Román Leão

Category: Blog Posts

  • The Next Civil War: Dispatches from the American Future—Stephen March

    It has only been three years since Canadian writer Stephen March took a hard look at his country’s downstairs neighbor and found us… well, let’s just say that we aren’t going to get our deposit back. Like a tenant that has decided to start cooking meth in the kitchen at night, what the United States does affects the entire building, and March smartly surmised that the future of the American experiment would best be sussed somewhat from arm’s length.

    When one is fully immersed in the the circular firing squad of 21-century American politics, it is difficult to shift one’s eyes anywhere than your neighbor’s trigger finger. As an outsider, March peered through the front window, and what he found is disturbing.

    March walks us through traditional, and very familiar-sounding, lead-ups to civil conflict. Economic and environmental instability worsens every year? Check. Political gamesmanship overrides all other governmental concerns? Checkedy motherfuckin’ check. Under those sorts of strains, March points out that even long-established national identities can fracture with shocking speed. Iraq in 2006 had a “relatively high” Shia/Sunni rate of intermarriage. “The supposedly permanent and intractable religious rift was a relic from antiquity,” he writes. “Then it wasn’t.”

    Our Canadian judge sees the cleaving of national purpose as a done deal, a problem inherent in the very founding of the union. “There is very much a Red America and a Blue America,” he writes. “They occupy different societies with different values, and their political parties are emissaries of that difference.”

    “Democrats represent a multicultural country grounded in liberal democracy,” he illustrates. “Republicans represent a white country grounded in the sanctity of property. America cannot operate as both at once.” But, man, it is fun to point fingers. March points his own finger at media empires who make fortunes on what Friedrich Nietzsche called the pleasure of contempt. “Blaming one side offers a perverse species of hope,” March admits. “Such hopes are not only reckless, but irresponsible.”

    As a foreigner, March is in the position to say what would be unthinkable to the average American. “The U.S. system is an archaic mode of government totally unsuited to the realities of the 21st century. The forces tearing America apart are both radically modern and as old as the country itself… bloody revolution and the threat of secession are essential to the American experiment.”

    After detailing several scenarios that might touch off a conflagration—some of which, such as the movement of outside National Guard troops into another state’s territory, and assassination, albeit, still attempted and ancillary at this time—March warns that once started, civil wars are really hard to stop. He writes that in 50 years of counterinsurgency we still have not learned that “violence that imposes order to control violence produces more violence and more disorder.” You can not achieve pacification by murdering people. I think Bob Dylan said that.

    Even if you were compelled to go that route, the overwhelming force of the state is useless against stochastic resistance. “A succession of winning firefights makes exactly no difference.” Lt. General Daniel Bolger, author of Why We Lost: A General’s Inside Account of the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars writes. “The local people have to run their own government.”

    March goes further, saying that it is impossible to de-radicalize the next generation while at the same time taking away their most basic rights. “It’s hard to find youth so stupid that you can kill and imprison their parents and tell them you love them afterward. It didn’t work in Iraq and Afghanistan. It won’t work in the United States.” 


    “This is the other thing that would occur,” writes retired colonel Peter Manor, “massive detention centers across the United States where people who were suspected of being disloyal… would be warehoused on a massive scale.” The U.S. is already the most incarcerated society in the world. A civil war would explode those numbers. Who would support or pay for that? Let’s not even get into the political morass of donor states vs. recipient states.

    The traditional intractability of the American populace may be the key to avoiding this scenario all together, given the hopelessness of fighting it out. “If you’re in a situation where you’re using armed force to try and quell a population, you’re either going to have to kill a bunch of them, or you’re going to pull out and let them have local control,” writes Lt. General Bolger. “You’re never going to talk them into seeing it your way.” The typical conclusion of insurgency conflicts is not victory by either side but exhaustion by all.

    Even the paperwork is daunting. March points out that uncertainty over small questions of daily life is a major reason why Scotland and Quebec are not independent nations today. Pensions, passports, national debt, dual citizenship, the military… are all things that would quickly become a bureaucratic nightmare.

    Once again, March leans into his innate Canadianess to say what an American would not. “At this point in history… much of the U.S. Constitution simply does not apply to reality. Democrats and Republicans alike worship the document as a sacred text, indulging a delirious sentimentality that was the precise opposite of what the framers envisioned as the necessary basis for responsible government.”

