in loving memory:

Yehudah Lev son of Shelomo

Natan the Levite

with special thanks:

Bernie Boudreaux, Larry Estes, Mike Faris, Steve

Garriott, Paul Gustie, Tom Keogh, Steve McCarthy,
Eric Oberchmidt, Stan Paik, Shane Rooks, John
Schellman, Roger Stouff, Brad Tollefson, Dalt Wonk.

ad astra per alla porci!

 <title> <?php (KARMIC WARRIORS ; ? >

<? php if ( is_single ( by ) ( ? > &raquo;

blog Archive <?php ) <? php bk_title () ;
?> dudleyclark </title> < ?> />

< meta name= “generator” content= “comedy, philoso-

phy, karma, blogs <? Php bloginfo (‘version one’) ; ?>” / >
A serious and good philosophical work
could be written consisting entirely
of jokes.
LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN
a blank page
 Midway this way of life we’re upon,
I awoke to find myself in a dark wood,
Where the right road was wholly lost and gone.
Hell, Canto 1 —Dante
a blank page
PLAYING CATCH ON RANDOM STREET

IN THE SHADOW of
a northwest icon, en-
meshed in the mecha-
nism that is SEAT-
TLE, aimlessly roam
people of all shapes
and sizes, kinds, col-
ors and sexes; people
of differing propensi-
ties, predispositions,
perspectives, pre-
dilections and pecu-
liarities; some who are
happily engaged, self-
certain, even driven;
others who are lost,
subservient, and
without wills of their
own. Some are prepos-
terously prosperous,
painfully trendy and
pointlessly hip, while
others are battered
and chagrined, per-
manently nonplussed,
and poignantly without
a clue; some of them
are right brain domi-
nate, some of them
are left-brain domi-
nate; few if any of
them is like Pomeroy
Jarvis.

<div><br />
 After brushing his teeth, Pomeroy Jarvis dresses
in bluejeans and T-shirt, a woolen L.L. Bean Lum-
berman’s coat and a Mariners baseball cap. Then he
decides on what his day will be like. Here is how he
does this: he uses a BB maze, the kind you roll around
and try to make the BBs fall into little holes. This
particular BB maze is an antique one decorated with a
colorful image of Betty Boop.

If all the BBs fall into the little holes in the sixty
seconds he allots himself, then he determines he will
have a “good” day. Whereas, if only one or two—or,
worse, none—fall into the little holes, then he pre-
pares himself for a “bad” day. “Good” and “bad” are
defined thus: bad might include a missed bus; a for-
gotten favorite bladder pen; wilted lettuce on his
sandwich; poor service on his cellphone; having to
stand too close to someone in line at Starbucks, etc.
While a good day might include—besides the opposite
of everything already mentioned—a smile from the
red-headed, freckled receptionist; no rain; plenty of
seating on the bus; a free Latte; finding a wallet in the
men’s room filled with twenty dollar bills. And so on.
KW As he steps outside, having divined that his day will
be moderately bad (only 3 out of the 8 BBs went into
their little holes), rain starts to fall.
(“Fall,” to most people, means an object being com-
pliant with the Laws of Nature as described by Isaac
Newton; it means, in essence, motion from a perceived
higher place to a perceived lower one. Thus, rain in
most geographic locales can be said to “fall” from
above. This is not always the case in Seattle. In
Seattle, rain—in other parts of the country known as
“mist”—can fall from almost any direction, even per-
pendicular to the earth.)
He adjusts his Mariners baseball cap so that its
bill is facing forward, and sets off for his favorite
Starbucks, and another glorious day at work.
And what PJ does for a living is this: he presses
buttons. The buttons form a part of a keyboard that
rests on his desk beneath a large, flat illuminated
KW
screen. When he presses the buttons on his key-
board, characters appear on the illuminated screen.
According to which buttons he presses, he can control
the shape and frequency of the characters’ appear-
ance.
Here is what some of his characters look like:

<?php get_header(); ?>

<div class=”outer”>
<div class=”inner”>
<div class=”middlecol”>
<div id=”content” class=”narrowcolumn”>
<?php if (have_posts()) : ?>
<?php while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>
<div class=”post”>
<div class=”punkt”>
<div class=”dot”>
<div class=”dot-<?php

This is a foreign language called PHP (a recursive

acronym for “PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor”). Among
some of the other foreign languages Pomeroy has
mastered are Perl (Practical Extraction and Report-
ing Language), HTML (Hypertext Markup Language),
C++, Cobol (COmmon Business Oriented Language) and
Java ™ (and, of course, JavaScript ™), along with a
smattering of many others. He tried to study French
 and Spanish, but to master those languages one has to
look at and speak with other people.
Here is an example of PJ’s sense of humor, as well
as what he does in his spare time. This is the well-
know Western European (North American continent
version) ditty, “Ninety-nine Bottles of Beer on the
Wall,” written in Perl:

‘’=~( ‘(?{‘ .(‘`’ |’%’) .(‘[‘ ^’-’)

.(‘`’ |’!’) .(‘`’ |’,’) .’”’. ‘\\$’
.’==’ .(‘[‘ ^’+’) .(‘`’ |’/’) .(‘[‘
^’+’) .’||’ .(‘;’ &’=’) .(‘;’ &’=’)
.’;-’ .’-’. ‘\\$’ .’=;’ .(‘[‘ ^’(‘)
.(‘[‘ ^’.’) .(‘`’ |’”’) .(‘!’ ^’+’)
.’_\\{‘ .’(\\$’ .’;=(‘. ‘\\$=|’ .”\|”.( ‘`’^’.’
).((‘`’)| ‘/’).’).’ .’\\”’.+( ‘{‘^’[‘). (‘`’|’”’) .(‘`’|’/’
).(‘[‘^’/’) .(‘[‘^’/’). (‘`’|’,’).( ‘`’|(‘%’)). ‘\\”.\\”’.( ‘[‘^(‘(‘)).
‘\\”’.(‘[‘^ ‘#’).’!!—’ .’\\$=.\\”’ .(‘{‘^’[‘).
(‘`’|’/’).( ‘`’|”\&”).(
‘{‘^”\[“).( ‘`’|”\””).( ‘`’|”\%”).( ‘`’|”\%”).( ‘[‘^(‘)’)). ‘\\”).\\”’.
(‘{‘^’[‘).( ‘`’|”\/”).( ‘`’|”\.”).( ‘{‘^”\[“).( ‘[‘^”\/”).( ‘`’|”\(“).(
‘`’|”\%”).( ‘{‘^”\[“).( ‘[‘^”\,”).( ‘`’|”\!”).( ‘`’|”\,”).( ‘`’|(‘,’)).
‘\\”\\}’.+( ‘[‘^”\+”).( ‘[‘^”\)”).( ‘`’|”\)”).( ‘`’|”\.”).( ‘[‘^(‘/’)).
‘+_,\\”,’.( ‘{‘^(‘[‘)). (‘\\$;!’).( ‘!’^”\+”).( ‘{‘^”\/”).( ‘`’|”\!”).(
‘`’|”\+”).( ‘`’|”\%”).( ‘{‘^”\[“).( ‘`’|”\/”).( ‘`’|”\.”).( ‘`’|”\%”).(
‘{‘^”\[“).( ‘`’|”\$”).( ‘`’|”\/”).( ‘[‘^”\,”).( ‘`’|(‘.’)). ‘,’.((‘{‘)^
‘[‘).(“\[“^ ‘+’).(“\`”| ‘!’).(“\[“^ ‘(‘).(“\[“^ ‘(‘).(“\{“^ ‘[‘).(“\`”|
‘)’).(“\[“^ ‘/’).(“\{“^ ‘[‘).(“\`”| ‘!’).(“\[“^ ‘)’).(“\`”| ‘/’).(“\[“^
‘.’).(“\`”| ‘.’).(“\`”| ‘$’).”\,”.( ‘!’^(‘+’)). ‘\\”,_,\\”’ .’!’.(“\!”^
‘+’).(“\!”^ ‘+’).’\\”’. (‘[‘^’,’).( ‘`’|”\(“).( ‘`’|”\)”).( ‘`’|”\,”).(
‘`’|(‘%’)). ‘++\\$=”})’ );$:=(‘.’)^ ‘~’;$~=’@’| ‘(‘;$^=’)’^ ‘[‘;$/=’`’;

<div><br />

KW Even when he was in Kindergarten, Pomeroy was

good with numbers and drawing and using clay and
scissors and brass clips and fluffy string and deli-
cious paste and smearing hand paints and applying
glitter. What he was not good at was this: looking at
the teacher, looking at other students, and looking at
the chalkboard; also, he was not good at talking to the
teacher, talking to other students, standing and talk-
ing at the chalkboard. Some of this had to do with
the fact that Pomeroy could not see well from an early
age. Some of this had to do with his naturally reti-
cent predisposition.
Most of it had to do with his parents.
Pomeroy’s parents were an ill-suited couple who
suffered from terrible and persistent hangovers.

KW

Night and day, or so it seemed to young Pomeroy—

and, later, to old Pomeroy—they fought. And when
they fought they would do these things: they would
yell; they would throw things (glass ashtrays were a
favorite); they would use bad language, and they would

tell their only child, Pomeroy, that he was all that was
holding them together, and that as soon as he grew up
they would get a divorce.
But this was just a lie; they never did get a di-
vorce, even after Pomeroy went through the trouble
 of growing up. In Pomeroy’s adult judgment, he
concluded his parents had become so used to fight-
ing that life without it would have seemed empty.
Pomeroy, through his college years, would occasion-
ally visit home to see if his parents were still fighting;
satisfied that indeed they were, he would return to
his dorm room to smoke dope until he couldn’t talk,
drink beer until his head spun, and stare endlessly and
without conscious intent into the alluring blue that
was his computer’s screen.

<div><br />

It could be fairly reported that Pomeroy lacked

for friends all his life.
Even as a child he had been alone, which is not to
say lonely.
Pomeroy always had an easy time amusing himself.
He had learned to read early, and pursued this activ-
ity with alarming ferocity. First, he devoured all the
books in his parents’ house; this had not taken long.
They were, in no particular order: The Holy Bible, Gone
With the Wind, Tobacco Road.
He had not understood any of what he read, but
that was OK with
him; he liked to read.
Soon he acquired
a library card and
began to read all
the books he could
carry, starting with
science fiction; later,
he moved on to more
serious topics, with
KW a special interest in
science.
Pomeroy longed to
build a rocket ship
and live on the moon.
When he was ten
he was given a pet poodle. He loved him dearly, but
his pet poodle soon committed suicide.
There has always been a component to Pomeroy’s
soul that determined life was basically meaningless,
but you must go on. You must put on your blue jeans,
pull on your NIRVANA T-shirt, adjust your Mariners
baseball cap and continue to play this game called Life,
even if you would rather not. Even if, like your pet
poodle, you would rather commit suicide.
In years to come, Pomeroy would adopt this as his
heraldic motto: Item Not Won; Similar Items Found.
In Latin (a dead language nobody really knows how
KW
to pronounce, and one Pomeroy never learned to read
or write), it would go something like this: Item non
won; similis items instituo.

<div><br />

When it became
time for Pomeroy
to find a job—after
the graduation cer-
emony his parents
forgot to attend—
he had such an easy
time of it he hardly
had to try. In fact,
there were so many
recruiters who at-
tended the gradua-
tion ceremony that
all Pomeroy (along
with many others)
had to do was sign a
piece of paper and
move that same day
from a tiny, win-
dowless dorm room into a bright, roomy condo. It was
that simple.
A snap.
 And the company that snapped up Pomeroy on the
glorious day of his graduation was MicronSearch, a
software company adored by some and endured by
everyone else.
But all that was years ago. And during all those
years, Pomeroy had seen most of his contemporaries
at MicronSearch move up the ladder to larger offices,
or simply retire to sail around the world. But he had
done neither of these things. He had steadfastly in-
sisted on remaining in the little windowless office that
had replaced his little windowless dorm room; he was,
he thought, happy exactly where he was, doing exactly
what he did. And the people who owned MirconSearch
weren’t going to argue with him. The people who
owned MicronSearch were also happy with where he
was, and with exactly what it was he did.
But something was beginning to happen to Pomeroy
Jarvis as he approached 40: he was beginning to slow
down.
Perhaps the voice of his soul was changing. “Life is
meaningless, but you must go” on was starting to sound
like “Life is meaningless, I was wrong about the rest.”

<div><br />

On this unremarkable, November day—the sky a

slate gray with purplish clots, the street glistening
with moisture from the previous night’s rain com-
mingled with rain from the current morning’s mois-
ture—men and women hurry along sidewalks, some dry
beneath blossoms of umbrellas, others hunched for-
ward to avoid rain falling on their faces and running

KW
their makeup. Lines are beginning to form outside the
thousands of Starbucks that populate Seattle, and
groggy-eyed panhandlers are wheezing, coughing and
shuffling their way to work.
Pomeroy has to do this each and every morning:
he has to walk past a gauntlet of wheezing, coughing,
shuffling panhandlers.
He hates that he has to walk past them; he hates
that they exist.
Early one morning once, before he had had his
Latte (i.e., before his brain was operating properly),
he made the mistake (he views it to have been that) KW
of giving one of the panhandlers some change. Now, to
this day, the panhandler he gave the change to smiles
and nods whenever he sees Pomeroy, and Pomeroy is
uncomfortable with this.
There is a part of him that would like to take this
panhandler aside and present him with a stern lecture
on the virtues of employment and paying taxes, only a)
he would be afraid to be alone with him, and b) there
was always the possibility he might be wrong.
There is also another part of him that has
searched for a better route to the bus stop. By bet-
ter, he means one that passes another Starbucks but
not another gauntlet of wheezing, coughing, shuf-
fling panhandlers. So far, that part of him has been
stymied; sadly, Pomeroy is no Magellan. For all his
searching—and there had not really been that much—
he has failed to discover a better route to the bus
stop, or a better Starbucks than the one with which
he is so long familiar.
So each and every morning he walks past a gauntlet
of wheezing, coughing, shuffling panhandlers.
And he hates it. But, then, everyone else does,
too.
The panhandler he once gave change to smiles and
nods and doffs his hat. There had never been an
occasion in his life when Pomeroy was doffed by any-
 one—doffing having fallen into comfortable anachro-
nism.
He just wants more money, decides Pomeroy. He is
doffing me for money.
It seems somehow a sad thing, this reduction of
doffing to an act of
pecuniary gain. It is
as if the Graces had
swept up Their scant
belongings and left
our planet, in search
of greener pastures.
A chill runs
through Pomeroy’s
thin, pale, muscousy
frame; a vague,
creakiness creeps
into his joints and
ligaments, like tunnel-
ing heteroptera. His
eyes shift focus and
roll off the bearded,
doffing panhandler
and his sign and his bowling bag, to the inviting glass
door of his favorite Starbucks. Inside, it will be
warm and dry, with wooden chairs that scrape on ter-
razzo floors and echo just like the chairs had done
when he was in elementary school. And there will be a
big, faux fireplace with an eternal flame, like the one
at JFK’s grave. And there will be tables scattered
with today’s Seattle Times and the Weekly and this
KW month’s Wired and People magazines.
And there will be WiFi.
But, best of all, there will not be any wheezing,
coughing, shuffling panhandlers, or panhandlers of any
kind. And there will be no more doffing.
 (People in Se-
attle, as a general
rule, do not doff;
most wear black
leather and avoid
eye contact alto-
gether.)
Turns out his
Latte is not free.
He did not really
expect it to be, hav-
ing put only 3 out KW10
of the possible 8
BBs into their little
holes. But one could
always hope.
He stands, Latte
in hand, and sips. He is surrounded by a roomful of
vaguely familiar faces, and this is as it should be; af-
ter all, he has been coming to this Starbucks since the
day it opened, fifteen years ago. But still he knows
no one, and no one knows him. In the years that have
unraveled since he began sipping Lattes here, he has
seen hundreds of faces appear and disappear behind
the warm, green plastic counters. Perhaps some had
finished grad school and moved on; perhaps some had
become famous musicians or novelists and moved on;
perhaps some had found better jobs or a new hair
stylist or a better yoga teacher or achieved Samadhi
and moved on; one thing was certain: they had moved
on. Moved on with their lives. And in this, Pimlico
Jester has something in common with them. He, too,
has moved on with his life. On and on and so on. And
now he is buying his (he does a quick calculation)
5, 467th Latte (another quick calculation places his
total to date investment with Starbucks corporation
at approximately $14,000US); but still he knows no
one, and no one knows him.
Except the bearded, doffing panhandler.
Pomeroy can see him through the glass that sepa-
 rates them, warm on one side, cold on the other.
Glass is like this: it’s real and not real. Nor is it so
much wall as membrane. A membrane that appears to
offer safety and security, but is in fact exquisitely
pervious; a rock thrown or insult hurled could easily
collapse it into glistening rubble.
Pomeroy, however, is not thinking about the para-
doxical nature of glass as he watches the panhandler.
He is waiting. And what he was waiting for is this: an
opportunity to steal out of Starbucks in such a manner
that he will not have to have further contact with the
bearded panhandler.
Being doffed makes him feel sulky.
While he refrains from exiting Starbucks, he stud-
ies the situation.
It had never occurred to Pomeroy Jarvis during
his 40 years on earth to ponder things too deeply, if
at all. He is convinced he has no answers to anything
someone else couldn’t more easily divine. He is also
convinced his opinion is just that, and ought to be kept
from public view and there-
fore criti- cism. Everyone
on TV has an opinion;
everyone who writes for
newspapers, or who publish-
es blogs has an opinion; if
there were answers to the
problems that plague the
world—the few that he’s
aware of— by now they
would have been figured
out, what with so many
voices talk- ing all the time.
Pomeroy Jarvis is nei-
ther a reg- istered driver
KW11 of auto- mobiles, nor a
practicing participant in
the American system of vote casting.
He studies the sign the panhandler holds in his
grubby hands.
This seems original. But, of course, not true.
What’s true is this: panhandlers are hopeless alcohol-
ics (like his own parents), addicts of things far worse
than books. Also another thing that is true about
panhandlers: they will say anything to part you from
your money. Their signs are contrived to appeal to our
weaker instincts. For instance. The reason so many
panhandlers have dogs is because there are so many
dog lovers in the world. And dog lovers will give money
to a panhandler with a dog just so they’ll be able to
feed their dog. Of course, the panhandler will feed
his dog something, but dog food is cheap; the rest
of that money will go directly into a liquor store cash KW12
register.
The fact that the bearded, doffing panhandler
holds a sign that suggests he loves to read is just an-
other ruse, along the same lines as having a dog.
The panhandler knows a lot of people in Seattle
love to read; he also knows it will warm these people’s
hearts to believe that he would rather read than be
drunk. So they will give him their change, believing
that, once he has accumulated enough, he will take it
straight to Barnes & Noble and purchase books that
will ennoble his mind. But this will not be the case, a
Latte sipping Pomeroy Jarvis concludes.
The change they give will instead enable his drink-
ing.
As Social Security has done for his parents.
He is unpleasantly surprised when his Latte runs
out. He glances at the electronic clock on his wrist.
He hasn’t time enough for a second Latte.
He has to get to work.
Most of the other people in the Starbucks are also
looking at their electronic watches. They, too, have to
get to work.
Pomeroy crushes his Starbucks double-lined re-
cycled paper cup nearly completely into a ball before
he drops it into a handsome, simulated wood trash-
can. He saunters to the door and waits. Soon, several
 leather-clad men and women join him. They all appear
uncomfortable, glancing out the warm/cold glass mem-
brane at the gauntlet of wheezing, coughing, shuffling
panhandlers.
The panhandlers, for their part, also having no-
ticed the time on their own electronic watches, stand
to attention and outstretch their paper cups.
Their dogs bark and wag tails in anticipation.
Not a word is spoken among the leather-clad group
that has grown in number at the door. One of them,
apparently in possession of a leadership strain, leans
on the push bar and leads the crowd outside.
Bedlam ensues as the well-dressed Employed exit
the Starbucks and pass the shabbily-dressed Unem-
ployed.

Pomeroy Jarvis heads for the curb; he’s done this

before. He jockeys to get as much space and as many
people between him and the panhandlers as he can.
He is happy with the results of his strategy. The way
it works is this: he gets away scot-free, while others
have to expend energy either speaking with or pains-
takingly avoiding eye contact from the gauntlet of
wheezing, coughing, shuffling panhandlers.
KW13 His pleasure at successfully having avoided the
gauntlet fades when he notices the bearded, book-lov-
ing panhandler. He is smiling at him—Pomeroy Jar-
vis—and doffing.

<div><br />
 Rain that was drizzle then mist is finally fog by the
time PJ’s bus hisses to a stop outside the big gates
and bigger guardhouse at MicronSearch’s endless main
campus.
Pomeroy Jarvis
attaches his nametag
before exiting the
bus; he likes people to
know where he works
because it’s so famous
and this, by extension,
makes him feel some-
KW14
what famous, too.
He steps into the
damp concrete day,
leaving the soft bus
glow behind.
At the guardhouse
he is inspected; a
wand is passed over
his body; his pockets
are searched and he
is asked several ques-
tions to which, hope-
fully, only he will know
the answers. Then he
signs in and is thumb-
printed and escorted
by two armed sentries
along a winding path
through hydrangeas,
rhododendrons and
roses, beneath trans-
planted spruce and
alder and maple, to
the wireglass-rein-
forced steel entrance of the main building. Here he is
searched again, wanded again and, like Oedipus, asked
three questions. Upon successfully answering these
questions, he is permitted entrance into the building.
At the vast semi-circular guard’s desk, Pomeroy
 Jarvis signs in again. Then, handcuffed to a uni-
formed guard, he is escorted to a bank of elevators
not thirty feet distant and accompanied to his floor
(No. 23) and into his office.
(It always makes Pomeroy feel safe to be at work.
Although he is not exactly sure why there are so many
precautions in evidence everywhere around him, he is
exactly sure the people who own MicronSearch know
what they are doing; after all, it must cost them a
bundle to do it, so they surely have good reasons.)
The guard uncuffs Pomeroy then locks him inside
his small, windowless office where he will work his
magic, pressing buttons, for the next eight hours,
with 15 minute breaks every other sixty minute pe-
riod, and a 23 minute lunch at noon.
Before Pomeroy can immerse himself in the prob-
lem he left unfinished the day before—as he has done
on successive days now for many years—he notices
this: a yellow square of paper affixed to the center of
his terminal’s illuminated screen.
Pomeroy frowns. He is certain this yellow square
of paper had not been there yesterday; certainly, he
had not put it there. And his office is securely locked
when he leaves at the end of the day, every day, by a
ruthless appearing, unsmiling, uncommunicative, uni-
formed guard.
Pomeroy creaks down upon his baby blue, custom-
ized chair and angles his head so as better to read the
small, unfamiliar script that inhabits the yellow square
of paper.
The yellow square contains these words:

KW15
 Pomeroy’s frown deepens. What could this
mean? Is he in some sort of trouble? His mind
reaches back over his life and is met with some re-
sistance. (Has he not always behaved as expected?
always produced massive amounts of code? often
stayed late—more so in the early days, before the
security tightened—and never, never complained?)
Then he hits on it—a promotion! But he
doesn’t want a promotion. Hasn’t he always
turned them down? Of course! That was the
problem! The one, single blemish on his ca-
KW16
reer—he has never accepted a promotion.
Now they are going to make him take more money,
give him a bigger office, and require that he as-
sume the mantel of managerial responsibility.
Pomeroy Jarvis shakes his head. He does not wish
to manage people. He does not even like people. All
he wants to do is write code. It is the one thing he
enjoys, and the one thing he is good at.
What will he tell them? Will they give him a
choice?
Two minutes later, still thinking these things,
there comes a knock at the door.

<div><br />

The man they sent to fetch him is sallow and thin

and pimply; he produces a feigned smile when he says:
“Please come with me, sir. The boss wants to see
you.”
(His eyes inflate for emphasis when he utters the
word boss.)
Pomeroy had expected him to say he would be
meeting with someone from Human Resources; he
could not possibly have imagined the boss would want
to see him!
(The emphasis placed on that word by the sallow,
thin, pimply man had been unnecessary.)
The boss we are speaking of here is none other
 than that Man of Mystery, Code Ninja Extraordinaire,
Mister MicronSearch Himself—Ron Delworthy.
Some say he is the richest man in America, others
that he is the richest man on earth. Everyone agrees
he is a genius of the first rank and mad as a hatter.
Unlike where most men of his position might be
expected to have his office—on his own building’s top
floor, with the vista of the city at his feet—Ron Del-
worthy’s is in the basement. In fact, it is in the sub-
sub-sub basement. In further fact, it is so deeply and
so secretly and so securely buried that a dedicated
elevator is required just to get to the special elevator
that takes you to the heavily guarded private elevator
that takes you to its door.
Ron Delworthy may be said to be a private man;
he may be said to be a man who scorns attention; he
most certainly may be said to be a man who believes in
security.
Pomeroy Jarvis is led into the first elevator, where
he is blindfolded. After this elevator descends 39
floors and sighs to a stop, he is led to the second ele-
vator; that elevator descends a single floor and stops,
then he is led to the third, final, elevator.
He and his pimply companion sink another level
deeper.
He is next led down a long hall and told to stand
quite still while his body is examined by a tunneling
electron microscope. Satisfied he carries within his
cavities no nano-terrors waiting to explode, his blind-
fold is removed and he finds his nose almost touching
a polished wooden door.
With barely a sound, the
wooden door slides open to reveal
a darkened room. Pomeroy Jar-
vis rubs his eyes. The hallway in
KW17 which he stands is lit with a warm,
rubious glow. This helps his eyes
adjust to the darkness that yawns
before him.
“Don’t just stand there! It isn’t
safe! Come in, damnit—come in!”
 P. J. does as
the voice in-
sists.
The polished
wooden door
glides shut be-
hind him.
“Don’t be
afraid, Pervus.
You’re safe in
here. Probably
for the first KW18
time in your
life.”
Pomeroy has
always felt safe
when he was at
work. But he
has to admit this: he feels much safer now. A brief,
unexpected sadness befalls him, sweeps across him
as if the shadow of a cloud: for, once he leaves Ron
Delworthy’s office, he doubts he will ever feel safe
again.
He senses more than sees a light and finds himself
moving in its direction. The light suddenly flares and
serves partially to illuminate the room in which he
stands and the man who sits in a large wingback be-
fore him, his feet propped up on a table.
It is Ron Delworthy, someone Pomeroy Jarvis
has only see in small photographs published in weekly
tabloids.
He has an almost round head that is entirely bald;
a white, walrus mustache obscures his mouth. He
wears what appears to be formal attire; his bowtie is
white, and the front of his starched, white shirt is
studded with black buttons; his black coat is an old
fashioned cutaway, and shiny stripes run along the
length of his black pant legs.
His appearance is strangely comforting to Pomeroy.
 Ron Delworthy—boss, as well as host—pulls a
corona-corona out of a nearby humidor, and offers one
to Pomeroy.
“From my own plantation. Not for sale. I have mil-
lions of ’em.”
But Pomeroy Jarvis, as with many of his Seattleite
peers, is not a smoker.
“No, thank you, Mister Delworthy.”
Ron Delworthy closes the humidor and motions for
his employee/guest to sit in the companion chair to his
right.
He lights his cigar while Pomeroy takes a seat.
“Look at my skin, Jarvy,” commands Ron Delworthy.
He angles his face so Pomeroy has a better view of his
cueball head. “Even my scalp is healthy and unwrin-
kled. What about yours?”
Pomeroy hesitates, then leans forward into the
light.
“Not bad,” assesses Ron Delworthy. “Of course,
you lack wrinkles because you lack gravitas. I have
gravitas up the ass, but no wrinkles. Know why, Par-
mus?”
Pomeroy Jarvis does not know why.
“It’s because I use this.” He removes from in-
side his coat a small white jar with a silver screw cap.
“Made especially for me. No-one else on earth can
have any. It’s all mine.” He replaces the white and
silver jar into his coat.
“You like movies, Pumice?”
Pomeroy does indeed like movies, but he seldom
goes out to see any, preferring to cocoon at home with
rentals.
“Yes, sir.”
KW19
“So do I. But I hate the crap Hollywood makes—
don’t you?”
Actually, Pomeroy loves the crap Hollywood makes.
“Yes, sir.”
“Know what I do about it, Plurvis?”
“No, sir.”
 “I make my own. Must have two hundred of ’em by
now. I come up with the ideas, hire the writers and
directors, cast the roles, finance everything, fuck the
chicks, guide the editing, then watch it right here.
And no one else can see them. No one who works on
the pictures can ever talk about ’em—or else.”
Pomeroy is impressed by this unexpected informa-
tion.
“You like Socrates? I have a wonderful musical
comedy about him.”
Pomeroy Jarvis is pleased to hear this; he has al-
ways liked to say the word “Socrates”. KW20
His boss and host stares into the glowing coal of
his ignited cigar.
“You know what poverty means, Pom?”
Before Pomeroy can reply, Ron Delworthy contin-
ues.
“It means God doesn’t care. Oh, not that God
doesn’t care about the human race. He just doesn’t
care about you—if you happen to be poor. You’re not
poor, are you? No, of course not. You worked for me,
didn’t you? See, Jurvis, the fact is
this right here—this so-called earth-
thing of ours—is actually an afterlife:
You and I—we’re already dead and
buried. This is all an illusion, shadows
cast on a wall. And the present condi-
tion of your so-called life is in direct
relation to the judgment God made
of you when you died. See? None
of what we do here actually matters.
Buttons you press, code you write,
money I make, these cigars—all mean-
ingless. But only a few people know
about this. The privileged few.”
Pomeroy is not really listening; he is dwelling on the
past tense verb his boss/host used in reference to his
employment status with MicronSearch.
“I started MS as a lark, just something to do while
 I luxuriated in God’s beneficence. Have to go through
the motions. So I give money to charities so men and
women still working on their karmas can siphon it off
and feather their nests in the hopes of getting caught
in the act so they can advance to the next level
maybe in a few thousand years, the way I did. It’s a
slow process, and I’ve been at it a while now. Owning
things is such a bore, but it’s part of my job—while
I’m here. After all, someone has to be top dog so oth-
ers can envy him. Envy is a very important part of the
whole, you know, formula—the megillah as our Jewish
cousins call it. You’re not Jewish by any chance, are
you, Jarvus?”
Pomeroy Jarvis is certain he’s not Jewish.
“Good. Now tell me. What do you know about
inhalers?”
“Inhalers?”
“Yes, inhalers, man, inhalers. When you can’t find
an inhaler anywhere—that’s when you know you’re in
trouble. You know what they say about frogs and
reality? Well, the same is true about inhalers.”
Pomeroy Jarvis is glad to know this. He had not
known it before. He is beginning to feel as if he is
among the privileged few.
“By now you’re wondering why I sent for you, right?
Only natural you should.”
By now, the ash on Ron Delworthy’s corona-corona
is so long he is required to hold it at right angles to
the so-called earth-thing of ours, or it will fall off.
He does this, rather than use the ashtray.
In fact, Pomeroy—after he notices the lengthening
ash—notices also that there are no ashtrays anywhere
to be seen.
KW21
“I’m told you’ve been with us a long time and done
good work. I like to reward people who stay with us
a long time and do good work, Jarffle. So here it is.
This is it. Your reward. Did you know I could hire
three Chinese students to do what you do for the
same amount of money I paid you? That’s right—paid.
 Think of the savings to MS, and the increased pro-
ductivity! Hell, Chinks work endlessly. You’ll be fondly
remembered for your sacrifice, don’t worry. And,
best of all—you’ll finally get some gravitas. No doubt
being broke and unemployable will give you plenty of
wrinkles. Gray hair, too. You’ve been one of my
drones long enough. It’s time you unfolded, become
whatever it is you’re going to become. Before it’s too
late. I mean, there’s a war on, you know. You may not
think so now, but I’m doing you a favor, son. Now you
agree to do me one, too, as you rise to leave.”
Pomeroy, in shock at what he has heard, stands.
“Keep quiet about the inhalers.”
Pomeroy’s mouth is very, very dry. He licks his
very, very dry lips with his very, very dry tongue and
asks, “Why me?”
Ron Delworthy puffs out a pinwheeling smoke ring,
and shrugs.
“I wonder that myself. Have a nice life, Purvis.”

