In 2026 I'm Resolving to...Flip Out...With Great Frequency!
Everyone wants to lose weight, stop drinking and drugging for the new year. But what happens when your tastes are more, dissolute? Not planning on letting Trumpian perversion pervert your filth? Eh?
Standing in front of a tub of soapy water, it was quickly twigged that if you spun the egg beater fast enough you could create bubbles. The speed, the spinning silvered blades and the…drama, of it all, was enthralling. If you were four years old. And I was.
“How’d you like school today?” My mother and my father were ON it, in regards to early life education, and my answer would be closely listened to.
“It was GREAT. I had a lot of fun!”
This is how life prepares you for horror since it had never dawned on the four year old that this was the beginning of a series of involvements that were anything but. By which I mean next thing I knew I was having to go to this place every day, and no more egg beaters now.
No. Now there were book bags. And by the time I was 13, the Jolly Stompers, Mike Tyson’s gang from Brownsville, Brooklyn were on my ass. None of which was great OR fun. But the habit had been instilled and I can’t have helped feeling a little bit betrayed by the unrequested drive to “make something” of my self.
“Eugene can’t come to the phone now,” he would sigh. “He just climbed out of the window and ran out into the field.” And for an extra dollop of integrity he’d add, “naked”…
I’m quite sure that I’d have tired of egg beaters and soapy water before long but if I had guessed that the trade-off would have been endless staff meetings and any and all manner of adult effluvia, I’d have killed myself.
“You have the LEAST integrity of any one I’ve ever met!”
The speaker is now a theoretical physicist who back then was chafing under the phone protocol where I’d tell him I didn’t feel like talking to this person or that, and he resented both that I was getting the calls AND that he had to lie for me. So we worked on a two-step whereby when someone called who I didn’t feel like talking to, I’d climb out of our window and run out into the field we lived next to.
“Eugene can’t come to the phone now,” he would sigh. “He just climbed out of the window and ran out into the field.” And for an extra dollop of integrity he’d add, “naked,” which while true, probably wouldn’t have broached his honesty kick to NOT mention that part.
Whoever was calling would laugh, because…well, who would do such a thing? But I took umbrage at the integrity thing.
“I’ve got MORE integrity than the last half dozen people you’ve met,” I pushed back. “We should have an integrity contest because,” and here’s where later I’d just quote Tony Montana, “…even when I lie I tell the truth!”
And so we did. I was a model of probity. For? For as long as it would take to win.
One year passed. Then two.
“What did you do last night?” I was being asked by a girlfriend who had just hit me with the “we should have an open relationship” deal.
“I went out.”
“With who?”
“Jennifer.”
“What did you all do?”
“Went to a movie.”
“What did you do after that?”
“Had sex.”
She had asked for an open relationship on Thursday but didn’t expect that meant fucking on Friday. I was starting to think that integrity was a lot of work.
There was some shouting, and a certain amount of upset. She had asked for an open relationship on Thursday but didn’t expect that meant fucking on Friday. I was starting to think that integrity was a lot of work. Especially as it didn’t cohere nicely always with what I really wanted to do.
In any case in the grips of an acid-fueled vision quest I had a moment. A Road to Damascus moment: integrity as artifice was worthless and man, in his natural state, should endeavor to best play the cards he’s been dealt and here is the key…according mostly to his tastes.
I was full of this and as I sat at the LA Press club with a Columbia professor of journalism watching, for some unknown reason, Benicio Del Toro hold court with some folks, I told her so.
“Well I’m Jewish,” she said, “and the basis for my thinking is framed by the Torah and the Talmud. So…that actually sounds a little crazy to me.”
For what it’s worth that was the last dinner she ever had with me, and while her point made me laugh at the time I realized, in the same flash that delivered me there that that was me in my natural state.
And then something strange happened. I relaxed. Integrity, schmetegrity. I would live a life examined and quietly embrace the self I was without regret, or excuse. Many before me had had the same journey. A path, a path interrupted, a vision, sometimes accompanied by hysterical blindness, or not, and then DESTINY. That is who you ARE and not who you were trying to be.
Sadly most of those people were monsters so a promise to myself. Call it my first (and last) resolution: leave people materially better off as a result of meeting you (than not). Outside of that? EVERYTHING FUCKING GOES!
Of course in the age of Trumpian discourse where this has become de facto policy, it seems I must answer the question once put to me by the aforementioned Jennifer when she had asked what I had done one weekend and, in the bloom of integrity, I told her.
