Love is the ultimate fiat currency, babe

White Men Can’t Jump (Bail When They’ve Probably Murdered a Federal Judge)

A note on the Kennedy assassination and Woody Harrelson’s father

Did everyone already know this??

Woody Harrelson’s dad was a hitman. Professionally speaking.

Not only that, if in fact Lee Harvey Oswald did not act alone—there’s no “I” in “team” or… “Oswald”—Charles Harrelson is a 100% plausible candidate for Additional Gunman.

Apparently, Pops Harrelson once took a great deal of cocaine and confessed to his role in the assassination, going so far as to draw a MAP of his Deadly Activities that day in Dallas.

I know some observers hear about the cocaine aspect and think it’s disqualifying—“This country deserves a better class of assassin,” I can hear them saying—with the apparent inclusion of “the FBI.”

But how many of these observers have themselves abused stimulant drugs, illegal or otherwise?

Don’t get me wrong. Taking too much for too long is a recipe for becoming frenemies with reality (and developing an allergy to having the blinds open).

But as someone who abused stimulant drugs as recently as Obama’s first term, I will tell you this. When doing so, I frequently said things I should not have said.

But in every instance, I believed these things to be true. Intensely. So intense was my belief in the truth of what I said that I would harangue and hector—browbeat, badger and beleaguer—yes, reader, I would pester—anyone within earshot for as long as the drugs lasted.

When it felt true, and truly important, that I needed to learn the facts about scotch, I wasted no time in approaching the bartender at HiFi in the East Village. I said, “So what’s like, the deal with scotch?”

When he responded, with evident contempt, “Maybe if you weren’t on coke,” I was intensely offended.

In other words: I understand that drug persons largely deserve their reputations.

I’m given to hyperbole even at my sober-est—this tendency was, apparently, amplified at my drunkest.

There was one surefire method by which my college companions could determine whether I was blacked out.

If they said, “Alex, are you blacked out?” and I responded, “That’s fucking impossible,” that meant the answer was yes.

All this to say, maybe Woody Harrelson’s father wasn’t the world’s most reliable narrator on the day he told his tale.

But you gotta admit: these weren’t the ravings of a random lunatic. It would be one thing if he were confessing involvement in an event outside the parameters of his known activities; if his day job had been something truly disreputable—let’s say, acting—we could comfortably discount his claims as the likely result of drug-induced psychosis.

But Woody Harrelson’s dad was not the inspiration for his son’s career. Charles Harrison died in prison after being convicted of assassinating a federal judge—which was not the first time he’d been locked up for a contract killing.

Charles Harrison was a rise-and-grind, let’s-get-this-money-New-York kinda dude. A forerunner of hustle culture, really. Only, his hustle was murder, and his culture was getting paid for it.

It’s something about the map, man. That’s the detail I’m fixated on. Do we have a copy of the map he drew? I think it’s time someone finally took a crack at this JFK thing.

Funnily enough, it’s good I didn’t know about any of this when my known activities included As Many Drugs As Possible; I probably would have gotten way too into it. (Like, not just a blog post, bro. A series of blog posts.)

Woe betide the acquaintances (and bartenders) of cocaine persons. I remember spending hours discussing The Phenomenon Of Charisma with my buddy at an off-campus house named for a non-German totalitarian government; whatever charisma we may have possessed was never so lacking as that evening.

A similar night at a ~girlfriend’s parents’ apartment, free for our misuse as the parents spent their weekend at their second home in the Catskills, turned into a twelve-hour thunderdome of heated debate over the optimally lifespan-elongating approach in the event of a zombie apocalypse. (Our conclusion—go, uh, to the Catskills—was essentially the same one adopted by New York’s money persons at the outset of the pandemic.)

Woody Harrelson’s career, revisited

At the beginning of Obama’s second term, Woody Harrelson starred in a movie called Rampart. It was forgotten immediately—or would have been if it weren’t for the disastrous Reddit “Ask Me Anything” (AMA) in which Harrelson answered questions from random Redditors. The thread was an instant cautionary tale for lazy marketers, as Harrelson—or the flack posing as Harrelson—seemed annoyed by questions that didn’t pertain to Rampart, tried without success to drag discussion back to the movie, and generally made an enemy of the internet.

The whole point of the AMA format, after all, is for sweaty internet persons to transgress the norms of professional marketers: to ask questions, in other words, with negative and/or sexual answers—“What did you really think about your second divorce?”—and to ask questions about drugs.

I have a request for Redditors. Could you add a third category of go-to AMA question? Could you remember to ask every celebrity who drops by whether they are related by blood to someone who might have killed any politicians, and if so, whether they did it for real? The future of the truth depends on you.

Time is a phat circle

What if the first season of True Detective, rather than investigating a fictional Louisiana serial killer, had investigated the Kennedy assassination?

Can’t you imagine Matthew McConaughey’s articulately nihilistic Rust prodding Harrelson’s charmingly bluff Marty about Charles Harrelson’s past?

“Give it a rest, Rust. The man was zooted beyond recognition. He would’ve confessed to assassinating Lincoln in that state.”

“Marty, have you ever heard the expression ‘Hiding in plain sight’? In your mind there are two worlds: a sober daytime world of reliable experience, and a murky night-world of discountable intoxication. But there’s only one world, Marty. And in that world, we’ve got decades of research demonstrating the failure of our sense organs to transmit what you so arrogantly call ‘reality.’ Hell, a simple optical illusion would be sufficient to refute your confidence if you had the fuckin’ courage to follow a premise to its conclusion.”

“Rust, I’ll be—real honest with you, buddy. ‘Bout three words in, I started workin’ on my fantasy team’s O-Line in my head. Saints are gonna surprise everyone this season. You heard it here first.”

SEE YOU NEXT FRIDAY, DEAR FRIENDS.