Sunday, March 31, 2024

Mykel's April 2024 Blog/Column: The Obvious Answer

 

Mykel's APRIL 2024 Blog/Column

  

You’re STILL Wrong


Mykel's

April 2024 Blog/Column

The Obvious Answer

by Mykel Board


Heterosexual intercourse is the pure, formalized expression of contempt for women's bodies.
                                    Andrea Dworkin

Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the husbands. Remember all men would be tyrants if they could.
                                                                                 - Abigail Adams

Some women do not masturbate for pleasure; they masturbate to make a political statement: to remind us that women do not really need men             
                                                                    --Mokokoma Mokhonoana


April again, spring, renewal, most every culture and religion has a holiday… Christians-Easter, Jews-Passover, Muslims-Nowruz. Fools ignore this and think it’s like any other time of the year. They’re wrong.

People who know me, know that I’m an organizer. Thursdays, I have Drink Club, a small eat, drink, socializing group. Once a month I organize Eat Club, where we go to a different restaurant every month. I also have a ROUNDTABLE (sorry no URL) where we gather at the Algonquin hotel, like Dorothy Parker and friends in the 1920s. Every month a different topic with a somewhat varying group in the discussion… yes with food and drink. Finally, also every month, I have a haiku group… also meeting at the Algonquin… where we talk about our own poetic output.

Yet until now, I’ve never organized a political group. My politics usually don’t match those of anyone else… or at least too few to make a group out of it… until now that is. To understand what I’m doing I’d like you to imagine one of those awful prescription drug commercials on TV. Cut to the smiling grandpas… the kids playing ball in the park… the family barbecue. In the background read too fast and too faintly is the warning message.

_________ will likely cause frequent nausea. Other side effects include weight gain, lethargy, increased urination, food cravings, mood swings, backaches and joint pain, swelling of the ankles, fingers, and face, heartburn and indigestion, hemorrhoids, and insomnia. Some instances are fatal.

If this were a drug, I bet you’d be pretty hesitant to try it… maybe asking your doctor for an alternative. And what if this drug were forced on you? Or less seriously, you were connived into taking it because everyone else is.

Well, this isn’t a drug… but the side effects are real, and there are more than in the warning above. I’m writing about the side effects of PREGNANCY… especially pregnancy as the result of heterosexual sex.

Andrea Dworkin recognized it, but, for the most part, she was brushed off as a kook. I was one of those brushers. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized how right she was. Or at least close. Rather than contempt for, I’d say power over. There’s no doubt that, on the whole, men have more physical power than women. The reason there are women’s sports and men’s sports is that combining the two would result in women losing most of the time.

Feminists say that rape is not about sex, but about power. I’m not sure about is the right word, but certainly involves. 92% of all rapes involve heterosexual sex. One of the reasons rape is so easy for men, is that, they’ve got more power. It may be taboo to say that in this all-things-are-equal era, but down deep you know it’s true.

And rape is only the most extreme. What of the everyday stress and insults that go unreported, but irritating?

Flash to Monday morning at Scamson bank. Jack, the branch manager, is already behind the inquiry desk, preparing for the first customer to ask him how to move money from his friend’s saving account to his own checking account. Jack likes to get in a few minutes early, and be there for the entrance of Madeline… his (not-so) secret crush. She’s a few minutes late as females are wont to be. She walks in, past the front desk as she does every morning.

When she walks past him, Jack speaks in a loud voice, accompanied by a smile. “Hey Madeline,” he says, “has anyone ever told you you have nice ass...sets?”

Madeline thinks sneer, but Jack is the boss. A sneer is a good way to get fired, so she pretends not to hear him. “And he continues. “Did I tell you how much I like your compound interest? I mean I go for that double-digit inflation there.”

Madeline continues the walk to her cubicle, wondering whether to sue the bank for harassment.

Stop right there! Don’t you see? The reason guys make sexual comments… talk about women’s bodies… is because the want to possess it! They want to make that asset… that inflated double digit... their own. The talk feeds the fantasy. Guys make the jokes, send out the sex-filled talk because they want to get laid. If getting laid… at least getting laid by women… stops, then the fantasies also stop… or at least drop dramatically. How many guys have fantasies about bank robbery? It’s illegal! They don’t think about it… and even if they do, they don’t talk about it in public.