<?php get_footer () ; ?>

not a blank page
a blank page
a blank page
 ORDER, DISORDER
AND THE SECRET LIFE
OF RUBBER BANDS

There are ways of walking

that merely bring you to your
goal; there are ways of walking
that avoid unanticipated fol-
lies or pitfalls; there are ways
of walking that provide witness
to God’s humor; there are ways
of walking that provoke stares
and prohibit calm observation;
there are ways of walking that
confirm abstruse theorems;
there are ways of walking that
are benign, ways of walking that
are overt, ways of walking that
are balletic, ways of walking
that are spare and succinct and
honed.
All these ways and more has
Zeno walked.
Zeno, who has walked per-
haps more than any man in his
time. Zeno, who has striven,
stridden and stumbled; who
has ambled and shambled and
lumbered and lurched; who has
struggled and shed and shone
throughout the hails of bullets,
darkling skies, dictates of Uni-
versal Prescription or Kismet or
Preordination or Fate or what-
ever other Universal Metaphor
might spring to mind—
Zeno who is—in technical
parlance—a Peripatetic.
Zeno who is, in philosophical
jargon, a Stoic.
 Zeno who is, in socio-
logical terms, a bum.
Zeno who is as Zeno
does.
Long live Zeno.

<div><br />

On this day in the
jungly jungle that is life
in Seattle, Zeno—who,
unlike those laved by the
KW28
flickering glow of marble
fireplaces, or warmed by
the hushed rush of heat-
ed air through brass floor
registers, never com-
plains of the cold or the
damp or the wind or the
vagaries of Life—stands
outside yet another Star-
bucks and prepares for
yet another day of think-
ing.
Yesterday, and the
day before—and as far
back as he cares to re-
call—he had also stood
and thought, had also
walked and thought, had
also lain and thought; had
also, during the night,
and the nights before,
dreamed his thoughts
into aeries of vine-clung
turrets, into dappled,
verdant fields alive with
songbirds and marigolds,
into lakes so pristine that
to drink from them was
to be restored to the
state of an infant’s innocence.
He unfurls his hand-lettered
sign made from durable cor-
rugated cardboard, and nods to
his fellow voyagers who line the
sidewalk beside him.
His sign reads: I Need Ca$h
4 BOOKS.
He is one of them, yet he is
not.
He stands together with
them, yet apart.
There is this about life yet
to be understood—why we cling
to the perception that there are
“others”; that there is an “out
there”; that a separation ex-
ists between us when evidence
abounds that cries to the con-
trary.
This will be today’s exercise.
He will think and ponder and sidle
up against this profundity; he
will wheedle his way towards the
heart of God; he will whittle away
at the delusions that conjugate
and separate and hobble our vari-
ous passages through life.
It will be a grand day.
But it has not always been so.
Days have not always been
grand for Zeno.
There had been times when
overcast skies were perceived
by him to be bleak and depress-
ing, as if contoured to fit his life.
There had been times when he
had had to be places, many plac-
es, often all at once. There had
been times when the phone would
ring and, like a cloud of gnats
dispersed by a sudden gust of
wind, his thoughts would van-
ish, never to reassemble.
And there had been times
when his heart was tied to
others for its happiness.
The rain has turned to
mist. Soon, it will turn to fog.
The men and women who
gather in Starbucks, who have
places to be, and telephones
to answer, warm themselves
KW30
inside and out with coffee and
a gas fire.
There had been other dis-
tractions for Zeno, as there
are other distraction for us
all.
But Zeno had not been
Zeno in those days.
In those days, he had been
know by another name, as had
Madonna, Cher and Bono in
their before years. In those
days, he had been regarded
and ignored in almost equal
measure. In those days, he
had been married and fa-
thered and beleaguered and
blessed and benighted and be-
mused; he had been charitable
and sulky and pinchpenny and
often, so often, drunk.
Things had not gone well
in those days; but they had
managed to go better than
expected.
In the end, life can be that
way.
What he had been taught
he ought to be; how he had
been expected he should behave;
these twin pillars had cast a
coldness across his life, shadows
most thought comforting and
often mistook for the sun.
From a roomy coat pocket he
withdraws a paper cup.
Men are not much different
from each other when they are
naked; the same can be said of
them when they are poor. The
blind see perfectly well, only
without light. In some ways,
they see better than those at-
tracted to the flame. Hunger,
thirst, warmth and sleep; these
are the sutures that tie us to-
gether, that cause us to huddle
close, that bind us to the earth
and make us call life hard.
But life is not hard; life is
easy. It’s only seems hard when
we struggle.
Zeno had given struggle a try,
and found it wanting.
He had done it for others
principally because they had ex-
pected it of him. First, his par-
ents; second, his peers; finally,
his wife. He had failed them all.
Failed them miserably.
Zeno had always, in oth-
ers’ eyes, been a failure, a lucid
stooge; something of a fool.
He had been sorry he had
failed them; he hadn’t meant to.
He had loved his friends;
he had loved his family; he had
loved his parents; but, somehow,
that wasn’t enough. They wanted
more.
 The truth was, his heart
wasn’t in it.
Slowly, this realization
that he was failing others led
him to begin a lifetime of all-
consuming speculation, begin-
ning with this question: what,
if anything, was his heart
worth?
He began with the things
he knew about himself.
He knew he wasn’t happy
KW32
making money; he knew he
wasn’t happy doing as expect-
ed; he knew he wasn’t happy
engaged in struggle.
This led him to his second
question: what ought to be
the goal of his life? Was it
to be productive? Was it to
be pleasant? Was it to give
and to receive love? Was it
to be benign, or bitter, or
angry or anxious?
Was it even possible to be
happy?
And, provided that it was,
was happiness a worthy goal,
in and of itself? Or was it
simply another form of self-
deceit?
And, if it was possible
to be happy, then how best
ought he to go about becom-
ing that way?
Could the achieving of
happiness be justified if, in
the doing of it, in its pursuit,
others were dissatisfied,
displeased, disapproved, or
themselves made unhappy?
 This led him to this question:
is there a real world out there
in which there are real values
that are actually accessible and
steadfast?
If there was, then that
meant there were rules of right
and wrong, and that his own and
others’ lives could be valued or
devalued according to the touch-
stone of those rules.
If there was not—if the
world we encountered was mere-
ly a projection of our imagina-
tions—then it was up to each and
every one of us to unveil our re-
lationship to the universal blend
of realities that formed the
atomic clouds we called tables,
chairs and single malt scotch.
The result of posing these
questions to himself led to a
marked reduction in his overall
vitality; instead of, for instance,
rising each day eager to tackle
the mundane assignments his life
had fostered, he began to stroll.
This strolling started off in a
small, unremarkable way.
It started after dinner one
evening.
This new facet of his life
raised few eyebrows, since it
was becoming known in those
days that walking was consid-
ered by the American Medi-
cal Association to be a perfect
form of exercise for overweight
Americans.
Later, he began to stroll
before and after breakfast; still
nothing was said. It was as-
sumed by his wife that this
meant her husband was de-
termined to be “fit for life”,
and she was pleased by this
because it would reduce their
insurance premiums.
At work, during his lunch
break, instead of eating, he
strolled.
This was worth remark-
ing upon, since he had always
KW34
been a man of great appetite.
Added to this, he was begin-
ning to appear distracted,
was ambivalent about replies,
and made vague suggestions
instead of giving orders.
Then one night he went
out for his evening stroll and
failed to return.
His body was never found,
so it was concluded he had
been hacked to pieces and
ground into sausage, or else
his various parts had been
scattered to dozens of
dumpsters all over town and,
like Humpty Dumpty, would
never be put back together
again.
His wife wept, wore black,
collected the insurance, sold
their house, and remarried.
Her new husband was a
good provider, a good father,
and a good businessman. He
was a pillar of the community.
He was a Deacon at their
church. He was a Boy Scout
leader. He had a passion for
roses.
Years later, after he died
of a heart attack, she cried
and donned black and collect-
ed the insurance and, while
selling their house, discovered
trunk upon trunk tucked away
in their attic, whose locks,
having yielded to the persua-
sion of a crowbar, revealed an
immense trove of child por-
nography.
During the years after his
wife had remarried to live out
the life she desired, Zeno’s
strolling took him many places
and, paradoxically, nowhere at
all.
They had, for instance,
taken him here, to stand out-
side this Starbucks on a cold
November morn when the rain
had turned to mist and would
soon turn to fog.

<div><br />

It would be unimaginable
for Zeno to think of this
Starbucks, or of any other
Starbucks, as a destination.
As a goal. For Zeno, it can
honestly be said, lives without
goals. It was simply where he
happened to be standing at
the moment. As he happened
to be standing outside this
Starbucks a few weeks earlier
when a gentleman had ap-
 proached and handed
him a handful of
change.
The gentleman in
question—the dona-
tor of said change—
had been tall and
gangly, and wore a
Mariner’s baseball
cap. His eyes had
been slitted with
residual sleep, and KW36
he had spoken not a
word. Immediately
upon dropping the
change into Zeno’s
palm, he had stum-
bled into Starbucks.
But not before
Zeno had smiled and
nodded, by way of
saying thanks.
The man had
either failed to
observe Zeno’s smile
and nod, or had
thought them unwor-
thy of response; in
either case, he ignored them completely.
Later, his system revved with
coffee, the gangly man had tum-
bled out of the Starbucks amid a
crowd of leather-clad Employed
and had, shielding his face, hurried
away along the sidewalk without a
backward glance.
Upon observing this behavior,
Zeno had concluded he was afraid.
 One of the many conclusions Zeno has
reached in his study of the human soul is that
most of what we do we do because we are
afraid.
It is as if we are hounded by Fear, chased
by it from birth to death.
First, it is shadows and creaks; then, it
is beasties under the bed; later, it is others’
opinions of us; sooner or later, it is about self-
justification, the rightness of our goals, the
finality of money and possessions as reasons
for our deeds.
Zeno has concluded that most of the people who
hand him change and occasional dollar bills do so out
of a form of fear called guilt.
Furthermore, he has determined that most of the
people he has met who live on the street and who pan-
handle and who sleep in boxes or under bushes or on
park benches, and who wind up frequently in jail, are
also for the most part driven by this same force.
Perhaps when there is nothing left to lose is when
we cling tightest to what has driven us to our destina-
tion.
To Zeno, struggle is everywhere; people have the
hardest time letting go. If it isn’t a struggle for
Rolex watches, it’s a struggle to be first in line at the
Mission for breakfast, or a struggle to get another
bottle of wine, or to crash a warm crib, or to pen-
etrate a woman.
To the Four Horsemen of Hunger, Thirst, Warmth
and Sleep must be added this—Sex.
Everywhere he looks, he sees
KW37 it: in averted eyes, in hurried
steps, in expensive luxury automo-
biles—fear.
But Zeno can be said to have
conquered his fears. Or most of
them.
 At least the obvious ones.
The hardest is the fear of death.
One of Zeno’s many Gedankenexperiments, or
thought experiments, has been to try and return his
mind backwards until he was two, a time when a child
knows no fear, nor has a sense of impending doom, or
knowledge of life’s eventual and inevitable termina-
tion.
He had to some degree achieved this, first by
forcing his thoughts to dwell in the Now and not to
stroll, as did his feet, into the so-called future or
the re-called past; second, by observing mothers and KW38
fathers and the behaviors of their children so that he
might approach the threshold of anarchism that is a
child’s reserve. He had, for a while, himself become
an anarchist, a naysayer, a grabber, a recalcitrant, an
unbathed, snotty-nosed brat.
One of the wonderful things about letting go of
the rules and regulations, the niceties of society, is
the freedom it allows to do all those things that would
otherwise cause one to be shunned and judged and
disallowed.
It was a way of turning Order inside out, of em-
bracing the Disorder that dwells inside; of allowing
Topsy to become Turvy.
As with security, orderliness is merely an illusion,
a forcefully imposed reality, an indication of just how
frail and weak a species we actually are.
Sheep have no need of associations or governance;
iguanas do very well without Social Security; butter-
flies give no heed to ju-
venile delinquency; emus
are insensitive to political
corruption.
That we should re-
quire such self-decep-
tions, and cling to them
with such tenacity,
speaks volumes for the
fear that resides in our
collective Soul.
His sign unfurled, his
bowling ball bag resting
beside him on the littered
sidewalk, Zeno stares off
into the middle distance
and enjoys the event of
mist turning into fog.
And he thinks about
the secret life of rubber
bands.

<?php get_footer () ; ?>

 WATLING STREET
AT KNIPPLE BRIDGE

It is a dark and stormy day.

Winter is expected to be wet
in Seattle, but it is seldom ex-
pected actually to rain. To mist,
yes; to hail, certainly; to shower,
of course; even every once in
a blue moon to snow is thought
agreeable, if unnecessary; but, to rain? Big, fat, KW40
splashy drops of water falling from the sky? Falling,
mind you, as in straight down and with willful determi-
nation—no; this is not the norm, this is not the case;
rather, this is the unexpected exception that crowds
life with such uncertainty as at times to make it seem
almost unacceptable.
It’s no wonder the suicide rate in the NW is so
high.

<div><br />

Perfidious Jackal stares out his window as flatten-

ing drops impinge themselves upon his pane and flow
downward, toward the earth’s surface, carrying with
them dirt and grime and birdshit, carrying with them
hope and warmth and beauty and subtlety; and, as if
in empathy with the rain-washed world, tears rill down
his own cheeks and face, carrying with them dirt and
grime and regrets and ambiguity
and dread.
He flinches when a pigeon
smacks into his window, lost in
the water-thwarted air world
where he lives, his meat-proces-
sor-chemico-radar useless in
the white noise that puddles the
streets, rushes into culverts,
 and gushes on a geodesic to-
wards the Mother of Us All.
Purvis Trickleheart is sad.
The speech that ran
through his head last night—
the one made to him by his
former Boss, and wealthiest
man on the planet, Ron Del-
worthy—runs through it still,
and will run through it he feels
for all time to come, or until
an event of equal magnitude intercedes in his life, an
event that, at this juncture in the array of all things
Jarvis, would be impossible to imagine.
The former MS employee sniffs, more for himself
than for the pigeon.
He had been not merely Employee; he had been
chapel warden; he had been acolyte; he had been
redoubtable advocate, reliable apologist, unfailing
booster; MicronSearch had not been merely his Em-
ployer, but his home, his vocation, his avocation, his
reason for getting up and getting down and grinning
and bearing.
And, worse still: MS was everywhere, always would
be. Its web has been cast worldwide; it is the dub-
dubdubdot of his soul. How could he ever not use
another MS product? They are ubiquitous. How could
he ever enter a software store again? Would he be
able to use his laptop without falling apart at the
three-tone overture as his applications open?
The former MS employee wipes
his nose.
The pigeon, stunned, recovers
on the windowsill.
He is like that pigeon, Pome-
roy decides. He had been sailing
through the aether unaffected
by the world when bam! he had
encountered an unyielding bar-
rier, unexpected wall. Now he sits,
stunned, wet with tears and chilled
to the bone, sits on the metaphorical windowsill of a
very real edifice; sits uncertain what to do, incapable
of flight, scared that other hidden barriers may lay in
wait for him if ever he re-enters the world.
There is a certain property of the human brain
that as yet has no name, or if it does is likely an inac-
curate or ill-descriptive one; a portion of that gray
bag of snapping synapses that hangs back until it’s
needed, much like a DC Comics superhero costumed as
a salesman who, in truth, is endowed with the powers
of flight and searing rays that emit from his eyes, but
who hangs back until the situation warrants his super
KW42
intrusion.
And when that time arrives, he’s off like a flash
into the nearest phone booth then up, up and away.
This as yet innominable portion of Pomeroy’s brain
similarly leaps into its own version of a phone booth
and sweeps in a flash into his neo-cortex to his res-
cue—PJ shakes himself as an unexpected imagery
enters his head, and inexplicable, inescapable aromas
confront and cause comfort to his olfactory glands.
He is gripped by a ferocious, uncontrollable urge to
visit his favorite Starbucks.
Like, now.
It is the great lifesaver, is
Routine; calling, nudging, suggest-
ing, urging; it is the cumulative
effect of years spent repeti-
tively rising, dressing, slumping
to Starbucks, schlepping to work,
sitting and typing code, stumping
to Starbucks again, then din-
ner, then cruising the Net, then
falling into bed to rise the next
day to dress and then slump back
to Starbucks and so on and so on
until the weekend when he would
not know what to do with himself
and sometimes he would never
leave his condo except to go to
Starbucks.
 Routine, in the case of
Previous Jamboree, saves
his life, rescues him from
the swale of lethargy,
scoops him from the
curtain of fog that is
Depression.
By possession of a se-
verely limited wardrobe,
he is saved from thinking
about what to wear; he
dons jeans, white T-shirt,
woolen woodman’s overshirt and Mariner’s baseball
cap. He slips the strap of his laptop’s carrying case
over his head. In deference to the downpour, he grabs
an umbrella. Then he exits his sanctuary, leaving the
stunned pigeon behind.
If the pigeon is still there when he returns, PJ de-
cides, still shuddering on the windowsill, still uncertain
of its future, then he will offer succor and a share of
his sanctuary, and make him his pet.
It will be his first pet since the passing of his
poodle.

<div><br />

It is staggering to believe that this allegorical,

allegedly intelligently designed Universe should allow
a fellow to lose his job like that; furthermore, that
it would allow poverty and disease and war and why is
there always a clutch of homeless people gathered on
the street to nudge guilt up from the still pool where
it naturally and quite happily hibernates inside the hu-
man soul?
KW43 At least, his human soul?
It is not that PJ is an unkind man; nor that he is
a flinching one in the face of poverty and injustice;
he just prefers not to notice. It has always created
in him a certain amount of dyspepsia to interact with
the lower order, deal with the unwashed, uneducated,
unemployed.
This last category clutches his throat and lodges
heavily in his breast as he turns the last corner be-
fore his favorite Starbucks.
Unemployed.
It is a word that now describes him. Is he to be
homeless, as well? Is he, too, destined to be unte-
thered from the Real
World, to wander the
earth his remaining days,
parsing his life with a but-
ter knife, a paper cup out-
thrust to scurrying pass-
ersby, a perpetual gnawing
inside, permanently cold,
prematurely old, perenni-
ally wet and shunned?
Ahead of him he is
relieved to see that the
line of panhandlers is
missing. All save one. It
is the downpour that has
dispersed them, the vaga-
bonds and tramps, the Laurels and Hardys, the fugi-
tives and wanderers, men and women broken on the
wheel of Life.
All except one.
The one who doffs.
The one who, as their eyes meet, doffs him even
now.
This is the final straw! It’s not enough to be dis-
missed from the single safe harbor he has ever known;
no! Now he must be mocked by a weatherbeaten bum!
This is definitely the final straw.
PJ averts his eyes and ignores both
doff and doffer as he races towards the
Starbucks glass door. His heart pounds as
he grabs the hand-worn door handle—close
enough to touch the street chevalier if he
isn’t careful—and jerks open the thick glass
door that separates rain swept Seattle
 from cozy warmth, calming tones, and the soothing
aromas of Starbucks.
Inside, he shakes then furls his umbrella, takes a
deep breath and relaxes; here, finally, he is among his
own.
The undercurrent of clacking as dozens type on

their laptops soothes his jangled nerves; the steady

glow of the gas log in its oversized fireplace softens
his pinched features; the gentle din of subdued con-
versation among iPodded couples is as congenial as a
cinematic Christmas scene.
If only the world were everywhere thus! If only
there were no wars, no hunger, no disease, no corrup-
tion in high places; if only the world were a giant Star-
bucks, an enormous Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood—
The door at PJ’s back encounters his still, ponder-
ing body as another patron hurriedly enters, effecting
his own escape from both severe weather and panhan-
dling doffer.
KW45 The hurriedly entering patron ignores PJ, the man
whose back he has struck with the door; instead,
he snaps closed his umbrella, twists it as if running
someone through—releasing a spray of chilled water
droplets—then, rushing past PJ, heads for the coun-
ter where he joins in its rubbernecking queue of menu
seduced clientele.
PJ doesn’t mind
the brusque behav-
ior evidenced by the
dripping patron; he is
a Seattleite, after all,
and Seattle is a town
where rudeness is
the norm. It actually
serves to comfort PJ,
this behavior; after
all, serial killers and
child molesters are
mostly neat, courteous
and polite people.
Normal people—
safe people—are exactly the opposite.
Familiar faces uncluttered by the flotsam of names
or the jetsam of personalities serve to soften the
horrific tragedy that has befallen him, and lighten his
darkening mood. In servitude to the Coffee Bean, he
advances toward the counter and fills the empty posi-
tion behind the back thumping, recently-entered, rain
peppered fellow.
He is feeling buoyed by the chittering crowd,
and the proximity of his favor-
ite coffee drink. When his turn
finally arrives, he instructs the
broad-shouldered, tattooed, big-
bicepped girl (at least, he thinks
she’s a girl)—the same possible
girl he has given his order to ev-
ery day at this same time of day
for the past several months—how
he would like his drink prepared. She scowls as he
recites his drink’s peculiarities. Over the decades,
PJ has become something of a coffee connoisseur;
his delicate taste buds can differentiate not only
Javanese from Ecuadorian, Sri Lankan from Ugandan,
Robusta from Arabica, but also estimate the altitude
at which the beans were grown, the month they were
 harvested, and the method of harvest itself (mechani-
cal harvest bruises the precious coffee fruit).
Ultimate comfort could only be achieved, he feels,
if the pseudo-girl employee could, besides prepar-
ing his potation correctly, additionally remember his
order without his having to recite it every day.
Would that be too much to ask?
Perhaps if he had himself more of a memorable
personality, then she—or he—might possibly be able
to remember him, and therefore remember his order.
These few musings are abandoned when his drink
arrives and the androgynous employee takes his mon-
ey, punches his card, then looks beyond him, over his
shoulder, to the impatient customer standing behind.
PJ is grateful for his
steaming beverage. He
carries it as if a sacred
offering to an empty
table, positioned nearby
the hissing gas fire, and
up against one of the
big membranes of glass.
He sets his cof-
fee down and rests his
umbrella upon the win-
dow sill. Next, he pulls
the laptop bag’s strap
over his head. He sits
and unzips the bag. The
white laptop slides out
of the bag’s black folds as if a jewel stolen from a po-
tentate. Briefly, he is reminded of the David Cronen-
berg film, Videodrome, where people slide VHS tapes
inside a vaginal slot on their stomachs. This image
passes quickly as he sets the laptop on the tabletop
KW47 and pops the lid off his coffee cup.
He brings his nose as close to the heated liquid
as he dares, until his nostrils sting from its radiating
heat. He closes his eyes and inhales. The imagery of
the Cronenberg film is replaced by that of nut-brown
men with greasy hair and lined faces turned sepia by
the sun. They wear colorful
serapes and wide-brimmed
straw hats. Slowly and me-
thodically they move among an
endless vista of bushy plants,
plucking by hand the cher-
ries that will eventually be
reduced to clattering coffee
beans.
A mile-wide smile muscles
his cheeks aside. His cares and worries dissolve in the
coffee’s steam, and are siphoned away. The world is
KW48
reduced to this small experience: appreciating his cup
of Joe.
When he opens his eyes the first thing he sees is
the panhandler.
He stands outside, partially sheltered by the
building’s awning. Stands outside and stares inside at
him, PJ. There is no mistaking this. Their eyes meet
and when they do, the old panhandler smiles. Then his
right hand rises towards his head and PJ knows ex-
actly what he is about to do.
Quickly, he looks away. His eyes dart about the
room. All the other tables are taken; there is nowhere
for him to move. So he sets down his coffee—his
appreciation of it thoroughly ruined—and opens his
laptop.
PJ thinks WiFi is a wonderful invention. If there
were no further computer innovations after the in-
troduction of WiFi, that would be
all right with him. He loves that
he can be someplace other than his
condo, other than his cubicle (brief-
ly, a lump swells in his throat), and
yet still be online.
The three tones heralding the
opening of his browser tugs at his heart.
“Yawyawyawyaw,” he says, in an effort to drown it
out.
He knows without looking that the old panhandler
is staring, so he angles his long frame such that his
left shoulder rides up against the
cold glass membrane.
If he must stare at PJ, then
let him stare at PJ’s profile.
The screen of his laptop wel-
comes him. He taps in his secret
password (ILUVMS123), and
checks his RSS feeds.
Really Simple Syndication is
a way of keeping track of blogs.
Each and every time someone
publishes a posting on his blog, it
registers if that blog is linked to
an aggregator. An aggregator is
software that collects RSS feeds.
It’s like having a magazine reader
that alerts you each time a new
article is published. This way,
you don’t have to keep re-visiting
the many blogs you like to read;
instead, you are alerted each time
a selected blogger posts a new
entry.
Phinneas Jaffle has been read-
ing blogs since the middle ’90s.
(He has always been ahead of the
curve technologically; life at MS
was good for that.) Blog reading
long ago replaced book reading for
him.
His favorite blogs are not po-
litical; in his opinion, there are far
too many of these, and they all
seem strident and self-righteous
and difficult to follow (especially
if, like Permeable Jerrywinter,
one doesn’t keep up with world
events).
Instead, he likes to read blogs
about people’s lives. The ones
that are akin to diary entries.
The ones that most blog readers consider boring.
One of his favorite bloggers is Madeline Swift’s
havocflowers.
Madeline Swift writes posts like this:

“…and that’s when I told Tom we had better not let

Mary know we are seeing a counselor. I don’t think that
children are able to understand when their parent’s (sic)
are seeking help from therapist’s (sic), or what it is a
therapist does, really. I remember when mamma and
poppy used to fight, and I guess now I am reliving the
very things that used to make me so sad…
KW50
He especially likes the flower pictures that she
includes in her posts.
PJ likes flowers, but knows little about them.
From time to time, Permafrost Jabberwocky has
wanted to write his own blog. The title of his own
blog, if were to write one (he has already reserved
the domain name) would be this: BRAINSWEAT.
But what would he write about?
He knows nothing about politics (the subject tugs
at his eyelids), and he doesn’t have an interesting life,
like Madeline Swift and her husband, Tom.
Tom Swift.
So he holds on to his domain name and continues to
read the RSS feeds that interest him.
Maybe one day things will happen in his life that
will give him something to write about.
So PJ drinks his coffee, reads his blogs, and ig-
nores the doffing panhandler outside. And all the
while he is doing this, the clock cuts slices off the
giant salami of Time.
He is reading from another blog, this one titled
fingermarks.

“…having an affair. I was not surprised. Lillian has

always had a wandering eye, but with her best friend’s
husband? That was a shocker. She says they only
 kissed, but that could mean anything, besides—I think
that kissing is more erotic than climbing on board, if you
know what I mean, and most women would agree. Kiss-
ing is worse than sex. It means there is something emo-
tional going on. But sex is just getting off. I could forgive
Hank if he did that, but if he liked kissed someone, then I
don’t know what…”
Pomeranian Juicer stops reading. Something is
sneaking up on him. Something is terribly wrong. His
eyes are fixed on the blue rectangle sitting on his bor-
rowed tabletop. What is it? What is it that is terri-

bly wrong? What has changed so much in his environ-

mental niche that he can no longer concentrate on his
reading?
It is then that he notices that a quiet has befallen
his favorite Starbucks.
He would like to know more about what the author
of FINGERMARKS would do if she ever found out
Hank had had sex with someone, but his curiosity pulls
his eyes away from the words to see what has, if any-
thing, changed in his world.
The first thing he notices is this: the tables are
all empty. Next he notices the line of people at the
front door.
They are all standing there—leather jackets put
on, laptops and iPods put away—staring at him.
At Pomeroy Jarvis, Esquire.
This is an unappealing situation.
He does not like being the center of anyone’s at-
tention, much less so for a roomful of his peers.
KW51 But are they still his peers?
After all, they have jobs.
While he is very unemployed and
has nowhere to go.
He can sit here all day if he
like, and read blogs. Finally catch
up on the doings of hornycapricorn and justtaking-
notes and pardonmysarong and incandescentyellow
and all the other blogs he likes but never has time to
read.
This had not occurred to him before, the fact that
he has had idle time thrust upon him.
Maybe this is what Ron Delworthy meant when he
said he was doing him a favor.
Even the perhaps-girl behind the counter is star-
ing.
They are waiting for him to join
their line.
KW52
They are used to his solidar-
ity—whatever his name is, wherever
it is he works—his standing in line
with them (there being strength
in numbers) and helping their pha-
lanx of leatherclad Employed shove
through the throng of papercupped
Unemployed.
Perhaps they had not noticed there is no throng
today, that the weather has driven them elsewhere?
PJ thinks they should stop looking at him and look
outside instead.
There is only the old Doffer to deal with, and he
should be easy.
They don’t need him.
But PJ is wrong; they do need him, whoever he is.
Like any herd of bovine animals, when one of their
number suffers, so do they all; when one of their own
loses his way, so do they all moan until he is found.
If they have to go to their cubicles, then he does,
too.
The last thing they want to know is that while they
are at work he is not; that he has managed to find a
way to stay here in Starbucks and drink coffee and
read things on his laptop.
Maybe he has made a fortune with a software
idea? Maybe he has been given early retirement with
a huge buyout? Or maybe. Just maybe—
—maybe he has been fired.
 If this last is true, he is no longer one of them.
If this last is true, he is a pariah.
If this last is true, he must leave this Starbucks
at once, never to return.
If this last is true.
If this last is true.
They await his reply to their silent questioning.
But Pathetic Jester has nothing to say.
Or, rather, he has much to say, but no way of say-
ing it.
He avoids their curious eyes by returning to his
laptop’s blue screen.

