MICHAEL DENNIS MOONEY -- new writings

an essay by Michael Dennis Mooney

In recent times the rural town of Dimock, Pa. has been “fracked” by the environmental legacy of the George W. Bush administration. (Vice-President Richard Cheney was its czar of “fracking.”)

  There are sixty newly-drilled shale gas wells in Dimock.  Water from the town’s water wells is no longer potable, nor usable for anything. Water has turned brown, gaseous, and corrosive. Dimock is the “Love Canal” of the Bush-Cheney era. Values of homes and farms have collapsed.

  This is just one town In Northeast Pennsylvania. In Texas, in Oklahoma, in New Mexico, in Colorado, in Wyoming, and in Louisiana water contamination has cropped up in drilling operations, many a fearsome public health atrocity appearing in local papers. The boom in gas exploration leasing of rural acreage has been going on in more than thirty states during the past five years, many of them far less vigilant than Pennsylvania.

  That state’s Department of Environmental Protection has had to rescue the now water-deprived Dimock, at great cost, by ordering water brought in. DEP probably had never heard of the farming hamlet before its aquifer was fracked.  Methane and drilling mud leaked through faulty cement well-casings.

 

Fracking? you inquire. Well, “a grotesque degradation” would be a good definition for this new item in our vocab.

  “Environmental assault“ would be a good definition. “Rape of the land and the rural culture” pretty much says it. And Pennsylvania has had a long history of degradation, via coal mines, oil wells, iron-smelting, strip mining, and coalbed methane drilling. Now high-volume shale gas drilling is re-traumatizing the state. Poor Pennsylvania is like a streetwalker who has been assaulted yet again.

  Fracking is the new mode of drilling for gas. It is literally the fracturing of the earth, at a depth of about one mile below the surface, to break open shale beds that hold trapped gas. It is a man-made seismic event. The ground trembles at this new technology of the peak oil era-- this is not a metaphor.

  Fracking was spearheaded by Richard Cheney’s old outfit, Halliburton, a huge international drilling services engineering corporation. When the George W. Bush administration came to Washington, one of the Vice-President’s missions was to make way for gas drilling.

  He had a vision. He sought to get the Environmental Protection Agency out of the drillers’ way, to promote a new era of “energy independence” via drilling for shale gas. He worked like the devil, literally, to get a new Energy Policy Act of 2005 passed by Congress. It exempted gas drillers from EPA clean water regulations. The drilling boom was launched. Bush and Cheney, Frick and Frack.  Two ol’ drillers. Their hands on the levers of the bulldozer of power. Things like this were bound to happen.

  If only Susquehanna County, Pa. had had a Sunni-style insurgency with which to repel the invasion. Frick and Frack had wanted to frack Iraq. You know they wanted to! But they had too much unexpected resistance on their hands. Not able to get away with it! Denied! An epic loss of opportunity! It would have been such fun to partner with the Iraqis in the energy independence business! (The Iraqi Sunnis didn’t think so. They’d wreck their wells and set them ablaze.)

 

Hydraulic fracturing is the pumping of many millions of gallons of slick drilling mud-- a slimy toxic slurry of sand, chemicals, diesel fuel, and water-- under high pressure into a well to break up the shale. This is called stimulating the well. When the well returns the gas, which is mostly methane, to the wellhead, about half of the millions of gallons of slurry returns to the surface, where it spills out into a pit.

  The mess contains millions of gallons of water that will never be usable again. It contains sand, used to thicken the slurry and prop open fractures in the shale beds. It contains toxins like methane. It contains carcinogens, notably benzene, from the diesel fuel used to make the slurry more slick and penetrative. And the mud contains radium and radon from the earth. Yes, dredged-up radioactive substances!

  (And these are only a few of the dozens of chemicals, many quite toxic, that are in the patented superslick “fracking fluid” which arrives on truckbeds, in containers labelled Halliburton, used by the Dimock drillers, Cabot Oil and Gas, based in Houston.)

  This evil slime, the blow-back, is not the typical stuff you’d get at a water treatment plant. This is one highly poisonous fracking mess!  What do you do with it?!

  (And the other half of the mess remains down in the gas well! Leaking through fractures into the surrounding earth! Which is no small consideration.)  

  There is, also, significant air pollution at the drill-sites, methane fumes and hydrocarbon fumes that are burned off and vented into the air, truly the equivalent of a big city’s car exhaust emissions in tiny Dimock.

  What do you do with it? When it returns to the wellhead, this Slime That Ate Dimock just sits in a holding pit and evaporates into the air. The workers near the pit are in full hazmat gear. It just sits. It is a barely contained spill, a disaster waiting to happen. Brought to you by Halliburton. Who brought you the BP disaster in the Gulf.

  (Halliburton was supposed to have adequately inspected their cementing of the Deep Water Horizon well that collapsed and exploded, tarring the beaches of four states, and Halliburton was later found at fault by government investigators.)

  And what else can you do with the chemical slime? You can put it back down the well when you’ve emptied it of gas! You can call this “the sequestering of waste.”

 

How does a nightmare like this, the tainting of the aquifer in Dimock, develop?

  In Dimock, the people had tried to soldier on and use their well water for showers, yet methane fumes were so bad in the showers they thought they’d pass out. Kids in homes around town took showers at school only. Dimock residents tried to use well water for laundry, and the corrosive fumey water ruined clothing with splotchy stains and it ruined dishes, cookware, silverware-- and dishwashers. People had to have bottled water for cooking and drinking, of course. DEP ordered water be delivered to Dimock in large tanks, “water buffaloes.” A town turned into a third world disaster site. The people of the town are suing the drillers, and the state is fining them, but they’ve made a fortune.

  How this happened? First of all, EPA’s eyes were taken off the ball. From 2005 until 2010, while the drilling boomed, the Freaks of Frack were kept exempt from clean water regulations by the new Energy Policy Act. The EPA was a Casey At The Bat wearing a blinfdold of Richard Cheney’s devising.

  Now EPA is onto the problem. They began a comprehensive study of high-volume fracturing in 2010, and will issue a full report next year. They also acted in 2010, issuing immediate prohibitions against the use of the diesel fuel in the frack fluid. State and local officials are starting to catch up. But for the last five years they’ve been behind the curve. Indeed, they were thrown a curve by the drillers’ public relations offensive.