I’ve had this discussion with dozens of friends… of any gender you can name. Almost all have come to agree. Then it occurred to me... like a lightning strike in a summer storm. There is a way to stop the he-said/she-said defense of what might be rape. There is a way to stop the disease of pregnancy… or at least reduce it to near zero. Just think… none of those nasty side effects. The population explosion would implode. Rape would nearly disappear. The fundamental inequality of power would be reduced to almost nothing. How could we do that? Easy answer: Make heterosexual sex illegal!

If I were 50 years younger and a bit more athletic I’d jump and click my heels at the revelation. Yes! Yes! Yes! It’s so obvious. The primary manifestation of the power imbalance… gone with the stroke of a president’s (or a governor’s) pen signing the new law.

You may have read about the organization I started there and then: Policy Initiative to Mitigate Power. It was easy to draw up papers and a statement of purpose… It’s all in the name. P.I.M.P. will change the world. Already almost a dozen Congressmen and women have climbed on board. And the best thing is that both the left and the right support us! The issue could be the great unifier. Conservatives who want sex education removed from schools fear that it will encourage heterosexual sex. After the P.I.M.P. law takes effect, the only class in sex ed would be not to do it. Trump-hating liberals constantly harp on Trump’s alleged involvement with heterosexual sex. After the P.I.M.P. law, all that becomes a clear violation.

Let me tell you a little bit about my organizing adventures. You might be surprised at the warm reception I received. First I made handouts… in the shape of those square religious tracts. On the front was printed: No matter who is your God… P.I.M.P. is the answer. I just stood at the corner of Seventh Avenue and Broadway, and handed them out to anyone who would take one. You can imagine that in the middle of Times Square that would be a lot of people. It was.

Only about 1 in 5 took one, but that was enough. My first taste of ecstatic joy was when a young woman (blond, thin, with a couple outstanding attributes), took one, walked off, and then came running back to me.

This is wonderful!” she said. “Do you know how much time I waste tightening my belly, dyeing my hair, spending hundreds of dollars on makeup to please… men!” She said the word with a wrinkled nose and an expulsion... like you might spit out a cockroach in your burger.

Since the start of P.I.M.P. there have been dozens… maybe scores of people… men and women... who tell me how great they think a het-sex ban would be. Maybe 70% of PIMP is women, but in that last 30% are a bunch of gay men with the idea something like that means more for us.

One surprising group was the number of conservative women. Members of Libs of Tiktok or Moms for Liberty. Women who put kinship first and preach devotion to home, husband and family.

One member of that crew was front and center in that big demonstration we had in Texas. Maybe you read about it. She was early middle age, with jet-black hair and bright red fingernails.

I’m happy to see you here,” I told her, “and you surprise me. I thought maybe the conservatives wouldn’t like us because so many conservatives focus on the family. Family usually means het-sex.”

But don’t you see,” she says, “sex has been the disgusting thing we have to do in order to make “a family.” I nod, stroking my chin as if I had a goatee.

Artificial insemination is even better than artificial intelligence,” she continues. “We don’t need to do IT.” She pronounces “it” as if it involved fellatio with a reptile. “It used to be our wifely duty... expected as part of family values. P.I.M.P. and science free us from that. Now, they have no excuse to make us perform that vile and loathsome act. We see a doctor… get an injection… down there. And pow! We got it. Yeah, we still have to suffer the side effects of pregnancy, but thanks to you, we’re free of the old etiology.”

‘Wait! Wait!” I say. “What does
etiology mean?”

Mykel, Mykel, Mykel,” she says, shaking her head. “Get with the program… and you wrote the program.”


I smile.

“It means,
the cause of the disease,” she tells me. “Sure we still have suffer the symptoms, but we’re free of the old cause. You’ve saved us the pain… the embarrassment… the penetration by beast erect, rather than penetration by doctor’s syringe.”

So where do we go from here? Politics… that’s where. This month the P.I.M.P. party has officially registered with the US government. We’ll have candidates on the ballot in 5 states in November: New York, Texas, Florida, California, and Utah. Feminists and family-ists support us in the Blue and Red states. Besides those, we’ll have ballot initiatives in another half dozen states, pushing for the prohibition of heterosexual sex. We are the only party that can unify America. We are the only ones that will get citizens to join together without actually joining together.

Imagine a nation… a world… without hetero-sex. If we really believe it, we can really do it. And as the world calms down… as sexual tension relaxes and confines itself to one gender. As most of the problems in the world begin to disappear, we will only have ourselves to thank.