“…rise like she said it would, so maybe I put in too

many eggs…”

But his heart is no longer in his blogs.

He can feel their accumulated stare worse than
the single stare of the old Doffer. Perhaps if he were
to explain what happened? Tell them he had had an
audience with Ron Delworthy himself? Then would
they leave him alone? Then would they understand?
After all, it could happen to anyone in today’s market-
place of outsourcing and downsizing.
It could even happen to them.
If only they understood, then maybe they would
have some empathy, the way he had had for the pi-
geon, and they would allow him to continue to visit his
favorite Starbucks in peace.
But in his heart he knows the truth is otherwise.
By their unified stare, he knows his world has changed
forever. That he is no longer one of them. That he
has been cut from the herd and
would proably wander off to die
alone at another coffee franchise.
KW53 The crushing weight of truth is
that this would be his last day at
his favorite Starbucks.
This is worse than losing his
job.
Now, truly, he has nothing.
 <div><br />

UPON THE EXODUS of his clan, the red sweep

second hand on the Starbucks electric clock slowed,
as if encountering an invisible, resisting force.
The crushing silence that descended as sign of
their judgment had exited along with their squeaking
heels on terrazzo; the brawny barista (or baristo),
having shrugged with resignation at the passing of a
momentary distraction, soon resumed the duties of
due diligence required by her or his Employer. KW54
Thus had Piers Jowlman been left alone, feel-
ing discarded, dejected and disdained.
Not to mention disliked.
His coffee’s paper cup has grown empty and
cold, returned to its initial state of advertising.
The blog on his screen “…the grandkids were fun to
have around during the holidays, but it took its toll on the
cats (sic) nerves…” has emptied itself of its former
allure.
A thickish feeling descends as an almost tactile
memory unfolds.
(Return with him now to Fifth grade when his
teacher, Mrs. Harmon, would
so often have PJ as her after
school guest, sitting wretched
and alone at his etched wood-
en desk, while his peers—his
clan—ran home to play.)
Childhood jeers ring loudly
in his ears.
With the descension of
these past events comes once
again a lumpish obstruction
in his throat. Sitting there,
red-faced, swollen-eyed, he
feels like a turnip root in a
vat of ice cream. A desire to slink away unobserved
overwhelms him.
But there is the Doffer to consider.
Stripped as he is of the group protection he for-
merly enjoyed, he is faced with this dilemma: is it
worse to remain inside Starbucks, condemned and
damned, a figure of ridicule, or to exit alone past the
panhandling Doffer, inevitably to be forced into in-
timate eye contact, and potentially seduced into the
giving of alms?
Not to mention being doffed.
In other words, is it better to be a sitting duck, or
a turnip?
This is what his life has come
to; in his opinion, he is as low as he
can go.
Maybe there’s a back door?
This thought, however, holds
forth faint hope. For, in order to
take advantage of said portal—
provided one exists—there would
be required a dialogue of some sort with the Ambigu-
ous Mythological Maiden, and this seems an unlikely,
and potentially dangerous, avenue to pursue.
So it seems he is struck here, lodged like a bewil-
dered pigeon on the ledge of a circle in Dante’s Hell,
one reserved for insipid dilettantes, aged virgins, and
the seriously uninspired.
Praxis Janusfaced is tormented, and sulks appro-
priately.
The red sweep second hand remains red, but
no longer sweeps; nor do seconds do their duty
and become minutes, mired as they are in a trea-
cle of gelatinous tachyons.
The Starbucks stands empty but for him; all
other forms of human life are currently off else-
where, gainfully Employed.
 Ptarmigan Jingleballs sighs. His eyes crawl down-
ward, as if extinguished suns, settle on the blue rect-
angle that is his laptop’s screen.
Thoughts both inchoate and incredible swirl about
inside his skull, like artificial snowflakes stirred by a
violent shake. Maybe I should look for another job?
But anything, after MicronSearch, would seem pal-
try by comparison. Maybe I should move? Thoughts
to betake himself to other climes have never been
seriously considered. Maybe I should
go back to MS and pretend nothing hap-
pened? After all, it is a Big Place, and KW56
maybe Ron Delworthy forgot to mention
PJ’s termination to anyone.
And maybe cow-tipping will become an
Olympic event.
As these thoughts cross and crisscross his mind,
events elsewhere in his world are taking place.
Outside, the old panhandler briefly studies his
watch. He picks up his bowling ball bag and, with this
in tow, pulls on the handle of the Starbucks door and
steps inside. Boldly, he approaches the plastic coun-
ter where he engages the ambivalent server in a brief
conversation.
Minutes later he is delivered a steaming cup of
black tea for which he forks over a portion of his
hard-begged change.
As reward for the server’s congenial-
ity, he leaves a hefty tip.
Bowling ball bag in one hand, cup of
tea in the other, he surveys the empty
room.
Empty, that is, except for Pithecan-
thropus Jabberwocky, who sits slumped, staring into
his laptop as if into the ocean’s depths.
Piebald Jodhpurs hears the scrape of wood on
concrete, which fact serves to deepen the two parallel
furrows that cleave his forehead, left to right.
 There is a slight trembler as a weighty presence is
felt on the tabletop; this event serves to disturb the
harmonics of his sorrow. He breathes deeply and ex-
pects the worst, and is served with exactly that when
he looks up.
The Doffer is sitting at his table.

<?php get_footer () ; ?>

KW57
 THE GESTURE OF A LIFE IS
ESSENTIALLY INWARD

There are no people I wish would

fall, or that Knipple Bridge might be
raised in their faces, as those bus-
tling businessmen who have so infi-
nitely much they must accomplish in
the world, instead of, like the rest
of us, when Knipple Bridge is raised,
finding it a good opportunity for
musing. (1)

Go away.

Blind swimmer. I have made

myself see. I have seen. And
I was surprised and enamored
at what I saw, wishing
to identify myself with it. (2)

Leave me alone.
 When the effect produced
ceases to be in a ratio to
the cause, disorganization
follows. (3)

I’ll call the cops. I will.

Really.

Facts shackle the imagination.

Facts appeal to that part of
human nature that needs to
control.

Please?

Observation is my métier.
And my observation of you
is this: you are tormented by
loss of control.

I will give you a dollar.

A whole dollar.
 Observe outside. Is it not
wet? While inside, is it not
dry? What separates the two?
Is it luck? Is it desire? Is it
the human will? Is it a pane
of glass?

Please. Leave. Now.

Please?

Everything flows, nothing

stays still. (4)

Oh my God.
You’re insane.

That would certainly simplify life.

I’m sitting in a Starbucks

at a table with a madman.

Great wits are to madness near allied, and

thin partitions do their bounds divide. (5)

 Look. I just want to be
alone.
Leave me alone, OK?

We need not to be let alone.

We need to be really bothered
once in a while. How long is it
since you were really bothered?
About something important,
about something real? (6)

So I like to be left alone, what’s

wrong with that?

There’s a difference between

being left alone and hiding out.

The only thing I want to hide

from is you.

You show the universe

indifference.

What?
 ...the price good men pay for
indifference is to be ruled by
evil men. (7)

I’m
not…
what you
said.

Do you vote?

Do you?

I never vote for anyone;

I always vote against. (8)

That’s nonsense.
 Forgive me my nonsense as I
also forgive the nonsense of
those who think they talk sense. (9)

Look,I. I
will tell
that. That.
Girl. If she.
He.
Anyway.
To kick you
out… Don’t
you
have
someplace
you’d
rather be?

A man who lives everywhere

lives nowhere. (10)
 Oh, I get it. You want
more than a dollar.
Enough for a room,
right? Here. I have
forty bucks, two
twenties—
take ’em. Now, go.

If you want to know what

God thinks of money, just
look at the people he gave
it to. (11)

What’s that supposed to—are

you going or not?

My life has no purpose, no

direction, no aim, no meaning,
and yet I’m happy. What am
I doing right? (12)
 You’re happy just
being…what you
are? You know what
I mean. No offense.
But you’re. You
beg. No home, no
family. You can’t
be happy.

We all beg. Have you a home,

or only a dwelling? Where is your
family? How are we so unalike?

Hey—don’t compare me
with. I have a…job. A
career. I can do something.
I am a productive member
of society.

I have been young, and now

I am old; yet have I not seen
the righteous forsaken, nor his
seed begging bread. (13)
 I don’t. Look, old man. I.
I have to get to
work now,
OK?
I have a lot to do.
People depend on me.

One of the symptoms of an

approaching nervous breakdown
is the belief that one’s work
is terribly important. (14)

I don’t know who you

think you are, but you
don’t know me
or what I do—you,
who do nothing.

My work is a game,
a very serious game. (15)

Oh, yes, very serious.

Holding out a pa-
per cup...
So, if you want money
to buy books, what sort
of books do you buy?
Books have the same enemies
as people—fire, humidity, animals,
weather, and their own content. (16)

Don’t you ever

answer
a question?

It is not every question

that deserves an answer. (17)

Well, I don’t deserve you

sitting here, either…
So what kind of question
would you answer?

A wise man’s question

contains half the answer. (18)
 Oh, so you think
you’re some kind’ve
philosopher, right?
That if you talk in
circles, people will
be impressed.

Fill what’s empty;

empty what’s full.
Scratch what itches.

Very deep.
Very wise.
If you’re so
wise,
why can’t you
make it in the
real world?

It is no measure of health
to be well adjusted to a
profoundly sick society. (19)

Ah. so. A critic.

Too good for
what the rest of us
has to do. That why
you’re always alone?
 Travel only with thy equals
or thy betters; if there are
none, travel alone. (20)

I’ll try
to
re-
mem-
ber
that.

It’s a poor sort of memory

that only works backwards. (21)

I can’t believe I’m

even giving you the
time of day.

Time flies like an arrow.

Fruit flies like a banana. (22)
 Ha-Ha. You can afford to
make your little jokes.
No one cares if you live
or die.
You and your kind don’t
even know what the word
“Responsibility” means.

Corporation. Noun. An ingenious

device for obtaining individual
profit without individual responsibility.(23)

You can’t be talked to,

can you?
Think you know it all.
You don’t hear a word
I’m saying.

Live among men as if God beheld

you; speak to God as if men were
listening. (24)

You’re like a parrot.

You repeat stuff you
don’t understand.
 The only good is knowledge;
the only evil is ignorance. (25)

Fine. If you
won’t go, I will.

There’s
nowhere
to go.

Man. Look at it.

Pouring down, still.
When’s it gonna stop?

The best thing one can

do when it’s raining is to
let it rain. (26)

Hm. Maybe
you’re right.

Maybe I’m
not right.
Oh, yeah?
 You make
mistakes?

It is nobler to declare
oneself wrong than to
insist on being right—
especially when one is
right. (27)

A verbal trap.
You’re probably
good at chess.

Chess is as elaborate waste

of human intelligence as you
can find outside an advertising
agency. (28)

I was never
good at it, myself…
OK, so we agree
on two things.

Admit this, then.

That you have no job.
That you are coerced by
newly-developed circumstance
to sit here and talk with me.
 No. I don’t.
You’re right.
I was…
outsourced.

More’s the pity!

To be wounded by a
neologism.

It’s all my fault.

I should have
worked harder.

Best men are molded

out of faults and, for the
most, become much more
the better for being a
little bad. (29)

You don’t understand;

you wouldn’t. A man
my age. I’m.
Washed up. I’ll never
write code
in this town again.
 You miss not your Job, but its
regularity. You should rejoice
that your life has been changed
for you, alleviating you from the
not inconsiderable task of
doing so yourself.

This is not
something to
joke about,
old man.
I’m too old
for this
to happen.

You don’t stop laughing because

you grow old. You grow old
because you stop laughing. (30)

Easy for you.

I’ve done
everything
right.
My credit is
perfect.
I have bills to pay.
You have cardboard
to scrounge.
 If you obey all the rules you
miss all the fun. (31)

What will I do
with myself?
I need to find a
job.

Everything considered, work is

less boring than amusing yourself. (32)

But MS
won’t give me
a decent reference.
Who’s gonna hire
someone replaced
by foreigners?

Then you’re free.

Excuse me?

You haven’t realized it yet.

Realized what?
 That you’re free.

That can’t
be.
Free?

Free to rise when you want.

Free to read what you want.
Free to eat when you want.
Free to go where you want.

But I don’t want

to be.
Free. I.
I don’t know how.

Freedom is just Chaos

with better lighting. (33)

Chaos…that’s right.
Where will I
end up?
 I may not have gone
where I intended to
go, but I think I ended
up where I needed to be. (34)

Words. Pretty words.

This is reality.
I’m not like you.
I don’t pretend to be
anything other than
what I am—a code writer.
I can’t...do anything else.

Reality is highly
over-rated. As is
this coffee.

Thanks.
Reality is that which
when you stop believing in it
doesn’t go away. (35)

OK, OK. I get it.

Is that all you
ever do,
quote people?
Don’t you have
thoughts
of your own?
 A table of random numbers,
once printed, requires no errata.

Great.
Just great.

You’re welcome.

I’m going home.

While I still have one.
I need to feel
secure again,
like I did at MS.

There is no security on this

Earth; there is only opportunity. (36)

You would say something

like that.
But in my world, things are
different.
We have cell phones
and alarm systems,
police departments
and garbage disposals.
To have little is to possess.
To have plenty is to be perplexed. (37)

Do me a favor. Keep
your fortune
cookie wisdom
to yourself.
And, if we ever meet
again—which I hope
we don’t—don’t doff
your hat.

He who has a thousand friends

has not a friend to spare. And
he who has one enemy will meet
him everywhere. (38)
REFRENCES

1 Soren Kierkegaard
2 Max Ernst
3 Baizai
4 Heriklitis
5 Michael Dryden
6 Ray Bradbury
7 Plato
8 W. C. Fields
9 Robert Frost
10 Marcus Valerius Martialis
11 Dorothy Parker
12 Charles Schulz
13 Psalm xxxvii, 25
14 Bertrand Russell
15 M. C. Escher
16 Paul Valery
17 Publilius Syrus
18 Solomon Ibn Gabirol
19 Krishnamurti
20 The Dhammapada
21 Lewis Carroll
22 Groucho Marx
23 Ambrose Bierce
24 Seneca
25 Socrates
26 Longfellow
27 Nietzsche
28 Raymond Chandler
29 Shakespeare
30 Michael Pritchard
31 Katharine Hepburn
32 Charles Baudelaire
33 Alan Dean Foster
34 Douglas Adams
35 Philip K. Dick
36 Douglas MacArthur
37 Lao-tzu
38 Ali Ibn-Abi-Talib

<?php get_footer () ; ?>

a blank page
a blank page
 Who sees the variety and not
the unity wanders on from death
to death.
KATHA UPANISHAD
a blank page
 COMES THE TIME OF 23
a blank page
 The dark lines are about to mount upward and overthrow the last
firm, light line by exerting a disintegrating influence on it. The
inferior, dark forces overcome what is superior and strong, not by
direct means, but by undermining it gradually and imperceptibly,
so that it finally collapses.
SPLITTING APART.
It does not further one
To go anywhere.
This pictures a time when inferior people are pushing forward
and are about to crowd out the few remaining strong and superior
men. Under these circumstances, which are due to the time, it is
not favorable for the superior man to undertake anything.
The lower trigram stands for the earth, whose attributes are docil-
ity and devotion.

The upper trigram stands for the mountain, whose attribute is

stillness.
This suggests that one should submit to the bad time and remain
quiet.
For it is a question not of man’s doing but of time conditions,
which, according to the laws of heaven, show an alteration of
increase and decrease, fullness and emptiness.
Hence it is not cowardice but wisdom to submit and avoid ac-
tion.
—from The I Ching, hexagram 23
Wilhelm/Baynes translation
 THE EXCLUDED MUDDLE
1
Imagine a basic Law of Nature
turned on its ear by a common,
ordinary, office product!

A form of Reversed Inertia2! KW90

A little-reckoned subset of the
Second Law of Thermodynamics.

What is the Second Law of

Thermodynamics?

The Second Law of Thermodynamics

can be summed up thus: over time a
closed, ordered system becomes spread
out and disordered.

This is why we grow old and—

rumor has it—die.

The Second Law of Thermodynamics

is also known by another name—
entropy.
As the opposite of a fact3 is a
falsehood; as the opposite of Chaos
is Coca-Cola™; so the opposite of
entropy is anti-entropy (or enthalpy,
or Gibbs Free Energy,4 or we could
all be mistaken and it’s nothing
whatsoever because it has no equal
and opposite).

Disorganization (disorder) leads to

a little thing called heat death.
 The opposite of heat death is called
Life.

And the opposite of a profound

truth may well be another profound
truth.5

As above, so below.6

(Oddly enough, however, in the

Great Scheme of Things, there is
no opposite of Up.)

As Alfred E. Newman was wont to

say, What, Me worry?.7

(Another opposite of entropy is

evolution8.)

(We shall pick up an existence by

its frogs9.)

Entropy is about future times.

Anti-entropy is about past times.

There is no Law of Disorder coded

into Nature: it requires energy for
wood to rot. The Second Law only
describes what energy tends to do
in the future.

Id est, run down. Become lumpy.

Disorganized. Like coins spread
upon your bureau top. That is, if
you have a bureau top. If you even
KW91
have a bureau. Not everyone is
lucky enough to have a bureau, you
know. Why, there are some places
on this small, planetary orb so poor
that not a bureau may be found.
ATP molecules (Adenosine
Triphosphate) are the major energy
source for all warm bodies. When
any warm body moves or makes
sounds (as in benign conversation
or orgasmic ululation) ATP changes
into ADP (Adenosine Diphosphate)
to release the little electric sparks
that make our parts go ’round—a
release of energy described as an
increase in entropy, or a decrease in
order.
KW92
In other words, it is only because
of the downhill flow of energy,
according to the Second Law, that
life (as we know and roll about
in like a puppy in the grass) is
possible.

THE PARADOX10

Contrariwise, likewise, and in all

wise, is this true as well: it is only
because of the downhill flow of
energy, according to the Second
Law, that life (as we call it laughingly
on days when our foreheads bleed)
eternal is impossible.

Living creatures are energy processing

systems that fail miserably unless a
bunch of biochemical cycles operate
synchronically to oppose the Death
Star of Entropy. When these systems
fail—i.e., loss of energy flow—or
malfunction due to critical errors
in synthesis or the introduction of
toxins or competing agents such as
viruses entyer into the picture, then
 systemic dysfunction—colloquially
known as “death”—occurs: that is,
energy can no longer be processed
to carry out the many reactions
required for life that are contrary to
the Second Law.

Get it?

Entropy measures the spontaneous

dispersal of energy in a system at a
specific temperature over a specific
period of time.

You see, order (life) has a very low

probability of existence in Universe.
For instance: the odds of dealing
four aces from a shuffled deck can
only be expected (according to the
Theory of Probability) to occur
once in every 270 thousand deals.
In other words, to deal four aces
on the first try would be similar to
those coins on your bureau top, if
you have a bureau top, suddenly
assembling themselves into rolls.

The entropy of Universe increases

during any spontaneous process11.

THE OPPOSITE OF A PROFOUND

TRUTH MAY WELL BE ANOTHER
PROFOUND TRUTH.

KW93
<?php get_footer () ; ?>
FOOTNOTES:

1) Ah, yes. Well, now. Here’s a word we use a lot. But

what, exactly, does it mean? And, furthermore, to pile
Pelion upon Ossa, what does exactly mean? What, for
that matter, does anything mean? And what has this to
do with the word “Nature”? But, then, you see, and
so on. I mean, one thing leads to another, doesn’t it?
All things being equal, all equalities being equivalent
and, of course, all roads leading to Rome. There has
been some head scratching I can tell you over the word
“Nature”. But we can (some of us, at least) agree on KW94
this: Nature is the material world, and it is composed
of matter and energy. What matter and energy are is
anybody’s guess. The word “Nature” is mostly Latin
(natura), with a pinch of Greek (ϕυσιζ), and means,
au fond (which is French), “physical,” although the
Latin connotation is “birth,” and the Greek is “growth,”
but then they never really did agree on much anyway.
The scale of Nature is immense, and by this I mean
huge. Imagine everything there can be, being at once
in a blink of an eye, and stretching all the way from
sub-sub-sub(etc.)-molecular to the macro-gigantic
size of Universe itself—which of course, you can’t do
because you only use 10% of your brain—and you
have the beginning of a slight notion of the immensity
of Nature. It has nothing to do with computers. If
you happen to believe all the stuff of Nature is mere
twaddle and faery dust, then you are most likely a
Solipsist (an extreme form of Idealism). This means it’s
all in your head. If, on the other hand, you are of the
cause-and-effect school (i.e., hammer hits thumb, vocal
chords tense with scream), then you probably believe
in an objective Universe, and are what we would call
a Realist. Of course, the fact that there are only two
choices should be a red flag (or herring) to anyone even
vaguely interested in complexity theory (of which the
less said the better). Is there a difference between “real”
and “artificial”? That is, besides the number of letters
and the fact the words actually sound unalike? This,
naturally, shifts our attention to the so-call mind/body
problem, which means (au fond) nobody really knows
what. It is for those of you who can’t live without the
 trifle of ambiguity in your lives that there are designer
drugs.
2) Inertia is one of the very most basic things you should
have learned in Kindergarten, along with all the
social graces. It goes like this (with kudos to Sir Isaac
Newton): Every body perseveres in its state of being at rest
or of moving uniformly straight ahead, except insofar as
it is compelled to change its state by forces imposed. Of
course, this description is only germane to classical
physics, that arena in which we play whenever we smash
our thumbs with a hammer, or try to hit a target with
a BB rifle. Perhaps a better explanation: you are eating
an ice cream cone in the back seat of an automobile
when your father comes to an abrupt stop. The ice
cream now on your face is inertia.
3) A fact is that which supports your opinion and ignores
all else that might contradict your opinion. Another
word for fact is disambiguation. In Philosophy, a fact
is a true proposition; in Law, a fact is something that
convinces a jury; in Science, a fact is a datum with
value. Facts, as a general rule, are void of ambiguity,
despite existing within an ambiguous reality; therefore,
a fact is something of a paradox. A fact, therefore, for
one person, may not be a fact for another; or, it may
be a fact, but the fact is not worth a damn. This is one
reason why Universe is such a slippery place in which
to write footnotes. The questioning of facts, then, in
the relationship of evidence to conclusions, may lead
to the epistemological stasis called underdetermination.
In other words, a theory (accumulation of facts) is
underdetermined if there is a rival theory inconsistent
with that theory, but just as consistent as that theory
given all the evidence, or facts. This is another facet of
Skepticism, or the challenge of beliefs about knowing.
That old French vagabond, Rene Descartes, was a great
juggler of underdeterminations; he attempted to argue
from a skeptical position to a position in which he had
significant knowledge, i.e., his dream argument in which
KW95 he pointed out that sometimes while dreaming one feels
awake and can’t determine the failure (or success) of
the dream experience (say, falling) to represent reality
(i.e., being asleep in bed). So…if you can’t distinguish
dreams from reality, you can’t completely rule out the
theory that you’re actually asleep reading this (which
 you might very well be, given the topic), rather than
having a veridical experience (being awake and reading,
eyes getting heavy). Thus, the theory that one is having
a veridical experience is underdetermined. But all this
does is lead to Hume’s problem with induction with
respect to empirical truth. As in the sun has always
“risen,” so it will “arise” tomorrow. Or will it? Dig?
4) This denotes (in thermodynamics) a potential and is
therefore a state function of a thermodynamic system.
Named after Willard Gibbs, father of vector analysis
and the first man to receive a PhD in engineering from
Yale (this does not mean all the prior recipients were
women), GFE is a factor (for instance) of determining
the voltage of an electrochemical cell, or the equilibrium KW96
constant for a reversible action. More simply, in
thermodynamics free energy denotes the amount of
energy in a physical system that’s free (i.e., available) to
do work.
5) Quotation from Danish physicist, Niels Bohr, who,
when asked if he believed the horseshoe above his door
actually brought him luck, said: “No, but I’m told it
works even if you don’t believe in it.” He also is reputed
to have said, “How wonderful that we have met with a
paradox! Now we have some hope of making progress.”
He noted that the task of physics wasn’t to discover
what is the essence of Nature (see footnote 1 above), but
only what can be said about Nature. He was also very
tall.
6) From the Kybalion, a mystical, hermetic book that
supposedly describes the teachings of alchemist and
all around wizard, Hermes Trismegistus. The seven
Hermetic Principles, by the way, are 1) Mentalism;
2) Correspondence; 3) Vibration; 4) Polarity; 5)
Rhythm; 6) Cause & Effect; 7) Gender. In this form of
metaphysics (a dualist perspective) everything is pitted
against everything else, and balance is the fulcrum
point upon which Universal opposites reside. Hence,
the dictum that everything is dual; everything has pairs
of opposites. This esoteric insight was later transmuted,
during XIVth Cent. France (and elsewhere), into a rule
of thumb (so to speak) to help guide ladies in their
choice of male companionship, i.e., the length of his
nose being an indicator of the length of his…well. As
above, so below.

7) Alfred E. Newman (Neuman), mascot for EC

 Publication’s MAD magazine, first appeared in 1954.
Later, his image (one that had drifted through the
imagery aether for decades before being employed
by EC) would be refined to its present day iconic
perfection by Norman Mingo. His origins (Alfred’s,
not Norman’s) are shrouded in mystery (much as his
spiritual brother, Kilroy). One thing we do seem to
know is that his name—Alfred E. Neuman—derived
from one of radio comic Henry Morgan’s (of “I’ve
Got a Secret” fame) radio shows, in which he made
reference to motion picture music composer, Alfred
Newman. This would make Randy Newman (Alfred’s
nephew) directly related to Alfred E. I hope this helps
explain one of the more recondite aspects of American
culture.
8) Phylogeny recapitulates ontogeny.
9) A grand quote from a grand man, Charles Hoy Fort,
but what it’s doing here is anybody’s guess. Charles
Fort (1874-1932) was the world’s premier investigator
of the supernatural, or anomalous phenomena. A failed
writer (novelist), he authored at least ten books, only one
of which was published (critics claimed it was “ahead
of its time”—death knell!). Always a melodramatic
character, Fort burned all his manuscripts, renounced
writing as a slave trade and vowed he would never set
pen to ink again. The next book he wrote was destined
a) for fame and b) to set him on the true calling of his
life. It was titled, appropriately enough, The Book of
the Damned. A journalist, a natural-born contrarian,
a humorist, something of a poet—these qualities
made him manifestly perfect for the role of Enquirer
into the Privy of Nature. Far ahead of his time (but
not as a fiction writer, thank god), Fort mocked
scientific positivism and reductionism long before it
was fashionable (it is still fashionable, isn’t it?), and
with his prejudice that scientific explanation is only
one of a range of explanations, none necessarily more
justified than another, was well in advance of Thomas
KW97 Kuhn’s work on “paradigm shifts,” and the Anything
Goes anarchism of Paul Feyerabend (ever get the
feeling footnotes need footnotes that would, in turn,
themselves need footnotes and on and on, ad nauseam?)
Claimed by many as the Father of Paranormalism (what
a distinction!), he coined the term “teleportation” to
 explain disappearances without a trace, conjecturing
(and this was back in the 1920s) alien abduction. His
other books were Lo!; New Lands; Wild Talents. A
favorite saying: “The earth is a farm. We are someone
else’s property.”
10) Living as we do in what some have touted an “Age of
Irony,” it may be difficult, and seem unnecessary, to
understand the importance (or the power) of paradox.
Paradox has always been a component in anagogic
teaching, and used as a tool to help the novitiate “see”
things that would otherwise be impossible to see.
Simply (and dryly) put, a paradox is a seemingly true
statement that leads to its own contradiction, or to a
KW98
counterintuitive conclusion. The recognition of (and
this is very important) ambiguities and equivocations
underlying paradoxes has led to many outstanding
advances in science, mathematics and philosophy. A
quaint example is this is the Birthday Paradox. This
states that if there are 23 (!) or more people in a
room, then there’s a chance of more than 50% that
at least 2 will have the same birthday. This paradox is
a mathematical truth that contradicts intuition (i.e.,
it is counterintuitive). There are, of course, all sorts
of paradoxes, some famous, others infamous. Zeno’s
Paradox (no relation to Our Hero) states that a flying
arrow can never reach its target since it is always half-
way there, i.e., the distance traveled is an infinite
number of halves; then there’s the Grandfather Paradox
(the one where you go back in time and either kill your
grandfather or sire your grandfather by having sex with
your grandmother), as well as paradoxes that aren’t
really paradoxes at all, but only seem to be, such as
the Epimenides Paradox (actually a logic problem),
exemplified by the statement, “All Cretians are liars”
(Epimenides was a Cretian, by the way), which was an
early variation of the Liar’s paradox that goes like this:
“This sentence is false.” (This is similar to the Nihilist
paradox; i.e., truth doesn’t exist, and this statement
itself is a truth, thus proving itself incorrect). Others:
Exception Paradox (if there is an exception to every
rule, is there an exception to the rule that states there
is an exception to every rule?); Hegel’s Paradox (Man
learns from history that man never learns from history);
Curry’s Paradox (if this sentence is true, then the world
 will end in a week); Choice Paradox (if I ask you for
a million dollars, will your answer be the same as to
this question?); Sorites Paradox (at what point, after
how many hairs have fallen, does a man become bald?);
Control Paradox (man can never be free of control, for
to be free of control is to be controlled by oneself );
Newcomb’s Paradox (how do you play a game against
an omniscient opponent?); Black Hole Paradox (they
violate a tenet of science that information cannot be
destroyed); and on and on. One of the seeming simplest,
yet for some (e.g., Wittgenstein) most perplexing of
paradoxes is Moore’s Paradox: It is raining outside, but
I don’t believe that it is. Story has it when Wittgenstein
first heard this, he awoke Moore in the middle of
the night and made him repeat the lecture word-for-
word. Wittgenstein’s early emphasis was on linguistic
problems relating to science and philosophy, and our
understanding of what can (and cannot) be “said” about
Universe, Life and Everything. Moore’s statement,
broken in parts, is logical but peculiarly inconsistent: It
is raining outside. I don’t believe that it is. Contrast this
with: It is raining outside, but he doesn’t believe it. This
statement seems consistent. The paradox comes in the
conjunction of It’s raining outside with the subjective
belief, I don’t believe that it is. Namely, he believes is
descriptive of something in the physical world (he
believes he’s hungry; he believes the lawn need mowing);
however, the first person equivalent, I believe, seems to
function not as a description of the outside world, but
rather as an affirmation of the proposition believed in
itself (i.e., hunger; mowing). In other words, there is
an asymmetry between first-person and second-person
attributions of belief. But that should be obvious.
11) Get your hands on a thick rubber band. Place it
against your forehead. Notice that it’s cool to the
touch. Now hook your thumbs through it and pull it
apart; that’s right, stretch it out and release it; then do
it again. Repeat this several times. Place it against your
KW99 forehead again. It feels warm, doesn’t it? Here’s why:
an object (in this case the rubber band) feels cool when
heat flows from your skin into it. Conversely, an object
feels warm when heat flows from the object into your
skin. Whether a material expands or contracts when it’s
heated can be called that material’s entropy level. The
entropy of a material is a measure of the disorderliness
of it molecules. When molecules are nice and ordered,
their entropy is low; when molecules are disorganized
and scattered, their entropy is high. But this isn’t exactly
true of rubber bands. Inside rubber bands, the messy
tangle of stringy molecules get straightened when they
get heated (pulled apart), and actually lose some of
their entropy. In physics, when the entropy goes down,
a system emits heat. Likewise, when a system increases
entropy, it takes in heat. So…when a rubber band
contracts, it sucks heat in from the environment. If
you were to heat the rubber band, it would contract
even smaller than before—why? Because by heating it
KW100
up we cause it to increase its entropy. This means that a
rubber band stretched around a core of other rubber
bands into a huge rubber band ball has, in essence,
reduced the measure of entropy in Universe. This will
be important for later.

