it and use it at home to replicate the effects of the treatment when necessary. It works well enough that I have to change tracks when one of them randomly shows up on the algorithmic playlist in the car lest I be transported, as it were.

The first tune has always been Eddie Hazel playing Funkadelic’s “Maggot Brain” from their album of that name, which is ideal for launching one’s self out of reality, and the second is a live version of “Comfortably Numb,” because obviously. Most of the music throughout is instrumental guitar with minimal accompaniment. (I’m happy to post the playlist if anybody cares to ask, but otherwise it’s too much work.)

Yesterday didn’t go very smoothly because my back was acting up and the doctor frowns on mixing pain meds with the brain-smoothing elixir, so I was uncomfortable throughout. Still and all, I woke up this morning enough fortified by the session to go mucking about in the polluted lakes and streams of the press and related environs without experiencing even what might be a warranted degree of despair.

I think the medical supervision provision for the insurance is reasonable. The drug is soilidly in the “shit can go wrong” category. Not reasonable is requiring the $900/session concoction.

Still, good stuff!

BlueSky, Smiling On Me

Along with the periodic ketamine sessions, and perhaps oddly, social sites have helped keep me approximately whole. I’m part of a community of (strange, companionable) sorts on Facebook, which I’m loath to abandon because they’re supportive, and have recently arrived on twitter alternative BlueSky, which is nice and shows promise for future development. (I got thoroughly squelched on twitter after inaugurating some post-purchase musky pile-ons, so not even my friends were seeing my tweetings there.)

One of the gratifying things about having remained on the autoflogging machines all these years has been watching a lot of my friends and acquaintances gradually coming ‘round to share my very low opinion of the Democratic party. It’s good to see them giggling about Biden’s solemn warning against the oligarchy, for instance, although there are a few who think it was great stuff that will echo through the ages like Eisenhower’s military-industrial complex warning, which was also to little effect but at least didn’t arrive so far after the fact. (Who paid your campaign bills, Joe?)

Limiting my social media use mostly to a computer rather than a smartphone, where an armory of ad-blockers and app-specific management tools (FB Purity, per instance, for facebook) helps keep my feeds ad-free and mitigates tracking a bit. It also promotes paying attention to out-and-about stuff when I’m out and about. It also requires more self-discipline than I have, sometimes. As Whisky Pete says, “I’m not perfect.” Who among us and etc.

weldonberger.bsky.social: cash me outside, hipsters!

Slight Return

I’m still not back to right following my Covid bout and I don’t know if I ever will be, so I gotta apologize for getting fragmented after a certain amount of time/writing in these missives. Doing what I can as I can, and thanks for your continuing support throughout it.

Music

OK Go—the album is Hungry Ghosts, which is about 10 years old, but the very cool video is more recent: “A Stone Only Rolls Downhill;” Horsegirl, Versions of Modern Performance (“The Fall of Horsegirl”); continuing in the horsey vein, we have feeble little horse with Girl With Fish (“Steamroller”); Miss Grit, Follow the Cyborg ( “Follow the Cyborg”); Fontaines D.C., Romance (“Death Kink” live).

Subscribe!

if you feel like it. Everything must go.

Take care; be well.