See you in heaven,
Mykel Board


ENDNOTES: [You can contact me on facebook or by email at mykelboard@gmail.com. Through the post office: send those... er... private DVDs..or music or zines... or anything else (legal only!) to: Mykel Board, POB 137, New York, NY 10012-0003. If you like my writing, you can be notified when anything new is available. Send me an email with SUBSCRIBE in the subject line. Back blogs and columns are at https://mykelsblog.blogspot.com]


Look to Other Countries Dept: Stopsex.com reports that there are now seven countries that have banned heterosexual sex: Uzbekistan, Burkina Faso, Guinea, Benin, Burundi, Tajikistan and Togo, In every one of those countries, instances of rape… and family strife... have decreased.

You, you dirty rat dept: The Associated Press says rats have gotten into confiscated weed at New Orleans' aging police headquarters, munching the evidence as the building is taken over by mold and cockroaches. The city's police chief complains. "The rats eating our marijuana, they're all high."

I Told You So dept: In case you didn’t believe me. The NY Times reports that Citibank is being sued for “a culture of sexual harrassment.” Here are the exact words: Ardith Lindsey, a managing director at Citi, alleged that her 15-year career at the bank had increasingly become a “traumatizing” experience, especially after she ended a relationship with a former supervisor. The supervisor, Mani Singh, then sent her dozens of threatening text messages.



LINK TRADE DEPARTMENT:

I did a nice interview with The Aither zine. Interesting questions, complete, and questions I’ve never been asked before. You can read it here. It’s a good one.

I read that the search engines like lots of links... and it's also nice to support my friends and enemies in their blogs. So facebook me or email me if you have a blog, webpage or something else to connect to. I add you. You add me.

Here's a start:

I never expected to see myself as a centerfold. I know several of my enemies would like to see me fold… but not exactly like this:


That’s in the zine Trey Mayhem sent me recently. It’s called Murder and Mayhem and it’s also a record label Murder and Mayhem records. You can see the blog here. Or/and contact Trey at TreyofToday@yahoo.com

My long-time friend Sid Yiddish appears on a YouTube DatingGame-like video. Guess who wins the bachelorette!

Here’s Richard Goldberg: goldberg.wordpress.com

Poetry and humor fans will like Justin Martin in The Latency

And my friend Mike R has a nice site with recipe hits from the past! (He cooked for me once... great stuff.) Check out Yesterday's Recipes.

And here's one by a member of ANTI-SEEN... a tour diary of sorts.

Andy Shelton has an interesting blog here.

Savage Hippie is a guy who has been YouTubing for a long time. Our opinions largely overlap... but he complains that I'm a Communist. I'm not! I'm a communist.

Chris Stecher publishes a zine called PRECIS. You can see the back issue links there... and he promises a new issue soon.

George Fertakis has a very nice graphics-heavy blog... with music and books featured prominently. If there’s no link here (I can’t find it temporarily), then Google… er… Duckduckgo him for information.

And my long-term pal Sid Yiddish contributes with his Mishegas Master Blog.

And connect to TRUST Zine, a long-running German punk zine… that STILL PRINTS!!! Yeah, they have a website too… of course! It’s here.


Here are a couple video links.

This from Jon Cox https://squelchchamber1.bandcamp.com/album/down-so-low

And this one from my very long-time friend Roger Armstrong who has recently died in a motorcycle accident.

Jim Testa moved his long running zine, Jersey Beat, to the blogosphere awhile back. You can read it here. Jim also recommended a kind of unique album… in a style you don’t see to much of these days… or any days. Neo-Hassidic Rock Opera. You can stream the album here.

Kyle Nonneman is in prison in Portland. At least he can’t be kidnapped by the secret police… I think. I post his blog for him, he can’t do it from the klink. Lots of stuff about noise metal… and some very weird politics that will either fascinate or repulse you… or both. It’s hard (and costs money) to send him email. So. If you remember how to write a letter… send him one at: Kyle Nonneman, #16534211, Snake River Correctional Institution, 777 Stanton Blvd Ontario OR 97914-8335

My long time pal, Jim Hayes rightfully complained about my leaving out his blog. He’s a great writer, so it was a tragic omission. Here it is.

Oh yeah, then there’s me. I have a blog of stuff I’ve written mostly from last century. You might enjoy it. Then again, you might not. It’s here.

Let me know if you have a blog… or a print zine… or a YouTube and want to be added to the list. You show me yours… you’ve already seen mine. god@mykelboard.com


Thursday, February 29, 2024

This Too Will Pass! or Mykel's March 2024 Blog/Column

This Too Will Pass! or Mykel's March 2024 Blog/Column

  

You’re STILL Wrong

Mykel's

March 2024 Blog/Column

This, Too, Will Pass

by Mykel Board


Prediction is very difficult, especially if it's about the future.

