The Old Haunts

Take a wander through your old haunts. Observe the disheveled specter of the rag-and-bone man driving his horse-drawn carriage of unwanted junk through this gentrified neighborhood. Witness the forlorn gypsy phantom with her wilting bundles of lucky heather locked outside our exclusive gated community. See the obsolete lamplighter's ghost searching recently repaved roads for the last of the long lost gas lamps.  And then there's me, a solitary shade cast across the dark facade of the shuttered town diner, like some sort of gloomy Edward Hopper oil paint figure, watching a trio of circus clowns wrangle their unwieldy stepladder as they unfurl a plastic banner over the diner's old neon sign: Caffe Tepid, opening soon. So farewell scrambled eggs with a side of sausage; hello guava parfait, I guess.

Although, truth be told, I've not frequented the town diner for several years. I used to, back in its heyday of gleaming chrome and red leather upholstery. But those mid-fifties fixtures and fittings were ripped out when the original owner died, replaced by laminated wood and polyvinyl. Obnoxiously loud music and ugly kitsch decorations invaded every booth and counter, and nobody bothered to refill the napkin dispenser to refresh your coffee. Elvis had left the building and some untalented punk rock group made themselves at home. Where there had once been lines around the block at Sunday brunch, in the final days there were only a few grimy students debating if they should order a ride-share to MacDonalds instead. Such is the fate of anything old fashioned or unique in the remorseless march of twenty-first century progress.

But surely this is how history is supposed to happen; the way of all flesh, as the saying goes. Once upon a time, even the rag-and-bone man, the gypsy, and the lamplighter all enjoyed their time in the sun. For many moons ago, the rag-and-bone man was selling the latest gadgets door to door, city people considered the lamplighter's evening chore to be an amazing urban innovation, the roving gypsy's lucky heather remained wild and unpicked on the moor; and even I thought the town diner was the most happening spot in this damned town. But not now. Things change. 

The Invisible Third Party

Buying a haunted house is one of the biggest mistakes first-time homebuyers make when getting on the property ladder. Not only do you need replace the kitchen cabinets and bathroom fixtures, you have to deal with the apparition of a headless nobleman floating through the wall you've just repainted. And what about are those creepy grinning skulls that suddenly appear behind you in the bathroom mirror while you're trying to trim your nose hair. It's no fun to find out that a jilted Victorian bride killed herself in what you thought was your cozy living room, and now is now a wispy grey lady who weeps and wails by the television every night while you're trying to watch reruns of The Newlywed Game

Fortunately, these typical restless spirits are easy to deal with. Most ghosts, especially disembodied phantoms draped in a white sheet, can be quickly and easily banished by pointing a three-speed rotary fan in their direction. Full power will blow them back to the tomb in no time at all. If the ghost is merely a cold, damp spot on the floor, buy a space heater and melt them into oblivion. I've employed both methods with great success in my own home, an isolated nineteenth-century vicarage overlooking an abandoned graveyard in East Grimsby. 

But if you live in a modern house built on sacred Indian tribal lands, and I know many of you do, then things might be a little more complicated than just a trip to the local hardware store to stock up o ghost-busting appliances. You will probably need an old fashioned Latin Exorcism, but it's not the demon that will make your spin like Linda Blair's in the famous Hollywood movie, it's the bill you receive from the Catholic Church two weeks later.

An exorcism can be spine-chillingly expensive for many ordinary households. On average, a gallon of holy water costs about $250 per gallon, more if it's freshly blessed, and a variety pack of votive candles can really push the price up. Most Catholic dioceses will throw in the priest for free, but you're still looking at over $500 per ceremony just to expel the restless spirit of a former occupant, who may or may not have been murdered in your master bedroom.

The same is true of booking a seance with a qualified medium. The full 'is there anybody there?' experience is not cheap, especially if you're seeking to communicate with the departed across the Vale of Death. I once worked in an office haunted by a former employee who died before he could update an important spreadsheet with new data. His mournful apparition appeared at his desk each working day, attempting to finish this task he had not completed in life. The only solution was to posthumously fire him via seance. His astral severance package was naming the conference room in his memory, a small price to pay considering the seance cost two thousand bucks, which did not include janitorial overtime fees for mopping up all the ectoplasm.

Such unexpected and nightmarish expenses are why I'm incorporating my new Ghost Insurance Company, featuring a special introductory offer just for you. For affordable monthly payments in the Crypto currency of your choice, GIC will cover all the exorcism and clairvoyant costs if your home or business becomes infested by unwanted spooks, wraiths, demons or poltergeists. So apply now, you know it makes sense.

Young Adult Fiction

Like millions of curious children around the world, Colin Hippo was disappointed to find no gateway to Narnia at the back of the old wardrobe in his bedroom. There was, however, a very pungent portal to Hell at the bottom of the young man's laundry basket. It took the form of two sacrilegious socks, worn for five days straight during a misguided hike through Stinky Hollow, a muck and filth flooded valley in the nearby Brown Mountains. Although Colin's hands were proverbially idle, his trail-walking feet were certainly not, yet the Devil had apparently still found a lot of work for them to do. And all of it smelled real bad. Just take a whiff for yourself.

