lickhaven

Does Kristi Noem’s bizarre hatred of everybody not white maybe stem from her being banned from every Native American reservation while she was South Dakota governor? It must be a bit provoking not to be allowed to set foot on 12% of the state you supposedly run, on threat of being charged with trespassing.

*   *   *   *

As I’ve said many times, I see population control as the major long-range necessity to save the world from annihilation. (No comment here on whether saving the world from annihilation is a good or bad thing.) But I’m delighted to see that RFK Jr. is doing his best to help with population control. Once the U.S. federal government, under his thoughtful care, has dropped all vaccines and stopped all health research, we should see a rapid increase in childhood death, directly and indirectly leading to a decrease in our population.

The main loophole is that this will directly affect only the U.S. population, rather than assure a worldwide solution. I also think there may be more effective approaches to population control, such as cutting birth rates through family planning, so that kids born only to be eliminated later don’t get born in the first place. Might even be a tad kinder to families, should anyone be concerned with that.

*   *   *   *

The marching on of waste:

1. We recently received from Amazon a 9×14 in. non-recyclable plastic mailer which held a 2×3 in. item we ordered. This comes to roughly 1.7 sq. ft. of  excess waste plastic, if you consider both sides of the envelope.

2. I recently bought a new iMac, with a 24 in. screen. The sheer amount of cardboard in the internal packing was bad enough, but the way it was wangled together beggared belief.

There were 8 or 10 individual miniature “boxes” constructed of interlocking parts that made no rational sense. Time and money was spent putting low-level designers to work to assemble the most complicated possible ways to intertwine elements of cardboarded forms that would defy Escher. It seemed pretty clear that stuffing folded paper between the computer’s parts would achieve the same thing with less weight, design cost, and bulk to dispose of. 

Or maybe they hired the 7 dwarfs: Skanky, Bumwad, Dingle, Limpdick, Nosewipe, Dimbulb and Rumpledforeskin.

3. And just in time – right in the middle of writing that last sentence – Linda returned with the mail, which included a free drink holder from Recover Red, a red-light therapy outfit be bought from. It was a “customer appreciation” item we neither ordered or wanted. It’s stainless steel, weighs over 12 ounces, holds 30 fl. ounces of “coffee tea water” (beer, not being considered a Good Thing, is not also recommended).

It’s 9 1/2 inches tall, comes with a 10 1/2 inch straw, and is slightly larger around than is comfortable to hold. The top features a bizarrely complicated opening mechanism that we have yet to figure out. From the included note, printed on a small plastic sheet, it seems to have been sent to help ensure a 5-star rating of the company’s product.

Feh!

*   *   *   *

Time travel is not possible because time is not a thing to be traversed, it is a record, an unfolding. It cannot be viewed in its extension, like the 3 dimensions of space. Time does not cause, it is a fixed record that cannot be gone back to or changed.

Einstein and others did us a disservice by melding “spacetime” as a term that makes 4 dimensions sound all equal in type and extent. 

Nowadays, string theorists posit 10 or 11 dimensions, the extras curled up in little balls like pill bugs. Watch it when you’re out in the garden that you don’t step on a dimension and fuck up the universe.

*   *   *   *

Daughter Cait, at her Twin Wolves Healing Arts center, is promoting “natural oral health,” which sounds like a really excellent idea. Unfortunately, it reminds me of my personal, peculiar response to almost anything having to do with my mouth – total revulsion.

From the first time I held a toothbrush, I hated brushing my teeth. Toothpaste made me feel that I was brushing with pure spit. That feeling has never changed. I haven’t used toothpaste in at least 3 decades. I don’t floss either, because the mere sight of floss makes me gag (even unused, but used, it hits me like an assault).

There are minor exceptions: As a kid, I almost liked tooth powder, which may be a worthwhile substance today, but back then had mint-flavored abrasive inclusions like ground lava, which can’t be all that good for you. I only used it at my grandmother’s, we never had it at home.

I pay the price today. I’ve lost at least half my teeth, though I chew relatively well thanks to the occasional crown or replacement. I do have a tendency to bite myself 3 or 4 times per meal, which just makes me more pissed at my mouth.

I’m sure I’ll be hit with the psych certainty that this results from some horrendous childhood trauma. Believe it, it doesn’t. It’s innate. And I can’t think of a more disgusting job than being a dental tech.

*   *   *   *

One of the chemicals that Linda uses in her glaze-making is gerstley borate. It is, she says, a “melter,” which sounds… unsettling. So my next character will be: 

Gerstley Borate, Deadly Man of Intrigue.

*   *   *   *

Now, if for some ungodly reason you’ve read this far, I have a question for you.

I’ve deliberately shied from starting a blog, perhaps because the word sounds like a form of nasal impaction, but I’m wondering – should I move my ruminations online, to an outfit like Substack or Patreon?

I do currently post them to Linda’s and my website, where we have exactly 6 followers. If I did transfer to online, all of you would still enjoy them [snicker, rattle, GUFFAW] delivered to your email, but I might be able to pick up another 6 followers who tripped over me while searching for John Derrick, the Scottish hangman. And I wouldn’t be looking for money; you could still read it for free, and I don’t need what pittance might otherwise roll in.

