Today they are making the president, and in five states: Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, Connecticut, Rhode Island.

All of these states, they are, in some way, disturbed.

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My daughter, she lived for a while in Pennsylvania. I learned then that this state, it is infested with doctors suffering from a severe religious disability, one that causes them to balk at prescribing birth control. I told my daughter to find a Jewish doctor. This she did. And that solved that problem.

But it did not solve the problem of the many young men roaming about in the pickups, all streaming from the bed, the slavery-diaper. These retroverts, they would oft cruise southern Pennsylvania town and country, then dip below the Maryland line, there to gather at squalid Ku Klux Klan compounds.

Yes. These are the people, of The Hairball.

My daughter, she lived downwind from Harrisburg. And at night she could see Three Mile Meltdown, glowing there, in the dark.

When she returned to California, it was with a cat with two heads.

Delaware, it is basically a post-office box for corporados, one owned by the Du Pont family.

I was once going to write a travel guide to Delaware. But then the publisher, he confessed that he was of Du Pont lineage, and therefore the book, it would need to elide all mention of the many Du Pont misdeeds. Lest the family, they would lure this man, to that place where Joe Pesci, he took a bullet to the brain, in GoodFellas. And there beat him with big sticks.

I eschewed the assignment.

Before the job aborted, I wandered widely the state, and was everywhere appalled to discover that spicy food, it is apparently against the law there. Delaware food, it was nearly as bland as that available, in ghastly abundance, in the nation's buffet-belt, that horrendously large swath of states in the nation's midsection, where mammoth peoples, they gather to feed, in huge low warehouses, that are perpetual-motion machines of something like food, steamy, aorta-blowing grease palaces, where the pork chops, and the macaroni salad, they never end.

Finally, there in Delaware, I found a roadhouse barbecue joint. But it was like no barbecue joint I had ever before endured. The guilt-ridden proprietor, a black man, he admitted that he been forced to strip all the spices from his recipes. Because the white people of Delaware, when encountering his original barbecue sauces, they would pant, and sweat, and snort, and finally flop around in serious seizures. He was afraid, he said, of lawsuits.

Dolefully, he told me, that scrapple, which is sort of the American version of haggis, it is considered by the Delaware white people, to be the very apogee, of spice, and heat. And he said that he could not serve it. Because, if he did, he knew, that all of his ancestors, they would haunt him, every day, and into all of the night.

In desperation, I began cruising the supermarkets, looking to buy there some Hot Duck Sauce, which is known everywhere as an essential food group. I figured I would just drink it right out of the can, while driving around in this wasteland. But there was no Hot Duck Sauce, I discovered, in all the state.

I literally wept. And then I drove to Washington DC, to the Indonesian place, and there ate rendang. Which is one pound of shredded beef, and one pound of chili peppers, with a little garlic and shallots and ginger and turmeric and lemongrass tossed in, all simmered in coconut milk, for 13 or 14 days.

When I returned to Delaware, to explore the southern portion of the state, things got spooky. The trees, they became thicker, began to close in upon the road, and then—yes—came the swamps. Until finally arrived the albinos, bursting out of the woods, beating on the car with banjos, demanding I squeal like a pig. I knew then that I had drifted into Maryland.

Quickly, I wheeled the car around, plowed through a brace of banjo-bearers, and then drove at top speed, until I had exited the swamp zone. I next checked into a motel, and there ate Medicine.

Russ Smith, the guy who founded the Baltimore City Paper, he once told me, years ago, before he went over to the dark side, that politicians in Maryland, whether Democratic or Republican or Wile E. Coyote, they are all so crooked, that they need to screw their pants on, come every morning.

And, it is true, that Maryland, it does seem to send to the pokey, nearly as many elected officials as does Louisiana, a state where it is actually a requirement, that one engage in criminal conduct, before seeking public office.

Spiro Agnew, for instance, he was governor of Maryland. Before Richard Nixon selected Agnew as his national-ticket partner in crime. Agnew, he is the only person known to have regularly received bribes of American currency, stuffed into crumpled brown paper bags, while sitting behind the vice-president's desk.