    He goes on, “Americans worship ancestors whose lives were spent overthrowing ancestor worship; they pointlessly adhere to a tradition whose achievement was the overthrow of pointless traditions.” March, perhaps naively, calls for a new Constitutional Convention, not understanding the very real possibility for real chaos to ensue, not grasping that there is always more to lose.

    March does understand that the failure of the American experiment, and he does claim that it is failing, would left the world a lessor place. “The world needs America,” he writes. “It needs the idea of America… [a place] where contradictions that lead to genocide elsewhere flourish into prosperity.”

    He does believe that the problems that plague our society at this point in our history are not beyond the capacity of the American people to solve. “There is one hope, however, that must be rejected outright: the hope that everything will work out by itself, that America will bumble along into better times,” March warns. “It won’t.”

    “If history has shown us anything, it’s that the world doesn’t have any necessary nations,” March sounds the alarm. “Once again, the hope for America is Americans.” Let’s not let him, the world, and ourselves, down.

  • From Big Change to Big Crime in 229 Days

    In January of this year, two days after President Biden’s Farewell Address, I flipped on YouTube to catch up, having long given up on network news. The first thing I saw is what looked to be an agricultural landscape complete with a tiny tractor slowly moving under a text overlay reading BIG CHANGE in a distressed serif font.

    Ten seconds into the video, a squeal of feedback prompted the camera to reel back revealing the metal bars of a fence while the familiar tones of Old Black, Neil Young’s signature ’53 Gibson Les Paul, bashed out a three-chord stomp.

    Big Change is coming’, coming’ right home to you / Big Change is coming’ you know what you gotta do. Heraclitus himself couldn’t have put it better when he wrote in the 5th Century BCE, “Everything changes and nothing remains still,” or the more familiar, “Change is the only constant.”

    Young’s new song threw a bit of a curveball, however, when in the very next line he sang, Big Change is coming’, could be bad and it could be good. It is in this moment of leaving room for hope that I think elevates this song beyond the myopically political. Even the most news-adverse among us could feel that we were in for a tectonic season of shift.

    I’ve heard the Biden administration described as a Restoration presidency, referring to when the English monarchy was brought back in 1660, after Oliver Cromwell’s unsuccessful authoritarian stab at a Commonwealth.

    The reinstatement of a tired form of government, in England’s case, the monarchy, in our case, the gerontocracy, was a clumsy metaphor, but one must admit that it wasn’t just ol’ Joseph Robinette, God bless him, that was looking tired.

    The whole neoliberal worldview that has provided the country’s raison d’être, and slow suicide, since the 1970s, was creaking under global pressures and the weight of all the money that a new class of oligarchs had sucked up from the shrinking middle class.

    As much as I would like for Biden to have pushed through more of a progressive agenda, perhaps things just weren’t fucked up enough for that to have been an option. Like the animatronic Peter Pan says as he eternally jumps out the window into the darkness of his signature Disneyland ride, “OK, everybody, here we go!”

    Or as Uncle Neil says, Big change is coming’, could be bad, and it could be great!

    With Vladimir Putin’s Russia driving through Ukraine for a warm water port in the Black Sea and TFG threatening to seize the Panama Canal and the soon-to-be-thawed northern sea routes around Greenland, the world was looking increasingly less like a game of Risk, and more like Rock-em Sock-em Robots.

    Smash cut to Labor Day and Putin is still bombing the bejeezus out of Ukraine despite TFG having allowed the international war criminal to fly to Alaska, a place that the dotard repeatedly referred to as, “Russia,” leading some to worry that he was going to give the state back after almost 160 years.

    Israel is still systematically destroying Gaza and its people. Oh, and TFG is sending National Guard troops to American cities to do… what, exactly? This is all to admit that the tenuous hope against hope that everything “might be great,” was… let’s just go with overly optimistic.

    Seven months and change later, Big Change has been usurped by Big Crime, as desperate and close to punk rock as this soon-to-be octogenarian has ventured in a while. Don’t need no fascist rules / Don’t want no fascist schools / Don’t want soldiers walking on our streets / There’s big crime in DC at the White House!

    Why it has once again fallen to Neil Young to strap on the Gibson and man the barricades is beyond me. This should be a golden age for angry young bands, but as Donald Rumsfeld so famously said, “You go to war with the army you have.”