  They were told, at public info meetings, hydraulic fracturing was an innovative technology. “Natural“ gas was an alternative fuel. There was plenty of it in shale deposits, hundreds of trillions of cubic feet. Enough to meet U.S. energy needs for hundreds of years. Drillers got a lot of “buy-in.” People wanted to believe America could be like a Saudi fiefdom, rich in an alternative petrol. Jobs would be created. American independence would be fostered. Prosperity. A new era. Progress. A boom.

  (Well, yes, a boom in profits for drillers. The drillers took tens of millions of dollars in gas from the ground under Dimock. Linda Fiorentino, whose artesian well blew sky high in 2010, due to a build-up of trapped methane, had gotten about six hundred dollars for leasing her land. It is now worthless.)

  Drillers, in their charm offensive, had portrayed mining for shale gas as a natural process. It’s mostly just “sand and water” which would be pumped into the gas wells, “more than ninety percent water,” they’d say. (It was eventually learned diesel fuel and benzene had been found in the blow-back all along. It was always part of the process.)

  State and local officials, eager for the dream of cheap alternative energy, eager for new local jobs and tax revenues, would echo this poetic mythology. They’d flat-out vouch for the safety of the drilling process. Officials for Pennsylvania’s Bureau of Oil And Gas Managment said there had never been evidence of fracking causing water contamination. (Methane leaking into the Dimock aquifer belies these assurances, which were not true to begin with.)

  The wellheads would be in out of the way rural locations, like fire hydrants in small isolated clearings. You wouldn’t know they were there.  (Tell that lie now in Dimock, and you’ll get a bitter Ha! The drillers' big trucks, the derricks, the constant drone of huge compressors, the hazmat suits, the muddy several-acre dill sites, the pits of slime, the fumes, fairly dominate the landscape.)

  The same lies were told in Texas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Colorado, Wyoming, and Louisiana, places where there is no longer so much belief in mytho-poetic legend. The gas boom has now arrived in the East, in traditional mining states like West Virginia and Pennsylvania.

 

And it’s coming to New York. Chesapeake Energy, a big corporate player, is leasing lands throughout Appalachia. Chesapeake is leasing the gas rights to huge tracts of land in the Catskill Region, also in the Delaware River basin along Eastern Pennsylvania. The Catskill tracts are close to the aquifer that supplies fresh drinking water to millions downstate in the New York City region. Similarly, the Delaware River Basin supplies fresh water to the Philadelphia region.

  Environmental groups such as the National Resources Defense Council want to keep drillers out of these crucial, sensitive areas. They look to the fracking of Dimock as a sentinel event that informs their cause, and they look to the award-winning documentary film, Gasland, as their mainfesto. The film by Josh Fox, a Pennsylvanian, shows  the real life experience of fracked rural communities.

  Here in New York State, where I live, the pitfalls are many, despite the warnings of Pennsylvania’s experience. A recent Department of Environmental Conservation commissioner, who resigned last year, gave the publc the same blanket assurances that there is no chance of water contamination from the drilling process. The state has often appeared eager, from the governor’s office on down, to reap tax revenues from allowing some drilling, as officials from other states had been in earlier drilling booms.

  New York City’s Department of Environmental Conservation has called for a ban on drilling in the Catskills area. The state legislature and the governor have established a moratorium on drilling for several months. The state comptroller has joined a suit to compel Halliburton to disclose the exact chemical composition of its fracking fluid.

  Halliburton has thus far failed to disclose the precise makeup of its formula, claiming it’s a trade secret, but it has been known to contain benzene from diesel fuel, and more than 50 other chemicals that help make it slick.

 

It isn’t only the drilling fluid that is slick.

  The industry’s techniques for gaining “buy-in” from the public is rather oily. They seek to make the public nominal partners in their profiteering. They ask people to lease their lands for money, and for a defined period of time. They promise royalties to lease owners from gas finds. They seek to make everyone a stakeholder.

  They tend to argue that if they drill on neighboring land they can take gas out from under your land too, whether you sign a lease or not-- so all the neighbors are in the same boat and might as well sign and get something. They create momentum for getting everyone into the deal. They portray holdout factions as anti-progress.

  They villify environmental concerns. It’s not toxins that hurt people, it’s environmentalists that hurt profits. They hurt progress, they hurt the business climate, and for the sake of some endangered ruffed grouse that lives over the shale beds! Environmental concerns are depicted as effete, tree-hugging.

  Drillers pay out thousands per acre-- and take out of the ground tens of millions in gas for the marketplace and for stockholders.

  What the landowners do not “get” is how they could band together-- since they’re all in the same boat--  and they could buy up the leases and refuse to let them go to the drillers.

 

One of the more dispiriting aspects of the story nationally, and on state and local levels, is that the drilling industry is way bigger than the regulatory apparatus. There are far fewer inspectors than there are drill sites. The industry is expected to be largely self-policing and to report its own foul-ups. Only the biggest disasters, like Dimock’s tainted aquifer, get really scrutinized and shut down by regulators. Three wells in Dimock were shut down.

 

Information Resources On The Internet:

  The amount of pollution that goes unregulated and unchecked is the focus of a special investigative project that can be found at:

http://www.nytimes.com/water

  The best long-form reporting I’ve seen is Christopher Bateman’s article in last June’s Vanity Fair, “A Colossal Fracking Mess:”

http://www.vanityfair.com/business/features/2010/06/fracking-in-pennsylvania-201006

  The broadcast newsmagazine, NOW, on PBS, has a good introduction, on web-available video, to the film Gasland:

http://www.pbs.org/now/shows/613/index.html

  Propublica.Org does a lot of good up to the minute reporting:

http://www.propublica.org/article/frack-fluid-spill-in-dimock-contaminates-stream-killing-fish-921

a "hairy dairy" story of "dumb young kids," and children too
by Michael Dennis Mooney


My dad is so weird! He's always popping in at the house, not to come home, but just to stop by when he's on his way somewhere, talking really fast. I can tell he's under pressure, trying to get a lot of things done, errands, that sort of thing. And do I want to go with him?

What? No! I'm in the middle of something!

I'm about to nail down the zillionth quadrillionth level of the Zoo Tycoon game. Or I'm making fifty drawings of every known kind of dragon-- scaly, winged, razor-clawed, red, flame-throwing, poop-dropping (wait, I didn't say that!)-- and the drawings are scattered all over.

And my dad wants to know if I want to go with him to get a haircut?

Uh, no! I don't think so!

So my dad came home this one time, and he said to my mom, "I'm just stopping in. I'm going over to Harry Gochee's Garage. Does Zachy want to go?" I was about seven years old at the time.

"Mmmm? Don't know." Mom was sipping her coffee, clearing the cobwebs, as she says.