<?php get_footer () ; ?>



Your thoughts go here

And so on...
STOP THE WORLD, I WANT TO THROW UP
You can measure the culture of a country by
the extent to which its lavatory walls are
scribbled on.
—Adolf Loos
 Fat Max Crwth Sez

In the beginning was the pun.

And God saw that the pun was good be-

cause it’s hard to find a funny pun.

Then came the groan and there lurched

into view Everything Else.

And darkness was upon the waters be-

cause it was night and nighttime is,
by definition, dark. And so on.

And language in those days was an ex-

ponent of self-congratulation.

And peace reigned in the heart of

beasts because no one can commit vio-
lence when in a state of wonder.

And things were pointed to and laughed

at and that became their names.

And the Act of Naming lasted an in-

finite series of presents.

And as the presents accumulated

they became known as the past.

And the sense of the world lay outside the world.

And in the world everything happened

as it happened and was as it was.

And in that series of presents, value which was of

value existed outside all happening and being-so.
And no-one spoke German.
And there was no death but only oc-
casional cessation.
And nothing was said except what could be said.
Except, of course, in German. For Ger-
man was reserved as the language of hu-
man philosophy. But neither humans nor
philosophy had yet been distributed into
being-so, so no one knew any of this.
And the feeling of the world in that se- KW122
ries of presents moved from a whole-
ness and oneness to a being-so that was
as a limited wholeness and oneness.
And God saw this was just OK
and not particularly funny.
God was never One to live outside the moment.
And then came the series of finites that became
the walking and talking types and they walked
and talked and when they moved they did so to
commit precise actions and when they spoke they
did so to say precise things, and they lived fully in
the present, which is God’s favorite chaise longue.
And this mode of expression was named by He
Who Names, and the name was: self-attention.
And it was bequeathed unto the walkers and talk-
ers to name themselves, and their tongues were
given strength in numbers so that they might
discover punch lines and thus amuse God who
still missed the initial crack-up of the First Pun.
And so worlds were made and they were set
free and upon these worlds walkers and talk-
ers walked and talked and presented their
genitalia one to another until there burgeoned
any number of walkers and talkers, thus mul-
tiplying the potential for punchlines.
 And God listened through a multiplic-
ity of ears, hoping, longing, desiring
the attainment of the First Groan.
For walkers and talkers in those days were
conscious beings and dwelled in a time-
lessness that did not include toys.
And so more days passed, relative to everything
in being-so that is not time, and in the fullness
of this measure came the metric we call Man.
And at that moment the memories of one-
ness and wholeness vanished and became com-
plexities and contradictions and ambiguities,
and self-attention became something other
and that something other was named ego.
And, Lo, there came Socrates.
And, after Socrates, Paradox.
Oh, and The Fall was swift and painful, for
swiftness and pain are modes of Man. Soon,
acting became thinking, and thinking caused
Man to live the limited existence called Future.
And without the aid of self-attention,
man next created Ordinary Language.
And then came German.
And God saw that it was what it was, and didn’t
really care much because on other planets walk-
ers and talkers were much funnier. Furthermore,
German offended God because jokes spoken in
that tongue were brutish, and few and far be-
tween, and even for Him hard to understand.

KW123 All, that is, except for those writ-

ten by Immanuel Kant.
And so God created Welsh.
And God saw that this was really good, actually in
fact better than the dodo, and far better than fish.
 What riled God most was all
the measuring Man did.
And as Man invented more and more toys, es-
pecially computers, God’s attention wandered.
Drifting towards the far lesser languages of preci-
sion required by machines, man became duller
and more lackluster, and his humor, what little
he had originally possessed, became feebler and
feebler until it was downright nonexistent.

And, Lo, God drifted off, alerted there were

marvelous punsters in a galaxy far away KW124
who practiced self-attention and did not
kill everything it could get its hands on.

But God did not abandon Man.

For, just in case things changed for the bet-

ter, He created a class of walkers and talk-
ers who would monitor events and remain
vigilant for signs of increased spiritual de-
velopment—i.e., a sense of humor.
And these people would not know they were the
minions of God, but they would be bestowed
with awareness of dissatisfaction and a desire for
truth. And this would lead in some to self-atten-
tion, as in the infinite series of ye olde world.

And God saw that it was a good set-up.

And so on.

<?php get_footer () ; ?>

Donald Duck and don Quixote are exactly alike
in that neither has ever trod the earth

This is:
a) True
b) False
c) Neither true nor false
d) Both true and false
e) Completely meaningless
f) Mostly meaningless
g) Mere quackery
h) All of the above
i) Some of the above, but not sure which
j) You’re not being serious enough
“Nothing in the affairs of men
is worthy of great anxiety..”
—Plato
Smile Upon Ambiguity’s Face
Exploitation has grown exponentially;
therefore, ‘seems’ more often than
not, is just that.
“Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment
of our intelligence by means of language.”
Discuss.
 “The Seven Samurai”
is to
“The Magnificent Seven”
as
The Second Law of Thermodynamics
is to
The Second World War
“ But words are things, and a small drop of ink,
falling like dew upon a thought, produces that
which makes thousands, perhaps millions, think.”
—Lord Byron
 “Son, I am able she said though you scare me, watch, said I, be-
loved, I said watch me scare you though, said she able am I, son.”
—They Might Be Giants, Apollo 18
 “He is unworthy of the name of man who
is ignorant of the fact that the diagonal of a
square is incommensurable with its side.”
—Plato
 Fat Max Crwth Relates
~In Detail~
Aspects of EDNA’s Speculative Existence
and Her Relationship to
the Post-Modern World
or
How EDNA Refused to Die for King Kong’s Sins
This is a story about a grrl. A grrl with KW138
arms past her knees, and with fingers
that touched her toes (even when she was
as erect as the men who viewed her).
This is not the type of story everyone
will be able to enjoy. If you don’t think
you will enjoy it, stop reading now.
There is no point to it, anyway.
This is not a parable or a put-on or a
paradox or a pun; this really happened
in the way all things really happen,
vaguely and with plenty room for error.
Her name was EDNA. EDNA is an
anagram for ADEN, and for DENA,
and for NADE as well as for DNA-E.
These are the only ones that make sense.1
But her name was EDNA.
Not Edna.
It was 1956. Secretary of State, John
Foster Dulles2, had just said, “The
ability to get to the verge without get-
ting into the war is the necessary art”.
 The King was hot. Blue Suede Shoes
and Hound Dog were on top.
Top is an anagram for pot.

Pot is the shortened form of

the word marijuana.

Whilst semordnilap is a semord-

nilap for palindromes.3

Teens were swooning over

Love me Tender.

But EDNA had not been

born to swoon.

EDNA had been born a grrl.

To say she had been an ugly child

at birth would be to say if you
stare too long into the sun you will
go blind. It was that obvious.

Sometimes the obvious is not apparent.

Some would say that ENDA

did not have a parent.

Parents’ eyes are supposed to fill with

love when they first see their child; ED-
NA’s presumed parents took one look at
theirs—the accumulative creature they
had borne into this veil of whimsy and
woe—and carted her off for adoption.

All that pain for nothing.

KW139 Even at birth, EDNA had been an
aberration; doctors (and nurses, too,
but especially orderlies) had marveled
at her hands that reached her feet.
She also had bristly hair that covered
her knuckles, a fact the medical men of
that time thought exceptionally weird.
The years slid by, as did the potential
adopters at the Phyllis Pomeroy Home for
Improperly Birthed Girls. In fact, when
they came to EDNA’s bed, the potential
adopters slid by so fast they made pages on
medical charts hanging on the wall flutter.
Summer followed Winter followed
Summer with most annoying regular-
ity, depending on where you began. KW140

In time, EDNA came to the ter-

minal point in her initially tempo-
rary residency at the PPHIBG; if she
wanted to remain there beyond her
first score years, she would have to be
an employee of the enterprise, an ex-
tremely unlikely proposition at best.
After all, who would hire some-
one whom children, upon first sight,
fled from, shrieking and crying?
Besides Mr. and Mrs. Bela Lugosi.4
But they had a child of their own.
However, as the only girl in the 23 year
history of the PPHIBG not even once
to have been considered for adoption, a
special niche, along with a modest sti-
pend, was created by Phyllis Pomeroy
herself, whose heart went out to this
poor, unloved, misbegotten knuckle-drag-
ging Eighth Wonder of the World.5
(Phyllis herself, poor dear, was sterile as
a pair of latex gloves; as barren as the
moon. Still, she had always pointedly
 refused to adopt a child of her own. As
she put it, in her own homespun man-
ner, to those who asked her why, “When
I adopt a girl out, I have a profit. If I
adopt a girl, I have a loss. Comprendi?”)
EDNA, touched though she was by this
gesture (a seldom enjoyed experience
for a grrl who, if touched by anything,
had been most touched by wind and
rain), made up her mind it was time for
her to travel beyond the safe enceinte
of her room; she desired to toss herself
into the slipstream of life, and see upon
which Golden Isle6 she would wash,
if indeed she must be a laundress.

Besides, the numbers, she estimated,

were in her favor. Long perusals of
newspapers had convinced her the world
was for the most part insane. This be-
ing the case, there must be someone
out there crazy enough to love her.

Of her time spent in the PPHIBG, not

much is known, or what was known
has been lost, or what is true has been
suppressed for the sake of children and
sensitive, impressionable types, or truth is
itself speculative at best and seldom really
known, for do not as many people who
view an accident report back that many
separate, independent stories, with but
the slightest resemblance one to another?
Nevertheless, it seems unlikely she would
have lost her maidenhead whilst living
there, considering both the circumstances
and her grotesque appearance. As for
KW141 those who latterly came forward to lay
claim as being first to distend her hymen,
all may be discounted as the ravings of
lost, lonely souls hungry for the fifteen
minutes Andy7 promised, pressed into
service and abetted by soulless scribes.
EDNA’s first employment
was in a Woolworth’s8.
It lasted a week.

The store was soon flooded with com-

plaints of frightened babies. And then
there had been the graffiti on the build-
ing’s face, especially the one in three-
foot tall red letters that proclaimed:
KW142
9
DARWIN LIED FOR YOUR SINS!

Such obviously Bolshie agitprop10

convinced the Woolworth’s big-
wigs EDNA was a liability and she
was forced to turn in her tunic.

EDNA soon thereafter became an habitué

of the street, a regular at the bread lines.

Then the Miracle occurred.

Walking along the Boulevard Extraordi-
naire11, dejected and depressed, her head
sagging forward, her eyes reading the side-
walk, her knuckles dragging the ground,
EDNA heard someone call her name.

“Hey, you!”

She turned to face the voice’s owner,

fully expecting to be spat upon, and
was instead greeted with the sight of a
tall, prodigious man wearing two vests,
a porkpie hat from which sprouted a
chicken father (red), hobnailed boots
(one red one blue), checked pants and
a U.S. Naval officer’s greatcoat. A bull-
 whip was coiled and attached to his belt,
along with several as yet unidentified
mechanical doohickeys. Through the
parting of his bulging shirt (the vests
were necessarily unbuttoned) a cavern-
ous, pasty omphalous12 could be seen.
“Yes?”
(As it happened, EDNA had the most
amazing voice. It was balanced precari-
ously between provocative and sexy. It
was sweet and yet knowing. It was lilting
and musical. It was a voice that could—
and often did—still the song of birds.
With a few words, EDNA could calm
enraged animals. Over the telephone, she
could seduce any man who ever lived.)

“Yes?”

The portly, preposterously attired man was

aghast at the sound of her voice. Fluted.
Mellifluous. Canorous. Eisteddfod.

He was Odysseus lashed to the mast,

the wax melting in his ears.

He was Pan enamored of Syrinx.

He was Stendhal13 stand-

ing before the David.

Obviously agog, he made an ostentatious

execution of a European bow, then set
to twiddling his mustachios. This effort
required both hands, as his mustachios,
which described two sixes back-to-back,
KW143 fell well below the length of his chin.

(They were, in fact, if stretched to

their maximum length, well over
a foot long, each side. But this
is inessential information.)

Finally, after a lengthy pause,

during which EDNA had be-
gun to lose hope, he said,

“Hew hare no reptile, hare

hugh my zweet?”

“No more than you are a gentleman,”

had huffed EDNA by way of reply. KW144
Despite her pinched features and sim-
ian nose, it was obvious to the portly
gent he had wounded her pride. She
spun on her heels—no mean feat when
considering the length of her arms—and
began to grow smaller with distance.

The man halted her with

a single command.

“Halt!”

EDNA froze in her tracks; it was as if

someone had pierced her heart with a
bicycle spoke. Slowly she turned, and
this is when she produced a smile.

The cracks in her chin fluttered; her

rheumy eyes glistened; a cloud of black-
heads scudded; a lunar landscape of zits
(both incandescent and recrudescent)
undulated. The man again cried out.

“Halt!”

He squinted throughout his lengthy

examination of her in the hope that
 this technique might mitigate her hag-
gish plug-ugliness. Her ante-pulchri-
tude. Her Gorgonesque deformity.

“Hugh hare naught run hov zee meel,” he

suggested, in a vaguely European accent.

EDNA narrowed her own eyes.

“You smartin’ off at me, buster?”

With a swoop of his head-

gear, he replied thus:

“Bermit me to hintroduce zelf. Hai ham

Hizzlefizzle14 von Neustater hov zee
Lichtenstein von Neustaters, howner and
hoperator hov zee Leetle Lichtenstein
Lechery Shoppe hon hupper Broadvay,
God Bless Hamerica. N’cest-pas?”

EDNA cringed—this man was a moral

leper! Zounds! Her mind reeled. Car-
nal knowledge was his byword, and
standing even this close to him caused
her severe adrenal agitation and a ris-
ing fear of algolagnial15 contagion.

“Away with you, you sexual zany!”

she cried, her ears now flutter-
ing in syncopation with her chin.

(Several passersby still live and for a

fee will testify to the day’s events. Says
Louella Bandini, of Sassafras, Ill., “It
was weird, you know? I mean, they was
standin’ there, she holdin’ up this golden
KW145 cross, an’ spittin’ at the fat dude, an’ all
the time he was zippin’ and unzippin’ his
boots…can I go to the hospital, now?”)
EDNA fell into the “leaping Bear”
stance taught her by the PPHIBG’s jani-
tor, one Morris Dufonski16, quondam
K’ung Fu world title champ and eighth
degree belt holder, who had been lat-
terly ousted from competition for his
propensity to carry a Lugar and shoot to
death those opponents who beat him.

Hizzlefizzle himself assumed the

“Crane” position—both lethal crouch-
es—which EDNA instantly recognized
and caused her to hail her assailant KW146
as, at least combatively, an equal.

Overwhelmed by his outré manner-

isms, she finally consented to attend
a séance in his company, followed by
a Romanesque debauch and a turkey
on rye with a bottle of slivovitz17.
They were wed in the following Spring,
the one following the Winter they
were in that had followed the Fall
that had been preceded by a Sum-
mer, depending on where you began.
Hizzlefizzle, who had battened consider-
ably and well off the pigeons who paid
good money to watch badly-photo-
graphed scenes of near-obscene nudity
between horses and women of various
ethnic identities, among other things,
remanded his new bride into the hands
of Dr. Thurgmond P. Reichenbach18,
of the hinterlands of Bolivia, an expert
in skingrafting and recovering lamp-
shades. In hardly any time at all, he had
EDNA’s face wrapped extensively in
gauze, much to the relief of his goosestep-
ping staff. Then came the surgery and,
when the healing was done—voila!
 EDNA was somewhat less
ugly than before.
Sixteen operations later, EDNA sur-
passed everyone’s expectations vis-a-vis
feminine pulchritude. She now pos-
sessed a pert, upturned nose, moonlight
blue eyes, and skin as smooth as rose
petals and the color of alabaster19.
She divorced Hizzlefizzle in the fall.
That’s the one that was anteceded
by the summer that followed the
former fall of their betrothal.
The money she acquired from the dis-
solution of their union was so great that
she soon thereafter enrolled in Hermione
Pluterguild’s School for Etiquette and
Sexual Conquest. There, she quickly
acquired superb table manners and an
impressive collection of Alpaca sweaters20.
Not to mention the amour of Hermione’s
eighth husband, Filbert Pluterguild, a
sixty-ish septuagenarian with a camel-like
penchant for spitting and possessor of as
many oil wells as Carter has liver pills21.

On his deathbed, several weeks after

separating from his wife of 83 years,
as he lay dying in the Paris apart-
ment he had shared with his new
lover for three full weeks, his last words
were reported to have been: “Oh, my
God…those arms…oh, my God…”.22

KW147 Now with her own retinue of servants

and surgeons, EDNA’s next conquest
was K. P. Goodfellow, owner of Cam-
bridge and Oxford and large bits of
Zaire. They were wed on the weekend
after they met at the Florence Club in
downtown Dayton, Ohio, which he also
owned, as well as other bits of the state.
But the union was annulled to the tune
of $30 million when she discovered he
preferred bananas to The Other Thing.

EDNA was now worth eight hun-

dred million dollars, AT.

After Taxes.23
KW148
Then the scandal hit.

EDNA, who preferred to sleep nude upon

an under-inflated tractor tire, had been
photographed in this lurid position by
a certain member of her staff, a sexual
scalawag who afterwards shared the stories
of her adventures (for money!) with the
world. The most amazing thing Uncle
Joe and Auntie Harriet learned from the
checkout stand tabs had to do with the
variety of previously unsupposed positions
that became possible when one’s hands
reached one’s toes.24 Within months,
models in such magazines as FUSE and
BRISTLE and PORN AGAIN and
LEATHER LEADER’S DIGEST were
featuring their long, painfully altered
arms, expensively lengthened by none oth-
er than Dr. Thurgmond P. Reichenbach.

As the world—not then engaged in any

distracting wars—fell prey to the in-
nermost details of EDNA’s unseemly
and sordid existence, EDNA by de-
grees grew listless and camoused.
Then she became despondent.
 And finally chapfallen and umbilicate.25

For, despite all her brief alliances and

even briefer dalliances—none, alas, had
been for love. In that one aspect, she
had failed in her life’s quest. She had
supposed the world crazy enough in
potentia to possess amongst its billions
of souls one insane enough to love her as
she was. But now she found herself no
longer as she had been back when good
old Hizzlefizzle had unzipped his boots
in plain sight on the sidewalk. Those
days, like her sex drive, were spent and
behind her. How she longed for the time
she sent little children crying to their
mums! How she wished she had never
stepped foot on this path of hedonism
that led to her sybaritic26 end! Despite
her newfound beauty and her bottomless
trove of cash, love eluded her completely.

EDNA thereafter, as everyone knows,

disappeared. A note was discov-
ered glued to a chiffonier donating it,
along with her eight hundred millions
(which were inside the chiffonier) to
the World Without Hiccups Society.27
Her last words: “Love don’t come cheap.”28

An unsubstantiated report had her

running naked through a rainfor-
est in Burma,29 her knuckles scor-
ing troughs in the moist earth.

KW149
<?php get_footer () ; ?>
FOOTNOTES:
1) An anagram is a type of word play (ana—“again” and
graphos—“write”). The result of rearranging the let-
ters of a word or phrase in order to create new words
using the same letters, anagrams often are expressed
in the form of an equation, thus: EDNA = DENA,
or earth = heart. Isn’t this thrilling? It gets harder.
Here’s a well-know one: roll in the hay = thrill a honey.
There are people who do this sort of thing. Sit around
day after day. Sometimes, when the subject and
its anagram result in a complete sentence, a tilde is
used, hence: semolina~is no meal. There are rules for
everything. And, as with everything that has rules, KW150
there is usually some sort of hoary past. Ancient
Kabbalists, fond of asserting such gibberish as “se-
cret mysteries woven in the numbers of letters,” were
quite keen on the things. The ancient Romans called
the art of divining anagrams “ars magna”. Coinci-
dentally “ars magna” is an anagram for anagrams.
(Jim Morrison = Mr. Mojo Risin on L.A.Woman)
2) Dulles (1888-1959) served under Eisenhower from
1953 to 1959 and had just a terribly lot to do with
the whole Cold War Thing. Here’s another quote to
give a better flavor of the times: “There are plenty of
problems in the world, many of them interconnected.
But there is no problem which compares with this
central, universal problem of saving the human race
from extinction.” He advocated a very militaristic
saber rattling-ish stance against all things perceived
Communist, Communistic or Communist-related,
or derived. In fact, he launched a veritable Holy War
on the philosophy of Communism, on the very idea
of anything not-American. He supported the French
in their little imbroglio in Indochina, the one we later
grew so fond of and that caused so many students
to roam the streets bearded, braless and with maps
to Canada in their VW vans. Another example: “I
wouldn’t attach too much importance to these stu-
dent riots. I remember when I was a student at the
Sorbonne in Paris, I used to go out and riot occasion-
ally.” People like this are still running the world.
3) Yes, well this opens up a can of worms, doesn’t it?
Obviously (it is obvious, isn’t it?), semordnilap is an
anagram of palindromes, but this brings up the whole
question of what exactly is a palindrome, and why
is it mentioned here? It could simply not have been
 mentioned at all, but there it is, mentioned, and more
than that, anagrammed. First, as to what it is: a palin-
drome is a word, phrase, number or other sequence of
units (such as a strand of DNA) that has the property
of reading the same in either direction (the adjust-
ment of punctuation and spaces between words is
generally permitted). The word “palindrome” comes
from the Greek palin “back” and dromos “way.” And
yes, there is a hoary past and so on, the Greeks, the
Romans and on and on. I could adduce examples for
you until night falls, or rises, as the case may be. Only
a few should suffice: civic reads the same in both di-
rections, as does was it a cat I saw? Some palindromes
use words as units rather than letters: You can cage a
swallow, can’t you, but you can’t swallow a cage, can you?
The first rule of palindromes is this: you must be very
clever. The second rule (if there is one,) is probably:
you must have plenty of time on your hands, prefer-
ably be unemployed, likely be unemployable and, of
course, still living with your parents. Unless you hap-
pen to be “Weird Al” Yankovic. In his album, Poodle
Hat, he included a song called Bob that is composed
entirely of rhyming palindromes. I believe he still
lives with his parents. Here is a computer program
written entirely in C Code by Brian Westley for the
1987 International Obfuscated C Code Contest:
type ‘a elbatum = ‘a ;;
type lol = bool ;;
type pop = int ;;
type b = { mutable lol : lol elbatum } ;;
type i = { mutable pop : pop elbatum } ;;
fun erongi lol pop n ->
pop.lol <- let nuf =
erongi ; fun erongi lol pop n -> pop.lol ; ignore
n in
erongi ; lol.pop <- n pop lol ignore nuf ; ignore
= fun tel -> lol.pop
<- n pop lol ignore nuf
;;