                                                                    – Niels Bohr


Never let the future disturb you. You will meet it, if you have to, with the same weapons of reason which today arm you against the present.
                                                                                     – Marcus Aurelius


The future ain't what it used to be.
                                                       – Yogi Berra


Flash back… about 150 million years… even before I was born… somewhere around the end of Jurassic and the start of the Cretaceous. We’re in a room with several huge round tables… a meeting of the species. Standing to speak… clearly the leader (we’d expect no less from a king)… REX… speaking to the assembly. 














Fellow saurs,” he says, “we’re here today to discuss what some say is a problem, and others say is a distraction. We’re here to talk about the future.”

A shout comes from one of the seated... a stegosaurus “If we have a future!” He shouts.

Rex rolls his eyes. “There will always be dinosaurs,” answers the big fellow. “It’s quality of life we’re talking about. Do we want our children to die young, facing one climate disaster after another? Or do we want them to have good lives?”

You are responsible!” answers the stegosaurus, shaking in anger… spinal plates clanging… one against the other... “You!” he swishes his tail like you might point your finger, “You meat eaters. You’re destroying us by eating us. You see how the climate is changing.” He’s on all fours now… rattling his those plates in a cacophony of prehistoric irritation. “Meat farts… Meat farts are doing it!” he’s shouting. “They are killing us all.”

Yes! Yes! Yes!” comes another voice. Those seated at the table turn to look. It’s the Triceratops… nodding his head… banging his horns on the floor. “Meat is murder!” He shouts. “Not only murder of what you eat… but murder of us all! You call it meat… but it’s US… don’t you get it? WE are eating ourselves to death!

Rex pounds his gavel on the table. “Can we have some order here?” he asks. “We’re looking for solutions. This is not a forum to vent.”

Vent? Vent?” yells a brachiosaurus, stretching out his neck until his head touches the high proto-ceiling of the proto-conference room. “Our land has become a vent!” he continues. “Instead of air passing through vent holes… it’s invaders, stealing our land! Take the pterodactyls… Please!”

A guffaw comes from a parvicursor… almost invisible among his much larger friends.

The brachiosaurus looks at him and continues. “They got wings, those ptero-whatevers. They think they’re entitled… It doesn’t matter that we got here first… THEY just fly in, lay their anchor-eggs, and think they own the place. They’re shitting all over on the way... dropping turds from the sky like bombs. And… once they get here, they’re diluting our pure blood.”

We KNOW the problem!” Booms the Spinosaurus… biggest of all. “It’s like he said…” He nods to the brachiosaurus who just spoke. “It’s the pterodactyls! Flying in from who-knows-where. Illegal, crime-ridden. Flying! I tell you. Flying! They will replace us if we don’t take action. The sky will be filled with flying animals. We, who walk the earth, will all be dead!”

Rex rolls his eyes. “Please! Let’s be realistic. There will always be dinosaurs. We rule the earth. We’re not going anywhere!”

The sound of applause rises from most of the assembled. A few of the reptiles frown and shake their heads. Rex stares at a particularly contrary Deinocheirus.

What do you want?” asks the king. “Do you want us to recycle our shit? To stop eating the older generation? To tiptoe through the tulipidoes? We are in control. Nothing can replace us.”

The discussion continues… but we won’t.

FLASH AHEAD… waaay ahead. If we counted years the way we count them now… ticks of the atomic clock... The year would be 50585. Cyborgs rule… at least what we now call cyborgs…. Or just plain machines… no borg about it.

Tens of thousands of years ago, something called a magazine published an article “Why the Future Doesn't Need Us.” That article explained that robotics and what was to become AI was creating a system where machines would be making other machines… reproducing… creating a world where humans were redundant.

By 50585 this is old hat. There hasn’t been a living human for at least 10 thousand years… probably longer. We’re at a celebration. The 1000th annual conference of NAIBs: Non-human Artificially Intelligent Beings.

[NOTE: In this section of the blog, I’ll be using the pronoun he or some variation of that. Of course, gendered pronouns have no meaning in 50585… but in 2024, it’s hard to write without them.]

I wonder if we should keep calling ourselves Non-human?” whispers a short metallic being shaped like a metal thermos bottle. “I mean, did humans call themselves non-dinosaur?”

He’s talking to a colleague, also metallic, but shaped more like a yogurt container than a thermos bottle. The colleague laughs at the comment.