Dad was talking busily about car inspection, and Mom was not listening. Dad was pouring himself a coffee, scanning the weather on TV-- flurries were about to fall on our daffodil shoots-- and loosening his jacket on a chilly Saturday in March. He was in a hurry.

I piped up. "No, Dad, I don't want to go. I'm planning to put my new Bionicles together." (Bionicles, you inquire? Think of Legos with moving parts that represent eerie alien life forms when assembled.)

"Mom, did Dad just say he's going to Hairy Goat Cheese Garage?" Mom was starting to balance her checkbook, frowning, not really listening.

"Yep. He did."

Dad was not listening either.

Heck, I myself never really listen. The whole family might as well be deaf! My dad has said that many times.

"Harry might call," Dad said. "I'll be on my cell phone."

"Huh? Okay," Mom said absently.

Dad turned to me. "Zachy, sure you don't want to go? We could go for pancakes at Four Corners Lunch? How about blueberry pancakes?"

"No, Dad. I want to stay here and play. I'll make Hot Pockets." I was always a real microwave chef. Press a couple of panels, watch the numbers tick down, and you're eating.


##

I snuggled my chair up next to my mom's, where she sat contemplating checks (and balances) and clearing cobwebs in her big warm robe while sipping "a bit of the fresh brewed."

Dad headed out the door, my dog Chocky shadowing too closely and sniffing at his sleeves and pockets. Chocky is a brown lab and "a pain in the posterior," my dad says. Dad eased out of the muddy, puddled dip at the end of our dirt drive and onto the road in his car, a dark green Jetta.

Then I began assembling a new Bionicle figure and I started to think. What a weird name that place has, Hairy Goat Cheese Garage!

Dad must have been kidding. I didn't picture it as a place here in town, like the Mobil station, all shiny and tidy, with rows of those cheesy crackers I love and a glass cases full of Pepsi in plastic bottles.

No, I pictured a very untidy place in the country-- with goats!

I daydreamed and daydreamed. Hairy Goat Cheese Garage.... was a place out in the middle of farm country, far from town and hard to find, along a winding and bumpy narrow road. It was a converted barn with a big old packed-dirt parking lot, a Coke machine out front with a metal bottle opener screwed to it. And goats.

There were goats, hay in their mouths and hay hanging from their scruffy beards, in the open bays of the garage. Goats wandering in and out as the mechanics there changed tires and jacked-up cars for lube and oil jobs.

In the office, next to an old manual cash register, there was a low refrigeration case with cellophaned packages of goat cheese for sale, cheap. You could get a nice big package for two dollars and a half.

The package label said, "HAIRY GOAT CHEESE-- from furry undisgruntled goats." Hairy Goat Cheese Garage was, as my dad would say, very "low tech."

There was a picture of a smiling goat critter on each package with a piece of straw hanging out of his mouth, wild beast horns curving back above his curly unruly hair, one sharp-pointed cloven hoof held to the side of his face.

He looked as if he were thinking. Whatever he was thinking, it was making him giddy, probably about head-butting someone. Or eating their Red Sox hat.

I was having a fine waking dream of a goat running away with the tire-change crowbar-- and then I was entertaining such questions and such wonders as...

Is Hairy Goat Cheese a cheese which is hairy? Would you, say, peel off the fur part, like a rind, then eat the cheese? Or is it dairy produce from hairy critters? I found the first of these, "cheese which is hairy," way more entertaining.

Then the phone rang. It woke me from my dreaming. Mom was in the laundry room, amid a static-y tidal wave of dried, unfolded clothes piled head high. I picked up the phone.

Hey, maybe it was Jeff. I'll tell Jeff about "hairy dairy."

The person on the phone asked for my dad and he said he was from Hairy Goat Cheese Garage-- just like my dad had said!

"This is Harry Gochee's Garage," said the voice on the phone, an oddly pitched, quavering, piping, crackle-y voice. Immediately I pictured in my imagination a gentle, distinguished older man talking. He sounded to me like someone who spent his time with frisky, gruntly goats. He sounded happy and relaxed.

The Goat Cheese Garage man wanted my dad to know his car was ready. The piping, crackle-y voice said, "Only needed a half a quart of oil." He sounded pleased. "Brakes, belts, lights, tires, everything is fine." He sounded happy the car did not need fixing.

Dad was going to owe him about $1.83 for the half a quart. (Hey! Maybe my dad would get a free cheese.)

I told the man my dad was on his cell phone.

"Oh, jeez, I've got to call the other number. See ya, young lad," said the Hairy Goat Cheese man.

I hung up the phone. Then I drifted into a daydream of goats.

Goats trying to climb trees. Not able to get their back legs off the ground. Then head-butting the trees.

Goats playing football with no helmets. Wearing numeraled wool sweaters like in the old days.

Goats like old professors, wearing goatees. Looking rather lost in deep thoughts and abstracted ruminations. Had they forgotten much of what they used to know?

Goats in wool coats, like bankers too rich to worry.

Goats in tap shoes going clatter-clatter in the parking lot.

Goats rolling tires, nudging them forward with their mischievous laughing snouts at Hairy Goat Cheese Garage.

Goats like rock stars too crazy busy and frenetic to fret about being ugly.

Young white chin-whiskered "kids" splatting in oil-puddles. Getting their wool really oily and dingy. Young goats the color of dirt. But really happy to be dirty.

Goats simply not caring if they will ever have a bath. Until maybe someday they get to roll in snow drifts. Or roll in pans of white paint! Or jump in a creek.

I went on and on.

Goats in bathing suits. Goats on a crazy tire-swing above that creek.

No! Goats skinny dipping in their bleached woolen underwear on a flurrying late-March day.

When my dad came home I said, "I want to go to Hairy Goat Cheese Garage."

"Next time," Dad said.

"Did you get any goat cheese?"

"That's funny," he laughed.

So the next time we went for a haircut my dad pointed-out the "Gochee's Gargare" sign, right there on the main street in town, a couple doors down from the haircut place. In fact, it was right next to the Mobil.

We went in, and I met Harry. He was a good-natured older gent. There were no goats playing silly tire-rolling games, there was no refrigeration case, and no cheese. It turns out Harry sells cars. "Auto sales and auto maintenance." That's how his sign reads.

"Harry's very old school." My dad approved.

"Old School? Dad, did Harry go to the old middle school when it used to be the high school?"

"You know, he probably did, in the 1940's. But 'old school' means schooled in the old ways, how things used to be done, according to honored customs."

