The Mumpsimus

Glenn Beck appropriates ACT UP's Silence = Death. I went to some ACT UP meetings and protests in the mid-1990s in New York . One of them was a protest against the Pope. People who were braver and more committed than I dropped a banner out of Saks 5th Avenue that read "CONDOMS SAVE LIVES". I was with a group of about 20 folks who were allowed into a special police-created protest area in amidst what felt like a million Catholics waiting for the Pope outside St. Patrick's Cathedral. I remember a woman coming up with her young daughter to the waist-high metal barricades that enclosed us. She threw holy water at us and told her daughter we were vampires. Perhaps in this new alternate reality, Beck will have Larry Kramer on his show to talk about Ronald Reagan . That would be fun...

I was there at the beginning. Yes, soon after Dr. Schaller (my favorite mad scientist) captured the bird , I blindly selected one of my favorite tommy guns and slaughtered the creature with panache.  I gutted it with my teeth.  I deconstructed it with a gulletful of Derrida.  I chugged a shot of ennui and belched sentences of purple bile into the airspace of downed jetliners.  I wouldn't call it a beautiful sight, but it was what I had. Jeff VanderMeer called me a "smart ass", but I was used to that.  He'd called me worse ("cretinous wombat", "illiterate dirigible", "barbaric yawp", "Dick Cheney"). It all led to a chain reaction of words, words, words. And now those words have been packaged and frozen with flash, waiting for you to take them out of the freezer and stick them in the microwave of your soul. All for charity. Go now, my minions.  Pre your order.  Feed the Wyrm and its whimsical Ministry .  Bring back s...

For all you folks waiting on the edges of your seats at home, here is my last contribution to The Conversation: Part Five . (In which we continue to talk about zombie movies and bring in Shakespeare for a cameo appearance.) If I had to find a pullquote, it would be: "Inevitably, I end up distrusting my own statements. And yet I continue to make them. Compulsion? Insanity? I'm not sure."