    I hope that when I’m 79 that I still have the gumption (and the freedom) to rail against things that I think are wrong. I also hope that if Neil gets rounded up by TFG’s masked mall-thugs, he ends up back in his native Canada, and not El Salvador, Eswatini, or South Sudan.

    The shit is hitting the fan and leave it to Shakey Deal and Old Black to sound the clarion. No more money to the fascists / The billionaire fascists / Time to blackout the system / No more great again

  • Happy 80th, Van the Man!



    Belfast’s beloved son Van Morrison has been a recording artist longer than I’ve been alive. Them’s first, and penultimate, album—having dropped in ’65—preceded me by a full year. This is to say that the mystic blues shouter has always been around as far as I’m concerned.

    Growing up on AM radio, Dr. Don Rose on San Francisco’s KFRC must have introduced the first Morrison classic I fell in love with, probably 1970’s Domino from His Band and the Street Choir, still one of my all-time favorite records.

    Although our childhoods were separated by a good 21 years and the Atlantic Ocean, I have to think of him as a soul brother equally steeped in Blues and R&B from our respective impressionable ages. My father used to sit me down, when he wasn’t blaring Fats Domino or Little Richard’s Specialty catalog as loud as it would go, and explain what the drummers on Count Basie and Duke Ellington’s seminal First Time! The Count Meets The Duke were doing before continuing his ongoing dissertation on Jimmy Reed’s Live at Carnegie Hall.

    As a result of what the less-enlightened among us might consider prolonged polyrhythmic brainwashing, I have often felt that perhaps I was grown in a weird sonic test tube to be a Van Morrison fan. The way that our man can stretch a phrase so that it lands off the beat like a jazz singer, or drop into a shamanic trance state to rival John Lee Hooker, it was a language I was well familiar with by the time he began to eschew the easy radio hit.

    I can still remember watching Van Morrison: The Concert on PBS late one night in 1990. I think I was half paying attention, digging the traditional Irish songs that had been on his collaboration with the Chieftains a couple of years previous. A good hour into it, the band broke into In the Garden from 1986’s No Guru, No Method, No Teacher at a frenetic pace. My first thought was that they were disrespecting the elegiac beauty of the song, a meditative highlight of the album.

    And then, with the crack of a snare drum, as suddenly as we were launched into the firmament by the upward thrust of the band, we break gravity and jettison the boosters. Van touches the seventh verse (so lightly) and then slips into a gravity-free trance, repeating, “You fell, you fell, you fell,” tasting and twisting both syllables, recasting them, rejecting them, pacing the stage like a nervous panther in a cage, and finally placing them, “from the garden.” I remember walking toward the TV, and saying out loud, “What the fuck?”

    I had seen plenty of live music by then, but I had never seen someone so enraptured by the moment, in the moment, of the moment. And who the hell is he talking about? Is he singing to mankind or speaking to the angels that were cast out of heaven? Maybe he doesn’t even know. Maybe it doesn’t even matter. It’s fucking poetry, it is.

    That song still makes me tear up every time I hear and I don’t know why. Is there a primal longing to return to the proverbial garden that Morrison tapped into? I am sure that he would just remark, as he has many times, “It’s just a song. I’m just a songwriter.” I call bullshit, but OK, I get it. The creative arts, when one is open and lucky, exist in a realm of real magic. It is best not to piss off the muse by calling it out.

    I have always respected Morrison’s high regard of the muse and his willingness to follow it wherever it might lead. The two records he produced during the COVID pandemic, and subsequent lockdown, gave his critics plenty of raw meat to devour. However, after a good 60 years in a game he, himself, has eschewed in both in song and action, I felt, and still feel, that the man has well earned the right to respond to societal events however he might feel appropriate.

    One can’t be surprised that an artist who sang the following, nearly 55 years ago, might not give a shit what anyone has to say about his business one way or another: Don’t wannna discuss it / Think it’s time for a change / You may get disgusted / Start thinkin’ that I’m strange / In that case I’ll go underground / Get some / Heavy rest / Never have to worry / About what is worst or what is best

    A re-entrenchment along the lines of Bob Dylan’s two solo folk records of 1992–93, seem to have redirected Morrison’s inspiration. 2023’s Moving on Skiffle revisited the type of music he played in his youth, before the trap and trappings of fame; whereas Accentuate the Positive, from the same year, celebrated rock & roll at it’s earliest, and least calcified, incarnation.

