In August of 2001 I met my youngest adopted brother, who I nick-named Mescaline Franklin and also wrote about under various names such as David and Mister Grey. He really disliked Mescaline Franklin as much as I dislike Jimmy. He is a man who eschews the use of drugs and, not knowing anything about them, misunderstood this reference to a meth-like substance used by roughnecks and other workers of long hours around dangerous machinery—such as panzer tank crews in the War to Save Hollywood—to achieve superhuman levels of focus. The combination of Benjamin Franklin-like polymath interest and auto-curation of 20th century media culture, like being able to name actors and actresses in obscure B-movies made before he was born, recommended that name to me as the best way to describe his eclectic intensity in a moniker.

Mescaline Franklin drove down to Baltimore from NYC once every other month for weekend training for almost 20 years. Nearing 50 years old, he had no desire to attend the Man Weekend to be used as a punching bag and tackle dummy for larger men a decade and more his junior. But Sean called him up and told him he was to bring me to Man Weekend, and he said, “Yes Sir,” and spent a week and hundreds of dollars carting me back and forth to the appointed place, and got punched, stabbed, grappled and whacked for his troubles.

Next to Gearhead Mister Saffrono and Uber Joe, Mescaline is the most competent driver I have traveled with in the east. To be clear, driving in The East and in the West are as different as a game of golf and a knife fight, and there is really no comparison.

After the day of fighting, Paul Bingham began to mingle with the various packs of knuckleheads gathered about. I was thrilled to see he and Mister Gray of InTheseGoingsDown discussing deep things on the porch. Paul’s Woman, Leanna, who videoed the boxing from ringside, said, “I’ve never seen Paul mingle this much.”

Paul then spoke to me, “It is so nice to meet Mister Gray—I really like his YouTube channel. It’s a shame Mescaline Franklin didn’t make it—I really wanted to meet him too.”

“You just spoke to him, bro—they are the same guy.”

Then these two men, who have both driven me around for entire days in different parts of the country that hates them so that I can investigate Leviathan’s more fetid folds of blubbery iniquity, were deep in conversation again, about a certain musician, a country music man who came out against the Stars and Bars. Anger flashed across the face of the man who was once a boy in the most evil city on earth being hunted by packs of Yutish Tribesmen, “Oh, wow, another artist I’ll never listen to again.”

This is the most endearing long term aspect of Mescaline Franklin’s personality, that he is the most tenacious citizen of The Land of Should. No matter what Is, this man will battle it on behalf of Should until his dying breath, battle it in his dreams, in his actions, in his art, with a rampant intensity that grants him not a single moment of rest. It is interesting that he and I have spent more time doing man stuff with each other than with any other person: we watched Baltimore burn in 2015 and were threatened by out-of-town military contractors for walking in my neighborhood. We have gone at it with blunt knives thousands of times, sticks hundreds of times, gloves dozens of times.

In July 2020, when a half dozen graduates of military colleges ghosted me for a training session and left me stranded in a park, in Henrico County, Virginia, with Porky PIG looking on as I played basketball with black college athletes to try and blend in, he drove from Northern New Jersey over night to extract me.

We have coauthored Hemavore, a novel and The Mind of Mescaline Franklin. I wrote numerous books at his request: Reverent Chandler among them. He has been the starting point for hundreds of my articles. We were refused service in Baltimore by a Central American cook, together. With all that we have in common, we are opposites. We were harassed by PIGs dozens of times each on our own, in different cities, and once together in Gray Haven, Baltimore County in 2002.

He is the most caring and concerned soul I have had the honor to know, caring more about a good dozen people than himself and caring about the evil world that hates him as much as its Satanic Majesty despises him. I have just cleaned his apartment and am making barely passable bachelor food that he will think is great, having his place and his only door key to myself for two nights and two days.

He is driving across three states, to take a man to the doctor, a man that in no way deserves this charity, but is being ferried to the meat puppet mechanic nonetheless.

Yet, when Mescaline Franklin smiles at a stranger, they cringe or shiver in terror; when he laughs, women shiver and quake.

Many times in the past and perhaps many times in the future, I have sat with him fully immersed in IS as he rants for SHOULD and I snicker at his deepest concerns as a passing entertainment.

He will help a stranger on impulse.

I will walk around a soul in need as a calculated cruelty—have actually stepped over gutter fallen men and watched children and women be brutalized, using the event as writing content. Such events serve me as a means of killing another portion of my weakness, taking me further away within, even as they hurt and cut him within.

In the meantime, we have both noted, people who meet us both tend to judge me the nicer. We sat at dinner the other night as he raged over a pit bull rampaging about a woman and child and I laughed, noting that a woman with a baby and a pitbull should have one eat the other as a reflection of her own bestiality. Women glance at me and smile and he and wince, when it is he who would rescue them from a dog or their brutal boyfriend and I who would order another diet coke and begin taking notes. I find this a fitting thing in this Hollowed [1] Land of Lies.

So there we sat: Mister Should, stewing over injustice and Mister Is, noting that of the four young women dining next to us, that for once he found the thinnest girl in a troupe the most attractive, and that in a world that had finally been shorn of all justice I might have easily acquired her at the expense of her big-boned cock-blocker, and that he would be welcome to breed on the smaller blonde.

He realized then, that our worlds of should, are as opposite as could be and that I only live in the world of IS because my should is impossible, until his completely crumbles and barbarism might entirely reign.

Here is to the most civilized man I know, whose caring about justice and rights and the general good in the face of such indecency that is Modernity has painted such a scowl across his face that strangers who meet us mistake this old misanthrope for the Good Guy and him for the Bad Guy.

Thanks bro—if the cops pull us over and start beating your ass while I play grandpa—I promise to stab one of the PIGS in the neck and drench you in his gore. We could not be more different, but we hate the same people and they hate us. Here is to a hateful end.

…

Notes

-1. No, not hallowed, this country is entirely obscene and incapable of grace.