But g-ddamn this Trump thing. The lies, the prevarications, obfuscations, the misdirections. It’s almost like he’s ashamed for raping 12 year olds.
“What’s the difference between you and a scumbag?” she asked.
And in Trump times with battle lines drawn all over the place it’s as good of a question as any one could ask and without even a pause for a laugh I answered then, as I do now: “most dyed in the wool scumbags work very hard to conceal their scumbaggery. I’m honest about mine. Which is even why we’re having this discussion.”
She thought about it and agreed that was less scumbaggy than if I had just lied about what I had done but what I had done was predictably exactly what I would have expected that anyone at that point would have expected me to do.
It’s all kind of very Princess Bride-y.
But g-ddamn this Trump thing. The lies, the prevarications, obfuscations, the misdirections. It’s almost like he’s ashamed for raping 12 year olds. And he SHOULD be. That and more (like jailed). Because what he’s accused of doing violates my sense of fair play.
So sure, he’s being the best Trump that he imagines he can be, but that part about NOT hurting other people and leaving them materially better off he missed. So when you look at the millions of dollars he funneled to pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, you know that very little of that lucre made it into any 12 year old’s hands.
Even if it had it doesn’t explain this being on his dance card. Especially since the girl is reported as having been tied to a bed at the time. Far cry from this being a mutual benefit society.
Leaving me the unlikeliest defender of the exploited. A known sybarite having an issue with a man of means getting freaky. He, Diddy, Bills (Clinton, Gates and Cosby) and the rest of this vaunted crew of kid fuckers and rapists though are first and foremost LIARS. Both about their dogheaded criminality (what? You thought this would be a forever secret?) and their place in space.
You see the difference is I never thought integrity was for suckers. I admired people who could do it, and I did it in my own way, as it was a noted concern of mine, but it dawns on me that for the aforementioned crew this was just business as usual and what was integrity but a word that the world they lived in didn’t deserve?
“Hey man…I’m sorry I tried to sleep with your fiancee, and your best friend, and your Mom.” In my mind the key words here were “sorry” and “tried”. “I had gone a little crazy.”
He accepted my apology, the second one I’ve ever made, by my count, and our friendship continued on, unburdened by past mistakes. The aforementioned men of means however? They apologize to no one for anything because, well “fuck the world.” An ugly sentiment in thought and deed. Lacking in both integrity and morality.
Is this me talking? Yes, it is, because fucking the world is not a guarantee of fun for all but rather a singular guarantee of fun for the fuckers. The aforementioned fuckers whose will to power and its exercise is as close as they’re likely to get to FUN.
And while my excuse/reason has always been connected to me being a skosh crazy, they’d turn their noses up at this characterization which is what makes them the scumbag criminals I am not.
So if you’ll excuse me, it’s time to fill a tub with soapy water, sans the egg beater, and wash the filth off of me after having explained, prolix yeah, why there are absolutely NO resolutions to be made this year. Easy (er?) to do when you’re exactly who you are, happy about it, and not likely to go to prison for it I guess.
Final note: I AM endeavoring in 2026 to viciously and with a furious anger attack those fools who expected to be suffered lightly, but that’s by no means any kind of new policy on Planet Robinson.
And wait…there’s more…I’VE GOT TO BE ME…buy it to believe it…
“For Eugene S. Robinson, performance art provocateur and Renaissance man, best known as the voice and force behind Oxbow and Whipping Boy, his latest era is nothing short of a wholesale rebirth—a second coming of fire, wit, and reverie.
Following the disintegration of his longtime outfit, Oxbow, Robinson, now residing in Spain, has set his sights on new frontiers. In the prolific artist’s latest incarnation, he is a revered literary figure with a rabid Substack following, lead singer of international metal act Bunuel, and now a sublime interpreter of the Great American Songbook.
Produced by Ako-Lite label head John Getze (Jim Jones All Stars, STAHV), I’ve Gotta Be Me” is the lead single from Eugene Sings!, a full-length collection of reimagined standards featuring Robinson’s unmistakable, iconic yowl in service to timeless classics.” — At the Barrier
And if books are still your thing and you still do books, please do the one Uncle Barry is doing, The Inimitable Sounds of Love: A Threesome in Four Acts…or the memoir A Walk Across Dirty Water and Straight Into Murderer’s Row, from Amazon…Or the Bookshop.Org dealie: Here?
And if you’d like to book a book show? Please DM.
This is a great exploration of the difference between any trickster god and Zeus. I prefer the trickster gods… their goal, if they admit to any, is to create transformation toward insight. Zeus just wants more power and self gratification. Great read!