Last night should have been a fine time to catch up, do some writing, think, create, etc. and so on. Instead, I fell asleep on the couch taunted by the senseless, in the sense of having no sense to them, rantings and bon mots of what I consider the lunatic fringe.

I meant to come home and perhaps celebrate M. and the day we had in the big city that ended with the restaurant he chose in advance, the very San Francisco-esque dinner at Foreign Cinema. A place that in addition to serving good food and wine projects, well, Foreign Cinema on it’s courtyard wall. We dined to the relentlessly and tragically optimistic whoredom of Fellini directing his wife, Giulietta Masini, in Nights of Cabiria.

Beyond the movie’s almost feeling like it could have a Pretty Woman, happy ending for a streetwalker theme, before we remembered it was Fellini and a happy ending was fucking unlikely, I could have written about the Bay Area family, mom, dad, teenage daughter and boy dining next to us. The boy, who was maybe 9 or 10 at that clearly a human being but still fun enough to build a fort and not have pubic hair level of boyhood, was rapt by the film being projected. He considered it the kind of “bad movie” you end up watching when flipping channels, or so he mentioned between bites of pasta and staring at the movie. He clearly didn’t understand what was happening and why all those men were being mean to Cabiria, even after his earnest, very Northern California seeming mother tried to explain prostitution to him.

But, I didn’t write about that or the nice British couple who stopped us in Union Square, because we clearly looked the sort to know where Abercrombie and Fitch might be. Nope, I read comment after comment and stupid website after stupid website, and it’s all Paul’s fault.

Paul is obsessed with Larry Sinclair. Larry Sinclair is the sad, little, scruffy guy whose Youtube video is making the rounds on account of his probably never sucking any famous cock ever but wanting to believe he did.

Now, Paul is actually someone I know from Boston comedy who I would call a friend. So, I know he is not actually either a Hillary or Obama supporter. He’s also not a Huckabee supporter, although he’s known to play a right-wing, religious wingnut alter-ego on stage, who may well be. Nope, he’s one of them there card-carrying capital L liberals, which is probably why we’re friends, and I do believe put an X beside the sadly doomed, but consistent and honest, Dennis Kucinich.

The beauty of Paul is he snarkily gets in there and tilts at internet windmills like nobody’s business. He’ll try to get a dialogue going with religious radicals, anonymous “fans,” if you call them that, of Natalee Holloway, a swath of politicos, comedians and various other dregs of the magical electronic intertubes flame-war of cyberspace. And, he makes his dough off computers, so he knows how to switch identities and keep on commenting, even when moderators and arguers shut him down. Worse yet he has the technology to post not only as himself, but as his aforementioned conservative alterego.

The world needs a new word for the kind of web-based crazy that allows you to argue with yourself in two different voices. (Not saying I haven’t done it. Lord knows, I have too glassy a house to throw that stone.)

I’m waiting for the day his wife hides his keyboard. Although, like myself, she’d probably have to also hide a number of cell phones and other devices.

As for Larry, and the story that may or may not be waiting in the wings for a big, ugly FOX news outing, as the poster of this video clip claims, I’m not biting.

Sometimes, I just need to believe that the fringe is the fringe and that is where it will stay. That the voices represented by gossip rags, tabloids and now crazy folks with computers, are minority voices. They are pervasive, they in their small way, stick like a super-strength epoxy, but they never make it to the center of the marketplace of ideas, because they’re crazy talk.

I have to believe. To contemplate a world where every shithead is heard equally is to horrible to contemplate. Poor little Larry. He’ll either be used and churned by a temperamental and hungry, conspiracy-theory baiting, short-wave radio public, or his scruffy hick self will give one blow job too many to a strange black man on drugs and die a lonely death.

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