    This summer’s Remembering Now reads at first as an aural CV of all of the genres that Morrison has explored over the years, with familiar places and themes bubbling up in the fragrant stew. The closest cousin in the Man’s deep catalog sounds to be 1991’s Hymns to the Silence, one of my all-time favorites.

    Eighty years on, Morrison’s voice sounds as strong as ever; age bringing, if anything, a resonance that was missing in the early days. Listening back, I hear the young, brash rocker of 1965–66 as a trumpet, blasting out the theme over the roar of the band, announcing the new world as it was unrolled before it. These days, Morrison’s instrument has become a tenor sax, deep and luxurious, able to evoke longing and defiance with equal strength and intention.

    Roll me over, Romeo.

  • Shit from an Old Notebook: Odds and Sods

    Sometimes when writing a long-form piece like a novel, you find yourself wandering down paths that don’t end up going anywhere, at least anywhere that helps the story.

    This one of those digressions that I rediscovered while cleaning out an old laptop that is not long for this world. I can remember where I was when I wrote it, high on a ridge over Fairfax, California, looking out the window of the little home office that I quickly threw together after the COVID pandemic brought the world to a screeching halt.

    I was lucky enough to be trapped in a honeypot where my view was across a wooded canyon. A few houses up the hill the road dead-ended at open space where my dog Biscuit and I could look down on the failure of modern civilization.

    Originally, I had the idea of making Burn Your Starry Crown a trilogy, checking in each time the tale-tail comet came back around, ultimately ending as an outer space yarn. I became disavowed of that idea as I quickly realized it was completely out of my ability to pull off. Maybe some day.

    As distinctly as I remember where I was, I have little-to-no idea what the heck I was thinking and/or smoking here. Enjoy.

    When the teacher became aware, he was cast out of a warm world of water and salt. He liked to think that he had been born of the biggest womb in the world: the Pacific Ocean. He was delivered, not squalling, but gasping for air on a pile of lava rocks; laid out like a sacrifice. But to whom should he be offered up? The teacher could think of no one.

    Nor could he imagine what chain of events led to his ignoble presentation; brined and bleeding from his corporal brushes with sharp coral. Nothing left to do but get on with it, he supposed, with very few clues as to what it might possibly entail.

    The teacher… did he always think of himself as a teacher? Did he actually have a name? He struggled to his feet and spoke the two words he remembered from somewhere; “I am.” His voice was parched and unfamiliar to him, but the intent was very recognizable. He knew he had been cast here for an important purpose, but exactly what that was might have to wait. He was famished.

    A lone figure appeared out of the dense growth surrounding the beach carrying a large polished plank with a fin attached. Perhaps some kind of shark totem, he thought. That’s a good sign, he recognized; and apparently he knew what a shark was.

    The man was tanned and had the bleached white hair of someone who spent his days in and around the ocean. When the figure saw the teacher standing naked on the heiau, he dropped his totem and spoke the two words that came to define their relationship going forward.

    “Holy shit.”

  • Shit From an Old Notebook: Squid Game

    While sitting at my favorite taqueria, enjoying my tacos dorados and reading the ruminations of Billy Collins on the death of the masculine hat, I overheard this dadaist conversation:

    “Squid.”
    “Have you ever had a really excellent squid steak?”
    “Negative, ghost runner.”

    Either the conversationalists in question were spies and were sizing each other up before getting down to nefarious business, or they were really, really high.

    I’m guessing the latter.

  • Post #100—Looking Forward


    Well, the ol’ materfamilias has said a lot of goofy shit since… well, since I’ve known her, but I’m going to take this little piece to heart from now on. I think I must have been breaking her balls over Mother’s Day or something, and I prodded, “When is my day? Just because we decided not to have kids, there’s no day for me?” Of course, I knew full well that everyday was up for grabs without carpet critters running underfoot, but I could not pass up an opportunity to give her the business. She looked at me with a moment of strange clarity and said, “You have a whole month.”

