Yesterday being Cinco de Mayo I made the usual magic in the kitchen — guacamole and Lazy Gringo Posole.
This is not exactly a forced march through The New York Times Cooking section. You th’ow the ingredients for the first into a bowl and mash ’em up, and you th’ow the ingredients for the second into a pot and simmer ’em up.
One more day on the counter and this avocado would’ve been a goner.
Soups and stews were among the first dishes I learned how to cook, and when the sloth has got me with a downhill pull I will fall back on them at the drop of a chef’s toque and drop the fucker myself.
The posole takes two hours to cook and about no time at all to prep. I toss three cloves of garlic into a small food processor for a quick, coarse chop. Next I add four or five dried red chile pods, seeded, and a large yellow onion, chopped into chunks the processor can swallow. Zoom, another round of push-button chopping. Toss the results into a 6-quart pot.
Drain and rinse a 25-ounce can of white hominy and add that to the pot. You can do the whole dried-hominy thing if you like, but I told you I was lazy. Add a pound and a half of pork or boneless, skinless chicken thighs, cut into 1-inch bits, two teaspoons of Mexican oregano and one of ground cumin, salt to taste, and 6-7 cups of water. Bring to a boil, lower to a simmer, and go watch the hummingbirds for a couple of hours, returning to the pot now and then to give ’er a stir.
Caution: Posole in progress.
The guac’ is even easier. To a bowl add one large avocado, a light drizzle of fresh lime juice, a couple-three teaspoons of finely chopped tomato (optional), a smidge of minced white onion if you like it (Herself does not), and salt to taste. Mash with fork, leaving it a little chunky just ’cause. Serve with corn chips.
You want some nice warm flour tortillas for the posole, along with some class of crunchy garnishes — minced jalapeños, chopped radishes, green onions — and a scattering of cilantro. Watch the BBC’s “Lord of the Flies” on Netflix as you dine and be glad you’re not a castaway kid trying to get that pig in the pot you don’t have.
“Always scribble, scribble, scribble! Eh! Mr. Dog?”
What I need is a manifesto.
Everybody has one. How are The Authorities to understand why you act the fool if you don’t provide some sort of owner’s manual? A map detailing the weed-strangled, varmint-infested trails between your hairy ears?
Fun Fact: The word “manifesto” has its roots in Latin, deriving from the noun manus, which means “hand,” and festus, the scruffy character who in 1964 replaced Chester Goode as Marshal Matt Dillon’s deputy on the TV oater “Gunsmoke.”
Don’t let him bite you.
Thus “manifesto” means “Hand of Festus,” or, more accurately, “Fist of Festus,” something often found in some miscreant’s face.
As in season 12, episode 17 of “Gunsmoke,” titled “Mad Dog,” in which Festus believed he’d been bitten by a rabid mutt and was on the brink of a hideous death, which for some reason led him to beat the snot out of Goober from “The Andy Griffith Show,” who was on leave from Mayberry and moonlighting as a bad man.
So I’m thinking my manifesto should say something like “Don’t act like an evil Goober unless you’re after a puck in the gob,” which should suit the ever-shortening national attention span.
And maybe we should throw something in there about how you don’t want to get bit by no mad dogs neither. As Festus has taught us:
That hydrophobia, it’s a pretty sorry way to die, ain’t it, Doc? You know, a fellow gets shot, why, he’ll just fall flat on his face. Oh, he might kick a couple of times, that’s what makes the crowds turn out. But what I mean is he won’t go just snatching off his clothes and sashaying around trying to bite folks.
Of course, that advice may be coming a little late for a few of the strutting mutts who really need it. But don’t try to pin the rap on me, just because I suddenly have a manifesto. Their rabies ain’t my doing. I wouldn’t bite ’em with your teeth.
Don’t touch that dial! No, seriously, don’t touch it. Eeeyeeww.
I see Prince Maybelline, putative Heir to the Golden Escalator, has managed a rare double in the 2026 Foreign Policy World Series, failing to end a war and queer an election.
Sucks to be him. If there’s ever a Marvel movie about this administration, and there shouldn’t be, I figure Johnny Depp plays the prince in full Jack Sparrow makeup. Stellan Skarsgård will of course bring his Baron Vladimir Harkonnen chops to the role of Addled Shitler, but with an overlay of Evil Otis Campbell from the Bizarro World version of “The Andy Griffith Show.”
And now Shitler is beefing with the pope? He’s a huge fat bastard for sure, but I don’t think he can make the weight for that bout, no matter how many Unhappy Meals he inhales between fat rails of Adderall.
Still, this year’s “spring forward” meant we spent one less hour today stacking sandbags against the tide of bullshit flowing downstream from the Orange House.
So, winning? Maybe. We must take these little victories wherever we find them.