Before selling their soles to Satan, Colin's socks were unremarkable grey-green poly-cotton socks with yellow reinforced toes. Colin had bought them at his local outdoor sports emporium, Mad Sherpa, famous for its cautionary mountaineering motto: "If you get lost climbing Everest, you won't freeze to death in our latest range of thermal fashions." Stinky Hollow wasn't Everest, sure, but what it lacked in formidable peaks it compensated for with unbearable stench. As soon as an intrepid hiker set foot in Stinky Hollow he'd be immediately knee-deep in fetid swamp. Consequently, specialist sweat-wicking socks were an expedition must, no matter how expensive they were. And that's where Colin left the beaten path before even taking his first step: with his tiny allowance, Colin could only afford a single pair of socks to last him the entire week. So what was initially a simple hike in the woods had turned into a rambling Black Mass.

Clearly, some sort of 'wash and fold Exorcism' was necessary to restore Colin's accursed laundry basket to its former God-fearing state as a convenient receptacle for dirty clothes, and not remain the Stygian pit of eternal and very rancid damnation it had become. But the Exorcist would require detailed washing instructions instead of a Bible, a bottle of concentrated bleach rather than a sprinkling of holy water, and obviously an industrial strength oxygen mask, not to mention a pair of long-handled tongs for wrenching the socks away from Satan's clutches. In this case, the Exorcist was known as "mom," and she had plenty of experience of struggling withe the Dark Side, so everything ended Happily Ever After.

The moral of this story is: if your route takes you across odiferous terrain called 'Stinky Hollow' in the Brown Mountains, perhaps choose a different route. And always pack at least two spare pairs of clean socks, even your route fortuitously passes through an area known as Relaxing Foot Bath Spa in the Dazzling White Mountains.

Privacy vs Piracy In The Digital Age

Everyone is sick and tired of installing Big Tech's perpetual and superfluous software updates. I 'update' this blog every week or so, yet don't find it necessary to require 'multi- factor authentication' just so you can scroll through all the nonsense I've written here. But maybe I should? 

After all, even the most inconsequential paragraphs I post are far more valuable than Apple's tedious "bug fixes" and Google Drive's tiresome user-interface improvements. I don't want those evil Chinese bots gaining access to my opinions about the music of Alban Berg or if bald men should wear hats inside or not. 

Alas, ubiquitous computer hackers are proving difficult to outwit and out-code. Most of our Online passwords are already compromised before we've even thought of them. Everybody everywhere can download everything about you at the nefarious touch of a button on their burner phone. 

It's like your pet parrot is squawking out your mother's maiden name all night long and your Social Security Number is simply 012-345-6789. Very soon Big Tech will need to demand DNA samples and a colonoscopy to sign into your Internet accounts. Perhaps Microsoft already does? I have no idea. I drew the curtains on Windows many, many years go. 

So will my reader's banking and credit card information be safe with me? Well, if reading American Fez entails first answering my impertinent and very intimate 'multi-factor authentication' questions, I have to say that's a definite No. Let's face it, I have no qualms selling people out to the highest bidder. Partly because I want the money, but mostly because I've always secretly dreamed of being an Auctioneer. 

"Do I hear fifty dollars in Bitcoin for the password to Jane Doe's Bank of America savings account? Going, going, going. Sold to Vladimir Spamkov for fifty dollars in Bitcoin!" I'd prefer to be auctioning artworks and antiques but I'll take what I can get. You've been warned.

Those Who Do Not Remember History

 'The world's oldest profession' is an accolade bestowed jointly on prostitution and politics. After all, the duties and ambitions of each are so very similar. And, if you hold no objection to droll metaphor, even the performance of their respective antediluvian tasks requires an analogous set of iniquitous skills and shameless guile; skills perfected over several millennia of on-the-job experience. In fact, I have no doubt that the earliest wild-haired harlots learnt a thing or two from their bearskin-clad statesmen about selling themselves to whoever or whatever could pay.

Historically, prostitute and politician first appear as recognized job descriptions at the very Dawn of Civilization. Explanations of their dubious offices are scrawled on clay tablets discovered in the lowest layers of excavations at the most ancient of archeological sites. Additionally, both primitive lipsticks and electioneering manifestos are frequently found in the fossil record. Some scholars, such as myself, also claim that the pyramids and Stonehenge were actually ancient polling stations. Such conjectures are difficult to prove but are the only correct conclusions that can be drawn from the evidence, provided you are not some jaded, unimaginative 'professor' with tenure at one of our ridiculously overpriced and increasingly irrelevant universities.