    I guess I do have a month, or, at least, I’m claiming it. July is my time to shine, and shine I fucking well planned to do. If it killed me. Ever since I was a kid, the celebratory nature of July was bracketed by the Fourth and—at the tail end—my birthday, which just happens to coincide, more often than not, with the local Portuguese Festa. One of my folks favorite jokes was to tell me that they were taking me out to lunch for my birthday and, invariably we would find ourselves down at the Hall, sweating in the almost-August heat with a several hundred other souls waiting for sopas.

    This July hit different, as the kids say. Besides the fact that it was the coolest July in, if not my lifetime, at least half that long, it was oddly… subdued. Maybe it was the loss of Ozzy or the increasingly unstable political situation, but the last month felt like a demarkation of sorts and now we are all waiting for what comes next.

    I would say, “watch this space” for insightful commentary on the ongoing decline of Western civilization, but, in the immortal words of Sweet Brown, “Ain’t nobody got time for that.” In actuality, this space may be end up being part of my escape from all that noise. I am embarking on the long journey of writing another novel, and plan on posting bits and pieces as I go.

    Which brings me to a question that I have been thinking about a lot this last month: What is the point of art when the whole world feels like it is about to burst into flames?

    Talk amongst yourselves.

  • The Prince is Dead, Long Live the Prince (of Darkness)

    John “Ozzy” Osbourne made quite a career out of the moniker, “Prince of Darkness.” The guy knew a good hook when he saw (or heard) one, but he was more than that to a few generations of fans now. Ozzy was a hero to every misfit who struggled to find their place in this crazy world. He was—and I mean this with all due respect, and today, a broken heart—he undisputed King of Fuckups.

    Anyone who has read his 2011 autobiography, I Am Ozzy, knows that the man should have died about a dozen times before Black Sabbath even started, that he wasn’t killed seems to imply some sort of preternatural intervention. It’s not our place to guess the intention of powers beyond our understanding, but I am glad it seemed to work in our favor.

    I first heard Black Sabbath on a purloined 8-track compilation, We Sold Our Soul For Rock ‘N’ Roll. I don’t remember who stole it or how it came into my possession, but, in retrospect, it’s only fitting that this gateway drug appeared by illicit means.

    Ozzy’s plaintive wail of, Oh, no! Please God help me! in the titular track makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up to this day even though I’ve heard it easily thousands of times. This was a guy in serious trouble, perhaps at the end of a road that started with possession of hot merchandise before leading to… to what? I had to know!

    The second song on that collection, The Wizard, follows the track order on the band’s first album and allows a small slice of light to cut through the incessant Birmingham cloud cover. Maybe the wizard will make everything all right after all. Nope.

    It’s the third track that sealed my fate as an Ozzy fan for nearly 50 years. Skipping the needle ahead past an iconic suite of jazz-inflected proto-metal from the Black Sabbath album, Warning, comes as, well… a warning, but like in one of those Japanese horror films, if you’ve heard it, it’s too fucking late for you.

    The crazy thing is, Warning is not even a Black Sabbath song, it’s a cover of a 1967 single by The Aynsley Dunbar Retaliation. The what now, you ask? And you would be right. At the time, Dunbar was hot from drumming on John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers’ A Hard Road, which featured, wait for it, future Fleetwood Mac instigator Peter Green. I swear, were there like twenty people left in England in the ’60s?

    Somehow Sabbath takes this throwaway 45 and turns it into a signature statement of intent. Geezer Butler’s bass announces the proceedings before Ozzy sets the scene:

    Now the first day that I met ya / I was looking in the sky / When the sun turned all a blur / And the thunderclouds rolled by

    And then it gets worse for our man, Oz:

    The sea began to shiver / And the wind began to moan / It must’ve been a sign for me / To leave you well alone

    I have yet to find the right vocabulary to explain what it is in Ozzy’s delivery of the word, “shiver,” but there is a realness to it. Even though he didn’t write the song, he saw that shit. You can’t convince me that he wasn’t drawing on some experience of being out there in that moaning wind, metaphorically, or not.

    The short chorus comes up fast with Ozzy lamenting:

    I was born without you, baby / But my feelings were a little bit too strong

    It’s the way he hits the word “strong” that kills me, because it is not. It is anything but, it may not even be in key, and yet it somehow incorporates all the pain and frustration of the outsider. It is not a howl against the void, but more like a capitulation with the dark.