One thing I noticed about Harry, he had a piping, bleating voice, and curly, wooly, unruly hair. But I didn't say anything about it.

And this is nearly the very long-haired hairy end of my shaggy goat tale.

##

But wait! One more part to the story.

Later in the Spring we went to the Four Corners on a Sunday. It was Mother's Day, and my dad was joking with the waitress. He ought to be serving her coffee, he said. She joked right back, took her apron off, plopped her pad and pencil down, and sat with us. And we all waited laughing til the other waitress came around.

Eventually, when they were done horsing around, Mom got the Mediterranean Momelet. Mom said the Mediterranean was "eggs, tomatoes, olives and feta." I said the Mediterraneans are awful strange. I got the pancakes, plain, with no butter, just maple syrup, and milk to drink.

Dad pointed to the "Chevre And Scallion Omelet" listed on the menu. "I'll have the goat and onion," he said. He is so weird!

So I said, "Make sure the goat's well done." I ate Dad's toast with jam, and he ate half of one of my pancakes. And he must have been hungry, because he ate some of Mom's potatoes, which she was leaving, because she was "not sure beeyooteeful glamorous Mediterraneans would eat home-fried potatoes."

And the stuffed moose on the wall above the perpetually unlit fireplace was grinning stupidly, as were we all.

An October Ghost Story, The Sox V. Yanks, 2004
by Michael Dennis Mooney


DAN: Hey, Dan Patrick here. Tonight's shortened edition of SPORTSCENTER comes to you from historic Fenway. In about twenty minutes the Red Sox are about to contend against the Yankees they love to hate-- but a half-hour ago, about 7:30, a most unusual sight arose out of the gloaming and hung in the air above the big green left field wall, above the banks of lights, above the billboard ads, above the scoreboard filled with zeroes. There it is! [Camera pans.] An apparition of Bart Giammatti. He says he wants to address everyone before the game, the media, the fans here at the park, the players, the TV audience. He wants to discuss, quote, "a matter of much concern to baseball." We're going to bring in my broadcast parter Kenny Mayne. Kenny, what do you make of this?

KENNY: Hi, everyone. Yeah, Dan, this is creating quite a buzz in the stands. The game'll start at exactly 8:19, and Old Bart's just hanging there in the sky. He's not ready to speak to the crowd yet. That's what we're hearing. He's waiting for the seats to fill up. Now,...um,...Dan?

DAN: Shoot, Kenny.

KENNY: This might be stating the obvious--

DAN: That's what you do.

KENNY: -- But, correct me if I'm wrong, Bart Giammatti is no longer the Commissioner of Major League Baseball.

DAN: No longer, right.

KENNY: He's, kind of like, ...well, dead, no longer in the loop, really--

DAN: He's dead.

KENNY: -- And baseball already has a commissioner, I forget who--

DAN: Selig. Bud Selig.

KENNY: --Yeah, that's the guy! So, where does Giamatti get off holding a surprise news conference? I heard he requested to be on SPORTSCENTER.

DAN: We're going to interview him on tonight's show. You should pay more attention at the meetings.

KENNY: Now, this is really out of his jurisdiction. He's a dead dude. He has no juice anymore. No say in baseball.

DAN: You could argue that, but a revered former commissioner has arisen from the dead. Then people tend to sit up and take note. Thus Mr. Giammatti has himself some press coverage, and a public
forum.

KENNY: But no real say, no authority.

DAN: To use an overused phrase, he has moral authority.

KENNY: Okay, Dan. What do you think the old man's so worked up about?

DAN: He said, "a matter of much concern to baseball."

KENNY: I think it's going to be players' salaries. Bart's concerns aren't likely to be real up to date. He's been, like, dead for years. Out of the game, really.

DAN: Could be. A star player like Sammy Sosa gets fined for showing up late to a meaningless late-season game, and he gets docked more money than a working couple with "good jobs" and a mortgage can earn in a year. He doesn't even notice, it's only one day's pay.

KENNY: Hey, I got it! The commissioner has thought it over and he wants to reinstate Pete Rose.

DAN: No way. Not On ESPN. Not after we just aired The Pete Rose Story.

KENNY: Dan, what do you think Ol' Bartholomew's concerns are?

DAN: My guess is it's steroids in the game, but that's just me, the BALCO story is really breaking right now?

KENNY: Yeah. That interview in Sports Illustrated with "The Iron Sheff." Did you see that?

DAN: The Yanks' Gary Sheffield. He indicated the BALCO company could get you a "supplement" that would ostensibly be a vitamin--

KENNY: -- But it'd be Vitamin S!

DAN: [laughs]

KENNY: Big Red "S." Stands for Superman.

DAN: No, for steroids, you doofus.

KENNY: I say Bart's going to ban "Shef" from b'ball. Fact or Fiction?

DAN: Let's not get ahead of ourselves. No advanced word yet on Giamatti's plans.

KENNY: You know, if he did ban "the Sheff" it could really hurt the Yankees' lineup. "Sheff" has been banging the ball off the wall like he's on a squash court or somethin'.

DAN: He's been lifting.

KENNY: He is AMPED! Now if he get's banned the Sox will have a much bigger chance of winning. An announcement like that would send a lightning bolt through Fenway. They'll be dancing in the stands all week.

DAN: No, I don't think it'll be about just one person.

KENNY: I'm betting he smells what "The Sheff" is stirring with his big stick. And he doesn't like it one bit.

DAN: No. A "ban" wouldn't hold up. Selig is commissioner. He would say a Giamatti ruling could never be countenanced. Not one made in 2004.

KENNY: You gotta stay on your toes when you're dealing with dead ex-commissioners.

DAN: Truer words never spoken. Let's swing the lens over to Peter Gammons and Harold Reynolds down on the first base line.

PETE, HAL: Dan. Hey, Dan. [players in warm-up drills behind them, some players pointing up to the sky]

DAN: Pete, you've got sources all around Fenway. What are you hearing?

PETE: Dan, no official advanced word. I am, though, hearing from old friends of the former commissioner--

KENNY: -- Ones who are still alive, right?

PETE: Alright, real "alive" sources are saying that Bart Giamatti is actually concerned with the Red Sox. He has an issue with the Red Sox players, their comportment in public, that kind of thing. That's what I'm hearing.

KENNY: Let me get this straight--

DAN: -- What would be the chances of that?

KENNY: Pete, are you saying Giamatti's been, um, apparitioning, making mysterious appearances all around town? Appearing to your sources? Telling them he's not happy with the Red Sox players', uh, comportment?

