LOTS OF TESTOSTERONE

Not to hear Pete Hegseth talk about it, but too much testosterone can lead to health issues. Including heightened sexual drive but reduced sperm count, plus pimples, greasy skin, heart issues, and general smelliness. Which is probably exactly what we want our men in uniform to have. Especially in the hot climates to which we usually send them, places like Alabama, Louisiana, Florida, and Mississippi.

Where, because of all of that, they will blend in.

Aggression, benign enlarged prostate, coronary disease, emotional instability, hairiness, halitosis, hypertension, increased appetite, infertility, insomnia, liver problems, low sperm count, migraines, uncontrollable sexual urges, violent mood swings. They'll be absolutely indistinguishable from most Republicans. And probably die much sooner.
Which leaves more for the rest of us.

You know, most of us are probably fine if you quarter all the smelly alcoholic rapists in the South, that's kind of what we expected anyway, which is why we don't ever visit.
At least I don't. Alabama will freeze over before I do.
And Louisiana, Florida, Mississippi.

[Also Texas, but for different reasons.]


Sorry folks, you'll have to survive without my sparkling presence.

Nevertheless, two of my favourite American writers remain William Faulkner and Tennessee Williams, both of whom had the misfortune of being southerners and could not see anything wrong with this. As you would expect both wrote about flawed human beings, people who were emotionally unbalanced, in some cases overwrought and batshit.

[William Cuthbert Faulkner: September 25, 1897 – July 6, 1962. The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, Sanctuary, Light in August, Absalom, Absalom! A Fable.  Thomas Lanier ('Tennesse') Williams: March 26, 1911 – February 25, 1983. Battle of Angels, The Glass Menagerie, A Streetcar Named Desire, Summer and Smoke, Rose Tattoo, Camino Real, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Orpheus Descending, Garden District, Sweet Bird of Youth, Vieux Carré.]

Faulkner was a pipesmoker, whereas Williams, the more unstable of the two, experimented with drugs, booze, and cigarettes to dull the pain he certainly must have felt as a gay man from Mississippi, where other than depravity and fatty foods there is so little to still the mindnumbing agony of being intelligent surrounded by inbred syphilitic morons.

Naturally I sympathize with both men.
I too am a pipesmoking man.
And I work in Marin.



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