    After a serious masterclass in band dynamics, Ozzy crawls his way back to the mic:


    Now the whole wide world is movin’ / ‘Cause there’s iron in my heart / I just can’t keep from cryin’ / ‘Cause you say we’ve got to part / Sorrow grips my voice as I stand here all alone…

    Game over. Fucking sorrow has gripped his voice, man! Has there ever been a more legitimate take on the word? Billie Holiday may have delivered one, but her voice, even at its most vulnerable, was beautiful. Ozzy’s delivery is tantamount to crying ugly.

    I remained a devoted fan through his being sacked by Sabbath and I reveled in his jaw-dropping rebirth with Randy Rhoads, Bob Daisley, and Lee Kerslake [say their names], and beyond. I have to admit that I harbored a few misguided proprietary feelings toward our man when he became a reality show until I realized that there was enough Ozzy for everyone. Until today when there wasn’t.

    If anyone has ever earned a rest, it’s Ozzy. I don’t know what else to say. There’s iron in my heart.

  • Submission (A Correspondence in Three Parts)

    (1)
    Greetings XXXX XXXXXXXX editors,

    I wanted to thank you all for sending my return envelope back; I’m just not sure what kind of message you were trying to send. Was the empty envelope a metaphor for the howling void that we all must someday face? Or perhaps my submission just left you speechless and unable to respond? I’m sure that with time, and the proper medicine, I’ll suss it out and all will finally be revealed… or, I could just ask. So, ’erm… what’s the deal?

    Yours envelopically,
    Ray Larsen

    (2)
    Hi Mr. Larsen,

    I hope you haven’t been deteriorating into madness while awaiting our reply.

    I apologize for the empty envelope and the subsequent foray into the land of unanswered questions. While I would like to claim artistic genius and expressive intent, it was sadly just a mistake. As the assistant editor (i.e. graduate student) I possess a very fine skill set for stuffing, licking and sending envelopes. Your envelope, unfortunately, missed the crucial first step. And now I must re-evaluate my postal prowess, sigh.

    Well, at the very least I can relieve your sufferings—the envelope was meant to hold a lovely blue little slip, bearing our logo and this message: “Thank you for your recent submission to XXXX XXXXXXXX XXXXXX. Though we are unable to include your work in this issue, we are glad that you gave us the opportunity to consider it. We wish you success in placing your work elsewhere. Thanks again, The Editors.”

    It tries very hard to be friendly while inevitably informing you that we are crushing dreams. We don’t like that part of the job much and we know that you like it even less, so really, I’m quite sorry that you were subjected to the empty envelope.

    Really it’s quite a profound little piece of paper. The color is really quite nice. And the size is wonderful. I’ve spent tens of minutes in the copy room, brushing off my math skills to figure out exactly what size will fit into a variety of envelopes.

    If you would like the little blue slip that the envelope was meant to contain, I’ll happily send it along. It’s a very nice slip.

    Yours apologetically,
    XXXXXXX XXXXXX
    Assistant Editor
    XXX

    PS Hopefully this little blunder doesn’t mean you will be too incapacitated by the proper envelop-related medications to submit to us in the future!

    (3)
    Greetings Ms. XXXXXX,

    Thank you for your enlightening, entertaining, and timely response to the vacant envelope imbroglio. At no time did I mean to impugn your prowess as it applies to stuffing, licking, etc. I am sure that the sheer volume of correspondence lends itself to the occasional unintended mystery.

    Please don’t let this aspect of your responsibilities weigh any heavier on your conscience than does the slip itself. I, for one, have started an art project with the myriad beautifully colored papers that have been sent my way. I am sure that the one you have been charged with discharging is lovely.

    I imagine it to be a medium Persian blue, as was the binding of Bailey’s A Treatise on the Seven Rays, reflecting a possible theosophical bent on the part of XXX. Or perhaps it is a less esoteric, but no less historically relevant, Prussian blue—one of the first synthetic pigments ever developed, and interestingly, an antidote for heavy metal poisoning.

    I don’t want to make more work for you, however, and I will simply wait until my next submission works its way through the editorial process. I will force myself to be content with the seasonally apropos light spring green version I still hold and cherish.