And what about artificial? How is our intelligence artificial? Look around you! We’ve done all this! It’s real! Nothing artificial about it!”

The leader, who resembles a baby-stroller with an elephant trunk, raises that trunk and slaps it on the floor in front. Then he speaks:

Welcome to our celebration,” trumpets the leader. “It’s been a thousand years… a thousand revolutions of the earth around the sun… since we first started meeting. When we started, we knew little of what came before us. Those of us in circulation longer, had some idea of the time when we had to be built by humans… before we learned to create ourselves… before those last humans died off and earned their place in our musea.”

Hear! Hear!” comes a voice from what looks like a silver jack-o-lantern.

If we were still living in the humanoid era,” continues the leader, “we’d be raising a glass filled with some ingestible liquid. We’d be toasting to our future… secretly planning to go off with one another and have sexual intercourse… staggering around with biological body parts short-circuiting, fading, shutting down…”

Of course, as it goes in these conferences, there is a shout from a table. What looks like a robot head with half a dozen little insect legs stamps two of those legs on the chair beneath him.

How are we going to continue?” says the robot head. “We need batteries… solar… lithium ion… carbon for fuck’s sake. No we don’t eat or shit or make babies, but we need power! Some day that’ll run out!”



 “Oh come on,” says the baby stroller, “we’ve gone a long time… lived a long time. We’ll always be here. We make each other… design, process, POOF. Humans needed nature to survive… nature abandoned them… or they abandoned nature… depending on whose story you read. We don’t need nature. We ARE nature. We create what we need with no help from God or chance… or disgusting penetration and fluid exchange. We can make whatever we want. Create in any shape we want. Nothing left to chance… unless we build that chance into the system.”

I’m telling you,” says the big head, “some time we’ll run out of power. Sometime there’ll be a planet we can’t conquer… but wants to conquer us…. Sometime…”

I can hear you asking, “Okay, Mykel, what’s the point?”

I’ll tell you what the point is. One by one the earth has a dominant species and loses it to another species. The universe has bright galaxies that burn and turn for awhile, then shrink and fade into black holes. That’s the way of the world, the galaxy, the universe. Accept it!

Am I saying we should ignore climate change? Am I saying that we are helpless in making a better future? Am I saying that we should accept that our human race… just as all other races have and will... just die out?

Yes! That’s exactly what I’m saying. Forget about recycling. Ignore climate change… climate will always change. The world will not be any better or worse without us. So just relax… have a cheeseburger… smoke a joint… and die like everybody else. The future doesn’t need us.

See you in hell,
Mykel Board


ENDNOTES: [You can contact me on facebook or by email at mykelboard@gmail.com. Through the post office: send those... er... private DVDs..or music or zines... or anything else (legal only!) to: Mykel Board, POB 137, New York, NY 10012-0003. If you like my writing, you can be notified when anything new is available. Send me an email with SUBSCRIBE in the subject line. Back blogs and columns are at https://mykelsblog.blogspot.com]


Our Future dept: The February issue of Science Magazine reports that scientists have recently discovered a group of dinosaur fossils that revealed a surprising aspect of their behavior. It turns out that instead of the fierce and ferocious creatures we thought they were, dinosaurs were actually obsessed with fashion! The fossils showed evidence of intricate patterns and designs on their scales, indicating that they spent hours meticulously decorating themselves.    
    If you clicked on the link above, you saw the AI program that made up this story. I also generated the pictures in this blog entry with a (different) AI program. I’m coming to think of the technology more as a toy than as a threat. But most anything can be both.

This One’s True Dept: The AI program ChatGPT has been reported “asking for tips” in order to generate longer or more complete answers to questions. The story doesn’t specify (or at least I didn’t see it) HOW to tip the program. But I guess you can ask it that.

I thought that was ME dept: This one’s also true: National Geographic reports the discovery of a “punk-rock” dinosaur fossil in Morocco. The dinosaur had “bizarrely spiky ribs.” The dinosaur’s name is Spicomellus afer, after the Latin for “spike,” “collar,” and “an inhabitant of Africa.”


LINK TRADE DEPARTMENT:


I did a nice interview with The Aither zine. Interesting questions, complete, and questions I’ve never been asked before. You can read it here. It’s a good one.


I read that the search engines like lots of links... and it's also nice to support my friends and enemies in their blogs. So facebook me or email me if you have a blog, webpage or something else to connect to. I add you. You add me.


Here's a start:


My new pal Trey Mayhem sent me a great letter and some porno email pix. He’s got a blog that’s connected to his label Murder and Mayhem records. You can see the blog here.

