The Rise and Fall of Harry Hamid*

It is the eyeliner, is how you know. More than the famous discolorations on the skin, liver spots shall we call them, more than the sense of shrunkenness. And not the eyes themselves, no not that, they can remain as before for all I care of them, and not the eyelids, either, but a red line around the eyes, as though bright red eyeliner has been applied. It happens in the very old, consistently too, at some point of aging, and so it was with my breakfast partner, Buck.
Breakfast partner, pfshaw. The hardest thing was to look, the eating was reprehensible, what with the essentially raw eggs supposedly scrambled, he might as well have drunk them.
“Missouri… and Iowa… and Kansas… and Missouri... and Nebraska,” he said. This was the first thing he’d said to me ever during these our daily silent breakfasts at the West Gray Café. I was dumbfounded, it is not too much to say dumbfounded.
For lack of a better response, I said this: “Wh-wh-what?” and I set down my fork in order better to listen t…

This one is all about me.
I’m Harry and I was born in Omaha, which is in Nebraska, which turn and turn about is in America and I’d wager you have heard of that, America, probably, so I refuse to take this description any wider. If I wished to be all dramatic and literary and pretentious about it, then I’d say something like this: “I came into this world in the Year of Our Lord One Thousand Nine Hundred and Seventy-Three.” But I do not wish to be all dramatic and literary and pretentious about it, so I’ll just say I was born in 1973. That’s hardly a year one is likely to associate with God much anyway.
Let’s get on with this.
To locate Omaha on a map, first you get a map and then you point to the very center of it. Look at where you’ve pointed. Your finger is somewhere around Omaha. To be honest, your finger is probably in the middle of a cornfield, but the cornfield is not far from Omaha. Back then, I mean in the Seventies and not when you pointed, the city was made up of stockyards and…

There are many people, so many they can almost not be avoided and sometimes not at all and a few of these people I cannot avoid mentioning when I write. However, there exists one person, a person in particular, I have avoided, mostly, mentioning when I write until today.

I mention him here and now and I am sorry for that. And that person’s name is:
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP.
I know I know but the thing is, what you should understand is I enjoy talking of politics as I enjoy other things in my life too, say, scratching rashy skin or picking the tiniest of hangnails or waiting about to vomit when nauseous.
There are friends, bloggers, and other people as well who say this to me: “Harry, why don’t you ever write about President Donald Trump in your blog?” They deserve an answer, I believe, and so this is it. If you choose to continue reading and why not, then you may notice my answer comes in three parts.
First, I have nothing to add to the discussion. I lack what might be called a novel angle.…

Obviously, it all brings back many memories for me. All of the people phone me, or a lot of people phone me, anyway, and they ask me what I think of the boys. All I can say is all there is to be said and all there is to be said is that I am glad it looks as though they’re getting out of there.
A cave is not a tree, how true that is – although I suppose, if pressed, one could do a rough list of similarities – and twelve Thai boys are not the one boy which was me, Harry.
As for words of advice, what good are they? Keep away from endorsements, maybe. I believe I’d tell the boys that. Yes. To sell one’s name and likeness as I did for a cheap knock-off version of Stretch Armstrong dolls was a mistake and my appearance on “Webster” a disaster, and “well-documented,” too, as they say.
Even now, even today, there are some times, not a lot of times but some times, when I get recognized as Harry the little boy in the tree from 1981. How many people are there who can say they’ve seen the top of N…

I was driving down Fairview Street when the man with the big head saw me. His eyes were too too wide and to me, being in the moment as I was, as we all are mostly, I suppose, the eyes appeared as though bloodshot. To a degree which would concern me, were they my eyes, anyway. A doctor may disagree with me on this.
I was nearly home. His car pulled out around me and that’s when I saw his big head and his probably problematically bloodshot eyes and he was spitting on his own window shouting he was so angry.
“I just want to go home,” I said to him, though uselessly as there was no way the man with the big head could hear me.
I just want to go home a lot. My friends, who are all getting divorced, are not there in my home, and my mother, who hates the President, is not in my home, and my clients are not in my home, either, not even that one client who threw her shoe at my head on Monday. At my head! Everybody is angry and more than usual but I don’t want to be angry too.
It’s music, mostly. I…

“Report: Netflix Bans Employees from Looking at Each Other for More Than Five Seconds.”By now you have seen this news headline, or else not, it’s all the same to me, honestly, because I have got to clear the air as this was my idea and only my idea and also my only idea in my capacity as Netflix Executive Vice President of Sexual Harassment Curbation and Affairs. What a mouthful that is...
The idea was sound. I maintain even now that the idea – my idea – was and is as sound as sound could be. You’ll see what I mean. I am confident of this.
See, in i.t. you’ve got Bruce, and then in accounting you’ve got Rita with the pretty hose who always carries with her those mints, and she has dimples that look like my Aunt Stacy’s. If Bruce from i.t. is told he cannot stare at Rita from accounting, despite her very pretty hose, for more than five seconds at a go then it solves or rather it prevents a great many problems. Even though when I give a speech at staff meetings now, the crowd appears as t…