PETE: Exactly. I'm not used to reporting on the activities of those who are long deceased. But, yes, there have been seances held around Boston all during last week's playoff series. At one seance (I was there and it was eerie) Giamatti's voice was floating in through air-conditioning vents to the darkened dining room of an Italian Restaurant. He was saying, "This is no way for pro ballplayers to comport themselves in public. This is no way for a biker gang to present themselves. Nor even a horde of pillaging Visigoths." Then the lights and the a/c went off!

KENNY: Sounds like you really got into the house chianti and candlelight, Pete. That apparition! He talks like an old professor.

PETE: He was president of an Ivy League school. Though it was only Yale. [snickers] And he was a Dante scholar. So he knows about the eternal damnation you get when you really screw up.

DAN: Pete, is that Stephen King? Behind you there in the first row? With the old Sox cap on?

PETE: Yes, it is. He's been down here from Maine for every home game this season, he's doing a book from a fan's perspective.

KENNY: The apparitioning of Bart ought to fit in nicely for King. Let's flip it over to Hal Reynolds. "HR," I say Ol' Bart's going to ban those dumb head-first slides into first base. Whattdaya accomplish when you do that?--

HAL: -- Kenny, Kenny! [laughing]--

KENNY: You feel like such an ass. And you end up hurting the first baseman's feelings when he steps on you. He could turn an ankle.

HAL: Kenny! My Mayne Man! Let's keep this in focus. [laughs] Baseball people I know around the league are saying it's about the Sox too. I think Pete's right. If it were about the Yanks Mr. G. would go right to "The House That Ruth Built." He'd confront the team right there. Kind of man he is. [players behind him pointing up again]

DAN: I think Peter and Harold are onto something.

KENNY: We'll find out in a few minutes. The apparition is leaning over the green wall. He's sort of "counting the house," I think, or he's looking for one of those sausage vendors.

DAN: You know what I think the Giamatti announcement will be about? This will sound silly but I'm sure of it. It's about haircuts. [grinning] The Red Sox are a team that needs haircuts.

KENNY: Nah! No freakin way!

DAN: Yep. It's about haircuts. The current Sox roster is not clean cut. That's what the apparition was saying in the
restaurant. This is about how they "present themselves." Now, in the old Roger Clemens era the Sox were clean cut. They looked sharp.

KENNY: Yeah. They cleaned up nice. Then they lost and came in second.

DAN: The current Sox are good pitchers and terrific booming hitters. But they have bad hair.

KENNY: Dan, jeez guy, is that all you think about? Hair? Hair care? ....


THIS SHORT FICTION PIECE IS UNDER CONSTRUCTION ... MORE SOON

I SAY HER "PHILOSOPHY" IS AN ODE TO EBENEZER SCROOGE!

an essay by Michael Dennis Mooney

"Objectivism," so-called, is an ultraconservative hankering and nostalgia
for Victorian Days when autocrats and oligarchs ruled everything, people
like Carnegie, Vanderbilt, and Rockefeller (or in the late-Victorian era,
those like Ford, Edison, and Bell.)

Ayn Rand's objectivism was never a system of thought, nor was it ever, even
slightly, objective. It was the product of Ayn Rand's strongly angry
reaction to growing trends for social democracy in the early part of the
century, some of which went mightily awry (and murderously so with Russian
bolshevism) some of which went fairly well, as with evolving social democracy
in Britain and in Denmark, for example, and in the U.S. under Franklin Roosevelt
and the Democrats.

Ayn Rand was an ultraconservative who was uncomfortable with anything
that pulled away from late-Victorian values, her values. Values she'd
adopted from her headstrong tyrannical mother. The last social thinker Ayn Rand
agreed with was Ebenezer Scooge, pre-conversion. She was stuck in the mud,
like a Model T in a rainstorm. She was so antediluvian she was an embarrassment
to the right. She was, for example, eager to censor fellow screenwriters like
Dalton Trumbo, via her denunciations of them as Un-American during the McCarthy
Era.

She was understandably, of course, devastated by the revolution in Russia,
which had indeed confiscated her father's thriving business and her once-affluent
family's home.

Her advocacy of reason and reality are perfectly fine. She wanted ideas
which you can prove with an appeal to reason and to the facts of evidence. Fine.
But her conservatism, her longing for an old-school late-Victorian world of
earnest striving, long hours of hard work, careerism, achievement, and
success is merely her nostalgia. Neither reason nor the facts of reality
recommend to us her passionate longing for the good old days before the car,
the phone, and the electric light bulb, also the days before public education,
municipal hospitals, or pensions and health care for the elderly. Indeed, before
paved sidewalks.

Her entire system was one passionately incensed and bitter reaction, ultimately a
paranoid one, to marxist thought, some version of which she heard all around
her at the University of Petrograd in her late teens, and it surely left an
ugly after-taste with her. She was right to critique socialist states, especially
in their most totalizing idealogical manifestations, as in Soviet Russia and in
Maoist China. But she was wrong to see statist tyranny in the New Deal's social
democracy here: that's just Bircher-style conspiracy theory.

She remained essentially traumatized after she arrived in the West,
deciding that social democracy in general was merely a prelude to bolshevist
revolutionary mayhem. She had become a rather fully paranoid personality, a
reactionary, a rightist.

Her answer to marxist thought was an entire system of anti-marxism, and
that is what so-called objectivism is. Marxists claimed that industrialists
exploited the surplus value of labor. Randianism claims, countering, there
is a surplus of value that inventors and entrepreneurs contribute to a
product which is then exploited by the government's authority for taxation
and for redistribution.

Marxism claims workers are enslaved by low wages and subsistence
living conditions. Anti-marxism, in Randian analysis, says businessmen
are a voiceless exploited minority who are forced to pay for social
democracy, schools, roads, utlities like sewers and water lines,
municipal hospitals, public transport, regional airports, community college
job training facilities.

She fantasizes in Atlas Shrugged that the business execs should go on strike,
the ultimate anti-marxism, a "strike" by the capitalists, and the rest of us
would be mere incompetent shirkers who wouldn't know how to get things done
without the corporate VPs of this world, the Dagny Taggarts, directing us.
That is some fantasy! (Note for readers: Dagny Taggart was the central character in
Atlas Shrugged, dealing with enormous frustration as an executive, in not
being able to find effective employees and reliable suppliers.)