But whatever the academics say, bureaucracy and streetwalking clearly predate the establishment of what we now think of as tribes and settlements. So, since there were no tribes for the bureaucrats to govern, and no settlement streets for the streetwalkers to walk in, how did those politicians and prostitutes from bygone days go about their dubious businesses? Well, they obviously put their deceitful, nefarious heads together and propounded the idea of tribes and settlements to their gullible constituents and clients. And such deceitful quid pro quo is how the parliamentro-boudoir system of order and patronage has screwed us ever since.

An immediate effect of creating tribes, and settlements was the spread of Herpes, a sexually transmitted disease named after the First Kingdom Egyptian pharaoh who contracted it from the infamous courtesan Gonorrhoea. But such shameful personal problems were nothing compared to the misery and dysfunction inflicted on people by the political half of the disreputable duo. For instance, humankind could have invented the wheel much earlier were it not for the interference of Paleolithic politicians. Stone-Age governments also imposed a fire tax on a per cave basis, and stipulated that hunter-gatherers must obtain valid licenses to stalk mammoth with sharpened flint-tipped spears. 

These draconian policies were the beginning of what conservative commentators have named 'The Swamp,' so-called because its low-browed architects often literally lived in swamps, in rudimentary mud huts balanced on stilts sunk into thick slime. Some authorities, myself included, have also termed this stage of socio-economic antiquity the Savagely-Primordial Complex, although not even I know what we mean by that exactly. Nevertheless, the continuity from homicidal maniac crouching in a mud hut with his home made axe to modern day senators pocketing backhanders on Capitol Hill is easy to follow.

Too Much Information

My toenail clippers are quite large, professional grade, heavy-duty. It's almost like they require both hands to operate correctly. In fact, I could probably trim my garden hedges with them. Even create an elaborate topiary, if I wanted. But I'm not a fan of showy flora at home.

I'm sometimes afraid I'm going to sever the tips off my toes when I'm using the clippers. You need to be very precise otherwise there will be blood. I refuse to use them on my fingernails for this very reason. So I just chew those, which is fine provided you file them into acceptable shape after each mouthful. And, as you might expect, the file attachment on my toenail clippers belongs on a woodworking bench beside a massive chisel.

Personal grooming would be much simpler If I just bought a new, more convenient, user-friendly pair of toenail clippers from my local pharmacy. But I tend to believe that an abundance of ease can often lead to downright neglect. Before you know where you are, you've grown huge horns instead of dainty toenails: five little rhinoceros skulls stuck on the end of each foot. Unhygienic and unsightly.

Of course, my clippers are powerful enough to cope with such a disfigurement but I'm not going to let you borrow them if and when it afflicts you. Sorry but I don't like to share my surgical implements. What I do like to share, however, is useless information, especially when it's "too much" information, like this piece of claptrap I've just written. 

Alas, these are the times we live in. Thank your lucky stars it's only a few paragraphs on my obscure blog, and not a thousand pages of confessional memoir promoted by Oprah Winfrey, or a paid Substack subscription that you cannot cancel until next year. Although, there's no difference really. It's all grist for the dark, satanic mills that grind out moronic 'content' and worthless opinion.

In The Shadow Of The Uninterested Majority

'Why bother?' That old, persistent, uncomfortable question that faces the keepers of many flames, especially those obscure flames, like this blog, American Fez, that only flicker in the darkest crevices of the most obscure caverns of ye olde World Wide Web.

I've employed the phrase 'uninterested majority' in the title of this post, but that implies there actually exists a minority that is interested. But there isn't. 

There is only me, the keeper of the blog flame, mumbling these verbose screeds to myself while I type, hoping there are more books of matches somewhere in the pockets of my cloak to relight the fire when it self-extinguishes from lack of inspiration.

And that happens more often than not these days. What is there to write about, anyway, that isn't already written and rewritten as a meme then adapted into an TikTok video. Too much quantity, too little quality. Everything is consumed and regurgitated at an alarming rate by an insatiable audience of zombified spectators. We are left with a choice between artificial intelligence and zero intelligence.

Why bother? For example, it's self-defeating for me to write critiques of Artificial Intelligence. Such is the speed at which AI evolves, my observations will be out-of-date before I even finish my first sentence (as will, no doubt, the terms and conditions of using AI). But the redundancy of my own opinions won't stop me typing, of course, because unlike the machines I opine upon, I never learn. I just collect enough brain kindling to keep my flame burning for no good reason.

At least theAI ChatBots are ordered to write and can't refuse. But I have no excuse. I am my own commissioning editor and vanity publisher. After all, it's not like I have a devoted readership to entertain, or even a random readership for that matter. Every post on this long-suffering blog is immediately buried in the mass digital graveyard of futile and worthless Internet activity, with no headstone, winding sheet, coffin, or ceremony. I can't even muster the creative will to finally turn this little flame into a Viking funeral pyre. These words are simply exported into the bottomless pit of unwanted 'content' along with all the other screams in a void.

So why bother? Well, I guess the answer is: what else am I going to do with my prodigious leisure time except warm my hands around the fire until some robot kicks the brazier over.