🚀 go-pugleaf

   - Foss is now such a shell of couldn't-have-ever-been-in-the-first-place
he's got to invent fictitious characters to talk behind his back as not even
real Paranoid delusions will waste their valuable time on that any more and the
lowest idiots on floors Four, Seven, and Three are avoiding noticing he's in
the same elevator.

   - Is that all there is to this job, I am quitting this instant, I applied to
Gogol, I applied to Fyodor D., what did I do to deserve getting "accepted" to
this place?

   - And he even got so out of it he supposed the Political Science Department
was not watching him when it was, so now he is in Very Deep Trouble. When he
was Undrugged he was having narcoleptic nod-outs in their smoking lounge, then
chainsmoking like a furnace to get enough nicotine stimulation to lurch to the
DATALAB to write oneline letters to Janie Johnson saying he was too far gone to
use the computer, twiddle the e-dial to see if there was anybody good on, read
e-mail, write a one-line letter to someone else saying he couldn't use the
computer, reading more e-mail, in short conspicuously doing nothing which took
four hours, going back to the smoking lounge to smoke like a furnace to get the
energy to call the cab to take him the three blocks back home, in short being a
Public Nuisance, taking the Homelessness Problem out of the classroom where it
belongs, being an Esthetic Blight & Offense to the Sensibilities of Decent
People, and scaring women raising clamor for another Rape Awareness Week
*without anybody actually even thinking this*, understand, just *noticing*, at
most checking with Campus Public Safety which had one cop so Retarded he told
Foss about the dossier.
   Then the long-awaited New Prescription, he gets five days of Chemical Bends,
attempting conversation with people he does not deserve to know, accosting
decent women with spuriously innocent-looking greetings, scaring other women by
apologizing for having made strange noises to himself which they may have pick-
ed up on but ignored, facing in the direction of women exibiting that gonna-
rape-ya eyeball tic sunk in the fatuity that he can't see them is excuse enough
and twitching from caffeine side-effects. Also Peering Into classrooms getting
people Disturbed, which happens on the Fourth Floor too but he is Sociology's
Humanitarian Liberal Gesture which Pol Sci wants no part of.
   Naturally nobody but nobody goes around Caveatting somebody this psycho, so
if they can't ignore, they humor, you know what I mean, "anticipatory monitor-
ing," the works, if he Suspects he's Paranoid, "catch-22," but no, too wacko to
occur to him, even Really Believes one and a half people are friends with him.
Pol Sci has Rules forbidding anyone to make wordlike sounds in his direction
and has disciplined the one-and-a-half people in question who aren't even
coming into the DATALAB. For having committed Positive Reinforcement. So maybe
next week the DFOSS@ccvm.sunysb.edu show goes off the air.

   - No wonder wallowing-in-self-pity is illegal, they'd rather have you smoke
crack. What's this gossip we are paid the $20 to talk about?

   ****

   - There's a Vietnam Veteran named Howard Feldman who is a graduate student
on the Fourth Floor. Think of Rambo. Now, think of Rambo as Jewish. Got that
clear? Well, back last year, academic, Foss turned Howard Feldman onto VWAR-L
@UBVM, where BLUE HERRING is listowner. That's all, said nothing about BLUE
HERRING, figured all Howard had to do was be himself, you know, Howard has a
Vietnam Veteran image to live up to, and BLUE HERRING would self-destruct. Not
that Howard is, uh, difficult, it's just that he is loyal exclusively to "My
Brothers," he's gonna get even to whoever did in My Brothers among whom was of
course Howard. Who is a Marxist Revolutionary, who is a Fascist, who is every-
thing Angry. Not just that he believes it, he has a responsibility to look the
part. And Professor Michael S. Schwartz, in the words of Ollie North, loves his
ass.

   - Wasn't that when Ollie said, "The Old Man loves my ass"? Meaning Ronald
Reagan who was playing the President on the Series, the time slot now filled
by the spinoff? Ollie's problem, everybody always knew about Ollie's problem,
which was to George Bush Ollie was *expendable*.

   - To George Bush even Fawn Hall was expendable, and that is the true measure
of George Bush's evil, anybody who'd consider Fawn Hall expendable, the only
hunan being in the entire movie, is the incarnation of evil.