And that is some chutzpah!-- to think of businessmen as a poor downtrodden
minority. I'm sure the executives at Goldman Sachs, at General Motors, at Microsoft,
are telling themselves every day, I'm a poor exploited minority group waif! I'm
like a lil David Copperfield in the workhouse, saying, "Please, sir, can I have a
little more, a little more gruel, sir!" Actually, maybe at Lehman Brothers,
they are saying that (since the ex-Goldman execs who were insiders at Treasury
let them die like dogs in a blizzard, while Goldman got bailed via its exquisite
connections to the policy makers.)

Now, those who truly were a voiceless exploited minority in Old St. Petersburg
were the Russian Jews, such as Rand's father, who didn't have good legal protections,
as those maintained in Western countries.

Ayn Rand denied she was a conservative, but only because the
prevailing conservative editors and writers she met were too middle-road
and moderate, too relatively timid, to support her strongly felt
anti-communist fury. She couldn't affiliate with them. She was, in fact,
a paleoconservative, an ultra-rightist of a kind that conservatives found
too rigidly dogmatic. She wanted the role of government dialed-back to that of the
era before there were roads! She wanted an American Frontier type of
government, a national militia of some sort, municipal police forces, jails,
and courts. That's it. All else would be the province of the business
community, privately run for profit. Social concerns would be the bailiwick
of church groups, of philanthropic organizations, all non-governmental, no
public treasury monies involved.

Her idea of what capitalism is, or is supposed to be, in fact, never existed.
People with wealth and governmental officials with power always collaborated!
N.Y. Central Railroad under Cornelius Vanderbilt, e.g., literally "owned" every legislator
in New York State via an unpublished payroll. There was never any principled separation
of economic puissance and state power in the history of capitalism, and there isn't
now. But that is what capitalism is: it's an industrial system that has an unfair advantage
due to its capability for getting cozy with the state. So called laissez-faire, the
separation of state and economics, was always merely a theoretical model, an hypothesis
which didn't apply well to facts, by the time of the industrial era. It might have been
meant to apply to an earlier mercantile era, but I'm not sure it applied well then.

Ayn Rand's appeal to reason, also her appeal to the evidence of the perceivable
facts of reality, was not original with her by a long shot. So much for her
"objectvism" as a new philosophy. Her interest in rationalism, in logic and science,
in the objective "facts of reality," was only really new to cultish Ayn Randians,
semi-educated fans of her works, who had read one or two books, hers, fans who
hadn't the background to evaluate her in the broad history of human thought.

[Actually, all of her core beliefs date from the late 1700's and the English
Enlightenment: Laissez-faire and free trade (Adam Smith;) Rational self-interest
as a motive power for productive behavior (Adam Smith;) Limited government (John Locke;)
The perceivable facts of evidence (John Locke and all who came before him, back to
Francis Bacon;) also, Enlightenment Era Rationalism, that of Humboldt and others, who knew
that knowledge was possible and definable through science and good methodologies. Yet she
had no grasp of rationalism's application to twentieth century matters. The last time
she was up to date, philosophically, was in the time of Mozart operas, tricorn hats, knee
breeches, waistcoats, powdered wigs, and snuff. Also duelling pistols!]

Since the era of Voltaire and, following him, all the dozens of
philosophes of the Enlightenment in Europe and in England, there had been
a thorough-going rejection of the non-rational superstition-based thinking of
the church authorities, and a rejection of the birth-right authority of the
land-owning class, the aristocracy and royalty. This appeal to reason by the
philosophes, a group most influenced by Voltaire and Rousseau, created
our ideals of democracy, a striving for a greater equality of opportunity for working
people, it led to the overthrow of aristocracy and kings, to the weakening
of the church, and to the establishment of republics and the rule of law.

This is where reason leads, to greater equality, to opportunities for
industrious people and their families.

Ayn Rand was tempted to mis-use the achievements of the Enlightenment and
its dozens of thinkers. She wrote as if there were no philosophers
before her who recommended reason and opposed authoritarianism. She took credit
for what Voltaire, frequently writing from the Bastille, had done. (Every one
of his nearly 100 volumes was suppressed by royalty, he was often imprisoned,
always writing gay little notes to the king thanking him for the free bread and
water, such hospitality!)

Why did she act as if Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot, Montesqieu, St Simon,
dozens of others, never wrote their pamphleteering attacks on authoritarianism?
And she was aware of the French language and literature, it was one of her
languages from childhood on. Why?

Because these thinkers wanted to promote increased equality for all people.
They weren't rightist rearguarders fighting against change, but she was!
She was essentially a proto-fascist, a highly intolerant reactionary hate-monger,
a shoot-from-the-hip-ster, someone who'd be glad to see the public's concerns
go to hell while industrialists reaped trillions via the laissez-faire tradition.
The BP disaster, the coasts of the Gulf states despoiled to the tune of tens
of billions in damages, that is what laissez-faire is.

The ultimate "junk shot" to shut-up the spewing BP well would be a boatlload of the
Atlas Shrugged volumes, 1300-plus pages each, that the Ayn Rand
Institute sends out free to the schools. I'm sure there are enough copies
of the laissez-faire new testament in a warehouse somewhere to choke that well forever.
It would be that rare instance of Atlas exerting a benevolent influence!

A History of Viagra
by Michael Dennis Mooney


Today, on the broadcast, we're with Bobby Levin. We call him the "nutty professor," because his specialty is human gonads, the functioning thereof, also the malfunctioning.

Good evening! Great day to be alive! Specifically, I'm a reseracher in Geriatric Hypogonadism, which is sexual dysfunction, basically a lack of normal erections, in older males, and the relief of the problem with medicine.

Bobby, honestly, you seem younger than Springtime, yet we understand you're retiring next year from the College of Pharmacy. How is this possible?

You're as young as you feel, Charlie, and I'm in Viagra research!--

Do you treat yourself with that stuff?

--Yes! And I'm feeling like a very frisky 30-something, one that goes for hikes up hills, one that stays up late, ahem, stays up, and fools around. Life is good!

Retirement? For a young fellow like you?

I'm 66, a few months away from 67, and eligible for full benefits, so I'm leaving the Pharm! I'm done with the College of Pharmacy and teaching at the end of the school year. But I'll still have my research grant at the hospital.

We'd like to hear about Viagra. What has been learned about it so far?

When we first discovered this formulation, we were researching its potential as a medicine for lowering blood pressure. It didn't do so great in that area, except in mild hypertension cases.

It was a bust?

Yeah, we were prepared to write it off as unworthy of development. We were wrapping things up, finishing our notes, we were asking all the research subjects to bring back their unused supplies of Sidenafil. That's what it was called then.

I see where you're going with this. They wouldn't return the samples?