    Yours in the wild blue yonder,
    Ray Larsen

  • What’s in a Name? [Pt. 2]

    I was born Raymond Andrew Larsen in late-July of 1966, closing in on six decades ago as of this writing. Raymond is a family name, after a great-uncle on my father’s side, one of five born to an immigrant couple from the Azores. I think he helped keep my father on the straight and narrow after his father was out of the picture, a task with which even God themselves had limited obvious success.

    I have long suspected that my middle name came from Andy Nickolatos who happened to own the Black & White liquor store on the corner of Main St., a block and half from the house. I can neither confirm or deny—given that all parties, apart from myself, have passed on*—that the bestowal of Andrew either settled a bet or a sizable tab. I wonder what a middle name was worth in mid-60s commodities, and what that might translate into 21st-century dollars. It was probably a dodgy investment at best.

    By all accounts, my grandfather, a Dane named Larsen was a real piece of work. He and my grandmother, Elvira, were divorced—a rarity for Catholics in the 1950s—and he died when my dad was still pretty young. To this day, I have never seen an acknowledged photograph of the guy, although after dad passed I found a souvenir Los Angeles restaurant pic of him as a young kid sitting with two uptight-looking people. Not his usual crowd, to be sure.

    I know that Larsen in Danish means “son of Lars.” Having lived in California my whole life, the only Lars I know of is the drummer for Metallica, but we are roughly the same age. It would have been nice to fall into some of that Master of Puppets money, though.

    As dad got older, he dropped more stories of his strained relationship with his pater familias, none of them all too flattering. Of course, it was Louie’s name to claim or disavow, so we’re stuck with it, a tie to a lineage I really know little about. I’ve read that, like the Portuguese, the Danes have historically been really into boats, fish, and faded empire, so they should be my kind of people. Maybe we just got a bad one.

    After living under the Scandinavian surname for a half-century, I figured my pen name should pay homage to the side of Dad’s family I actually related to. Leão is Portuguese for lion, and given that, if pressed, I identify as a double Sun sign Leo, I can get behind that.

    Part of writing under another name, is the freedom a different headspace can afford you. At this point, Ray Larsen has done all kinds of different things, but they have followed a certain, if avowedly circuitous, path. This Leão motherfucker, though, who knows what shenanigans he might get up to?

    Quite coincidentally, the statement, “I read,” is translated in Portuguese as, “eu leio.” As far as Roman goes—or incongruously, “Román,” which denotes a Hungarian provenance (I don’t remember what I was smoke… erm, thinking)—it has historically simply meant, “a citizen of Rome.” If you’ve read your Phillip K. Dick, you’d know that we are all citizens of the Roman Empire, which never really ended but manipulates our materialistic and spiritually bankrupt world to this day.

    Wow, that got dark.

    As far as I know, Román Leão has no middle name, although he may be taking bids.

    *OK, Mom is still around, but either a) those characters cooked up a story that she believed. It was pretty early in the relationship, or b) she knew the gross percentage of GDP that the tab entailed and signed off on it. Either way, she ain’t sayin’.

  • What’s in a Name? [Pt. 1]

    I was enjoying the dubious honor of teaching English to Vallejo freshmen when, while getting ready one morning, a national news program featured a fellow word warrior from somewhere in the Midwest who had been fired when it was discovered that she had the temerity to have been writing Harlequin romances on the side.

    Now, let us just set aside the injustice of high school teachers having to do anything else besides the insanely demanding job listed on their CV, and let’s hope that the woman in question was writing for the same reason the rest of us do: she had to, or burst.

    Let’s look instead at the shortsightedness of a corn-fed school board deciding that they didn’t want someone, and I fight the impulse to use all caps here, who had actually written and published books to teach their children how to (checking notes)… write.

    I have never had the pleasure of reading a Harlequin, but as a kid who devoured Stephen King, William S. Burroughs, and Charles Bukowski, I am fascinated to know how much damage the board thought a formulaic romance might inflict on a young, impressionable mind. (We aren’t going to mention Clive Barker here as there may have been some actual scarring from those stories, although nothing some Richard Brautigan didn’t smooth over.)

    My point being, one would be hard pressed to find someone who had been driven to a life of debauchery and indulgence from something they read, and if they had, good for them. Given that I was working on my first novel at the time, however, and considering the amount of sex, drugs, and… Sasquatch it contained, I started thinking that a nom de plume, might be called for, perhaps even a nom de guerre.