   - Michael S. Schwartz, you know, is the same guy Ralph W. Larkin once called
"not THE Michael S. Schwartz!" He really is. More important for our purposes,
he is the same Michael S. Schwartz played by Woody Allen in THE LAST OEDIPUS
COMPLEX IN THE BRONX, which is Woody Allen's tribute to the Other Side of the
Jewish Lower Middle Class culture which produced the genius of Woody Allen, Bob
Dylan, Michael S. Schwartz. The Other Sidedness is symbolized by the Eternal
Opposition of Brooklyn and Bronx, if your relatives were in one they weren't in
the other or you never saw them as long as you lived, you know. And there was
Dodger Alienation.
   All the Jews were for the Dodgers, the rare deviant was for the Giants, even
after tho move to the Coast, all through the First Intermediate Period up to
the Foundation of the Mets, the eraction of the once-noble Shea Stadium to be
the Ruins of the 1964 World's Fair, and so on. Nobody was so antihuman as to be
an outandout race traitor, you know, for the Yankees, except Ignace Foss, who
became allarmenianized as Irving. And his reputed only child, Daniel A., who
was from the beginning cast out of his Tribe, didn't know any better, and hated
the species worse than the old man anyway.
   But way off in The Bronx you had no contact with Ebbets Field, you had no
intimate Dodger-relation, you were cut off from all the intimate springs of
life amid souls of grayish cardboard. So here is the symmetry of the film, on
one side of the Grand Concourse is Son-of-Sam, on the other is Daniel A. Foss,
each growing up in a different variant of Otherness from what produced the
successes, the winners, the geniuses, the trascentently prophetic, and latterly
the revolutionary-visionary.
   Woody Allen had one hell of a time with some of the casting. Son-of-Sam was
the easiest, you know, iforgotwhoitwas who played "Pvt Gomer Pyle" in Full
Metal Jacket. Daniel A. Foss was a problem, because you just can't show a kid
that disgusting on the screen, you lose the audience, and where you going to
get an actor who can self-consciously PLAY THE PART unless he already IS the
part? But if the kid already IS the part, how is he gonna break into Hollywood?
   Michael S. Schwartz was the easiest, because he looks like the spitting
image of Woody Allen! That's even his problem, "He can't Deal With his Woody
Allenness," they say. He denies it. But the Woody Allenish *essence* is all
the place with him, you can't miss it, he can't stifle it.

   - You ran on so long, dammit, I forgot which character I was. Now, here's
Howard Feldman suddenly important to Foss for two reasons.

   - Right. He is a walking encyclopedia of everyone killed, wounded, missing,
or just a bored disgruntled grunt, for the whole Vietnam Era. First thing, Foss
is afraid, *was afraid*, this was last week, that Jnie Johnson had got married
to him in a ceremony conducted without his consent or knowledge by a Witch name
of Starhawk. So that Janie Johnson is now Wife #3. Which does not matter in the
least regarding such that the alleged wedding was never consummated, that Janie
Johnson is still virgo intacta, because in the Witch religion it is perfectly
normal and natural that if you go near a practicing Witch with dirty thoughts
in mind and you are not the authentic Old Nick in person she will as a matter
of course shrivel your balls and make your dick fall off.
   So Foss has taken the vow of eternal adultery like Bill Clinton his like it
or not leader. Should anything in that area ever happen shich is out of the
question, who cares.

   - What does Starhawk have to do with the Vietam War, goddammit, you are
talking my ear off!

   - Practically nothing, that's the point! The A5A Starhawk was a Navy bomber
so piss poor in design and engineering that you launched one off a carrier it
fell plop into the water or it got blown up by its own Retarded Bombs or it
fell out of the sky before getting near NVA flak or missles.
   One and only one A5A Starhawk actaually Saw Action, combat, in the 'Nam, and
Howard Feldman knows it. Knows every doomed second of its tragic flight path
the day, April 23, 1971, he says, it was shot down over Vinh, no chute, total
destruction after a Son-of-Sam 6 flew up its tail.
   Starhawk has been dead for 21 years!
   Foss cannot possibly be married!
   But that was *last week*. This week, Foss is worried he's not *good enough*
for Janie Johnson!

   - And the other reason Howard Feldman is suddenly important? Crazier even
than this stupid shit I suppose?

   - You catch on! Monday Foss corners Howard Feldman in the hall walking in
direction of Michael S. Schwartz's office, 409 South. Undrugged, Foss cannot
make it from where he's lying semiconscious on the floor of 426 North all the
way to the other end of South, but Undrugged this day he is not. Howard
Feldman catches himself not walking his Rambo Walk, accesses his Rambo software
and activates Ramboistic swing of biceppy arms.
   "I've fictionalized you, Howard." Foss is still worried on Monday that BLUE
HERRING will ID Howard on VWAR-L LIST, but BLUE HERRING has refrained from Foss
baiting so long - imagine when the Fish is out to catch you! - Foss is sure,
either BLUE HERRING is safely dead OR, considering how the HISTORY people have
broken nearly all imaginable or unimaginable food taboos, he is prepared to do
the Ultimate, to eat BLUE HERRING, pardon the FNORDism, RAW, on daytime
television.
   "You fictionalized me as what?"
   "As a character called The Veteran, who *personally* rescued two MIAs in
1987, said rescuees looking all-armenian sure enough yet on account of commie
brainwashing by the Pathetic Lao have refused or have become unable to speak
anything but Laotian ever since."
   "That's right, every word of that is true, I went in there, I rescued two
of My Brothers. You know who or what ELSE was there, the pigshit phony who did
absolutely *nothing* to resucue *anybody* wile throwing out, not his own money
of which he's got more than he himself plus the IRS together can ever count,
but the nickels and dimes of wives and children of MIAs, the fuck?"
   "H. Ross Peroo-hoo-hoo?"
   "Correct, I know it all, I saw it all, They know what I know, They are gonna
come after me, They can only kill one of me which They have not done yet not
that They haven't tried, but They can try again. I'm guaranteeing you, Foss,
there may be one less of me but a lot fewer of Them you'll ever believe. You
know what was wrong with the people who made those Rambo pictures, Foss?"
   "What, Howard?"
   "They were afraid of the sight of blood."

    - Time's up. We are Normal, we got something to do after work. One thing.
What does Woody Allen have to say about the difference between Son of Sam and
Daniel A. Foss?

   - Son of Sam had strength of character and courage of his convictions.

Daniel A. Foss