Before he was retired to the golf courses, Agnew, he would sneeringly deride the Americans with epithets like "nattering nabobs of negativism." In speeches written for him by Pat Buchanan, an ageless Nazi who today pens apologia for Adolf Hitler, and fervently supports for president The Hairball, his fellow Klansman.

Connecticut has a silent "c," and therefore it does not belong in the United States. It should be in France. In France, the people strive to pronounce as few of the letters in the words as possible. Or else the words are pronounced mutant.

For instance, the "Hebdo," in Charlie Hebdo, it is pronounced "eh' do," except you race across the "d" as quickly as possible, so that hopefully it won't sound at all. Another example: the French author Michel Houellebecq, his last name is pronounced "wehl bek," except you should race over the final "k" at the speed of light.

Connecticut needs to detach itself from the North American land mass and float across the Atlantic and there fasten on to France. The people of Connecticut, they will certainly be happier. Because they have national health care in France. Also, the food, wine, film, literature, philosophy, and sex, they are all better there. And, if you happen to lose your job, 100,000 people, they will pour into the streets, to demand you get it back.

Rhode Island. What can I say? It's a chicken.

Also, its nickname is "Little Rhody," which calls up hideous visions of hemorrhoids.

Rhode Island, Connecticut, Maryland, Delaware: when you stand on the beaches in those states, and look out, you will see the sun, rising out of the ocean.

That is so totally wrong. Because, everyone knows, the sun, it is supposed to set, in the ocean.

It is all very disorienting.

And, today, disoriented people from these states—and from Pennsylvania, which is so disoriented it doesn't even get to have an ocean—they will be voting to make the president. And, many of them, they will vote for people, who are even more disoriented, than they are.

It can also be disorienting, to reflect, when one is attempting to determine one's location using a sextant, that the sextant assumes the earth is flat.

The earth is not flat. Probably. And yet the sextant, it works. Anyway.

This is an example of how you can do something, even when, at root, you don't know what you're doing.

Irving Berlin, he is another example. He could neither read nor write music, and was such a buffoon on the piano, he could really only play in the key of F sharp—which is the one where you get to lean heavily on the black keys, which are those that stick up, and so are most forgiving, to fumbling fingers.

But, every day, melodies, they were arriving in his head. So he found ways to get them out. He would whistle these melodies, to people who could write music, and they would scribble them down. He later bought a transposing piano, where he could finger his melodies, in his fumble-fingered F sharp, and then turn a wheel, on the piano, that would shift the melodies, into other keys.

In such ways, Irving Berlin, he wrote almost as many songs as god.

However, even when he got done, doing what he was doing, not knowing how to do it, he still, often, didn't know, what it was, he'd done.

For instance, when Berlin wrote the songs for the film Holiday Inn, he thought "Be Careful, It's My Heart," that would be the big hit. When, instead, the people, they wanted, from the same film, "White Christmas." The single that has since sold the most copies of any song in the history of the humans.

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The humans, they are on this planet, only because somebody went ahead and did something, not knowing what they were doing.

We know this from the true-life documentary series Battlestar Galactica. There, Kara Thrace, an arrogant skilled fuck-up; when all, for all and everybody, is pretty much terminally lost; she is told, to just go ahead, and jump; the ship through hyperspace; though she has no coordinates, none at all; just jump blind, she is told; and she then reaches, in her mind, for a scrap of music; and she jumps the ship, to those notes, of music; and those notes, as it develops, they are what is known, as here.

This is doubly impressive. Because Thrace was dead at the time.

All of the humans, they are descended from a child, aboard that ship, who was, and is, Mitochondrial Eve, and who only reached here, because she was scooped up, and saved, by a couple of other wandering souls, who had followed, scraps of vision, they had received, through the years and the years and the years and the years, of the Opera House.

So. You know. Even if you think you don't know. What you're doing. Maybe. Just go ahead. And do it. Anyway.

My advice. Anywho.

[video:https://youtu.be/wFuc-J-WPtg]