We found they'd grown quite attached to their little blue pills. Wouldn't give them up willingly.

And the reason? As if I didn't know!

The men, we noted, were, "having sex a lot more," , and it was, they reported, "THE BEST THEY EVER HAD !!!! " We realized we might be onto something. Lightning in a bottle.

These were not necessarily old men, am I right?

Correct. They were middle-aged, thirty-somethings, also 40's and older.

Most of us have thought this treatment was more for the elderly married man.

You see, blood pressure problems and erectile dysfunction both tend to hit the human male, and require treatment, at about the same time in life, in the post-35 age range, in middle age. So we were treating the right age group, but, in a sense, the wrong set of symptoms, with this medication. So we simply changed course. We had a new med to treat a problem no one had ever treated medically, not like this! So Viagra was born.

So, Bobby, you can treat younger people with the Vitamin V!

Yup! Charlie, it won't do anything for a 20 year-old, obviously. He'd just be wasting his money. But anyone in their later 30's, or 40's, 50's, etc., anyone who's been woefully noticing some inability to become erect while in a good stimulating lovemaking situation, will find this med makes quite a difference. You know, it will work better for a 40 year-old with a relatively small degree of impotence, than for, say, a 90 year-old, as there is, in the younger fella, way more potential to work with. Yes, it's for younger people, and it makes them feel even younger.

How does it do this?

Simple. It causes an increase in circulation to the erectile tissues! All it takes is just a small amount of increased blood flow, and VOILA! This drug is a vasodilator, it creates greater amplitude of flow.

Bobby, indulge me, here's a favorite joke of mine: Doctor says to the pharmaceuticals sales rep, "I have a complaint about those Viagra pens. They only work about half the time!" Ba-Da-Bim! But you're saying, this medication, though, always works, and quite reliably.

I take it (believe me, I knew I needed the help) and it has never not worked.

Well, now we know why you have such toothsome grin. And how long have you been taking it?

All through the late 90's and the 2000's, up til now, 2010. Two to three times a week. It's good for about 48 hours or more. You figure, you take one mid-evening on a Friday, the dose is less than 24 hours old on Saturday. On Sunday, you're still good.

They call it the weekend pill?

That's right. 'Fact, I'm going to take one right now, as it's Friday, and it's cocktail hour.

Bobby, what are you doing? We're on the air!

So report me, uh, to the F.C.C. or something. Here, I'm taking one right now. Plus, I've brought along this big cocktail shaker with O.J. and ice, I'll pour in a few shots of vodka, there!, and I'll have my ritual Friday evening DOUBLE SKA-REW DRIVER!! That'll get the "Vitamin V" going. Later, I'll go home and screw around some. First, though, I'll prepare a little barbecue for my wife, the lovely and sensuous Sheila Levin. She likes a grilled tuna steak with teriyaki sauce, I like a nutty and garlicky pesto on mine. And then I'll let her take advantage of me. We NEVER have anyone over on a Friday. 'Less I've taken the day off and we've been fooling around already.

Bob, sheesh!, you can't do stuff like this on the air, drink and combine it with a drug.

Just did. Can't undo it exactly, either. Hey, count this as one of your Public Service Announcements. You could make a video cassette, and show it once a day.

Bobby, you're the devil. Put that drink down, and get that canary-eatin grin off your face.

You should get yourself an O.J. sponsor, I'm drinking the true juice of youth. It's good for ya.

Bob! Get rid of that plastic cup!

Okay, I'll pour it back in the shaker. But I'll be sipping it through a straw all the way home. In the streets. Since I'm an outcast here.

You walked here?

I walk everywhere, to the store, to work. To a restautant in the evening, with my Sheila. To the movies. Heck, we like to walk half way across town for any reason at all, just to walk. It's all the same idea. Get the blood circulating. Only place I drive to is Connecticut. Why do you think Walt Whitman, for example, was such a notoriously horny guy, always writing about free love, about freely loving women, one woman and then another?-- and men! He walked everywhere, he walked all the way into Manhattan from Brooklyn. Like it was nothing. He was a vigorous old sage, and a horndog. Get yourself a good pair of hiking boots, young man.

Bobby, I'm sixty! I get my insurance from AARP!

You're a young man to me, Charlie. "Sixteen and Sixty are the same." That's from Karl Shapiro, the poet, he's saying both ages are ones of a great, exuberant idealism, and a disposition to rebellion and independence.

Okay, tell us some more about the early days of investigations into Viagra.

I remember our first international conference! At the time, Viagra was only legal here in the U.S. The F.D.A. had just approved it. We had all these foreign doctors attending, practically every hotel in the city was booked-up. These foreign docs were getting the American docs to write them Viagra scripts.

I can see where this goes.

These international doctors wiped out the city's Viagra supply. Every pharmacy, way out into the 'burbs, as far as Pennsylvania and Delaware, had run out of it by the second day of the convention. Friday was still three days away, and there was no Viagra to be had. Pfizer became aware of this, but there was little they could do to make more, not on the spot like that, not enough. It was the one Viagra-less weekend in the city, and Viagra became a smash hit around the world. Global buzz! Quite a thing! A true story.

Tell me about Pfizer. They making money? I bet they are.

They've sold more Viagra tablets than all their other medicines combined, ever! They're doing okay. They did a billion in sales the first year. They fill a new script every few minutes.

Do people abuse this stuff?

Sure. A very funny-- also a not funny-- story! A true story! The first Viagra death...

Keep it clean.

...This fella, you'd have to say he was morbidly obese, he'd contracted the services of a little lady of the evening.

And who knows what else he may've been contracting?!

So, as he is very heavy, several hundred pounds, he is used to taking extra-large doses of some medicines, like Ibuprofen, say, because he has to compensate for all that body tissue to get the effects of the med. Well, he took, I think, too many Viagra tabs. He was having sex with her-- and he died right on top of her. Hey, at least it enabled him to have a fling at making whoopie. 'Course, she had her arms around a great big problem.

My god!

Now, if she were one of those girls who ALWAYS has a cell phone in her hand, she might've gotten rescued a lot quicker. No one discovered her 'til the next day. The bed wasn't very firm, and she was just pressed right down into this squishy soft old mattress like a bug smushed into a wadded-up newspaper. She couldn't budge him. When the maid came in to clean the hotel room the next day, it was eventually discovered there was a live lil call girl, uh, sex worker, under the huge corpse.


Phew! We're going to take a pledge break for a few minutes. We'll be back in five with our guest, Bobby Levin. Are we off the air? Bobby, pass me that shaker. Bring us some mugs, please.


