Buy now! Grab 'Em By the Pussy Riot Collusion Insurance! Now with Ivanka Scent!

Hahaha! It's me, Planet 3799 Novgorod, here to help you America with some great product! As a hacker for the Russian government, my only purpose in life is to help make sure your elections produce the best result for the number one country in the world! And can you guess which one that is? Here is a hint for you: Donald Trump is not the president of it.

However, now with this new but great product, you can rest assured that even if we hack the election, there will be insurance to cover you against collusion. And the best part about this insurance? Lean in. I must whisper. Closer. Closer. ... IT'S COMPLETELY WORTHLESS! Hahaha. You just let me shout in your ear.

Except for Ivanka Scent. It is very great product. After all, doesn't everyone want to smell nice when they are getting screwed?

America, you are such a source of great pride for me today. I cannot tell you how it feels to be the team responsible for the election of the worst president ever in America. When we started, we sat down and mapped out all the characteristics of a bad president -- uninformed, inexperienced, incurious, lazy, dishonest, unethical, immoral, cowardly, etc. -- and then thought, "We will try to elect someone with maybe 20% of these characteristics." Then Trump turned up, and we couldn't believe it. "He's the perfect terrible president! He has so many of these characteristics! And he's off the charts as a liar, a coward, and as someone who doesn't give a shit about learning anything! This can't be possible!"

But it was. And did we score. Big time! I am thinking about the World Cup 2018 obviously, which was a glorious thing for us in so many ways. Too bad for our team, but they still represented us well. But America did you see the moment in the Final when France was waltzing to victory 4-1 over Croatia and the French goalie -- overconfident? clumsy? just plain stupid? -- put the ball on the pitch for what should have been a soaring goal kick downfield but instead he tried to dribble the ball around a lone but stellar Croatia player who reached a leg out, intercepted the ball, and scored? Did you see that?

What a moment! That moment right there was the Helsinki Summit. Trump is the French goalie going it alone, dribbling on the pitch against our glorious Vladimir. Trump is completely outclassed by himself on the ground against Putin, but Trump is so deeply dishonest -- even with himself -- that he has no clue.

I don't pretend to know the details of what we have on the poor fellow -- except to say it is money, the only thing that registers in his capital-reptilian brain. It doesn't matter. He is covering himself with shame, and me, personally, I have confessed to feeling sorry for my American adversaries (but only fleetingly, Russian comrades, and never in such a way as to deter me from the pursuit of our goal!) Still, though, one has a romantic notion of the classic joust between two equal champions, like the Crusader notion of Richard with the lion heart against the Muslim warrior Saladin. What can I say except the unpronounceable lingo SMH: America has fallen so short. I can laugh at it, but at the same time I am embarrassed for them.

And to watch Trump trying to "walk it back," and then contradict his walking back, and then "walk it back" again. Who does he think he is, Michael Jackson? I will invent a new dance for him. It will be Russian and it will be a huge hit and it will look like people running around on a soccer pitch with Russian security in hot pursuit and it will be called "Grab 'Em by the Pussy Riot Collusion Insurance! Now with Ivanka Scent"! Hahaha! America, my gift to you! Great product! Buy now! And don't forget to dance!

But what is truly baffling is the people all around Trump who know he is lying and ignorant and a coward! How is it possible that they can't see us behind him, through him, under him, over him, using him to score goal after goal after goal? Can they really not know what's going on? Do they not care? There is a single, simple, easy, obvious thing that could be done to block us: get everyone behind an effort to secure the American system of elections. Everybody would be for that. Unify America, like, you know, it says: the United States of America.

But no. The Republicans are happy to have our help, as long as it beats Democrats. Democrats are the enemy. NATO is in good shape compared to America. America isn't even a banana republic now. It is a banana split. A giant banana split. The biggest in history. All peeled and sliced banana served up with ice cream and whipped cream and offered up for sale! America the banana split! America for sale! No republic anymore, just one big huge economy that anybody anywhere can buy into or hack into or sway or swing to your heart's content! "Give me you tired, your poor ..." Hahaha Miss Tired Statue of Flibbertygibbet! What's tired and poor is your American ideals! Forget them. Eat the banana split! Buy now! What great product! The best!