But there’s more. Palindromic motifs can be and

are found in most genomes, or sets of genetic instruc-
tions. However, the meaning of palindrome in the
KW151 context of genetics is slightly modified. Since the
DNA is formed by two paired strands of nucleotides,
and the nucleotides always pair in the same way
(Alanine (A) with Thymine (T), Cytosine (G) with
Guanine (G)), a (single-stranded) sequence of DNA
 is said to be a palindrome if it is equal to its comple-
mentary sequence read backwards. The sequence
ACCTAGGT is palindromic because its complement
is TGGATCCA. Get it? Also, some philosophers
suspect a palindromic relationship between astrophys-
ical-biological evolution and the experiencing beings
in it. The issue is related with ascertaining if Nature
is an instrument (i.e. merely a means) and otherwise
devoid of any value, instead of having intrinsic value
(i.e., an end in itself ); likewise, if sentient beings are
merely a means (one to entropize Nature faster, but cf.
supra., etc.), or possess any intrinsic value whatsoever.
So, either the whole set of empirically-found realities,
or facts, makes sense in both directions (palindromic),
or sense can be ascribed to such a set by reading it KW152
in one single direction only, as one would a written
(non-palindromic) sentence. A single direction means
reading Nature in a classic, materialist/idealist sense,
while reading it in both directions means a mirror or
reciprocal functionalization. In either case, both reali-
ties (mind-possessing living creatures, and astrophysi-
cal-biospheric evolution) uses for its own ends the
reality that uses it as a means. Interesting stuff, isn’t
it? What’s at stake you might ask? The answer would
be—everything. The possibility of ascertaining wheth-
er conscious beings are worthier than non-conscious
Nature depends on if axiological (values, or meanings)
readings ascribing a sense to what is found going on in
Universe can be obtained in both directions. (And you
thought a rose was a rose was a rose, right?) Finally,
as to the second question, that is why palindromes
are mentioned here at all, when they fairly well could
have been dispensed with, the answer is—because.
4) Bela Lugosi the actor, not the Balkan politician.
This is the guy who portrayed Count Dracula, not
the chocolate cereal guy. He was in numerous hor-
ror movies, not Sesame Street. He was married a
lot and often, but had only one child, Bela Lugosi,
Jr. Imagine how many lunches that bought. He was
born Be’la Ferenc Dezso Blasko in Hungary, back in
1882. Yes, that Lugosi, the friend of Ed Wood. An
apocryphal story has Vincent Price saying to Peter
Lorre at Lugosi’s funeral, “Do you think we ought
to drive a stake through his heart, just to be sure?”
5) For those of you whose lives have been debilitated by
a surfeit of television and a lack of a classical educa-
tion, the Seven Wonders of the Ancient and Modern
Worlds (beginning with the Ancient) are: The Co-
lossus of Rhodes; the Hanging Gardens of Babylon;
 The Great Pyramid of Giza (this is the oldest Wonder
and the only one still remaining); the Statue of Zeus
at Olympia; the Pharos lighthouse of Alexandria; the
Temple of Artemis at Ephesus; the Mausoleum at
Helicarnassus. Counterpoint these with the Seven
Modern Wonders: Itaipu Dam in Brazil/Paraguay;
the Netherlands North Sea Protection Works Proj-
ect; Panama Canal; the English/French Chunnel;
the CN Tower in Toronto, Canada; the Empire State
Building (yes, there are now taller buildings, but
had many had King Kong fall off them?) and, last
but never least, the Golden Gate Bridge. Imagine
being compared to any one of these! To be con-
sidered the Eighth Wonder of the Modern World!
What a prodigy! What an accolade! Unless, like
EDNA, the mantle settles on your humbled shoul-
ders because you happen to be amazingly ugly.
6) When they miss us we shall be
Well afloat,
Dancing gaily o’er the sea
In a boat!
While the breezes from above
Carry whispers of our love,
And are singularly free
What they quote!
When an island comes in sight
We will land,
For we’ll run the vessel right
On the sand;
Then we’ll leave our fairy ship,
And across the surf I’ll skip,
If my lover holds me tight
By the hand
O my own and my adored!
To some island unexplored
Let us fly across the blue and sunny sea!
Population only two
Shall I weary first of you,
Or will you, my love, grow weary first of me?
We shall see!
We shall see!
KW153 On that golden Grecian isle
We shall stay,
Making love in classic style
Day by day!
If my grammar should be weak
 When I worship him in Greek,
Yet my heart knows all the while
What to say!
Then we’ll build a house for two
Nice and dry,
For it won’t be always blue
In the sky;
And we’ll live in figs and grapes
Served in many ways and shades!
Oh, you don’t know what we’ll do —
He and I!
O my own and my adored!
To some island unexplored
Let us fly across the blue and sunny sea! KW154
Population only two
Shall I weary first of you,
Or will you, my love, grow weary first of me?
We shall see!
We shall see!
7) Reference here is to Andy Warhol, a sort-of artist/con-
man. He famously once claimed that “Everyone will
be famous for 15 minutes.” He also said: “I’m bored
with that line. I never use it anymore. My new line
is ‘In 15 minutes everybody will be famous.’” Of
course, you can see the difference. And then there
was: “I had a lot of dates but I decided to stay home
and dye my eyebrows.” But my personal favorite
remains, “When I got my first television set, I stopped
caring so much about having close relationships.”
Ah, the life of an artist. It’s the only life for me!
8) F.W. (for Frank Winfield) Woolworth, founded in
1911, was among the first five-and-ten-cent stores,
which sold discounted general merchandise at fixed
prices, usually five or ten cents (hence the name),
undercutting the prices of local merchants (an early
version of Wal-Mart). It was also the first store to put
merchandise out for shoppers to touch before making
a purchase. Prior to this, customers presented the clerk
with a list of items which were kept behind counters.
The stores eventually incorporated lunch counters and
served as general gathering places, a precursor to the
modern shopping mall food court. The son of a farm-
er, F.W. actually aspired to be a merchant. In 1910 F.
W. commissioned architect Cass Gilbert to design his
new corporate HQ, a 60 story skyscraper that was,
for a time, the tallest building in the world. This was
changed in 1930 when the Chrysler Building opened
its doors for business. Woolworth’s building’s splendor
 and resemblances with European Gothic cathedrals caused
the Rev S. Parkes Cadman to call it a Cathedral of Com-
merce during its opening ceremony. Ah, commerce. Ah,
Christianity. And what of those merchants in the Temple?
9) Charles Darwin, known to his intimates as Chuck, is buried
at Westminster Abbey alongside a bunch of other famous
white dudes. He is probably best known as the father of ten
children, after having married his cousin, Emma. I had a
cousin I was hot for when I was a teenager, but my mother
told me I couldn’t ever marry her because we were related.
I couldn’t explain to her, because she was my mother, that
I did not want to marry her (my cousin, not my mother),
I only wanted to have sex with her (again, for clarity’s sake,
my cousin and not my mother). Maybe one day Chuck
woke up, put on his glasses, looked at what he’d done, and
it occurred to him he wasn’t supposed to have married his
cousin, either. So he sat down and, in his spare time (he
was a professional naturalist, so he was severely underem-
ployed), scribbled (for this was in the day when people
were so marvelously educated it seemed each and every one
of them could write; for example, look at all the military
men who returned from the carnage that won them battle
ribbons, to write voluminously and in great detail all about
how they missed their men, the smell of their sweat, their
grunts at hard labor, and all the other swell things that go
with that choice of professions, unless of course one doesn’t
actually choose one’s profession so much as it is chosen for
one genetically which, long way round the barn, brings
us to—) The Descent of Man, followed up by Selection in
Relation to Sex (a title no doubt chosen by his publisher
since Chuck’s first effort had not enjoyed brisk sales), and
The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. So you
can see how marrying so close to the trunk of his family
tree might have had an influence on his choice of sub-
ject matter. One wonders—had he chosen perhaps more
wisely, or used some sort of prophylactic—might he not
have scored as one of his century’s better crime writers,
a la Conan Doyle? As it happened, his influence—out-
side the crime genre, that is—was still rather broad, and
today still serves as a flashpoint for certain sorts of minds
who are prone to vicious screeds, vituperative expositions,
Bible thumping (King James version), and who generally
express a deep-seated need for control, albeit not self.
10) I just love the intimate juxtaposition of these two words,
KW155 don’t you? Always fun to throw into a cocktail conversa-
tion, or to mutter in a dark manner as one passes a group of
picketeers on the street. Some chap is buzzing right along,
expressing his thoughts on Ugandan economic develop-
ment, or what price HIV, when you lock his eyes with yours
 and utter, “Bolshie agitprop”, then stalk away with one of
those cartoon black clouds in your wake. I mean, really,
what sort of repost is possible? For that growing seg-
ment of you who are probably not reading this anyway,
‘Bolshie’ refers to the not much longer word, Bolshevik,
which itself means “majority faction”, something of an
oxymoronicism if there ever was one. Bolsheviks referred
to themselves as the “Marxist Russian Social-Democratic
Labor Party”. They were opponents of both Russian
traditional statehood (read: Czar) and the Russian Ortho-
dox Church (read: God). Besides the Bolsheviks there
were the Mensheviks. Even though to our ironic smart-
ass ears this sounds something like a ski team in a Mad
magazine sketch, in reality it means nothing more or less
than “minority”; hence, the Mensheviks were the minor- KW156
ity of the majority faction, for which no real word has
even been coined. After the split, in 1917, a dude named
Vladimir Lenin seized power in Russia, and the Bolshies
became more popularly known as the Communist Party.
As for agitprop…it’s a slang word applied to any form
of media that tries to peddle opinion, especially if its
aim is to convince people (read: sheep) through agitat-
ing their minds with highly emotional language (read:
biased, self-righteous blather). Just to be erudite, the
word evolved not from the popularly suspected contrac-
tion of agitational propaganda, but shortened from that
self-same Communist Party’s term, otdel agitatsii i propa-
gandy, i.e., Department for Agitation and Propaganda,
later renamed, perhaps more mellifluously, certainly more
obscurely, as the Ideological Department, making it sound
rather like it belongs in the Platonic Shopping Mall.
11) Memphis, Tenn.
12) Obviously, from the hobnailed boots, it was the Fab Six-
ties when this took place. The reference to Omphalous
is an interesting one, and leads as we shall see in a mo-
ment to the philosophical dead end of “Last Thursday-
ism”. But first a word about the meaning of the word
Omphalous. It means navel. Umbilicus. At the Shrine
of Delphi, a navel-shaped stone was believed to designate
the center of the world. This brings us to the so-called
Omphalos Hypothesis. Named after the title of an 1857
book by a forgotten fellow—so we shall remember him
here, if only for a moment—Philip Henry Grosse (for
whom the Grosse Fugue had not been named), in which
he argued (with what degree of conviction it is impos-
sible to say, not having read his book) that, in order for
the world to be ‘functional’ God must have created earth
with mountains fully formed, trees with their growth
rings, Adam & Eve with pubic hair, navels, nails and
 PMS, and that therefore (logical leap here) no evidence that
we can see of the presumed age of the earth or of universe
can be taken seriously (read: reliably). This argument has
been extended by deeper thinkers (yes, they are a species
of creationists, for creationists do evolve) to the property of
light, claiming that it (light, that is) only appears to travel
from far-off stars. These are perhaps the same ones who
believe A&E had no navels (which, coincidentally, may
very well be the case for cloned humans, another form of
Adams and Eves, but we’ll leave that for another time). The
philosophic problem that arises from this is powerful, if a
bit silly. Since the hypothesis is posited upon the conceit
that apparent age is just that—apparent—and therefore an
illusion, it is perfectly reasonable to argue that the world
and everything in it was created perhaps only minutes ago.
Any memories one may have of before times were created
in situ , in the same fashion as was the fossil record. This
is whence the expression “Last Thursdayism” derives, since
everything we know could as well have been created last
Thursday as 50 billion years ago. British philosopher/logi-
cian and political activist, Bertrand Russell—an eminently
rational white dude—wrote the following in reference to
Grosse’s idea: ”There is no logical impossibility in the hy-
pothesis that the world sprang into being five minutes ago,
exactly as it then was, with a population that “remembered”
a wholly unreal past. There is no logically necessary connec-
tion between events at different times; therefore nothing that is
happening now or will happen in the future can disprove the
hypothesis that the world began five minutes ago.” (Analy-
sis of Mind, 1921) Hence the inescapable fact that we are
born in mystery, we live in mystery and we die in mystery.
13) For brevity’s sake we shall assume you are schooled in the
stories of Odysseus, and Pan’s love for Syrinx. But how
many these days are familiar with the French author, Stend-
hal? Or much less the Stendhal Syndrome? I thought not.
Simply put: the Stendhal Syndrome is a psychosomatic
(what an ugly word!) condition that results in acceler-
ated heartbeat, dizziness, confusion and hallucination
when exposed to—art. Stendhal (Marie-Henri Beyle)
described just such an experience in his book, Naples and
Florence: A Journey from Milan to Reggio, which he wrote
in 1817. Florentine art has a history of making people
dizzy. Has something to do with all the curly-cues. The
syndrome was named by one Graziella Magherini (the
KW157 Magherini Syndrome just didn’t sound right), in 1979.
14) Of completely no value is this: there are
no anagrams for Hizzlefizzle.
15) I have been accused in the past of being unnecessarily
sesquipedalian and macroverbumsciolist. This could not be
 further (or farther) from the truth. I am very circum-
spect in my choice of language. Take, in this instance,
for instance, the use of the word algolagnial. It is based
on the Greek αλγοσ = “pain” and λαγεια = “lust.”
Thus, algolagnic is the paraphilia of deriving pleasure
from pain. What does paraphilia mean? Hang on.
Let’s finish up with algolagnic first. I thought it relevant
to add that algolagnia is not the same as masochism,
since algolagnia is simply an enjoyment of pain and
does not require the subtler stimulus of domination,
submission or humiliation that go into the packet we
like to think of as masochism. Paraphilia, on the other
hand, is derived from παρα = “besides, or around”, and
ϕιλια = “love,” and means sexual arousal in response
to situations (or large, bumpy vibrating objects) which KW158
may interfere with the capacity for affectionate sexual
reciprocation. This does not, of course, make it wrong.
16) Another name that has been lost to us in the mists of
time. Morris Dufonski was born Morrie Duchamp (8
lbs. 9 oz.) in Dexter, Ga., USA, on or about 1909 or
1912 and in the merry month of May. Hence, he was
a Taurus. He stood fully stretched at 5’ 3” and weighed
various weights throughout his life, both naked and
fully clothed. He was, according to legend, for that is
all we have left for us upon which to gnaw, something
of a runt. One of those famous 90 lb. weaklings whose
face is continuously covered with sand kicked there by
a string of bullies who had nothing better to do that
afternoon. Morrie was a lonely child and self-taught
martial artist until WWII sent him packing to the S.
Pacific where, upon being demobbed, he remained for
a while, soaking up culture and surface radiation, until
he felt reasonably assured he could return to the States
and kick some white butt. The rest, as they say, is his-
tory (history being a nightmare from which we are all
still trying to awaken.) Biography, of course, is riotous
with confections, and one would hate to lay claim to
the omniscience many of the nasty fellows who write
such things claim. Nevertheless, we have it on good
authority that Morrie, besides being a psychopath and
highly trained killer—thanks to the US Army—was
also, perhaps not unlike most men, a repressed homo-
sexual. But, also not unlike most men, so unable to
express his inner longings that he found it necessary to
channel his frustrations into his own unique form of
creativity—i.e., killing people with his bare hands. Or
with a Lugar. Which he would also use with his bare
hands, unless it was cold and then he wore gloves. It
was shortly after he had been sentenced to 20 years
 in Sing-Sing for impersonating an airship in public
that we find him employed by the PPHIBG. As an
escaped felon he was rather cheap labor for Phyllis.
17) This intoxicating beverage, also known variously
as rakia, or plum brandy, originated in the Balkan
Peninsular. The name derives from the South Slavic
word for plum, sliva. Production is concentrated in
Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Macedo-
nia, Croatia, the Czech republic, Poland, Romania,
Serbia and Slovakia—in other words, everywhere you
might envision men wearing long fur coats, jackboots,
enormous ZZ Top-like beards and giving imperious
glares at Western girls in skintight jeans. It is the
national drink of Serbia and Montenegro, and comes
in pretty round bottles. You must be 21 to purchase
and consume alcoholic beverages, Lord knows why.
18) Didn’t you think Gregory Peck was mis-
cast in The Boys from Brazil?
19) Think Myrna Loy.
20) Highly prized by ingénues and cross-dressers alike,
these sweaters come from the fleece of camel-like
ungulates called Vicuna pacos or, more popularly,
Alpaca. “Alpaca” is the name given to two distinct
things: the wool from the Peruvian alpaca, as well
as the style of fabric manufactured therefrom, also
known as mohair or Icelandic sheep wool It comes
in 22 vibrant, natural flavors and no, alpaca are not
the same as llamas, although both animals, as with
all camelidae, enjoy the unpleasant habit of spitting.
21) As an aside to some of our younger readers, if such a
thing exists, this reference is to a quaint time in the
heritage of our country, a bucolic XIXth Cent., not
long after the Civil War and continuing right up to
the Big One (WWII) when medicine was still (still!)
in its infancy—i.e., before the genome had been
mapped—and people were (still!) gullible and more
than a little naïve. This was the heyday of so-called
patent medicines. In those days, such products ex-
isted as “Pink Pills for Pale People” (a very big seller
for the Civil War, which had not been named that
as yet), and “Carter’s Little Liver Pills”. This lat-
ter is, obviously, whence our reference was drawn.
Carter’s Little Liver Pills were many and varied, and
were guaranteed to improve digestion, pollinate the
KW159 peter, palliate neuralgia and sleeplessness (of which
there must have been a lot after that noisy Civil War),
prevent blindness (yes, blindness), resolve gout (what-
ever that is), mitigate sciatica, act as a rebarbative
for rheumatism, darken sallow complexions, lighten
 monthly discharge, restore locomotor ataxia (ram-
pant in the XIXth Cent., along with TB), as well as
partial paralysis, St. Vitus’ Dance (whatever hap-
pened to that?), as well as mop up the after effects
of la grippe, soothe heart palpitations (arrhythmia),
calm La Tourete’s syndrome, fade fistula, heal hernias,
abate bladder infections, alleviate apoplexy, eradicate
blackheads, rid ringworm and hooknose, not to
mention cure dandruff and saturnine or phlegmatic
personality disorders (these were pre-Prozac days),
mend malaria and manic depression and even har-
ness chronic masturbation. Unfortunately, the for-
mulae for these pills were lost in the hubbub of the
Second World War (WWII), so medicine was forced
to start over and has been foundering ever since. KW160
22) This is, of course, key to understanding EDNA’s
allure, the major source of her charm, as it were.
For, despite the amounts of radical rhinoplasty
she may have undergone, or the numerous skin
grafts from her derriere, the one item she retained
from birth was her greatly (and naturally, unlike
her epigone) exaggerated arms. This not being a
prurient narrative, we must needs leave it to read-
ers’ imaginations exactly what the wondrous ap-
plications of such lengthy appendages might be.
23) In 1862, in an effort to support the War Between
the North and the South, Congress enacted the
first income tax law. It was a graduated tax, so
that a person earning from $600 to $10,000 a
year paid at a rate of 3%, and anyone who made
more than $10,000 paid more. This was, BTW,
when the so-called inheritance tax made its debut.
This tax was eliminated in 1872. The Supreme
Court actually decided, around the late 1890s,
that the income tax was unconstitutional because
it was not apportioned among the states uni-
formly. But then, in 1913, along came the 16th
Amendment. That, of course, made the income
tax a permanent fixture…just in time for the First
World War (i.e., the First War to End All wars).
24) Cf. 22 supra.
25) The basic idea behind Hedonism is that all actions
can be measured by how much pleasure they pro-
duce or, conversely, how little pain results. Phi-
losophers John Stuart Mill and Jeremy Bentham
established Hedonism through their critical assess-
ment of the concept of Utilitarianism. (Utilitarian-
ism can be summed up thus: all action should be
directed towards achieving the greatest good/hap-
 piness for the greatest number of people.) There are
2 schools of Hedonism: 1) Bentham’s approach was
quantitative; i.e., the value of a pleasure = intensity
of pleasure x duration, while 2) Mill’s approach was
qualitative; i.e., higher levels of pleasure are better
than lower levels of pleasure. He believed simpler
beings, such as pigs (Johnny loved pigs), can access
pleasure easier than we since they don’t “see” relational
events, consequences, etc.; hence, unlike us, they can
roll about in mud endlessly, and eat until the excre-
tion is above their knees. As for we humans—well,
obviously we’re mired in the mud of mentation and
haven’t time for rolling about lazily in feces (except
metaphorically). But what, you may ask, has this to
do with our story? To this I would answer Nothing,
then move on to addressing Sybaris, a city of Magna
Graecia (Greater Greece) on the Gulf of Taranto. This
was an Achaean (think: ancient Greek) colony found-
ed about 720 BC (the Spring and Autumn Period in
China), back when the area (unlike today) was fertile,
fat and fine. Sybaris became proverbial throughout
Greece for its magnificence and luxury. Such was it
that, throughout the VIth Cent., no other Hellenic
city could compare to it. Inner turmoil between
democrats and republicans (lesson here!) led to an in-
ternecine war that destroyed the city utterly. So, while
being a Hedonist may be considered a philosophi-
cal position, as well as a heck of a lot of fun, being
a sybarite is pretty much the same as being dead.
26) Recurring theme. This word is used in an associative
manner, thus: umbilicus means naval (omphalous);
a navel is concave (inwardly shaped), and therefore
depressed. Many might say this is a mere contriv-
ance, and something of a stretch. I say it is a way of
energizing language. By providing old words with
new meanings not usually associated with them,
the old words profit in several ways, in the main by
being used rather than sleeping within the pages of
moldering dictionaries, but more importantly by
bringing new imagery to pedestrian concepts, in this
case “depression.” So next time you’re feeling blue,
try using “umbilicate,” as in this sentence: “Hon, I
love you but I’m feeling a bit umbilicate tonight.”
27) Annually, some 30 people or so will die horrible
KW161 deaths from uncontrolled hiccups (hiccoughing). The
medical term, singultus, comes from the Latin, singult,
translated roughly as “trying to catch your breath
while sobbing is like having sex while stirring an oxtail
stew.” Hiccoughs lasting more than 48 hours are
 described by doctors as protracted. Hiccoughs lasting
more than a month are termed by these same health-
care professionals as intractable. While hiccoughs that
persist more than several months are considered to be
contractable to most small carnivals or sideshows spe-
cializing in bizarre human behavior. The longest at-
tack in recorded history lasted 60 years, but was finally
cured when the patient died. Hippocrates and Celsus
associated hiccoughs with liver inflammation. They
were too early in the history of humankind to take ad-
vantage of Carter’s Little Liver Pills. Galen believed
hiccoughs were due to violent emotions arising from
the stomach. (Apparently, the ancients were unfamil-
iar with flatulence.) Protracted cases of this debilitat-
ing and socially offensive disease occur more often in KW162
men than women and can develop at any age, even in
utero. Many instances of hysterical hiccoughing are
never resolved, but several psychogenic speculations
have been adduced: they include, shock, fear, conver-
sion disorders, personality disorders and malingering.
This would explain why I always started hiccoughing
when assigned chores as a child. If you or any of your
friends, associates, past lovers, relatives or lien hold-
ers know of anyone who suffers from this potentially
tragic disorder, please, step up to the plate and help.
World Without Hiccups is a non-profit charitable
organization that is completely tax deductible. Please
send your checks or Money Orders (PayPal is also ac-
cepted) to: Reverend Bob, P.O. Box 023, Delworthy/
Provo, Utah, America, and receive a virtual backslap.
28) “The tongues of dying men enforce attention like deep
harmony” (Richard II, II.1.5-6, William Shakespeare,
or whoever) The last words of famous men/women
linger in the air and help us guide our lives as we
move among the shadows of this multi-dimensional
plane we insist upon calling “the world”. Take, for
instance, the last words of American cinema idol,
James Dean, who died violently in a car crash when
he slammed his Porsche into another car: “That guy’s
gotta stop…he’ll see us.” Then there’s the chilling
final words from that famed aviatrix, Amelia Ear-
hart, “KHAQQ calling Itasca. We must be on you,
but cannot see you. Gas is running low.” Or how
about Thomas de Mahay, Marquis de Favras, who
plotted to help Louis XVI escape during the French
revolution. He was handed his official death sen-
tence as he was being led to the scaffold. Reading it
over, his last words were: “I see you have made three
spelling mistakes.” One of my personal favorites
 has always been the last words of the stage actor,
Edmund Gwenn, who reportedly said: “Dying is
easy. Comedy is difficult.” The German Philosopher,
Georg Wilhelm Hegel: “Only one man every un-
derstood me. And he didn’t really understand me.”
Conrad Hilton, the Hotelier, as he lay dying, was
asked is he had any wisdom to leave the world. He
replied: “Leave the shower curtain on the inside of
the tub.” When Timothy Leary died, his last words
to help urge us along with our lives was this: “Why
not? Why not? Why not? Why not? Yeah.” Many
people doubt the accuracy of Nostrodamus’ predic-
tions. But who could doubt him after hearing what
he said the day before he died: “Tomorrow, I shall no
longer be here.” Jeanne-Antoinette Poisson, Marquise
d’Etoiles Pompadour, mistress to Louis XV, when
she died, called on God to “Wait a second.” Then
she quickly rouged her cheeks. But the best is yet to
come. General John Sedgwick, a corps commander in
the Army of the Potomac during the Civil War, while
at the battle of Wilderness, peered over a parapet at
his troops. His officers urged him to take cover from
sniper fire. His last words before being shot in the
head: “They couldn’t hit an elephant at this dist—”
29) Modern day Myanmar.

KW163
 “

not a blank page

The nature of God is a circle in which
the center is everywhere and
the circumference is nowhere.”
—Empedocles
“Cliché is the armature of Universe.”
—Alfred Jarry
The future is likely to be less traumatic for you
if you accept that there can be
truth without absolutes
science without objectivity
morality without rules
society without uniform values
and religion without a church
 Zeno’s Paradox
or
How to Stop Suffering and
Learn to Love Aplomb

Zeno was sitting one day on the wooden dock be-

side the ferry terminal unpeeling a burrito, a bandage
on his head. Seated beside him was Phylactery Jones
stretching his neck and scratching the stubble on his
prognathous face.
“Master,” asked PJ, to no one in particular, “why is
there something instead of nothing?”
“Who says there’s something?” responded Zeno, a
smear of mustard on his ragged smile.
“Ah,” Postulator Juniperbush responded, heaving a
heavy sigh, “that is bloody unfathomable.”
There was silence amongst them whilst Zeno masti-
cated.
Again, interrupting the Silence, Mankind’s natural
state, Passionfruit Jodhpurs asked, “Is not the mate-
rial world an anchor to our flight?”
Licking his dirt-impregnated fingertips, Zeno as-
tonished his follower with words arranged thus: “Only
consciousness of the material world frees us from it.”
“But how can that be?” wondered Zeno’s acolyte,
his brow ploughed with furrows as if a fresh field in
spring. “Is not attachment the very trouble of it all?”
“Do you want my pickle?” responded Zeno, pinching
the limp green gherkin fruit (Cucumis sativus) between
soiled right thumb and index finger.
“Ah,” came the enlightened reply.

<?php get_footer () ; ?>

“Every joke is a tiny revolution.”
—George Orwell
 Entr’acte
Angels Without Wings
Wingnut & Nickledick
Review the Latest Hollywood Blockbuster
SHAMAN 2: THE ASTANGA STRANGLER
Followed by an Interview with the Director,
TRANKAS DROOKING

KW180

W: Fuck, man.
N: Yeah, fuck.
W: What a fuckin’ pimp flick.
N: Pumped me hard.
W: You’d have to be a rug-munchin’ asshole not to dig
this shit.
N: Fuckin’ A.
W: Did you see that bitch’s fuckin’ rack? Shit, man,
why don’t they bring back 3-D?
N: Yeah…whatever.
W: You don’t fuckin’ know what 3-D is, do you,
shithole?
N: Fuck I don’t, duckwad.
W: You mean dickwad, asshole. Fuckin’ illiterate
whore.
N: Fuck you.
W: Uh-uh—fuck you.
N: Oh, that’s a clever riposte.
 W: Retard.
N: I know you are but what am I?
W: No, you are.
N: No, you are.
W: Not, dipshit. You, dildo. I mean, uh…
N: If I’m a dildo, then you’re an infected zit.
W: Whath’fuckever. We have to take a pee break while
our corporate pimps jack off. When we come back—
N: You’d like to come back, wouldn’t you, turkey baster
dick?
W: —we’ll talk to the director of this dope franchise.
Up yours, cock sniffer.
N: Oh, yeah? You smelly motherhumpin piece of—

And so on…

KW181
 The Meaning of Myth,
Mirth & Money
or
Cantata Castrata

I was a good cop. I liked being a cop. My

daddy had been a cop, although not a good
one. My grand-daddy had been a cop, I
hear a fair one. For all I know my great
grand-daddy was a cop, too.

Who knows what kind, or if they even had

cops in those days.1

In other words, I come from a family of

cops.

We were brought up poor, but honest,

loved, well-fed and with extremely creative
corporal punishments.

The sad fact is, if I had a son—which, of

course, is impossible now—I would want
him to be a cop.

If I had a daughter, on the other hand, I’d

want her to be a massage therapist.

The worst day of my life began like any

other.

The sun came up2, the sky brightened, and

the mercury rose. Before noon I knew it
would hit over a hundred in the shade in
Mojave. But here in Seattle it would be a
cool 68º F with a gentle breeze wafting off
the beautiful Puget Sound.3

I pulled on my Kevlar™4 underwear and

slid into my black Buster Browns.5 Then
I thought better of it and slipped on
my pants and shirt as well. I fried up a
rasher of bacon and a couple eggs, made
some syrupy java and burned some whole
wheat sesame toast. Slathering tahini8
on the toast, I fed the eggs and bacon to
my blue heeler, Russell (named after Lord
Bertrand Russell6, the mathematician).
I’m a vegetarian myself, always have been.
Actually, not always. Just since I stopped
eating lard7.
Nor do I drink coffee, stuff kills you. But I KW184
do love the smell.
I wiped tahini off my chiseled features and
poured the syrupy java down the drain. I
reminded myself that soon I would have to
replace the pipes, as the caffeine appears to
be eating through the “O” rings that hold
the trap together.
Perhaps this is a clue to the Challenger
disaster.9
I put on my tie, my shades, my utility belt,
my Glock 23®10, and settled my cap onto
my burnished head. I slipped a couple
of unused Trojans®11 into my pocket, too,
because I’m a cop and you never know. I
used to love having sex with other human
beings in the back of my cruiser.
Little did I know, as I stepped out of my
run-down second-story walkup in the seedy
part of Capitol Hill12, that today would
change everything in my life, rearrange my
thinking about the meaning of existence,
how poodles fit in, and where all my lost
socks had gone. Never again would I take
life for granted or pour coffee down the
drain.
 I unlocked my cruiser and slid inside.
Reflexively, my right hand grasped the
grip on the 12 gauge Mossberg 50013. I
still tingle whenever I recall the sound of a
cocking shotgun. It was at times like these,
with the Mossberg 500 in one hand and the
Glock 23 on my hip, that I most seriously
loved being a cop.

I pulled out of the drive, nearly knocking

over a lezzy14 couple in black with spiked
hair and tattoos. I bumped the siren just
to make ’em wet their panties. Although
I don’t believe lezzies wear panties. Might
hamper the spontaneous nature of their
relationships. I flipped them off and hit the
streets.

I needed to bust someone’s chops. Not the

lezzies, that’d be too easy. I needed a guy to
hit. Someone who could take it. I popped
my knuckles in anticipation.

Now, in retrospect, that was a wrong thing

for me to want to do. Not only because
it had the potential to fuck up another
human being permanently, but because it
pissed someone off bad enough to really
want to fuck me up.

It happened when I was exiting the vehicle.

I had dropped my baton into its loop on
my belt, and was headed towards a green
dumpster where a terrified bum was
urinating (I used to love the looks I’d get
when they saw me coming. I’m a big guy.
Six three, two ten or twenty, all muscle. I
KW185 make faggots sigh like young girls).
That’s when it happened.
I wasn’t expecting a trap. I wish now I had
read more Sartre15. I heard the footfall and
began to turn when I saw the constellation
Cassiopeia16 and thought that was strange,
what with the sun out and all. Then it hit
me. The taped piece of galvanized pipe. I
sagged like a sack of yesterday’s potatoes.
Another hit. My arms flew to my head for
protection. Through a red haze I could see
the first bum moving in. No longer was his
face filled with fear or was he peeing. Now
he looked like a Miss America finalist who
didn’t win. Without the tiara17. KW186

Next thing I know I’m coming to and

relieved to be alive. You ever have that
happen? You know, maybe fall off your
Harley18, hit your head, black out for a
while? When you finally come to, you
check your body over one part at a time—
first your toes, then your ankles, then your
knees, and so on until you reach your neck.
That’s what I did. Went through the drill.
I seemed to be OK. Nothing broken. Neck
worked. Splitting headache, of course,
but that’s what you come to expect from
concussions19. Still, something didn’t feel
right. I was getting that chill up and down
my spine. Things definitely weren’t going
the way I wanted.

I was strapped to the bumper of my cruiser

with my pants pulled down, a ticking bomb
hanging from my scrotum20.

I think the worst part in these situations is

usually the tourists taking pictures.

One of the tourists used his cellphone and

called 911. The Bomb Squad was alerted
and they brought out Wanda the Wonder
Dog, a German Shepherd who could sniff
 out a bomb buried under a thousand
pounds of elephant shit21. Sure enough,
Wanda wagged her tail and set to licking
the general location of the explosive device.
I have been assured by those who know
about such things that bomb dogs are
trained to lick explosive devices in order
to ascertain their chemical composition.
Whatever the reason, it felt good.

Next thing I know, I’m looking Captain

One-Arm Janssen22 in the face, and he’s got
on a scowl that would stop a cement truck.
He told me the timer only gave them
about three minutes and then the lower
extremity of my body would be blown to
smithereens (he could never bring himself
to use the word disarm). I wasn’t sure
what a smithereen was, but I knew I wasn’t
interested in finding out the hard way.

“What? That’s it?”

“Yup,” the Capt. said. “…unless.”

“Unless?”

This seemed like a reasonable question at

the time.

“Unless we cut off your balls.”23

“Cut off my—?”

I could hear some of the Bomb Squad

guys giggling. Tourists continued to take
pictures.
KW187
And all the time Wanda was licking
furiously, tail wagging like a willow in a
windstorm.
“Two minutes,” advised the Capt., glancing
at my crotch. Apparently, there was a digital
readout on the explosive device that was
visible whenever Wanda wasn’t licking.
Which wasn’t very often. “Joe’s ready if
you are.”

Dr. Joseph Sallinger was standing nearby,

latex gloves on, scalpel in hand. The latex
gloves reminded me of the Trojans in my
pocket.

I wished at that moment I could start the KW188

day over. Knowing what I knew, I would
have looked a little harder for someone to
punch out.

I only had seconds to make up my mind.

“OK,” I croaked. “Do it.”

The Captain nodded at Joe. One of the

guys yanked on Wanda’s leash to get her
out of the way.
“No time for anesthetic,” the Doc growled
as he bent to his task. “This is gonna hurt
like hell.”

He was right.

What a lousy way to lose an erection.

And here’s the irony. Turned out the bomb

had been defused by all of Wanda’s licking.