This morning I burned a little of my saved daylight by reading an essay in The New York Times, in which the daughter of two former American revolutionaries found the Oscar-nominated “One Battle After Another” to be “nothing more than entertainment” rather than “a battle cry for a generation.”
Huh. Hollywood veterano Paul Thomas Anderson cranks out a rapid-fire rom-com inspired by a rambling mythical history by Thomas Pynchon, and Hope Reeves — who herself is working on a comic memoir of being raised by retired Weatherpersons James H. Reeves and Susan Hagedorn — finds it regrettably unserious.
Well. Shit. Can’t have that. Can we?
Why not?
• • •
I myself have been regrettably unserious since — well, since forever — and, like the thought of suicide, it has gotten me successfully through many a bad night. And a few fairly grim days, too, whether shortened or lengthened by government fiat.
My upbringing was unremarkably middle-class — Catholic Republican father, Presbyterian Democrat mother — and yet somehow I came to cast myself in the role of atheist radical son.
A diet rich in Warner Brothers cartoons, Marx Brothers movies and Mad magazine will give a kid a taste for anarchy. Who do you root for? Not The Man, that’s for sure. It was one battle after another and Elmer Fudd lost every one of them.
So while I would eventually become interested in Weatherman, and personally sample various flavors of Marxism — Socialist Workers Party, October League, Communist Party (M-L) — these last two, like Weatherman, offspring of the Students for a Democratic Society — my first real political infatuation was with the Yippies.
• • •
Elmer wanted to cut off my lovely hair and send me to Vietnam. I wanted to Bugs Bunny his ass. And so did the Yippies, whose regrettably serious alias was the Youth International Party.
Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin were probably the most famous of these Groucho Marxists, whose theater was the street. Levitating the Pentagon. Throwing money at traders at the New York Stock Exchange. Running an actual pig — Pigasus the Immortal — for president.
The Yippies invaded Disneyland, taking over Tom Sawyer’s Island, threw pies, and applied for a permit to blow up the General Motors building. When it was denied, the Yippies shrugged and said it only proved that it was impossible to work within the system to change the system.
Alas, that old system sure proved durable, resisting change from within and without.
Some Yippies became yuppies. Rubin traded his Viet Cong flag shirt for the suit and tie of a businessman. He died in 1994 after being hit by a car while crossing Wilshire Boulevard, in front of his penthouse apartment. He was 56, well past the 30th birthday after which nobody was to be trusted.
Hoffman jumped bail after a dope bust and went underground. He eventually resurfaced, did some light time, and returned to activism.
But it was the Eighties — remember those fabulous Eighties, kids? — and the old act didn’t seem to be going over so well with a new audience. Hoffman died, reportedly by his own hand, in 1989. He was 52.
• • •
By then, mockery had already begun infiltrating (or was being co-opted by) The Establishment. “Saturday Night Live,” which debuted in 1975 with guest host George Carlin, somehow remains relevant in an aw-shucks-just-kiddin’ sort of way. David Letterman, Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert have had their innings, and Jimmy Kimmel is still in there pitching despite some booing from the luxury box at Fudd Stadium.
But there’s something about old-school, street-level mockery that really gets The Man’s dander up. The reigning Man, Elmer Befuddled, who hires out his shotgunning of critters at home and abroad because bone spurs, watches a shit-ton of TV. And if he sees yuuuuge crowds from coast to coast rocking the next No Kings rallies on March 28, giving him the old Warner Bros.’ sendoff — “Th-th-that’s all, folks!”— he might just do a John Belushi, spin right out of his chair, and hit the deck in a slobbering, shitting sayonara.
It comforts me to think back to one of Gilbert Shelton’s “Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers” cartoons, in which political candidate Rodney Richpigge commits suicide by proxy, ordering his chauffeur to drive off a bridge because he thinks people are laughing at him (a half pint of amyl nitrite getting an unexpected wash in Fat Freddy’s jeans was the actual giggle-trigger).
Hope, as they say, springs eternal. No matter what time it is.
Barking mad and talking out his arsehole as per usual.
His Excremency King Piggy the Sticky-Fingered will be farting higher than his ass this evening during what the legacy media insists upon calling “the State of the Union address” but will almost certainly be more along the lines of the late George Carlin’s “Complaints and Grievances,” only not funny.
I will not be watching for mental-health reasons. Not his mental health; that leaky vessel has sailed, caught fire, exploded, and sunk. My mental health. What with the tariffs and inflation and whatnot, new TVs are way too pricey for me to be shooting ours in a fit of rage.
What say we all give it a miss this time around? If the senile old toad doesn’t stroke out tonight in what he promises will be a long airing of Crimes Against Him, he might just get ferried across the Styx tomorrow by the sort of ratings you might expect from a live goat fuck on the Trinity Broadcasting Network.
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