Who needs a republic anyway? After all, what's a republic? Can't expect an American to know, especially not your president! And he doesn't! He has no clue what a republic is. Don't believe me, Planet 3799 Novgorod who knows more than you about America and who flipped your election? Then be on the safe side! Buy my Grab 'Em By the Pussy Riot Collusion Insurance, now with Ivanka Scent! Guaranteed worthless! Just like the Constitution your cheating President swore to defend!

Hahaha! It would hurt if it weren't so funny!

Hedonist's treadmill, philosopher's comb (in praise of Folly (Beach))

The waves lap upon the shore as they have done since time immemorial and as they will do for time unforeseen. They were they are they will be: there, beyond the reckoning of any wreckage.

Sometimes they are perfect in form: a long, rolling ridge that rises and then breaks forward into a scroll that comes crashing down into a wash of foam. One after another they come, as incessant as they are patient as they are determined to meet a destiny the same as doom.

From my home in the Appalachian foothills of Tennessee to Folly Beach, SC, is as easy and unbroken a trip by interstate highway as anyone could want. It is also almost the shortest distance between two points: me @home and the Atlantic Ocean. A happy coincidence. As is the overlap between the name of the beach and the name of this blog.

I have been there before, a while ago: before a hurricane washed away all manner of manmade protuberances and appurtenances. Those are back, in greater profusion and lushness than before, tempting another reckoning with the wind, but bravely and brazenly and lushly squeezing every margarita moment until then.

The dry sand is soft and floury. But beyond the tidebreak litter of sharp, broken shells, where it has been wetted and pressed and molded by the onrushing water, it is terra firma suavis; together with the water it is the rhythmic flowing encyclopedicure that needs no looking up and that no algorithm can replace.

Feel is the oldest of the senses, and the deepest, and here is its home, après womb, the closest thing to the garden from which we have all been cast out and to which we seek to return. The other senses are not absent: from afar sight imposes the occasional as the ideal, with a classic sameness, a geometry of gravity upon a graph; sound highlights the distant crashing to which we are only an audience; taste does not seek the overweening saltiness; and smell is rewarded mostly by the absence of effluvia or the spritzy industrial bouquets of sunscreen.

But it is feel that wraps the experience into a single, singular inheritance that begins with a look back over the shoulder at the rising, approaching ridgecomb into which you are pulled by the outward rush of undertow and into the path of which you dive, thrusting the arms back and leaving them by the sides and surrendering to the force of the downward curl that throws you face-forward through the roaring, salty surf and propels you along until you stand in the shallows, always with one desire: to go back and do it again.

Body-surfing is the only way to experience this. Admittedly, compared to the grace and athleticism of surfboarding, it is ridiculous -- indeed risible -- to watch: a head disappears into the foam and moves forward fifteen yards or so. But the point is not to entertain or to be watched or to master a wave with a board. The point is to become part of the wave itself, part of the energy that rises and crashes and propels. You become part of the medium not by embracing it, but by throwing yourself forward into the force that sucks you in and throws you forward, propelling you in a liquid jet through face-striating bubbles and enveloping you in a soothing salt wash.

It does require a modicum of skill: catching the right wave at the right place and at the right moment in its breaking; maintaining a shaft-like form without legs so high or head so low so that you are roughly tumbled, which it seems even the smallest wave can do. But the child can ride as well as the geezer, and vice-versa.

Conditions can be better or worse. Mostly it's a matter of waves being too chopped up by wind or too becalmed or too rude can be better or worse, but current can be a factor as can the quality of the water. I was rewarded (for what, I don't know) this time at Folly Beach with warm (not hot) water and modest but majestic waves, chariots of water rolling in like clockwork.

The hedonist's treadmill. Not a hedonic one. The hedonic one is the one you have to tread to maintain the homeostasis that keeps you at a mere baseline of happiness. Nobody ever mounted a treadmill in pursuit of pleasure. On the other hand, the hedonist's treadmill -- the wave -- is happiness itself. It is flow inside of flow, the cyclical surf in which pleasure reiterates again and again, without any more effort than a little timing and throwing yourself into it. It is the possession of pleasure by the medium of pleasure. The hedonist's treadmill is the philosopher's comb.