I guess both me and the bomb have that in

common.
I tried to stay on the force. I pretended
everything was OK. We all did. But
 everything wasn’t OK. Weird shit was
starting to happen.
For one thing, I stopped wanting to bash
people. It kinda crept up on me. One day
I was bashing this piece of filth’s face into
a bloody pulp when in mid-punch I lost
interest. In fact, I lost my lunch. After
that, I never hit anybody again. Not even
perps24 who deserved it.
There was other things, too.
Like I started wearing sweaters to work.
No, not angora like Ed Wood25. Just plain
sweaters. Cardigans, mostly. Didn’t want
anything to get in the way of my Glock
23.
Not that I was ever going to use it again.
The boys razzed me pretty hard about
the sweater thing, I guess because it was
summer when I started wearing them, and
really hot out.
Then came the hot flashes26.
But maybe the weirdest thing was the
deeply satisfying sense of calmness that
descended upon me. Used to be, at the end
of a long shift, I was ready to flip people off
for anything, looked forward to knocking
back a bottle or two of single malt. Shit,
even a red light would send me ballistic. I’d
bang on the steering wheel and scream all
sorts of obscenities.
KW189 But after the “event,” all that changed.
Now I ended the day feeling like a feather
floating on air. Fit as a fiddle and ready for
love, as the song has it. Calm and collected.
Serene. I even smiled and nodded to
jaywalkers. I no longer felt hostility towards
punked out, tattooed lezzies. Hell, I even
started to understand some of the pain gay
men have to go through, living in a world
filled with prejudice and hatred.

One night, sitting alone in my apartment

with nothing on the boob tube, I picked up
one of my handjob mags27, leafed through
it, then tossed it back on the pile. I had
an epiphany. I was no longer interested in KW190
jerking off. It stared me in the face like an
ugly broad daring me to pop her bra strap.
At first I panicked. What had been for my
entire adult life a daily thing to do was
suddenly and irrevocably gone.

I had no idea an orchiectomy28 could do

all that.

Here’s the kicker: after the initial shock, I

didn’t give a damn. It was fine. Now I
didn’t have to spend every waking minute
thinking about pussy. Sometimes just a
hunk of ass to sink my hard cock into.

But these days my cock doesn’t get hard

anymore. Well, hardly ever. Now I use
that time for other things. I’ve taken up
beekeeping and gardening on the rooftop,
and even learned to knit. I stopped watching
movies and started watching films. And I
stopped watching the boobtube altogether.

But the best part is I stopped losing my

hair. Not only that, but I started growing
some. It looked pretty good, so I decided
to let it go long. I had forgotten how wavy
it was.
 It’s true my memory isn’t so good as it
used to be before I was what the Docs
call hypogonadal29. But, so what? I sleep
better, my skin is smoother, and my thighs,
well, they’re looking good.

Obviously, I no longer fit into a testosterone-

filled environment like a cop shop. I went
through a series of jobs after I quit, from
being an undertaker (cried too much), to
working a food counter (gave away too
much—what are we going to do about
the homeless?), to what I’m doing today—
selling flowers. I have a cart on Broadway
up on Seattle’s Capitol Hill, and it’s a good
business, especially with cops stopping by
all the time for bouquets. I’ve made a lot
of new friends, especially transgendered30
people, both post- and pre-op. I do yoga,
and started meditating. I’m even leading
a support group for fellow castrati. I was
amazed how many of us there are! A couple
of us are thinking about writing a book,
maybe even making a video.
So, as you can see, although it’s not
something I would have asked for, life
after castration ain’t so bad. In fact, it’s
led me to believe it’s the things we don’t
want that might just be the things we need.
It’s opened up my mind to understanding
we don’t know dick about anything, not
like we think we do, and that science and
religion are illusions. Things to do to
pass time. And politics! To me, the way
I am today, politics is just another form
of cruelty to animals. Now I look at the
KW191 world differently. Now I embrace duality,
doubt purposefulness, and remember the
long road to freedom takes more than a
single step.
 What a world it would be if men, after they
finished breeding, would have themselves
snipped. Peaceful. Serene. And more
interesting socks to choose from.

And Jesus said to them, “When you make the

two one, and when you make the inside like
the outside, and the outside like the inside,
and the above like the below, and when you
make the male and the female one and the
same, so that the male be not male nor the KW192
female female; and when you fashion eyes in
place of an eye, and a hand in place of a hand,
and a foot in place of a foot, and a likeness in
place of a likeness, then you will enter (the
Kingdom of Heaven)…”
—The Gospel of Thomas31

<?php get_footer () ; ?>

 FOOTNOTES

1) In one form of another, there have always been cops. Cop

is a shortened form of copper, an English slang reference
to the metal used to make policemen’s (Bobbies)
badges, or shields. The world police was coined in
XVIIIth Cent. France. In Anarchist theory, cops are
the force responsible for maintaining and defending
the interests of the bourgeoisie (i.e., the fatcats), shoring
up the status quo ante; also for protecting private
property; also for keeping capital from the dispossessed
classes, or proletariat (skinny cats); also for promoting
the male dominator, hierarchical form of society; also
for enforcing a class-ordered societal structure; also
for, creating psychological duress; also for fostering
inequality and a general atmosphere of fear. Racism,
homophobia and sexism—to name but three—are
in the main staunchly supported and promoted by
policing agencies worldwide.
2) Sunrise is also often referred to by English speakers as
sunup. Sunrise is when the sun appears over the horizon
and should never be confused with dawn, the point at
which the sky begins to lighten, ending twilight. Both
sunrise and sunset are optical illusions caused by the
bending of lightwaves that result in the sun appearing
to peek over the edge of the earth while it is, in fact, still
below the horizon. Buckminster Fuller, the XXth Cent.
pantechnicon, theorizer, inventor, architect, champion
of William James Sidis, and general all-around wizard,
despised the terms as so offensively inaccurate that
he replaced them with sunsight and sunclipse. If
you’re wondering why the sky is blue, or sunsets are
so beautiful, this fact can be “explained” by the so-
called Rayleigh Scattering Effect, i.e., the scattering of
light (electromagnetic radiation) by smaller particles
than light’s wavelength. In other words, teeny tiny
particles that are suspended in a medium of a different
index of refraction (water droplets) diffuse a portion
(approximately 25%) of incident radiation (direct
sunlight) in all directions (the sky). For instance, when
the sunlight is nearly tangent to earth’s surface, the light
path through the atmosphere is so long that most of
the blue and yellow spectrum is scattered out, resulting
KW193 in reddened skies. Here is the scientific formula for a
beautiful sunset, or sunclipse:

3) Puget Sound is an arm (sound) of the pacific Ocean.

It extends approximately 90 miles south from the
 Strait of Juan de Fuca to Olympia, Washington. The
Indians of the area used to refer to it in the Lushootseed
language, as “Whulge”. Its modern name came from
one Peter Puget, who explored its southern end back in
1792. The first settlement, New Market (Tumwater),
was settled in 1846. The Sound is a huge, or whulge,
saltwater estuary fed by freshwater from the Olympic
and Cascade watersheds. A state-run ferry system
connects the coastlines of the Sound, as well as all
the islands. Unfortunately, the ferries no longer serve
alcohol.
4) DuPont Company’s brand name for its poly-
paraphenylene terephthalamide fiber. It is 5x stronger
than the same weight of steel, extremely heat resistant,
and decomposes above 400°C without melting.
Invented by a woman, Stephanie Kwolek, it was KW194
originally intended to replace steel belts in tires.
5) Buster Brown was a comic strip character created in
1902 by Richard Felton Outcault (The name “Buster”
was derived from the then very popular Buster Keaton).
The strip holds the distinction of being the first in
America to feature a talking dog, Tige. John Bush, a
sales director at the Brown Shoe Company, persuaded
his superiors to purchase rights to the Buster Brown
name. The brand was introduced at the 1904 St. Louis
World’s Fair, and is still going strong today.
6) Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell (1872-
1970), British philosopher, logician, mathematician,
educator, liberal, socialist, anti-war activist, prophet,
humorist, raconteur, philatelist, commentator,
comedian, dancer, naval officer, editor, racing buff,
synthesizer, woolgatherer, economist, intellectual,
poet, sharpshooter, equestrian, Illuminatus, alchemist,
writer, humanitarian, Nobel Laureate, essayist, water
colorist, polygamist, pacifist, cross-dresser, knitter,
savant, wit and damn good cook, was also the creator
of these memorable bon mots: “War does not determine
who is right. Only who is left.” “The secret to true
happiness is to face the fact that the world is horrible.”
“The whole problem with the world is that fools and
fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wise
people so full of doubts.”
7) Animal fat produced from rendering the fatty portion of
a pig. Although few in First World still eat food cooked
in the stuff, it continues to be is used to manufacture
soap. It is also the name of a punk group.
8) A paste made from ground up sesame seeds. A major
component of hummus, it comes in two varieties,
hulled and unhulled, and makes an excellent substitute
for peanut butter.
9) This is in reference to the Space Shuttle Challenger
disaster that occurred on the morning of 28, January,
1986. The shuttle was destroyed 73 seconds into its
 flight because of the failure of an O-ring seal in one
of the solid fuel boosters. The Rogers Commission
was formed to investigate the matter. Among its panel
of scientists and consultant was the famous, infamous
and formidable Richard Feynman. Feynman famously
demonstrated (on television no less) how the O-rings
became less resilient at ice-cold temperatures by dunking
part of one into a glass of ice water. He also pointed
out the discrepancy between NASA’s management
claiming a 1 in 100,000 chance of serious failure, and
the engineers claiming only 1 in a 100. Feynman, a
brilliant physicist, bongo player and one of the many
godfathers of the Atomic Bomb, added greatly to our
understanding of quantum electrodynamics and quark
theory, for which work he was awarded a Nobel prize
(some say he ought to have received two). Something
of a practical jokester and wag, he wrote many popular
books, and said many imponderable things, to wit:
“Physics is to math what sex is to masturbation.”
“What does it mean, to understand? I don’t know.”
“Dear Mrs. Chown, ignore your son’s attempts to teach
you physics. Physics isn’t the most important thing.
Love is.” And his last words: “I’d hate to die twice. It’s
so boring.”
10) Trojan (based on the ancient Greek city of Troy) is a
popular brand of prophylactic, or condom (latex or
sheepskin), sheath worn on the erect penis. The Trojan
company started life as Youngs Rubber Company,
begun in the 1920s by Merle Youngs, a conservative,
devout Presbyterian farmer. In the 1980s, the company
was bought out by Carter Wallace of Carter’s Little
Liver Pills (cf. Supra.). Early condoms (“rubbers”) were
manufactured from vulcanized rubber; they were thick,
smelled of sulphur and kerosene, had leaky seams and
were most likely toxic. New technology has improved
the condom considerably. The newest® development
is Durex Avanti, made from DURON , which is 2x
stronger than latex, yet actually thinner. The purchase
of condoms in the US was illegal before the 1970s. It
is rumored that frequent use of them will make you
blind.
11) Police in the US usually carry pistols or sidearms,
among which Smith & Wessons, Sig-Sauers and Glock
are the most popular. Glock is a defense contractor
named after its founder, Gaston Glock, in Deutsch-
KW195 Wagram, Vienna. The Glock handgun first came into
prominence as the Glock 17, a polymer-framed handgun
that was essentially a 9mm Luger Parabellum with a 17
round capacity. The most recent version, Glock 23, is
currently the single-most popular police sidearm used
in the US. Contrary to popular myth, Glock pistols
will indeed set off a metal detector, as well as a tired,
under-educated, underpaid and generally angry airport
 security employee. A full 82% of Glock handguns is
metal. The “plastic” bits are actually a dense polymer
which is radio-opaque, a fancy way of saying it shows
up on X-ray machines. Glocks are simple, contain
fewer moving parts than most handguns, and are
among the least expensive semi-automatic weapons on
the market.
12) Capitol Hill is perhaps the most densely populated
neighborhood in Seattle, Washington, and considered
that city’s center for gay life and hip counterculture. No
one seems to know why it is named Capitol Hill. One
story has it that a real estate developer in 1910 named
it to attract the state government to move up from
Olympia. Formerly, it had been known as Broadway
Hill.
13) The Mossberg 500 is manufactured by O.F. Mossberg KW196
& Sons, Inc. The 500 is not a model, but a series of
hammerless, pump action repeating shotguns (typically
12 gauge) and is the only shotgun (reputedly) to have
passed the US Army’s Mil-Spec 3443E test. This may
not be the truth, but it is a good selling point.
14) A generally derogatory name for lesbian. “Lesbian”
denotes a homosexual female and may be used as a
noun or an adjective. The word derives from Lesbos,
a Greek island in the Aegean. There the lyric poet,
Sappho, lived and ran a school for girls in the VIth
Cent. BC. Many of her poems were about her passion
for her students’ bodies. Historical reports of relations
between women are sparse. This is in no small part due
to the fact most records were kept by men, and men
have a tendency to put the best face on things (i.e., lie).
Nevertheless, in most Western societies prohibitions
against women-to-woman relations have been less
strenuous than those against men-to-men. This may be,
in part, because men have always been men, no matter
when or in what part of the world they may have lived,
and men generally are turned on by the thought of two
women doing it. In the UK, where male homosexuality
was criminalized in the XIXth Cent., lesbianism was
left alone. Queen Victoria (so the story goes) refused
to sign a bill outlawing the practice, insisting that
“…ladies do not do such things.” Alternate terms for
lesbians are: dyke, byke, bulldyke, diesel dyke, bulldagger,
butch, stone butch, glamour butch, granola dyke, gold star
dyke, leather dyke, lipstick lesbian, low femme, PC dyke,
soft butch lezzie, tryke, U-hauls, and vagitarian.
15) Jean Paul Sartre was a French stand-up comic who
regaled the crowned heads of Europe as well as the
uncrowned heads of lower Bohemia. He was a part-
time poofter when being a poofter meant Reading
Gaol. He was born in Paris, and spoke French fluently.
He was not so tall, not at all like Cary Grant, and when
he died he remained that way. When he wasn’t telling
 jokes, he spent a great deal of time masturbating.
And reading, which is much the same thing. As is
mathematics compared to physics. When he was with
a woman, it was usually Simone de Beauvoir, who
had affiliated herself with him because he could help
her get published, make beds, whisk eggs just so, and
wore women’s undergarments exactly her size. She
was a feminist and he was a faminist. The two things
are practically identical except for the spelling. Sartre
loved mescaline but it made him nauseous once so he
wrote a book, Nausea. He was horrified of what he
termed “naked existence,” only he said it in French so it
sounded more like nahkeed hackzaustaunce. Before he
died he made up a religion called Existentialism, which
he stole whole-cloth from German philosophers and
the hilariously named Phenomenological Movement
(sounds classier than Bowel Movement). He was not
a happy man, as is the case with most comics. Take
Jerry Lewis, for example. He was not a happy man. In
fact, since he is still alive, we can surmise he is still not
a happy man. Although he may be happier today than
he was when he was young. He probably would have
been happier if Dean hadn’t got all huffy and quit the
team. The French rewarded Jerry with their highest
honor (English: honour)—a brief buss on both cheeks
by another man. For more information on JPS, read
his book of jokes titillatingly titled, Being and None-
the-Less, or How I Came to Terms with Rejection from My
Father, Who was a Naval Officer, and Learned to Pretend
to Like Women If They Looked Even a Little Like Mon
Oncle.
16) A northern constellation based on the Greek myth
of vain Cassiopeia, one of the 50 Nereids, and the
“sole daughter of the sea.” She was the mother of
Andromeda, sired by Cepheus of Aethiopia. One of
the 88 modern constellations, it was also one of the 48
listed by Ptolemy, inventor of Ptolemaic astrology.
17) From the Persian tara, for crown. Traditionally, a tiara
is a high crown shaped like a cylinder narrowed at its
top. The ancient Assyrians used to make them complete
with bull horns and feathers, lacking lustrous stones
such as diamonds. The Pope used to wear a tiara—that
funny shaped Conehead hat. This was, however, set
aside by Pope Paul VI after the Second Vatican Council,
a decision based on the fact his head was too lumpy for
KW197 the hat to settle properly (it kept listing to the left, and
this fact was being interpreted by some of the more
extremely mystical minded as a sign of a Neo-Marxist
conspiracy). Probably the coolest tiara ever was the one
worn by superfly babe, Wonder Woman. Hers is so
cool because, like Oddjob’s bowler, it can be used as a
weapon. (Cf. also, Sailor Moon, a Japanese animated
manga series by Naoko Takeuchi based on the concept
 of reincarnated defenders in sailor suits—all of them
magical girls—come from a destroyed kingdom that
once spanned the entire solar system. It is arguably
one of the most famous anime series in the world.)
18) Po-TAH-toe, po-TAH-toe, po-TAH-toe©—probably one
of the most recognized sounds in the motorcycling
world: the sound a Harley Davidson makes riding down
the road, trying to loosen its load. Popularly known as
“Harleys” or “hawgs”, these machines, manufactured by
the Harley-Davidson Motor Company of Milwaukee,
Wisconsin, are designed basically as heavy cruisers and
cost a lot of money. They also leak oil, or at least used to.
More iconic than practical, distinctively American, they
were never famous for either engineering, gas mileage or
performance, but mostly for their distinctive sound and
constant, costly maintenance. Did we mention they KW198
are also very expensive? Since 1998 Harley-Davidson
has been owned by the Buell Motorcycle Company.
19) He is referring here to a MTBI, or Mild Traumatic
Brain Injury. Also called, by some physicians, a “bonk
on the head.” The MTBI is among the most common
(and least serious) injuries sustained by human beings,
with the possible exception of ingrown toenails.
20) The male homologue of the woman’s labia majora, the
scrotum (from Latin scrotum, cognate with O.E. scrud
“garment,” source of the word shroud. “Isn’t the sea what
Algy calls it: a grey sweet mother? The snotgreen sea.
The scrotum-tightening sea. Epi oinopa pontoon.” —
Joyce, “Ulysses”) is basically an external bag that holds
the testicles. The function of the scrotum is to keep
sperm chilled, shaken, and not stirred. Temperature
control occurs when a man pulls his testicles inside his
body (this is called the cremasteric reflex), thus keeping
them warm when it is cold outside, and vice versa. The
scrotum is also a martial arts target for a) women who
are trying to escape a rapist; b) men who are trying to
escape a rapist; and C) rapists who are trying to escape
the police.
21) Yes, it’s true: dogs can indeed “sniff out” bombs. Teaching
a dog to find high explosives (such as nitrates TNT;
plastique PETN, and cyclotrimethylenetrinitramine
RDX) is much easier than it sounds. Harder is teaching
the animal not to fetch. (An elephant can excrete up to
100 lbs of poop per day.)
22) A reference to the American actor, David Janssen, who
starred as Dr. Richard Kimble in the TV series, The
Fugitive (1963-1967). In this dramatic series, Dr.
Kimble is accused of his wife’s murder and sentenced to
death. While he is being transported, still in custody,
the train he is on jumps its rails and he is given the
opportunity to escape. This event sets him (and the
series) off in a new direction—tracing down the real
killer, a one-armed man. The final episode, when Dr.
 Kimble finally corners and faces the one-armed man,
remains one of the single highest-rated episodes of a
TV program in history (TV history, that is). The series
was supposedly inspired by the true-life Sam Sheppard
case of the 1950s in which a physician was found
guilty of murdering his wife and sent to prison where
he languished for many years before being acquitted
by the US Supreme Court. (This, of course, is in no
way germane, but is mentioned as an example of yet
another cultural layer that glosses our beliefs in so-
called Reality.)
23) Is it just coincidence that this is footnote #23, and his
balls are being cut off? Some would say no. For is
not 23 the sacred number of Eris, goddess of discord
(according to the Principia Discordia)? Is not 23 Skidoo
the title of a poem in Alister Crowley’s The Book of
Lies—Falsely So Called? And is not hexagram 23 in the
Book of Changes not titled Splitting Apart? Others will
call this a case of apophenia. Eerie, to say the least. But
even more eerie is this: the so-called Skull and Bones
322 Identity. Tangentially related to Euler’s Identity,
this pattern identifies an intercept node of addition/
multiplication/exponents and the transcendentals “e”
and “pi”. For instance, the left side of the equation is
((3*2*2*) * (3+2+2)) = (12*7), just as December 7th
was the attack on Pearl Harbor. Also, this: a skull has
3 holes and 2 bones (2 femurs, each with 2 knobs) so
that (7*2*23) = 322! Is this synchronicity or simply
pareidolia? In any case, the separation of a man’s testes
from his trunk is a big deal.
24) The bad guys, i.e., perpetrators; politicians.
25) Edward Davis Wood (1924-1978) was a filmmaker
who bore the title “worst director of all time.” Having
no money and little talent, he nonetheless was able
to bring to the screen such Z-grade pictures as Glen
or Glenda and Plan 9 from Outer Space (“We used
Cadillac hubcaps for flying saucers in that.”), as well as
resurrect the flagging career of Bela Lugosi. Ed Wood
was a transvestite who, after a long day spent directing,
enjoyed nothing better than dressing as a woman,
wrapping his male torso in angora, and consuming
a bottle of whisky. He maintained, however, that his
transvestitism was not a sexual perversion, but appealed
to him because the angora provided him with maternal
comfort. His career as a film director and actor (he
claimed the same distinction as his hero, Orson Welles,
KW199 for having written/directed/starred in all of his own
films) eventually dried up, which was more than he
could say. He lived on, writing novels (Raped in the
Grass, The Perverts), and drinking whisky until he
faded out to closing credits at the age of 54. There is a
Church of Ed Wood, composed of a reverential group
of True Believers, who worship his works, his life and,
of course, his holy angora shroud.
26) A symptom of the onset of menopause and changing
hormone levels, in this case the result of a loss of
testosterone. Sometimes it’s hard to be a woman.
27) So-called pornographic (from the Greek πορυογραιϕια,
literally meaning writing about hookers, the root of
which, πορυη, means to sell) or dirty magazines filled
with nude images of women and men and shaved
poodles in various attitudes of sexual arousal for the
benefit of (generally) male masturbation. Although
thought of often as synonymous in the popular
mind, there is a difference between pornography and
erotica. Erotica, from the word Eros, “to love,” include
literature, works of art, film, etc, that deal substantively
with the portrayal of human sensuality and sexuality
(again, two separate things often confused) on higher
emotional levels than porn, but just as much fun to KW200
watch.
28) Twenty dollar word for castration. Also known as
gelding or neutering, orchidectomy is any action—
surgical or chemical—in which the male of the species
loses his testicles.
29) Another fancy word. This one refers to a defect of the
reproductive system that results in the dysfunction
of the gonads. The gonads (or, more popularly, the
“nads”) produce hormones (estradiol, testosterone,
progesterone, inhibin B and antimullerian), activin
and gametes (eggs/sperm, depending on which sex you
happen to have been born wearing).
30) Who knows? These days it can mean anything from one
end to the other of the post-modern sexual continuum.
Anything, in other words, that is perceived as being
in opposition to conventional (read male dominator/
missionary position) male-to-female sex roles. To
illustrate, this is one of symbols for transgendered-
ism:

Confused? Not as much as (some would say) they are.

31) Discovered at Nag Hammadi, Egypt, in 1945, this
Coptic papyrus manuscript contains a list of 114
sayings attributed to Jesus of Nazareth. The text was
written (i.e., attributed to) Didymus Judas Thomas, one
of Jesus’ 12 disciples (the famous “doubting Thomas”),
and claims that the special revelations and parables it
contains were made by Jesus directly to him (Thomas).
The saying that is quoted above is the final one, number
114, and has caused considerable disagreement as to its
meaning among scholars. Jesus apparently held that
women were worthy of receiving spiritual teachings. To
 say the least, this was an unpopular view. The Gospel
of Thomas confirms that Jesus had female apostles,
including Mary Magdalene and Salome; however,
the canonical gospels state otherwise, i.e., that Jesus’
apostles were only men. In a Platonic, or Platonist,
context “male” and “female” had the philosophical
denotations of representing “form” and “constituent
matter,” respectively. Hence, an object’s “maleness”
equated to rules governing its formal composition,
while its “femaleness” was the material from which
it had been composed (it’s “stuff ”). Given these
meanings, the process of becoming “male” equated with
the Platonic veneration of form. Thus, Jesus’ statement
here creates the idea of spiritual ascent and perfectibility
for all people—even women. In any case, the Gospel
of Thomas was not included in the canon for several
reasons. Besides siding with women, it was generally
considered heretical and inauthentic and, perhaps
worse, its emphasis on individual spirituality (i.e., apart
from the Church) was anathema to organized religion.
In the book of John, the emphasis is on Jesus as the
“only begotten son” of the Father; while, in Thomas,
Jesus is quoted as saying that “…the Kingdom of the
father is spread out upon the earth, and men do not see
it.” In Thomas, Jesus was attempting to bring about
individual enlightenment; thus, he was engaging in
an attack upon the structure of belief (“maleness”), in
favor of the content of our being-ness (“femaleness”),
a counter-revolutionary position to take even today.
This strand of Christianity was of course quashed, for
were it to become known that there was no need for
hierarchical male dominator Popes and Bishops, et
Alia, then there would be no need for a Church, per se.
Taken in this way, the teachings of Jesus as presented in
Thomas are closely aligned to those “taught” by mystics
elsewhere and in other times. This in no way undercuts
Jesus’ message, or the importance of his personality;
instead, it places the responsibility for spiritual growth,
and the acceptance of the revealed truth of Jesus’ words
that the hearer of is divine, directly on the shoulders of
the individual. The fact that enlightenment is available
to all who enter into the understanding of the message
(the real Good News), that “…the Kingdom of the
Father is spread out upon the earth…” would change
the structure of society overnight, level the playing field
KW201 as it were, and make every single soul equally important
was every other single soul (which is, of course, the
fact). Thus was Jesus’ message of enlightenment as the
great Democratizer was crushed.
 Entr’acte
Angels Without Wings
Wingnut & Nickledick
present
A Dialectic on Epistemology
&
Ontological Comedy

W: Fuck you.
KW202
N: No, Fuck you.

W: You’re a fucked-up sickshitmotherfucker.

N: You’re a Lowlife asswipe. Get th’fuck away.

W: Don’t you fuckin tell me what to do, cumrag.

N: Shitforbrains.

W: Rugmuncher.
N: Eat shit and die.

W: Suck my anal probe.

N: You’d like that, you fairy fuckin twisted perv.

W: Kiss my hairy ass.

N: Fuck you.

N: No, fuck you.