##

We're back with Bobby Levin!

Charlie, this is some great coffee your producer makes. 'Course, I like to sip mine with a swizzle straw. A lil plastic umbrella would be festive in my cup.

Ahem, we were talking about abuse. Will there ever end-up being, say, a 12-step program for Viagra abuse?

It isn't an addictive substance, so no. But anything can be abused, so there are cases in which this medicine has fed into an already screwed-up life, one with lots of unhealthy behaviors and anxiety-driven compulsions. Also, there are new studies showing that Viagra has really changed the pattern of adult development in old age, which we define as life after 60.

That's a powerful thing, it can alter how people typically grow older?

A man used to retire to the life of a typical old-school grandfather, he'd stay close to where his kids live, visit with the grandchildren a lot, do house-repair projects, work on the golf swing, volunteer at the fire department, do the crossword puzzle, ho hum, take naps, listen to Benny Goodman records in the garage, etc. But now there's a new older man that is taking his Viagra Rx on the road.

What do you mean?

He might acquire a girlfriend of about age 40, or even younger, someone who's really peaking, a ripe middle-aged woman, and then move away from the family to be closer to the hottie, the babe!

Now, in old-school days, the kids and grandkids would expect to be his heirs.

Yes, but not now, the sole heir can, perhaps, be his new babe toy. She has a powerful say over what happens. I had a friend, Mackey, his name was, he went way out into the Midwest-- well, to Buffalo, far enough-- he left his family here, and transferred to a job out there, at an age when he should've been, by old-school lights, settling into a retiring mode, one of just being in the background of his son's life.

He shuffled off to Buffalo. He met someone.

Yes, he did! On the internet, as they exchanged blog posts. Pretty soon they're on the phone every day. In no time, he's traveling to meet her on his August vacation. In a few hours, they're shacked-up, in some god-forsaken, rundown, ghetto-y Buffalo neighborhood. He's 59, she's 40. They are an instant item. They spend weeks together, never apart, a sort of wild joy ride of a first date, she's a divorced woman, a grad student-- a divinity student!-- with the summer off. A couple weeks out there together, then they spend a couple more weeks back here. They set the copulation record for a first date, as they remain together every day for a month or more! Alert the Guinness World Book! He then resumes working evenings in the hospital back here after vacation, he's in nursing, and they fool around all day,'til he goes to work at 3 p.m. She then stays home and plays with the computer, watches her soap, reads her grad school books, talks on the phone, orders-in Chinese. He comes home from work at midnight, and he doesn't sit down to a lonely beer and late night TV, 'cause she's calling out to him, "Get that ass in this bedroom!," real playful, and they do some more minky pinky. And again in the morning, right after coffee, some more. And this girl babe of his-- Mairlie, he called her, she is a Mary Lynn-- Mairlie herself is pure human Viagra, as she likes having sex, and she likes having it a lot, I mean, frequently, she's always wanting to mount his lap while he's just sitting there playing with his, um, laptop. You'd have to know Mackey to know how this transformed his life, he's one of those big hefty working class Irish, 250 lbs, six foot two, a body made of beer, beef, and buttermilk, but now, with Mary Lynn, he's exercising every day, walking to work two miles like it's nothing. He's a changed man with a smile on his face.

Your friend is a new kind of senior citizen!

Yes, he is!

So he leaves his family and the hometown area.

Yes, he transfers to a hospital out in shabby hairy old icicle-hanging Buffalo. Same job, same pay, a better-run facility. He rents a house there, a good one, and at a great price. The first thing they do is fool around, right there on the carpeting of the new place, with the still-loaded UHaul in the driveway. They christen the new house with their sweat, their bodily fluids, and their ecstatic cries echoing mightily off the bare walls. Things are going gangbusters. Well, for the moment.

This is the new horizon available to grampy!

Believe me, there can be some dazzling sunrises on this horizon! So, then, many months later, (Mackey told me this story in tears) they had some squabbles about their new domestic arrangements, then a big angry blow-up. She left him! She would NOT speak to him. Now, what is he left with? He's in this strange town on the foggy, polluted shores of Erie, he's hundreds of miles from his son, from family members, his sister, his mom, he even misses the ex-wife, who, at least, was a friendly woman who would talk to him. And winter is a-comin' in, it's late November. Then comes the first December arctic blasts, single-digit temps, and lake-effects snows. He's depressed, anxious. Can't sleep. Starts drinking too much. It's the holidays, it's his 60th birthday in December, and he's living in desolation. He gets in some minor scrapes. He hassles someone he thinks is dating the babe. He is extremely remorseful and self-blaming, the way depressed people are. He has no life there in hoary depressing Buffalo, yet this is how far away he got from his life, via Viagra. Eventually, he finds his way back here and gets rehired at the old job, but he comes back here in pretty rough shape. He goes into therapy, hoping to find answers. So these setbacks can happen, by way of overly compulsive, well, "womanizing," I'd guess you'd say. This particular fella was not a sex addict, you know, not a maniacal conqueror of one woman after another, but he certainly took a big head-first plunge with a woman he didn't know. He had a good time, but paid for it with a lot of heartache, and he hated himself aferwards for being a fool. This could've been much worse, if he had been dealing with multiple substance addictions, like, say, cocaine and tranqs. As it is, he spent a lot of his savings, which might've gone into better things. But you know, if she phoned him, he might do it all again. That's what he says. He still refers to her as "my baby." (And, in fact, she's exactly the right age to be his offspring!) If he could see her again, he'd, of course, approach the matter with some caution, he would not so swiftly merge his life with hers. This was a case of "Sixteen and Sixty." Our Mackey was a teenager again, at 60, pulled into a vortex of desire for Marvelous Mary Lynn.


This medicine helped wreck his life for a while.

Yeah, but at least he didn't use Viagra, as some older men will, to be with nineteen different girls in a summer season, only to end up with syphilis, perhaps. He had intended to marry the hottie. They both intended to be happy together, and happily erotic at that.

Bob, we're just about out of time.

I always end my talks with a little proselytizing moment. I take out my prescription bottle, there!, and open it up, there!, take one tablet out, here it is, and put it on the table. Then I turn to my interlocutor, and I say, "So, any questions?"

Look at that silly grin! Get out of here!

Any questions, Charlie?

Yeah! Can I have one?

Take it with your coffee, and have yourself a weekend, my boy. Just don't end-up in hairy-assed Buffalo.

A Guide To The Hot Spots And The Not So Hots  ~by Michael Dennis Mooney