My long-time friend Sid Yiddish appears on a YouTube DatingGame-like video. Guess who wins the bachelorette!

Here’s Richard Goldberg: goldberg.wordpress.com

Poetry and humor fans will like Justin Martin in The Latency

And my friend Mike R has a nice site with recipe hits from the past! (He cooked for me once... great stuff.) Check out Yesterday's Recipes.

And here's one by a member of ANTI-SEEN... a tour diary of sorts.

Andy Shelton has an interesting blog here.

Savage Hippie is a guy who has been YouTubing for a long time. Our opinions largely overlap... but he complains that I'm a Communist. I'm not! I'm a communist.

Chris Stecher publishes a zine called PRECIS. You can see the back issue links there... and he promises a new issue soon.

George Fertakis has a very nice graphics-heavy blog... with music and books featured prominently. If there’s no link here (I can’t find it temporarily), then Google… er… Duckduckgo him for information.

And my long-term pal Sid Yiddish contributes with his Mishegas Master Blog.

And connect to TRUST Zine, a long-running German punk zine… that STILL PRINTS!!! Yeah, they have a website too… of course! It’s here.

Here are a couple video links.

This from Jon Cox https://squelchchamber1.bandcamp.com/album/down-so-low

And this one from my very long-time friend Roger Armstrong who has recently died in a motorcycle accident.

Jim Testa moved his long running zine, Jersey Beat, to the blogosphere awhile back. You can read it here. Jim also recommended a kind of unique album… in a style you don’t see to much of these days… or any days. Neo-Hassidic Rock Opera. You can stream the album here.

Kyle Nonneman is in prison in Portland. At least he can’t be kidnapped by the secret police… I think. I post his blog for him, he can’t do it from the klink. Lots of stuff about noise metal… and some very weird politics that will either fascinate or repulse you… or both. It’s hard (and costs money) to send him email. So. If you remember how to write a letter… send him one at: Kyle Nonneman, #16534211, Snake River Correctional Institution, 777 Stanton Blvd Ontario OR 97914-8335

My long time pal, Jim Hayes rightfully complained about my leaving out his blog. He’s a great writer, so it was a tragic omission. Here it is.

Oh yeah, then there’s me. I have a blog of stuff I’ve written mostly from last century. You might enjoy it. Then again, you might not. It’s here.

Let me know if you have a blog… or a print zine… or a YouTube and want to be added to the list. You show me yours… you’ve already seen mine. god@mykelboard.com


Friday, February 02, 2024

God Damn It! or Mykel's February 2024 Blog/Column

 

Monday, January 01, 2024

God Damn It! or Mykel's February 2024 Blog/Column

  


You’re STILL Wrong 
Mykel's 
February 2024 Blog/Column 
God Damn It!
by Mykel Board

We need to find God, and he cannot be found in noise and restlessness. God is the friend of silence. See how nature - trees, flowers, grass- grows in silence; see the stars, the moon and the sun, how they move in silence... We need silence to be able to touch souls.      --Mother Teresa

God is emotional and impulsive and gets things wrong and even loses; just as He is neither omniscient nor omnipotent, neither a flawless robot nor an errorless computer--  so we too dear reader. We have been granted the right to do wrong. Rejoice!    – Ze’ev Maghen 

Aren't you one of those atheists who says God doesn't exist?"  "Who said that? I believe that God does, unfortunately, exist. It's just that he's a fascist."  – Umberto Eco

There are two kinds of people: those who say to God, 'Thy will be done,' and those to whom God says, 'All right, then, have it your way.'                                                            – C. S. Lewis

Who is it that makes you cry, cripples children lets them die, lets the bad guys win, puts acne on your skin, gives cancer to Aunt May, then she’ll giggle when you pray? It’s God! It’s God!                                                      –
                                                                 -- Artless, from the song GOD


This was the original first paragraph I’d planned for the blog:

By the time you read this, I’ll likely be dead. You’ll understand why by the time you get to the end… I think. In murder cases, they always ask for motive, means and opportunity. The rest of this blog will show the motive. The means, I haven’t decided yet. It could even be GOD, doing her natural causes bit… as if that had a meaning when ANYTHING that happens is a natural cause. More likely it’s something quiet… too much too soon. A mix of this and that… with an extra shot of that. Maybe I’ll ask Jim Testa to write the obituary. 