Und so weiter…

<?php get_footer () ; ?>

 Fat Max Crwth’s
Creia1 No.23
or
Why it’s Good to be a Dog
~ including ~
Exhortations to PJ & Z

No; of course; it’s never enough; obviously,

there’s need for more; must needs be need
for more; one can never be obstreperous
enough; one ought never be sufficiently
immund;2 ribald and feculent; filthy, lousy,
squalid—become, I say to you, a task for
Cleaning Man Hercules to undertake,
one to make the Augean Stables3 appear a
shining shrine in contrast! If you have hair,
then grow it! To cut your hair is to bespoil
Nature’s gift! Watch them, watch them—
see how they grovel, trigged and well-kempt,
the lot as solid underneath as old bongwater,
filled with Starbucks and Arugula, with
Celtic tattoos, shaved pussies, nipples and
navels pierced; watch them walk gladly on
their way to another day of enslavement;
watch them as they wear down their dime-
a-dozen souls, dozing little chameleons
terrified of bird droppings, always on the
lookout for predators—for predators are
always on the lookout for you, when you
live in fear. Do I live in fear? Ha! I fear a
boring conversation more than I fear death!
If only I had a master like Antisthenes!4
Still, I wear a cloak and carry a staff and
wallet as badge of my trade. Remember,
fellow souls, it is good to do good and to be
abused. By this credo have I lived, bloomed,
KW203 withered and soon one day die. There is
no right or wrong about it. Credo quia
absurdum.5 One need only fear the solid
argument. And nuptials. I honor he who
has never married; I worship he who has
never fornicated; I humble myself before he
who has never farted. I spent many years
begging the statues in Seattle to give me
money, food—but never work. Not one in
ten—nay, not one at all—ever returned a
smile, much less a stater or an tetradrachm.6
Thus grew I in my resolve; thus did I learn
to embrace rejection. Worse than being
a novelist! I performed my antics for steel
and stone, acquired tolerance for cold and
wet, let mold and mushrooms find habitats
between my toes; only then did I know
how to beg. This thin veil, this sliver of
veneer called civilization is a dogma that
needs pissing on. And I’m just the dogma KW204
to do it! The deeds of my teacher fill me
with gratitude, with eudemonic song.7
Look at my penis. Go ahead, look at it!
Hiding its little head in the brush. Is it a
paradox, or a paradise? The pair of dice
hang below. Soft, warm, inoffensive little
glow worm. But let him take umbrage, let
him get his blood up! See his head snake
forth unfettered, his glistening eye range
the landscape seeking its prey? It is a dual-
natured beastie, boys, as is the heart that
pumps it up with blood and the brain that
primes it with lust.8 This I can train you
to control! Why wait until 90 to do the
deeds of today? Ah, masturbation!9 I sing
to thee a paean, for in life is death and
in cumming is going and in hardness is
softness in the implicate order10 of being
is sameness and nothingness commingled.
So much heat wasted on dissolution! Men
talk in awe of violence, fighters who can
take on tenfold foes and survive! If they
but put a tenth as much fascination into
their own souls!11 They care naught for
what becomes them, peradventure they live
beyond their twenties! Fear crops them like
a blight—they are afraid to grow old, afraid
to become fat, terrified to lose hair, lose
control, let loose a fart in public—in short,
afraid to be different from the herd! Do
you look at them passing and see you there
 any to respect? We only look up to them
because our asses rest upon the ground.
See how they studiously ignore us? They
fear exchanging language with the likes of
us. Ask my comrade, Zeno here. All he
does with money, my Balzac,12 is waste his
mind with books. They think it’s an angle,
a scam. They think hunger is a disease.
Throw money at the designated people and
all will be well! Place your thumbs upon
your eyes, press, and you will see stars!
How they have complicated the simple gifts
of the gods! One day they may be blind
or crippled. How many will live to make
fifty? Who will care if they do? Is this why
they breed? But their brood grows to ignore
them, which is a worse fate than hate. So
many of them actually believe lies are truths,
and turn their eyes from truths that seem
like lies. Security—what does that mean
exactly, except the inevitability of death?
Wealth—why, the richest man I know is
filthier and jollier than I! Happiness—do
these people think watching movies and
making money is happiness? Happiness to
them is but momentary distraction. But
we will all starve together. And when the
darkness13 comes, those used to the light
will be blindest. They sprinkle themselves
with holy water once a week to purify their
souls, to wash off the muck of commerce—
when it would benefit them more to learn
grammar! To teach themselves how to
reason. To understand rhetoric. Philosophy
is nothing more than word play, and demons
are as golden-tongued as gods. The gods
provide every one of us with the means to
be happy and good, yet we devote ourselves
KW205 to striving after phantasms, and making
ourselves miserable. You know, my friends,
there’s but a finger’s difference between a
wise man and a fool. If a man raises his
first finger and speaks, people might think
him wise, and give heed. But if he lifts his
middle finger like this—they think him
 dangerous, and run away.14 This is why
I am a dog. A dog lives life freely, doing
what he does with respect for none, fealty
to few, and dominion over nothing. The
dog knows naught but the Rule of Nature.
Dogs do not plot, plan or complain. Dogs
live in the moment. When did you last
see a conniving dog? They do not wear
clothes or watches or drive cars. Small
dogs, big dogs, it doesn’t matter; they learn
to live in peace, travel in pax. When they
get hungry enough, they’ll gladly eat their
recently deceased best friend. They have no
theology, no sophistry, no science, no tools. KW206
I am a dog to them, hustling along with
their backpacks and iPods, agendas and
routines, deliveries to make and papers to
grade and prescriptions to fill and groceries
to buy and payment plans to worry over.
I cry, “throw me a bone!” But they hear
me not. They can’t hear above the din in
their heads, the dim light that leads them
to their suicides; they are too taken by the
gay colors of this festival of cruelty.15 If they
only knew that god is dog doo on their
shoe.16 So close; so far away. All is without
reckoning, can’t be added up, balanced,
taxed, recorded. It is like catching fish to
play a game of Parcheesi!17 Numbed and
mumbling, they hope to buy a house, take
vacations, send their kids to college—all
the while believing in induction and post
hoc ergo propter hoc,18 and in post and ante
meridian, and in status quo ante and in
Truth,19 Justice20 and the American Way21
while they look forward to Social Security,
retirement and a gated community in
Tallahassee.22 I say unto you two mortals
before you reunite with the body political,
think you as a dog—What Would A Canine
Do? Sniff your friend’s crotch! Lick your
own ass! Gnaw contentedly upon a bone.
<?php get_footer () ; ?>
 FOOTNOTES:

1) A commonplace of the Progymnasmata

(Προγυµνασµατα, Greek pro “before” and
gymnasmata “exercises”), a set of fundamental
exercises meant to prepare students of rhetoric for
public oration. The Progymnasmata was central
to ancient and renaissance pedagogy. There are 14
Progymnasmata in all: Fable; Narrative; Chreia;
Proverb; Refutation; Confirmation; Commonplace;
Encomium; Vituperation; Comparison; Impersonation;
Description; Thesis; Defense. The word used here,
chreia (chreiodes, “useful”), is defined as “…a brief
reminiscence referring to some person in a pithy form
for the purpose of edification.” Typically, a chreia takes
the form of an anecdote.
2) An interesting word, and an unusual one. It extends
from the Latin immundus, as in im- “not” + mundus
“clean.” Throughout this monologue will be used
many words not typically heard in casual speech. This
may be a result of crossing over into a parallel universe,
or a form of atavism, or else the fact that our world
is composed, as Democritus—c. 450-370 BC (who,
according to legend, was supposed to be mad because
he laughed at everything. He was sent, by those who
felt his disposition a threat, to the great physician
Hippocrates to be cured. Hippocrates determined that
Democritus was not mad at all, merely happy. And
so to this day he is often referred to as the Laughing
Philosopher)—taught, of many discrete atomic worlds,
some with similar spin, others with reverse spin, and
still others with no spin at all.
3) Grade school stuff, but probably worth reviewing. The
Greek hero Hercules (aka Herekles) was the son of Zeus
and a mortal woman, Alcmene. After he performed
the Twelve Labors alluded to above, Herekles became a
demigod, sort-of like being vice president. The Labors
were: Slay the Nemean Lion and return with its skin; Slay
the Lernaean Hydra; Catch the Ceryneian Hind; catch the
KW207 Erymanthian Boar; Clean the Augean stables in one day;
Kill the Stymphalian Birds; Catch the Cretan Bull; Steal
the Mares of Diomedes; Steal the Girdle of Hippolyte; Steal
the Cows of Geryon; Steal the Apples of Hesperides; Capture
Cerberus. Apparently, being a demigod meant a great
deal to the guy. No need to go into the details, except
to say that the stables in question were owned by one
 Augeias (meaning “bright”), King of Elis. Obviously,
he was renown for his stables, which housed the single
greatest number of cattle in the known world…and
had never been cleaned. Ever. The ancient Greeks
referred to the constellation Capricorn (L.) as the
Augean Stable, since the sun (the “bright”) rests there
during the winter solstice.
4) Founder of the so-called Cynic school of philosophy,
Antisthenes flourished between c. 444-365 BC. The
word “Cynic” did not mean what it does today. The
Cynosarges (from Gk. Κυον, or “dog”) was where he
founded his school in Athens. He wore a cloak and
carried a staff and wallet as the badge of his philosophy,
and taught a form of Socratic virtue mixed with great
disdain for pomp, pride and all that sort of thing. KW208
(Sound familiar? These ancient streams may have been
forced below ground, but they do spring up now and
again along the geodesic of history.) The Cynics rejected
the so-called “norms” of society, and adopted shocking
habits, flouting conventions to make their point. They
challenged auditors to get in touch with their “natural,”
animal side. Thus the dog became their symbol. This
school of “thought” (actually rhetoric and sophistry) is
considered to be a link between Socrates’ teachings—
the “virtue is knowledge” guy—and that of the later
Stoic—“prick my flesh and I don’t wince”—school.
Antisthenes reduced Socrates’ words to their lowest
denominator, and developed them into something
very Nietzschean and existentialist; he taught that
“knowledge” was not the Socratic harmony of morality
with reason, but more the human will practicing action,
essentially substituting “individualism” for reason and
morality in social relations. He and his followers
carried their terms of this individualism to its logical
conclusion, decrying the ordinary pleasures of life as
harmful inasmuch as they blunted the operation of the
will. In other words, wealth, fame, power and the like
tended to dethrone the authority of reason and prevent
the soul from its natural predispositions—apparently
behaving as if it were a dog. Man exists for and in
himself alone; what others do or think or say is not
worth a farthing; his highest end is self-knowledge/
self-realization apart from society. Thus, disrepute
and poverty are desirable, for they drive one in upon
oneself, purifying one’s intellect from the misleading
(Vedic maya) appearances of the external world. So
the Good Man wants nothing (except maybe a Good
Woman); like the gods, he is self-sufficient (unless he’s
 demigod and goal-driven like Hercules); he is a citizen
of the world and everyone else can go hang themselves
(one of his mottoes: …gain wisdom or buy a rope.)
Antisthenes is reputed to have written ten volumes, but
only fragments remain. Marcus Aurelius, the Roman
Stoic, quotes him in his Meditations: It is royal to do
good and be abused.
5) Literally, I believe because it is absurd. Variants are: I
must be crazy to believe this and That’s just crazy enough
to work.
6) Reference to Diogenes of Sinope, whose teacher was
Antisthenes. He is reputed to have begged from statues
as practice to become a mendicant philosopher. He
is also reported to have (in the best Platonic sense)
surpassed his teacher in living the Life Ascetic. He
reduced his belongings to a single bowl and a tub. He
lived in the tub. The bowl he drank and ate from—
that is, until the day he saw a child drink water with
cupped hands. After that, he broke his bowl because
it “complicated” the simplicity of life. He was fond
of masturbating in public. Once, when rebuked for
this practice, he is reported to have said, “If only I
could soothe my belly by rubbing it.” It goes without
saying (but we’ll say it anyway) that Diogenes avoided
the perils of earthly pleasures. He disdained what
he perceived to be the folly, pretence, vanity, self-
deception and artificiality of most human conduct.
He used to stroll through the Agora in broad daylight
while carrying a torch, telling people he was searching
for an honest man. One of the great “philosopher
stories” centers around the meeting of Diogenes (there
were many Diogeneses) and Alexander the Great. The
Ruler of the Known World (and student of Aristotle)
was thrilled finally to come face to face with the great
man himself. He approached the dozing philosopher
as he lay curled up in his tub and asked, as King of the
Known World, if there was anything he could do for
him. Diogenes’ famous reply: “Move. You’re blocking
the sun.” Alexander later declared that, if he were not
Alexander, he would be Diogenes. Upon the event of
his death, a pillar was erected to Diogenes’ memory. At
KW209 the top of the pillar rested a marble dog.
7) A reference to Eudaimonism, a philosophy that defines
right action as that which leads to “happiness” or “well
being”. It originates from Aristotle’s Nicomachean
Ethics, where he writes that eudaimonism means all
correct actions lead to the greater well being of an
individual, and thus to a society. This concept posits
 that human happiness is the central ethical concern.
Later (much, much later in fact), Existentialism would
come along and reject the notion of happiness as a
bourgeois fantasy; even Stoicism turned its back on
Eudaimonism. The concept was, however, imported
into Christianity by Thomas Aquinas, who sought
to prove that “happiness” or “well-being” was (is)
found ultimately in a direct (and therefore individual
and personal) perception of God. Still not a popular
position in the West.
8) An erection (or “hard on” “boner” “beef bayonet” “a
chubby” “tent pole” “stiffy” “sunrise surprise” “stonking
bazza” “turkey twizzler” “Sir Throblington” “meat
pole” “Norwegian wood” “woody” “hummer” “happy
to see you” “rocket in my pocket” “HOFNAR—Hard KW210
On For No Apparent Reason” “best friend” and
“boinger,” to mention but a few synonyms) occurs
when engorgement of blood in the corpora cavernosa
and corpus spongiosum (two tubular structures at the
base of the penis) result from stimulation. Besides
sexual stimulation (our personal favorite), an erection
may also derive from a full bladder or spontaneously,
as during a wet dream. Erection (or a stiffening of
the male member, also known as a “thingamabob”)
is apparently caused by the parasympathetic nervous
system, that same area of the brain responsible for the
“fight or flight” response. Hence, it is for this reason an
erection may be difficult to maintain if, say, one is being
chased by a irate husband. The sympathetic nervous
system is also responsible for ejaculation (surprisingly,
rhythmical rubbing has nothing to do with it), which
is why men (not teenagers) lose their erection after they
squirt. Men who may have an erection during sleep,
but are unable to obtain one while awake, are sad.
9) The act of self-pleasuring, also known as “buffin’ the
muffin” “beatin’ your meat” “burpin’ the worm” “rubbin’
one out” “hand job” “puttin’ the Kleenex kids through
college” “spankin’ the monkey” “jerkin’ the Gherkin”
“full knuckle shuffle” and the ever popular “jackin’
off.” Onanism, or the act of masturbation (from root
word εζεα, “penises” and Latin turbare “to disturb”),
extends from the Biblical character, Onan (Talmud
Niddah 13a, wherein the act is likened to adultery),
who spilled his seed upon the earth and earned for this
act the wrath of the terrible Pre-Christian God. As a
result, masturbation is frowned upon…at least in the
Bible. Philosophically (at least in German philosophy),
Immanuel Kant regarded it as a violation of moral
 law, making the a posteriori argument that “…such an
unnatural use of one’s sexual attributes strikes everyone
who thinks upon it as a violation of one’s duty to
himself.” He thought suicide less of an immoral act.
(He felt that the immorality lay in the fact that a man
gave up his personality when he used himself as a means
for the gratification of a bestial drive.) What a differing
view from that of the Olde Aegyptians who believed
that when a god masturbated it was a creative act! Or
the Greeks who regarded it…well, you can probably
imagine how the Greeks regarded it. On a more
contemporary note, Dorothy Parker, the divine Miss
Anthrope, reportedly said she had named her parrot
“Onan” because “…he is always spilling his seed.” And
the poet Allen Ginsberg, according to one biography,
came up with the idea of his celebrated poem, “Howl,”
while masturbating with a broom.
10) Physicist David Bohm is not into building blocks.
This doesn’t mean he is childless, only that he eschews
reductionism. (Reductionism means what it sounds
like: that the nature of complex things cans always be
reduced to or explained by more fundamental, smaller
things. For an example, read The Selfish Gene, by
Richard Dawkins.) For Bohm, the Whole encompasses
all things, structures, processes, abstractions, continua
and quanta. In other words, parts are considered in
terms of the Whole, constituting independent “sub-
totalities,” rather than the status of atomic units, or
building blocks. The implication, of course, is that
nothing is entirely autonomous. Bohm: “This new
form of insight can perhaps best be called Undivided
Wholeness in Flowing Movement.” This view assumes
that “flow” is prior to “things” (think vortex structures
that occur in a flowing stream of water, wherein we
might think of structural reality—even ourselves—as
the vortices). This brings to mind the precepts of Taoism
as discussed in Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching. “The Tao that
can be told of is not an Unvarying Tao.” “Tao begets
one; One begets two; Two begets three; Three begets the
myriad creatures.” “Tao is like an empty vessel that yet
may be drawn from without ever needing to be filled.”
KW211 This thinking is underlain by the striking symbol of
the blending entanglement of Yin and Yang, opposites
that are not opposite mixed together into the vortex of
the Whole. Also hinted at here is the Indian concept
of “samsara,” which means “to flow together,” to pass
through many states, to wander through a revolving
door between incarnations, in between and amongst
 Life and Death. In other words, the insights gained
through Bohm, Searle, Einstein, Heisenberg, etc.,
brings our imagistic thinking closer to the shamanistic
experience of the contextual Oneness of the flow of
Universe, and breaks down the Western mythos of
the “individual against nature” as epitomized in Bruce
Willis movies.

11) In contradistinction to “spirit,” souls are conceived of

as being eternal, immortal and to have existed prior to
their being slipped into this physical world dimension.
The use of the word does not correspond with the usage KW212
attributed to ancient Western thinkers such as Plotinus,
Heraclitus, Plato, et alii. The root of “soul” seems to
have originated from OE sawol, which has Germanic
links to the root from which also is derived “sea.” Think
living water. The Greeks called it ψχη, “psyche,” and
the much later Latin word was anima, both meaning
something like “breath.” There is a difference, by
the way, between infinity and eternity. The figure 8 is
symbolic of the former; the circle of the latter. One
can only wonder if God caused mankind the most pain
simply by our creation, or by giving us prepositions.
Theists say God is eternally existent. This may mean
either that God exists in eternity, where past, present
and future do not apply, or that God exists through
eternity, meaning at all times, so that past, present
and future again are meaningless, only in a different
way. In any case, the truth is infinity is a mathematical
concept that may nudge us in the direction of eternity,
but the difference between them (as far as the human
mind is concerned) is not significant. But then (some
may argue) neither is the human mind.
12) Reference to Honoré de Balzac (1788-1850), French
novelist whose many books was collectively entitled
La Comédie humaine. He finished 95 books, left 48
unfinished, and apparently died from drinking too
much coffee. “When women love us,” he wrote, “they
forgive us everything, even our crimes; when they do
not love us, they give us credit for nothing, not even
our virtues.” He also suggested that…“No man should
marry until he has studied anatomy and dissected at
least one woman.”
13) Uncertain; perhaps a reference to apocalypse (literally
“disclosure”), the eschatological end of the world
 (as in millennialism); or it may refer to the so-called
“rapture,” which event will precede the Last Days.
During the “rapture” all the saved souls will go directly
to Heaven, while the rest of us will have to slog it out
on earth dealing with fire and brimstone, rains of frogs
and spotty cellphone coverage. He might also simply
mean Old Age, or even macular degeneration. Who
knows?
14) It has been argued by anthropologists (imagine a
roomful of anthropologists arguing) that “giving one
the finger” is a variant of the phallic aggressive gesture
used by primates to threaten and belittle an enemy. In
other words, the “bird”—to use the parlance of our
times—has been around a long, long time. Roman
Emperor Caligula, that towering rôle model, made
supplicants kiss his middle finger. Throughout most
of the Middle Ages the MF went underground; the
use of digits was severely restricted by the Holy See,
who believed extended fingers belonged in the Mass
only and not to the masses. We wouldn’t see it again,
so to speak, until it cropped up in an 1886 photo of
the Boston Beaneaters baseball team’s photo. In this
image, Hall of Fame pitcher Charles “Old Hoss”
Radbourn can be seen slipping the finger to the
camera. Thus sanctioned by sporting heroes, it soon
became as American as mom and apple pie. And,
why not? America in those days was a melting pot, a
polymorphic polyglot of wretched refuse, of tired, poor,
tempest-tost souls, of huddled masses, none of whom
could understand a word the other spoke—what richer
soil for so simple a gesture to sprout and grow? Yet,
had it not been thus, a second chance would have come
along with the introduction of the automobile; can you
imagine a safer way for drivers to communicate their
feelings to each other without letting go the steering
wheel? “…remove the yoke from your midst, the pointing
of the finger, and speaking wickedness…” Isaiah 58: 9-
10.

KW213

15) A reference here to Antisthenes and his student,

Diogenes of Sinope. This might stand as signet to their
attitude towards the world.
16) Pantheism is the view that God-ness is in everything
 (even dog doo); i.e., God is immanent; Universe and
Nature are equivalent. In Hindu theology, moksha
(from the Sanskrit for liberation or release) refers to
breaking free from the cycle of death and rebirth by
transcending phenomena and leaving behind any sense
of time, space and causation; it is, in short, to become
one with the God-ness of All Being-ness which is the
Everywhen-ness of the Everynow. This is not the same
as Christian “salvation,” which only recognizes the
world as a battlefield and God as a supernal being far
removed from His/Her creations. For the believer in
Brahman, God-ness is like the light emanating from a
prism; it only appears to be broken into colors, but is
in fact unchanged. We also find this concept localized
in the Jewish Kabbalah, which inspired and informed KW214
Spinoza’s own form of pantheism. (Funny enough, a
now forgotten philosopher once criticized Spinoza for
believing God was immanent in all “things,” making
the point that it was a doctrine of “pure materialism”
that, in itself, would lead finally to “pure atheism.”
Seems silly now, but it did set the stage for the XVIIIth
Cent. Einstein, by the way, claimed Spinoza as his
greatest religious influence.) Problems abound, as you
can imagine, with pantheism. For instance, what about
Free Will? And for that matter, what about free beer
and a good five cent cigar? And Free Verse, what’s that
about? So, in summation, the thought that God might
be dog poop may not be so far-fetched, after all.
17) Haven’t a clue.
18) Ah, yes, Latin again. Literally, “after this, therefore
because of this.” Also “If, then therefore, because.”
Post hoc, as it is known by those in the know, is a
logical fallacy (or false clause) that assumes if one event
happens after another event, then the event that came
before must be the cause of the second event. This is
known also as affirming the consequence, or massaging
the facts, or fibbing. An example: a) Ice cream sales go
up in July; b) Car theft goes up in August; c) Therefore,
people eating ice cream cause car theft. Here’s another:
a) A Republican is elected into the Presidency; b) The
economy, driven by decisions made by two former
Democratic Presidents, finally swings upward strongly;
c) Therefore, Republican Presidents are better for the
economy.
19) Insufficient space to pursue the topic.
20) A hypothetical, subjectivist evaluation diametrically
opposed to juridical providence.
21) A Zazen approach to nationalism, as in “the watercourse
 way,” or “get out of my way,” or “do you know the
way to San Jose?”; anything to do with the USA, or its
inhabitants, especially those who inhabit the Pentagon;
doing things unlike the French; only speaking one
language; PepsiCo; Wal-Mart; Tri-Laterialism; reality
TV; John Wayne.
22) Capital of Florida, USA.

KW215
not a blank page
“It’s not worth the wile to go round the world
to count the cats of Zanzibar.”
—Thoreau
“Anything that happens happens, anything that in happening causes
something else to happen causes something else to happen, and
anything that in happening causes itself to happen again, happens
again. Although not necessarily in chronological order.”
—Douglas Adams
 Comes the Time of Capt. Twenty-Z Skidoo!
→ or ←
Mr. Bland Builds a Blog!

The difference between a blog and a website is the difference

between Rice Krispies® and the deep blue sea.
KW220
Twenty Questions Asked:

1) How can a person, once having been dispossessed and lost

to society, access the technology that would permit his or her
thoughts publication on the World Wide Web?
2) What do brutal people think about when they masturbate?
3) Is “love” equivalent with “consciousness”? Is “will” the same
as “hate”?
4) What is the significance of irony in relation to our notion
of god?
5) What is the meaning of money in relation to the corruption
of the human soul?
6) How do we reconcile the spiritual and material impulses
that dwell within us side-by-side?
7) Is every new relationship a word?
8) If philosophy and theology are ideas-about-reality and not
realities themselves, how can we know how to make right
actions?
9) If the path of things is silent and we are really symbols, what
should our relationship be to silliness?
10) Is death real or only sleep as a notion?
11) If poetry is as powerful as poets claim, why can’t it change
the world?
12) Is Zenophobia the irrational fear of Zenos?
13) Is there Mind, or do you Mind?
14) Is the world and its enfolded events pre-ordained, or is it
just Wednesday?
 15) Are order and disorder artificial divisions, man-made
concepts, or do such things exist beyond our level of distinction-
making?
16) Is any one thing more true than any other?
17) How can we ever know what, if anything, really happened
in history?
18) Can there be ultimate wisdom if all knowledge is
guesswork?
19) If there is no meaning to anything we do and there is no
such thing as absolute morality, may I please have another
milkshake?
20) If we removed the demarcation “decades,” would we still
see patterns in history?

<?php get_footer () ; ?>

KW221
 Phinneas Jogger & Capt. Teuthry

Chapter 2
(Part III)

AMONG CANNIBALS!

Being an Honest and Truthful Rendition

of Their Awful Adventures
as Provided by a Drunken Amanuensis
and Corroborated by Total Strangers
 BEAR ON THE BEACH
∞
A Case for Spontaneous Combustion
(also known as)
Order, Disorder and the Secret Life
of
Rubber Bands
KW224
(Part the Twenty-third)
Wherein is Revealed the Whys and Wherefores
Of Our Current Misfortunes
And the Inevitability of the Loss of
Inhalers Worldwide

“Brothers,” he began, for one has to begin, “you

either is the solvolutionist of the problems, or you is
the problematic hisself.”

To this there was attendant thunderous applause

and sniggers.

“The world is divided into dumbasses and asswipes,

and I shall leave it unto your own hairy selves to dis-
combobulate which one you is.”

More souls gathered at the river.

“They say drinks is bad for you; they say nickel

bags of spontaneous combustion is a mixed blessing;
they say you gots to read this, you gots to read that,
you gots to toe the line, lift those bales, you gots
to keep your mouth shut lessen you is in agreement--
amIrightoramIright?”

“Yeah you is!” sent up the chorus of assent.

 “Why is it you think inhalers can’t be found? Has
you looked as I has in every Albertson’s in every Pay-
less in every Safeway in all of Seattle?”

“No, No!” An astonishment of glances clung to his

coat.

“Item not won--“ he glowered as his spoken words

churned the surface “--similar items found.”

“Ooooh,” Oh’d the crowd.

“We looks upon the world through crosshairs like

a killer of rhinos. Everybody got hisself a different
sight to see through. And as if that weren’t enough,
we’ll never get anywhere defining terms.”

“Noooo,” No’d the crowd.

“Why, a culture ain’t nothing but a bunch’ve folks

what looks through the same damned sight.”

“Amen,” amen’d a few mindfucked mumblers in the

mix.

“Some sights they is more pretty than others, and

some sights they is more useful than others, but no
sights is more better than others.”

“At’site!” “Huzzah!” “Mamihlapinatapai!”

“Make no mistake, friends--dividing life into or-

der and disorder is the wrong way to head the horse.
The belief that order is true, that order is good, and
that disorder is its opposite--that’s plain dumb-ass.
KW225 How do I know this is so? Look at me! Look at us! We
has suffered the destructive aspects of their order.
They have laws and rules and guns and mules to stop
us from parking in the red zone and from partaking in
the creative uses of disorder. They call it--civiliza-
tion.”
 “Hut! Hut!” “Consternation!” “Cavil and riding
crops!”

The crowd had grown from a fruit stand into a diz-

zying array of retail outlets.

“Totally fallopian tubular!” “Outrageous!” “Steato-

pygous!”

“Philosophizers has concerned themselves from

time on high to get down low with sorting through all
the sights we look through trying to find the perfect KW226
one that will describe all Reality, when all along this
ain’t nothing but a hound dog just lying all the time.
It’s a big-assed illusion’s what it is! Little t truth is
what they call Big T Truth. Little t truth is the world
defined relative to the sights we is looking through.
Big T Truth is the sights themselves, the stuff the
sights is made of and at the same time is Big T Totally
Big U Unrelated to the Big Ass Sights themselves!”

“Paradoxical!” “Far flung out!” “Anagogic to the

Max, fat!”

‘Where are our inhalers now that we needs them?”

The crowd, packed tight as jam on Samba Night,

trickled forward.

“The tyrant needs broken spirits!”

“You got that right, Onk!” “Let the manchild sing!”

“Just as broken spirits needs a tyrant!”

“Perfect parallelism!” “Droll!” “Not bad for an ass-

scratching nonentity!”

“Historically, species at the end of their tether

tend to reproduce and recombine in strictless mismea-
 sure. The big question then on my fat lips is--is we is
or is we ain’t got the juice, baby?”

“We is!” “We ain’t!” “Jiz!” “Jeeze!” “Wilted let-

tuce let us waffle!”

“At the best, nothing; at the worse, this again.

BUT. Where are all the flooble inhalers? If the Bud-
dha craps in the woods does anybody smell it?”

“Tell us!” “Yell us!” “Yellow jaundice!”

“I’ll tell you where you need to go, what’s you needs
to know. Them inhalers is there, and they is there,
but there ain’t any of them here--that’s an irrefude-
cidable fact.”

“What we gone do?” “Is we gone make it?”

His hand raised, dribbling a fat chicken.

“Let us discuss tragedy and Popeye cartoons. Let

us discuss the autopoetic way of life, the antichristial
antievolutionarial antirevolutionarial antientropical
antiverse! With a dollop of mayonnaise! And you and
you and you, mister and missus Manapes! And just so’s
you’ll know what it is I’m talking about, hear this truly:
tragedy is when that that is secondary is acceptable
for that that is primary--dig? Take money.”

“Whoo Hoo!” “Over hear, boss!” “Lumped in an

analogous group!”

“Once filthy lucre replaces the quest for self-

knowledgeability as the primary goal and ass mover
KW227 in all things human and unpiggy-like, then there is
trouble in Rubber City! Money must serve, not swerve!
Lookit dudes--do I have money? You see me covered
in filthy human detritus?”

“Nyet!” “Not yet!” “You bet!”

 “No, I doesn’t got money! And why doesn’t I? Let
me express it thusly. I doesn’t gots money because
I dunst wants to be its slave like bullhocky ballsboys,
like until you Rolex’ed Few, you Choosing Faux! For
I am circular and you is flat as Wiley T. beneath an
Acme anvil! What is working for a limping but pimp-
ing for the man? Make it so he can add to his brood
of blond, well-groomed hominem. It’s all Capitalism
and Sex, my manfreudes. Lotta hot and cold running
crapualism and sexualism. If money is the meaning of
life and more is better than less, then let’s de-men-
talize and re-group and long live the co-creators of
KW228
chaos! But if they’re wrung--as I believes they is--
then we is on the wrong goose step to heaven and we
ain’t never gone get our gossamers! The world is the
dream of an unconscious body--maybe and maybe not-
-but it ain’t what they says it is, it ain’t a battlefield,
dudes and dudettes, and it ain’t no strip mall! Long as
we doesn’t care what happens in the world, long as we
dasn’t play close-ass attention, then we is the mate-
rial world’s prisoners! Reality is the real between
worlds! Money blinds us by solving little p problems!
You gots a toothache--money is the answer! You’s got
a fuse blew? Throw a wad of clash! But a soul ache?
Feel lost and alone? Can’t figger out the mumble of
things here in your lifeblood? Then you don’t buy a
new pool! And you dasn’t buy more jewels! And you
didn’t dip in no twice-bitten whore! Nossuh! We is so
dumbass we usually wind up just wanting what money
can buy! Mentalize and not Materialize! Don’t let or
allow true inner experiences to be replaced by Game-
Boys or DVDs and on up the foolchain and ’way up the
wazzu! Heck, noisy girls, everything is a symbol once
you’re seeking! What did that old Greek fartflosser
say, that God is just mind aware of itself? Then you
can be God, white fools! Don’t let God in--be the bug-
ger Hisself! Paradox is the just way! Hell is attach-
ment to this so-culled world! Credit Cards are the
lease to a condo in hell--have anything, pay with your
brief residence, be a nothing--that’s credit, wobble-
heads! Buy cheap, cost’s drear! Selling out means
 turning away from the path! There was a time when
silver linings were mostly free, when corduroy smiled
and bakelite mooned; now we is in a post-nuclear,
post-pasty, post-toasty, past-greenhouse, post-ozone,
posit-pistol, poast-dervish, post-inhaler world, and it’s
as it has been since Topsy went Turvy and the goose
cooked the gander--we is all misshapen without a pint
to our names cradled in mama’s smelly arms! So get
a leg up! Get a clue! Get a move on! And keep them
doggies rolling!”

“Rawhide!” whupped up the crowd of dumb-asses

before it drifted off to views of lesser assaults and
batteries.

PJ & Z passed away into the shadowy shrubbery of

unsanitized seattlilized mentalized reality, shapes and
forms transposed, traipsing along sidewalks, tripping
delightedly, fantastically, mumblingly unto themselves
something or other.

<?php get_footer () ; ?>

KW229
 Murray Murnau’s Muddled Maps of Mistery
Sect. 032; Subset 5; Quad. 1
presents

TOM SWIFT AND HIS

AMAZING MEAT COMPUTER
by

Mr. Suck & Mr. Nobodaddy

Bud Barclay groaned, cracked open sleep-encrusted

eyes and blinked up at the man wearing a white lab
smock.
Tom Swift, Jr.™ smiled down at his old friend. In his
seventies now, Tom still wore his hair in a crewcut, still
went clean-shaven, still had steely blue eyes. Besides
his features being more deeply-set, only his hair had
changed from when they first met as boys; it had gone
from blond to silver.
Bud Barclay had not been so lucky.
But then, Bud Barclay had not been a genius. Especially
not a genius with an insanely rich father. He had not
grown up with vast privileges and expensive schools.
His parents had ridiculed him for his friendship with
the high-falutin’ Swifts. But Bud hadn’t listened. He
had even gone so far as to date Sandy, Tom’s sister.
But, ultimately, girls had never been central to Bud
and Tom’s lives. Adventure had been the binder that
made them stick together. And adventures they had
aplenty. But the last few decades had taken their toll.
Tom’s father had been found guilty of embezzlement,
and it had taken almost all his money to keep out of
jail. Besides his fortune, it had robbed him of his most
important currency—respect. The Swift star—for so
long among the brightest in the heavens—had forever
fallen. The elder Swift retired from the world and
eventually committed suicide. As for his son, Tom
Junior, he withdrew from public scrutiny for many
years, as many as he judged necessary for his memory
to be forgotten.
Chow Winkler™, they say, died of a broken heart.
After that, Bud fell into a deep depression. It was the
sixties, legendary decade of Free Love and Acid. Bud
partook himself of both these offerings with great
frequency and in deep draughts. He had not cared if
he had sex with man, woman or beast; he had not cared KW232
if he overdosed; again and again, on his psychedelic
trips, he saw Tom’s burnished face, his sandy hair, his
steely blue eyes that danced with ideas; over and over,
he heard Tom’s voice in his ear whispering his love and
adoration, and he would bury his face in his lover’s
chest and inhale deeply of his scent.
There had also been lots and lots of alcohol.
It was, in fact, alcohol that prevents Bud Barclay from
being able to focus on his friend’s chiseled features.
Bud—once considered good looking and by some
(mostly men) even dashing—had not aged well.
Drinking and smoking dope and cigarettes had taken
its toll. He had grown blowsy and fat. His gut hung
like a giant breast over his belt. His hair and beard
had gone frizzy white and usually went uncombed and
untrimmed.
“What th’fuck?”
He had not seen Tom for over forty years.
“Zatyou?”
“Bud, how the deuce are you?”
“I’m fuckin’ fine, Tom. Fuckin’ fine.”
“Excellent.” Tom Swift, Jr.™ grinned in a boyish
 manner. “I’ve been looking for you. Ready to get back
to work?”
Bud Barclay groaned. Was he a sidekick dreaming he
was a man, or a man dreaming he was a sidekick?
He needed a drink.
The bottle of Tequila lay empty on the floor between
them. Bud had been sleeping in his own vomit.
“Come on, then, old chum. Time’s a wasting! I’ve got
the guldurnest gizmo for you to see!”
Bud iterated his groan.
It was as if Tom had not changed with the years. Fuckin-
A. Hadn’t he dropped out during the sixties? Hadn’t
he self-actualized throughout the seventies? Hadn’t he
profiteered along with everyone else in the eighties?
Hadn’t he cocooned through the nineties? Now, on the
cusp of the end of the world, on the brink of his own
crummy life, he comes waltzing back wearing a crisp,
white lab smock, with the same moderately handsome
features—in an ordinary one-in-ten-guy kinda way—
and wants him to giddyup because of a guldurned
whizbang gizmo?
Fuckin-A.
“What is it this time? A new Repelatron®? Trouble
with the Kranjovians? The dingus on the Challenger
fritz out?”
Tom Swift, Jr.™ chuckled. Bud could always be counted
on for comedic relief.
“No, my friend. The biggest thing of all.”
KW233
He wasn’t gonna tell; the fucker wasn’t gonna tell. Bud
in a flash recalled how often he used to think Tom was
an arrogant asshole.
“Fine, whatever.” Bud sat up. He had been sleeping,
besides in his own vomit, upon a dirty mattress without
sheets or blankets in a room that hadn’t been cleaned in
eight-and-a-half years—the length of time he had been
renting it.
The last six years Bud had been earning his keep begging
on the streets of Seattle. Early on in this career he had
staked out an unclaimed Starbucks™ and managed to
rake in a tidy sum of change every day. It was hard
work, standing in all kinds of weather, people averting
their eyes, tossing you coins to get rid of you. It had not
been good for his self-esteem, but his mental state was
far too delicate for him to engage in the Real World in
any other manner. Thanks to the guilt-ridden, coffee
addicted patrons of Starbucks™, he always had enough KW234
money for rent, booze and a few cans of potted meat—
not to mention the occasional Frappuccino™.
After all these years, he didn’t need any shit from Tom
Swift, Jr.™
“Spill the beans, Tommy boy, or you looked me up for
nothin.”
Tom nodded and appeared thoughtful. Realizing the
bind he was in—and wishing, despite his appearance of
bonhomie, to get the hell out of this shithole Bud lived
in—he came to an abrupt decision and smiled.
“OK, old pal. You win. Here it is in a nutshell.”
Tom bent down closer to Bud, but not so close as to
smell him.
“I’ve invented the world’s first meat computer.”
“Say what?”
Tom chuckled.
“A computer that doesn’t need hardware because it’s all
software, get it? It’s a biological computer that learns
on its own and doesn’t need constant upgrades. It
only requires a tetrawatt of power to operate, and I’ve
supplied them with an atomo-cyclic-transgenerator®
for that!”
Tom waited for a reaction.
 Bud threw up.
He wiped his mouth on the back of his sleeve and
frowned at the dirty kitchen window.
“Zit rainin?”
He hated to beg in the rain.
Tom had expected more. Quite a bit more, in fact.
He been hard at work over the last four decades. He
had redoubled—nay, retripled—his commitment to
invention after his father’s embarrassment and then
his gruesome death (by exposing himself to the 3-
D Telejector® Tom had invented when he was only
thirteen), and all with the single-minded goal of relieving
the world of MicronSearch™ and its inept technology.
Now, poised on the pinnacle of success, he had located
his old friend so they could share the fame and glory,
not to mention the boundless wealth and power that
would result—wealth and power far beyond anything
achieved by his father. Greater wealth and power even
than that enjoyed by Ron Delworthy himself, founder
and CEO of the evil MicronSearch.
Bud crumpled his face into a smile, exposing a mouthful
of missing teeth.
“Tom, old buddy, old pal, I gotta ask you something,
and I need you to tell me the truth—promise?”
Tom frowned and produced a solemn nod.
“Promise.”
“Fine.” Bud leaned forward. Tom wrinkled his nose.
“Got any spare change?”
KW235

<?php get_footer () ; ?>

 Zid Tarbox is Alive and Well,
And Eating Meat in Existential, Texas

And then there’s the story of the man

who, every morning, when getting into his
car, noticed as if for the first time the
inescapable fact of his gas tank being nearly
empty.
KW236
Every day he re-filled it, barely drove it
at all, then every night went to bed to awak-
en next morning to find his gasoline almost
gone.

This happened for twenty-three days in a

row.

He is now a Charter Member of our Soci-

ety.

Next up: a man with two children and a

fairly happy life arose one morning, dressed
and ate, then walked out to his baby blue
Volvo station wagon.

Twenty-three minutes after he started

the engine he was idling at an intersection
waiting for the light to change when a car
full of teenagers pulled alongside.

From a distance you could hardly hear

the shots.

The following year his wife joined our

Club.
Fellow once got on a plane only to hear
the pilot announce the flight had been de-
layed as a result of “two or three little
problems…” Two hours and twenty-three
 minutes later, he and his fellow passengers
were escorted onto a new plane—flight No.
023. Before this fellow could board, his
knees started shaking, his fillings started
buzzing, and he needed to pee and cry at the
same time. Short form—he never did get on
the plane.

Flight 023 crashed on takeoff, killing all

aboard.

Anyone ever tell you that humans have 23

pairs of chromosomes, and that the earth’s
axis is tilted at a 23° angle?

And how about this little ditty—

The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not

want. He maketh me to lie down in green
pastures: he leadeth me beside the still
waters. He restoreth my soul: he leadeth
me in the paths of righteousness for his
name’s sake. Yea, though I walk through
the valley of the shadow of death, I will
fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy
rod and thy staff they comfort me. Thou
preparest a table before me in the pres-
ence of mine enemies: thou anointest my
head with oil; my cup runneth over. Surely
goodness and mercy shall follow me all the
days of my life: and I will dwell in the
house of the Lord for ever.

The 23rd Psalm, in case you didn’t know.

Did you hear the one about the Army

football player who wore jersey No. 23?
It was during the 23rd annual Army/Navy
KW237 Game. Second half of the game and three
yards from touchdown, a jagged bolt of
lightening filled the sky and struck the
player carrying the ball—No. 23.

Did you know Pope John XXIII is an ac-

complished alchemist?

In ASCII, character 23 is ETBEnd

Transmission Block.

Is it any wonder that so many people are

fascinated by the number 23?

Have you long suspected the numbers

2 and 3, written and spoken in that order,
might be super symbolic, might contain
darkly magical powers?
KW238
Then you, too, could be a 23rdian!

Look for the 23s and they will multiply!

How can you refuse?

What do you have to lose?

The path of things is silent.

ETB

<?php get_footer () ; ?>

 What, Exactly, is Zaniism
And How, Precisely, Do We Prevent it?

Doctor Nebo Gipfel in Conversation:

(Feb. 3, 2023 transcript)

Q: Doctor, we’re back.

NG: About time.

Q: Where were we?

NG: Discussing, I believe, the benefits of genocide.

Q: Uh, no. Zaniism, how to prevent it.

NG: Oh, that.

Q: Quite. Let’s sum up what Zaniism is for any new

listeners.

NG: Must we?

Q: I believe you described it as “feminine”?

NG: I would hardly have been so kind.

Q: “Female spirited” then?

NG: More like vaginated eunuchs. Men who put down

the toilet seat when they’re done.
KW239 Q: I see. What else?
NG: Oh, it’s such childish crap. They prefer “harmony”
to conflict in ridiculous resistance to the thesis/
antithesis—or the yin/yang—nature of our hierarchical
universe.
Q: So they don’t see the valuation of the world, as it
were, as a series of steppingstones?
NG: No, of course not, little man. They see everything
as being neutral, therefore negative and useless. They’re
Romantics, with a capitol A for asinine. They’re holists,
do the whole “synthesis thing.” Accretive. They
believe poverty’s our natural state, and the acquisition
of artifacts—“stuff ” as an extension of ignorance,
what they term “greed”—is an aberration. It’s nothing
new, it’s syncretic, it’s ultimately shallow post-modern
posturing.
KW240
Q: This may be, but how do you explain its growing
popularity, especially among the weak, the poor, the
downtrodden and dispossessed?

NG: That should be obvious. Weaklings have always

clung to messages that exalted them—look at the whole
Jesus thing. Thank God that’s behind us.

Q: Of course, but not everyone can be a millionaire.

NG: They could if they weren’t vaginized, if they

didn’t ascribe absurdity to everything. See, this is what
happens when your life doesn’t have a sense of meaning;
when you drift and ogle the stars.

Q: So you would characterize this more as a movement

than a religion?

NG: Religion? Ha! You have to have structure to have

religion. These people are nothing more than agonists,
cheap contrarians, anarchists. They present us with
nothing—no programs, no plans, no blueprint for a
better world. Really, all they want is to destroy. They
want to rip down what Western Man has so painstakingly
erected. They want us to become Communists. There’s
not an original thinker among them. They would have
us close down schools, stop wars, feed everybody! They
don’t understand that poverty is not the natural state
of man, but is the natural result of laziness. Poverty is
punishment.
 Q: So these people are…lazy?

NG: Every one of them. Otherwise, they would find

ways to work within the system. It’s a mug’s game to
be a critic—lazy people do it all the time—but it takes
work, lots of it, to build a civilization. To design and
construct the infrastructure, say, for a town. To design
and manufacture better cars and boats and missiles.
But all they do is talk and throw rotten fruit. And isn’t
that appropriate, since that’s what they are in relation
to us—rotten fruit.

Q: Nevertheless, the movement is growing worldwide.

Police are confronting thousands, in several cases tens
of thousands, of these people, and they won’t fight,
they won’t move, they just sit and smile and appear to
be happy.

NG: Happy? Drugged you mean! We haven’t mentioned

the relationship of drugs to this sub-culture, have we?

Q: Drugs? No, I. I don’t quite follow.

NG: Drugs, man! You don’t think this thing would

have caught on without drugs, do you? That’s what
undercuts a man’s will to be a man—mind-numbing
substances.

Q: I see. I don’t believe anyone so far has been charged

with possession—

NG: Are you calling me a liar? D’you know who I

am?

Q: Well, of course, Doctor, we all know who you—

NG: Their leader, this Zero fellow—

KW241
Q: Zeno.

NG: Whatever. Best not to give him a name, it

only makes him think we respect him. Drugged out
nonentity.
Q: He’s only one of—

NG: Setting themselves up as revolutionaries!

Q: You know what they say, that revolution is not
political, but human—

NG: What’re you—a sympathizer?

Q: Uh, n-no. Of course not, ha-ha.

NG: Then toe the line, mister. Get with the program.
KW242
Q: Yes, of course, I was just—

NG: You were just about to lose your job, is what.

Q: No, no. Honest. I was just. Uh. So you. You

think we need to handle this threat how, exactly?

NG: We need to exterminate them, man! And we need

to do it soon, before they cause irreparable harm, before
they assassinate the President!

Q: Assassinate the President?

NG: You heard me. Our best intel indicates they may
already have set up terrorist cells just for this purpose.

Q: But they’re peace loving…

NG: Until we eliminate this sub-human trash, our

streets won’t be safe for women and children. Because
of them there will be a greater need for prisons and
gated communities.

Q: I see, but what you’re suggest sounds like some sort

of ethnic cleansing—
NG: Until we get a spine and admit the world needs our
direction—American direction—and incorporate the
uneducated brown and yellow people into line with the
need of production, distribution and consumption—
 Q: Yes? Until then what?

NG: What? Then what? Why chaos, of course. You

want to live in chaos? You want to wake up to a cold
shower, go to hospitals filled with doped-up doctors,
have your children taught subversive thoughts? Chaos
will destroy all we hold dear and true! We have to build
bulwarks against its encroachment! Have I told you
anything about my experiments with water?

Q: No, no sir, you haven’t. That will, unfortunately,

have to wait for another. We’re out of, uh, time. I’d
like to thank my guest, the distinguished Doctor Nebo
Gipfel of M.I.T. and C.I.A. And this is Mutton Jefferies
saying have a good night and a brilliant tomorrow.

<?php get_footer () ; ?>

KW243
 Entr’acte
Angels Without Wings
Wingnut & Nickledick
present
≡
A Dialogue on Filth and Depravation
as Proper Components of a
Eudaimonic Existence

W: The fuck’s that?

N: Mine. Found.

W: Lying sack of shit. Stole.

N: Heresy. Damned lie. A pox upon you.

W: The fuck that mean? Gimme some.

N: Nay! I henceforth require more space

than before. Move away, barbarian.

W: The fuck you—say, what’s with the faggot

talk? You homo now?

N: Brother, I have changed my ways. I have

seen an alternate path. I am pursuing a
greater good.

W: You’re pursuing a knuckle fucking sandwich

is what, you keep this shit up.

N: For your information and edification I no

longer wish to associate with the likes of you
and your salacious imagery.

W: My fucking what?

N: You heard me, scallywag. Begone. I have

gefilte fish to fry.

W: Your shit back up into your brain or

what?

N: That’s just the sort of crudity I have come

to expect and abhor.

W: Don’t fucking call me a whore!

N: I am beginning to find your barely

prehensile existence and lowbrow harangues
intolerable. KW246
W: Oh. Oh? You are, huh?

N: Yeah. I are.

W: Nerd-ass freakazoid.

N: Am.

W: At least you’ll admit it.

N: What?
W: Huh?

N: Oh yeah?

W: Yeah.

N: Yeah?

W: Yeah.

N: Oh—yeah?

W: Yeah!

N: Fuckin-A!

W: Fuckin-C!
 N: Furry-assed turd sucker!

W: Limp-dicked granny fucker!

N: Oh, yeah?

W: Yeah!

N: Oh YEAH?

Etcétera, etcétera, etcétera…

<?php get_footer () ; ?>

KW247
 GOD AT LARGE

Bondi swore he heard someone knock.

How many days has he been down here in the

bunker?
KW248
Four? Fourteen?

He was prepared to remain a long time. Where else

was there to go? As far as he knew, everyone else in the
world was insane, except for him.

And sometimes he wasn’t so sure about himself.

Not since he switched on the first machine.

He had meant nothing by it, beyond the measure of a

desire to do good. No one suspected at the beginning
it would come to this.

Nevertheless, he had been warned.

In a dream one night, during the period when his

experiments had developed to the testing stage,
Gottfried Leibniz had come to him and spoke in perfect
English, telling him there were areas in his mathematics
that bid gross errors entry, areas wide and deep enough
to prohibit any chance of a successful test. In fact, had
insisted the three hundred year old philosopher, such a
usurpation—the very word he used—such a usurpation
of matter would result in a rending of the fabric of the
universe. No one, Leibniz had insisted, should do what
he, Bondi, was about to do.

But that had only been a dream.

What finally happened was a nightmare.

 He had switched on the machine. The machine that
was guaranteed to produce sweet, clean energy. Energy
that was essentially free. Energy that left no radioactive
mess. Energy squeezed as if lemon juice from the hard-
rined fruit of our world.

Who would have thought Spinoza was right?

Bondi switched on a computer. A generator had started

automatically as soon as the power grid fell. According
to his calcs, if he uses his generator sparingly, he might
have enough juice—at reduced usage—for nine months,
maybe a year. Then what? Then would he—so long
deprived of human contact—throw open the door and
rush out to join the crowd? Would he become one of
them? Wouldn’t that be condign punishment? Hoisted
on his own petard, as it were.

After all, it was all his fault. The madness. The

bloodshed. And now this world war.

How many have fallen? How many lives has he spoiled

and destroyed?
And how many miracles have there been? Too many
to count.

Bondi smiled.

Maybe God would like it if he prayed.

Then why doesn’t he? Why doesn’t he—the first

human in the world to prove God exists—why doesn’t
he pray? Why doesn’t he want to bend his will before
the Great Creator?

Bondi opens a bottle of cognac. His larder had been

KW249 thoughtfully and thoroughly stocked.
All his friends—back when he had friends—had
laughed at him for building this bunker. “The Cold
War is over!” they told him. “You’re throwing away
money!”
But it was his money to throw away. He had earned
it, every penny of it. All sixty-eight hundred million
dollars of it. How he wished money could still buy
things! If he could he would use it to buy back his sense
of security, his feeling of safety. At one time he could
have afforded to buy and live on a deserted island.

Why hadn’t he?

Instead he had flipped the switch that ended it all.

Ended cascading waterfalls. Ended moonlight walks
on the beach. Ended lovers’ kisses. Ended the laughter
KW250
of children. How he hates himself for his arrogance!
His greed. His need for control.

All he has left now is this. An expensive hole in the

ground.

Yes, someone was indeed knocking.

<?php get_footer () ; ?>

www.Brainsweat/blog
 “Then anyone who leaves behind him a
written manual, and likewise anyone
who receives it, in the belief that such
writing will be clear and certain,
must be exceedingly simple-minded.”
—Plato
“Think slow, act fast.”
—Buster Keaton
not a blank page
 The heart gives the world a glancing blow.

—Z
 Happiness and property are usually
incompatible.
—Z
 The next great leap will come from a
garbage heap.

—Z
 Thesis, antithesis, suckerpunch.

—Z
Is that your Weltanschauung, or are you just sad
to see me?

—Z
 More realism! More humor!
More helium in the rhubarb!

—Z
 I’m just a boy who made god.

—Z
 Money buys everything but meaning.
Unless you think the world itself is
without meaning

—Z
 Thanks to all the little people.

—Z
To pretend is to do; therefore pretend to pretend
and you’ll do.

—Z
Capitalism only cares about making us more
comfortable in the world.

—Z
 Ethics and elegance are analogous.

—Z
 The more people there are who think you’re
real, the less real you are.
Really.

—Z
 Once you question the front lawn,
you are liable to question everything.

—Z
 But we do not have choice whether or not
we have choice.

—Z
The world of human aspiration is largely fictitious.

—Z
 Virtual Reality, as compared with what?

—Z
 Sentience is neither a gift nor a necessity,
but it does help pass the time.

—Z
 Never ask all trees to have
the same bark.

—Z
How long does it take to know how to go on?

—Z
 The obvious is not always apparent.

—Z
 If Jesus were to come back
he would be very old.

—Z
 Relax, uncertainty is good for you.

—Z
Comfort yourself with the awareness that self-
awareness is uncomfortable.

—Z
If truth is a virus, then paradox is its penicillin.

—Z
Deep contradictions means you’re on the right path.
Or not.

—Z
 When not in doubt, why not?

—Z
 What would you like to disorder today?

—Z

 Hurt ’til you laugh.
Laugh ’til you cry.
Rinse. Repeat.

—Z
 Who am I? I am a gruff, tough, squat, fat,
balding, frog-faced, parchment-skinned,
destitute, obdurate, old, oblate-spheroidal,
hemorrhoidal, snaggly-toothed, hirsute,
intransigent, intransitive verb.
You?

—Z
If Hierarchy is the metaphor for the Middle Ages,
then Dance should be the metaphor for now.

—Z
 It doesn’t get any simpler than death.

—Z
 Keep your faith in the water, baby!

—Z
 Collect entropy as you would dried sponges.

—Z
 If you don’t laugh,
who will?

—Z
not a blank page
ETB
“The last act is bloody, no matter how
charming the rest of the play.”
—Blaise Pascal
 AND FINALLY!

Trankas Drooking Expatiates on

Syllogomania,
the Diogenes Syndrome
& the Evolution of Dirty Jokes

By Lord Buddha’s Tooth! Shiver me lingam! What’s

that you say? Let him talk, let him speak, for words
soothe me. Yes? Say what? Louder, damn your eyes!
I see. Yes. Interesting question, if ineptly phrased.
Why are there so many old men and women about
on the streets, is that it? You fear them, do you?
Ah, for your purse or your life? I see. Of course.
Your purse. Have you ever offered alms? No. Only
encourages them, eh? By the horns of Beelzebub!
That ties handsomely into what my film is about.
After all I am here to pander. My latest picture,
Karmic Warriors, is a quintessential slice-of-life
about a high-level menial who loses his job. Since he
has no idea how to do anything other than what it
was he was doing, he eventually runs out of money and
starts living on the street. That part, by the way, is
played by Thug Candy, a recently discovered genius.
Believe me, he needed less directing than most of
the “A-list” names I’ve worked with. Natural talent.
He just seems to “get it.” Quite epicene, but very
very funny. One day, between set-ups, he visited my
trailer and offered me a blowjob! I thought I was
going to die. Funny stuff. God is this kid talented!
But—zounds! Lest we forget. The old guy plays Zeno,
KW329 right? Swear to God, found him on the street. Swear
to God. Man of mystery, goes by “A.A.” And he’s not
even an alcoholic! Another natural. We never learn
his real name, he’s just Z. He walked away from wife
and life and kept walking until we run into him who
knows how many years later. Always writing things
down. Real philosopher type. Only begs when he
needs to buy books. He’s released the programming,
you dig? Let it all go. He’s not about performance or
results. His gut doesn’t ache every night because of a
mistake or a bad decision or a crushing schedule. I live
scheduled. So I can’t get inside this Zeno character,
he’s too unlike me. So I make shit up. That scene
when he introduces Max Crwth? I was at a party
when the idea came to me. And don’t you love the
castration story? To me, some of the “philosophy”
gets in the way. But then, hey, I didn’t write the
book. And what a neat bit of writing it is, too. But
long, my brothers. Too-many-fucking-words long. I KW330
had to do some serious editing. I know, I know. In Part
III there could have been more scenes. But we had
seriously run out’ve money by then, so we were only
too happy to be able to get anything in the can. We
missed out on some stuff, like Pomjar—that’s what we
call him—starting his blog. Sitting in public libraries
all over town, outside raining like mad, grokking his
blog. I think that shit would have been awesome.
Instead, we focused on the voices and, since we could
no longer afford real people, we started using giant
marionettes. But we could afford voice actors. So
we blended all the strands together. Now you don’t
so much see the scene as inhabit it. Be-there-like-
now, you know? I mean, that’s what it’s all about, isn’t
it? Personal freedom? Mine. Yours. We’re all in
this shit together, folks, don’t forget. Chee-wow! So
it’s all about unplugging. Anybody? No, it was not a
conscious choice not to have Afro-Americans in the
cast, just happened that way. Next? Clichés are
the armature of the universe, baby. You over there?
The one in the blue coat. Yes, you. Right there. Yes
you. What d’ you want? Oh. We used a Panaflex,
and edited in Avid. Can’t beat the tried and true.
No, I’m not a Scientologist! I’m tired of being asked.
Yes? No, we haven’t spoken since we broke up, last
May. She’s doing a movie in Spain, some Spielberg
spew. Let her do it. She’s made her bed. I’m fine
without her. But it was a glorious, deep, soul defining
three-and-a-half weeks. Maybe one day we can be
friends. Yes? What do I think it’s about? I told you
already. Why don’t you people listen? Yes, I will. But
 I hate repeating myself. Personal freedom. You, teal
top in the corner. Yes, it was my inspiration to use
real street people as real street people. Talk about
art imitating life! Lotta great shots. Wonderful
faces. The French love faces, you know. I like French
films. Never understood the whole Jerry Lewis
thing, though. Another question? Yes, I know, but we
decided to cut out all the nude scenes. We wanted
a PG-13. The director’s cut will be out soon. As it is,
there’s cussing and, well, cussing. So far, people are
really dug-out on Wingnut and Nickledick. Am I right?
Hear that? Well—they’re coming back! We’re already
working on KW2. It’s going to be bigger and better,
with more sophisticated special effects. Different
writer. Without Z and Pomjam. Just a sort-of let
the boys go really wild. Maybe follow them around
and do the cinema verite thing. When I was in film
school, I did a lot’ve hand-held. I love Soderbergh.
And Dick Lester. I’d like to get back to that 60s
verve thing, you know? Anyway. Again? That must
be some potent crack you’re on, lady. I already told
you what it’s all about. I’m not going to repeat myself.
I hate repeating myself. What? My films are not
all alike! Rasputin 3 and Shaman 2 are completely
different. In R3 the killer is a shemale. In S2 the
killer is only pretending to be a pre-op, post-hormone
therapy transgendered male. Are there any intelligent
questions out there? You, in the tweed? Ah, yeah.
Thank you. No one has even asked about the whole
rubber band thing. The bowling bags. Retro cool,
eh? Can’t have people smoking or eating white bread
anymore. But no laws—yet—against bowling bags. See,
by collecting rubber bands, they’re reducing disorder
in our universe. That sorta makes them warriors of
a kind. You know? Yeah. It’s all about metaphysics
and who knows anything about that, right? But the
way we do it, if you never cracked a book, or even
went to school, no problem. The what? The bathroom
KW331 thing? Well, turns out it’s a kind’ve fixation of the
author’s, the guy who wrote the book. That was in
the contract. The boys had to visit five different
bathrooms and the camera had to let the viewer read
what’s written on the walls. I thought it was kinked
at first, but it turned out pretty cool. What? Oh,
the whole 23 thing so creeps me out. Once you hook
into it, you start seeing 23 everywhere. My room
number tonight is 223! I’m not saying which hotel,
though. By Jove and Buddha’s Belly! It’s time. Hate
to, loves, but I have to go. Got another interview to
do. Been real. Stay cool. Thanks, thanks, thanks.
<?php get_footer () ; ?>
THE ENTROPY
INCREASES
SPONTANEO
Y OF UNIVERSE
DURING ANY
OUS PROCESS
Habent sua fata Libelli
Your Thoughts Go Here
And so on...
<?php get_footer () ; ?end>
 The dudleyclark Story
highbrow slapstick
dudleyclark was born ahead of his time and somewhat
against his will in New Orleans, Louisiana, wintertime 1952.
His parents failed to be impressed when he began reading at
three. Likewise, they were not much interested when, at ten,
he declared himself a writer. Later in life, he dropped out not
only from high school but also Tulane University where he
vainly attempted to study philosophy––a subject that, ultimately,
rendered him even less employable than he naturally was.
Thus began his years of wandervogel (literally, wander-
ing bird), and his accumulation of sometimes humiliating,
sometimes stimulating, always excruciating jobs. In his time,
he has been––presented here as neither a complete cata-
loging, nor in chronological order––a movie projectionist
in a porno theatre, bookstore manager, welder, carpenter,
rock ‘n’ roll roadie, television cameraman, advertising rep.,
yacht broker, bartender, waiter, nightclub manager, deck
hand, assistant ranger, private investigator, building contrac-
tor, newspaper reporter, preschool teacher... and so on.
Amazingly––considering the time-frame of his youth-
ful years––he managed to avoid the Scylla and Charybdis of
alcoholism and drug abuse, and arrived at middle-life rela-
tively healthy and robust and capable of completing not only
whole thoughts and entire paragraphs, but books as well.
His first book, monkeydo, proves this point admirably (as
does the one you hold in your hand). An historical phan-
tasm set in fin de siecle Africa, it is a comic send-up of the Tar-
zan story set within the confines of a pen-and-ink jungle.
“Filled with the calls and cries of unfamiliar birds, along with cari-
catures, formulaic plotting and all-too familiar cliches, monkeydo somehow
manages to break new ground, albeit with a very small spade, and provides
fresh air to the stale genre of jungle-dwelling, vine-swinging he-men.”
--The Charenton Post-Dispatch.
He followed this up a few years later with Apocalyptic Craw-
fish!, a comic gem set in the green diadem of rural south Louisi-
ana. AC! not only convolutes McCarthyism, mutant monsters,
homosexual Air Force officers, and the ’50s dread of eggheads
and all things foreign, it also provides a classic recipe for etouffé.
dudleyclark, a man of some leisure, when not polish-
ing another opus of post-modern comic primitivism (such
as Roy Rogers in the Twenty-first Century, Vol. 4), can usu-
ally be found in a stupor hoeing in the veggie gardens
of his heavily-fortified family estate, “elsewhere.”
 Also by this Author:
Woodman & Wonderboy
Apocalyptic Crawfish!
monkeydo
Karmic Warriors
Neither Here Nor There
My Terrible, Horrible, Wonderful Life
Remembrances of Old Pard (childrens)
Roy Rogers in the Twenty-first Century (vols. 1 & 2)

And so on

ABOUT TIME PUBLISHING

New York Seattle N’Awlins Eugene
Licensed under Creative Commons A-N-SA
2008
www.abouttimepublishing.com
www.dudleysworld.com
not a blank page
Z ya!