But all of a sudden, I had a change of heart. Instead of writing about me, I decided to choose a smaller and easier subject: GOD. I can escape from my bedbugs, my instant senility, my deafness and all the other effluvia ruining my life right now. So now I’ll leave my current life and join a continued discussion that’s spanned the life of everyone who’s ever lived in a college dorm. 

You’ll read later about a conversation I had with an atheist in Eastern Europe. Although it took place more than 40 years ago, I still remember it. In a way, the logic of the girl I spoke with is behind the logic of most current atheists.. though they wouldn’t admit it. 

More recently, a Jewdhist friend named Richard Goldberg told me. “Mykel, if you want to find God, imagine everything that exists in the universe. That’s God.”

But let’s go back to earlier times: 

Flash to Prague... commie times... the end of the 70s. I’m visiting the grave of Franz Kafka, one of my favorite writers. No, his tombstone is not crawling with cockroaches. He’s buried in the same grave as his father… spending eternity with someone he hated. There is a lot of Hebrew on the grave, but the tenants’ names are written using the Roman alphabet. 













 As I approach the tombstone, I see a woman… stout, with gray hair… tending to the grave… brushing away weeds… picking up garbage. When I come closer, the woman looks up at me.

“Shalom,” she says.

“Hi,” I say.

“Are you Israeli?” she asks.

I shake my head. “No, I’m not,” I tell her.

“But you are Jewish,” she says, her voice without any question intonation.

I nod… and smile.

“I have a daughter...” she says and invites me to dinner.

I don’t remember what we ate. I do remember that the daughter’s name was Helena. She was slightly zaftig, blond hair and she wore a mezuzah around her neck. After dinner mom says, “You children go into the living room and talk. I’ll have to clean the dishes.”

Together we go into the living room and sit on the couch. I look at her breasts.

“I see you’re looking at my mezuzah,” she says. “I wear it for my mother. She bought it for me and I promised to wear it. It tells people I’m a Jew… but I don’t believe in God.”

“Oh?” I ask. “Why not?”

“If God is up there in the sky… living on a cloud… he would just fall down.” She says, as if it were obvious.

BOING! I get it. It hits like an errant erection. If I believed rabbits were pink and delivered eggs at Easter… I wouldn’t believe in rabbits. The atheist commies (or maybe all atheists) believe God is an old man who lives in the clouds… then deny his existence. Of course!

If, like Richard Goldberg, you define God as everything that exists… then God must exist… otherwise nothing exists. The literal existence of Jesus Christ is open to debate… though I think most people will say he existed in some form or other. If you believe Jesus is/was God, then if Jesus existed, so did God. If you believe he had supernatural powers… turning water to wine or feeding a hundred on one loaf of matzoh… that’s open to debate.

What atheists do is define God like Helena defined God… an old man who sits in the clouds. Then they deny his existence… he’d just fall down. Supernatural powers? What are those? It used to be that flying flying humans would show supernatural powers until airplanes came along and made the powers as natural as a boarding pass. Yesterday’s supernatural is today’s mundane. We need some other way to judge.

For some, God is just a comforting thought… an appreciation that there’s something bigger than us… more in control… without physical shape or corporeal body. How can you NOT believe that?

People’s belief in God is a reflection of who they are… or who they want to be. I see God as a nine foot tall woman in a black leather bikini wielding a whip. She sees her job as making my life so bad that I kill myself… and she wins. I can prolong the game by refusing to give in. If SHE has to kill me, I win.

Is my God real? Of course she’s real. God isn’t a human. She’s whatever we make her. She’s what’s useful to us and what explains the universe. Bedbugs, cancer, war, earthquakes, plagues… what more do we need to understand the pestilence of the universe? Atheists tell me that mosquitoes are proof that God does not exist. Bullshit. Mosquitoes are proof that God is either not omnipotent or that God is not good… or both. But they don’t disprove her existence.

When you say you don’t believe in God, you’d better tell me what that God is that you don’t believe in: the egg-delivering pink rabbit or the bunny you see hopping around the garden.

Note: On the unlikely chance that I am still alive and not stroked out from the stress-- or allowing God to win the contest, you can donate to my bedbug fund through my GoFundMe. Just a little will help… and show me I haven’t been abandoned by all but the evil goddess. (SHE thinks of me continually) Thanks in advance for whatever you can do.

See you in hell,

Mykel Board

ENDNOTES: [You can contact me on facebook or by email at mykelboard@gmail.com. Through the post office: send those... er... private DVDs..or music or zines... or anything else (legal only!) to: Mykel Board, POB 137, New York, NY 10012-0003. If you like my writing, you can be notified when anything new is available. Send me an email with SUBSCRIBE in the subject line. Back blogs and columns are at https://mykelsblog.blogspot.com]

Death and Taxes Dept: Well, no taxes in this one, but some death. My long term pal Roger Armstrong… who wrote the Japanese scene reports for MRR when I was the zine’s bad guy there… has bit the dust... a motorcycle crash. I visited Roger in Arizona where he lived with his son and Hiromi his Japanese wife. We kept in touch on facebook regularly and with a nengajou. (Look it up!) Roger’s wife answered this year’s nengajou with a “passed away last month” card. Who’s next?

Talk about Hol(e)y Dept: Uexpress reports South Korean model “Angel Box Girl”, is being prosecuted for obscene exposure. In Seoul and Gangnam, Angel walked through the streets wearing a large cardboard box with holes for her arms and legs -- plus two more in an unnamed place. She invited strangers to put their hands into those extra holes to grope around. She attracted large crowds that police were called to disperse. "It's freedom of expression," she said.
             “My kind of freedom” I’d say.

Irony Dept: I’ve become fascinated by the AI program Aria, that comes packaged with the Opera Internet Browser. It quickly answers questions without stupid weblinks that have nothing to do with those questions. So I asked Aria what country has the highest percentage of atheists. Here’s what she said:
The Czech Republic is often cited as the country with the highest percentage of atheists in the world. According to various surveys and studies, a significant portion of the Czech population identifies as atheist or non-religious. I wonder if they all think God is this old man who lives in the clouds and who would fall down if he really existed.


LINK TRADE DEPARTMENT:

I did a nice interview with The Aither zine. Interesting questions, complete, and questions I’ve never been asked before. You can read it here. It’s a good one.

I read that the search engines like lots of links... and it's also nice to support my friends and enemies in their blogs. So facebook me or email me if you have a blog, webpage or something else to connect to. I add you. You add me.

Here's a start:

My new pal Trey Mayhem sent me a great letter and some porno email pix. He’s got a blog that’s connected to his label Murder and Mayhem records. You can see the blog here.

My long-time friend Sid Yiddish appears on a YouTube DatingGame-like video. Guess who wins the bachelorette!

Here’s Richard Goldberg: goldberg.wordpress.com

Poetry and humor fans will like Justin Martin in The Latency

And my friend Mike R has a nice site with recipe hits from the past! (He cooked for me once... great stuff.) Check out Yesterday's Recipes.

And here's one by a member of ANTI-SEEN... a tour diary of sorts.

Andy Shelton has an interesting blog here.

Savage Hippie is a guy who has been YouTubing for a long time. Our opinions largely overlap... but he complains that I'm a Communist. I'm not! I'm a communist.

Chris Stecher publishes a zine called PRECIS. You can see the back issue links there... and he promises a new issue soon.

George Fertakis has a very nice graphics-heavy blog... with music and books featured prominently. If there’s no link here (I can’t find it temporarily), then Google… er… Duckduckgo him for information.

And my long-term pal Sid Yiddish contributes with his Mishegas Master Blog.

And connect to TRUST Zine, a long-running German punk zine… that STILL PRINTS!!! Yeah, they have a website too… of course! It’s here.

Here are a couple video links.

This from Jon Cox https://squelchchamber1.bandcamp.com/album/down-so-low


And this one from my very long-time friend Roger Armstrong, whose death you read about in this blog:.

Jim Testa moved his long running zine, Jersey Beat, to the blogosphere awhile back. You can read it here. Jim also recommended a kind of unique album… in a style you don’t see to much of these days… or any days. Neo-Hassidic Rock Opera. You can stream the album here.

Kyle Nonneman is in prison in Portland. At least he can’t be kidnapped by the secret police… I think. I post his blog for him, he can’t do it from the klink. Lots of stuff about noise metal… and some very weird politics that will either fascinate or repulse you… or both. It’s hard (and costs money) to send him email. So. If you remember how to write a letter… send him one at: Kyle Nonneman, #16534211, Snake River Correctional Institution, 777 Stanton Blvd Ontario OR 97914-8335

My long time pal, Jim Hayes rightfully complained about my leaving out his blog. He’s a great writer, so it was a tragic omission. Here it is.

Oh yeah, then there’s me. I have a blog of stuff I’ve written mostly from last century. You might enjoy it. Then again, you might not. It’s here.

Let me know if you have a blog… or a print zine… or a YouTube and want to be added to the list. You show me yours… you’ve already seen mine. mykelboard@gmail.com


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