If you think this is an even minimally good idea, would you choose Patreon or Substack as the more worthwhile?

[What is this, and why am I beleaguering you with anything of such length? 

[It is the opening chapter of what was planned to be my first and perhaps only novel, back in the mid 1960s. The attempt soon degenerated into confusing shit, but bits and pieces still live to haunt me. Some of those were stitched together as the Rylla profiles I plugged in here some months back. 

[Well, see what you think of this, and tell me if you’d like to read some of those other bits, or whether you printed it out to wrap your celery so it wouldn’t stick to the fridge shelf.]

Though young, Roswald had the aspect of a much older man. He took steps short and precise, each a small excursion forward and to the side, out, around and back again, into himself. Worse for him, he knew this and would go on periodic bouts of upheaval, trying to force his soul into some new form which might give his life direction and dimension. He wished, on some level, to be mighty-spirited, to leap the chasm which separates man from man, logic  from emotion, science from art, religion from common sense. He would alter his restrictive gait every six months or so, going into long, loping strides of bouncy, pogo-stick motions, only to find that at the end of three or four weeks he had returned to the out-around-back of his closed circle. His feet, he came to realize, knew the Truth and the Way, and it was a way of sorrow.

The day of his realization was, in a sense, a beginning for him, but a beginning steeped in a corrosive sadness which spread upwards through his legs, spleen and shallow-breathing lungs, arriving at last in the church pew of his consciousness, where it settled in for what promised to be a lifelong sermon on the errors of his ways.

His place in life reflected the melding of his inner place and his inflated aspirations with remarkable fidelity. He was an messenger boy of high governmental order, a go-between who, on a practical level, did bridge gaps (through hand-delivered communications), but who nevertheless need not show external evidence of a personal existence and must not, as a function of his position, have either a point of view of the ability to exert an influence over others.

Indeed, it was almost an anomaly that he was a human being at all–partly a matter of convenience to those who used him, partly a matter of not trusting those channels of communication which can be bugged, partly an anachronistic attachment to the Old Ways. He could, had his utilizes known the full spectrum of 1963 technology, have been replaced by any of three virtually bug-proof systems which had been introduced during the past five years. 

Now here is the strange thing: Roswald did get bugged, possibly the first human being to be fully wired for espionage purposes without his knowledge. The buggers chose him because they understood enough of psychology to realize that Roswald would be given to a streak of undeveloped hypochondria which could easily be primed to explode into full-blown hysterical symptoms.

As their emissary, they chose an outgoing, pleasant sort named Gerald Kloan, who befriended Roswald during the latter’s visits to Philadelphia to smooth the flow of information between GE Aerospace and the National Science Foundation (who, if anyone, should have known of more reliable communications systems but did not). Since Kloan was a junior exec with GE, it was natural that he should strike up the sort of amorphous friendship which leads to luncheon dates. At one of these luncheons, Kloan had a stroke of good fortune which set the operation in motion.

The seafood lunchroom was crowded with diverse sorts arranged around communal wood trestle tables, and the walls were decorated with row on row of oyster places and similar fishy implements. Roswald bit down on a small stone hiding somewhere in his oyster. The ensuing pain gave him a rare moment of clarity, raising him out of himself long enough to wonder why he had agreed to eat lunch with Kloan and why he had agreed to eat raw oysters, which he equated with swallowing someone else’s tongue.

Why had fate placed him here, now, why had his circular steps paced him into this strange corner to be assaulted by the deep? He felt a mild elation that somehow the sea hated him, that a whole bast body of water knew of his existence and took issue with it. But as the pain ebbed, the illusion of saline importance receded like a polluted tide, and Roswald was left only a diner with a sore molar.

Kloan clucked the usual friendly commiseration, then settled into an uncharacteristic posture of silence, flicking occasional worried glances across the table. It took several minutes for this ploy to register with Roswald, who had retreated once more to his insularity. Once he had noticed, it took a like period for his companion’s behavior to take on meaning.

“What is it?”

“What’s what, Rossie?” Kloan’s choice of this nickname was neat as a surgeon’s incision, dropping formality yet refraining from trespassing on the private property of Roswald’s given name.

“You keep looking at me like something is wrong.”

“Well. . . I don’t think anything is wrong.” He jabbed another oyster to underscore his provisional certainty.

“What could be wrong?” Roswald was annoyed, unused to attention and personally directed hypotheses.

“How’s your tooth?”

“Fine. It hurts. I must have hit a filling.”

“It doesn’t feel . . . strange?” Kloan poised an oyster before his mouth like an omen.

“No . . . just sore. What do you mean, exactly?”

“Nothing much, I guess. I just have kind of brittle teeth. See this back here”–he opened his mouth and pointed into the shadowed cavern which released no secrets in the dim light of the restaurant– “I bit down on a stone or something once and three days later a whole damn cusp came off. I must have gone back to the dentist six or eight times. Kept losing little pieces until he had to cap it. But I think it’s just brittle teeth with me.”

“I didn’t know you could have brittle teeth.” Roswald had stopped chewing, conscious of how he was avoiding the right side of his jaw.

“That’s just what they call it. maybe it’s the same with everybody.” Kloan looked quickly apologetic for the slip. “I mean, I don’t think your teeth are going to fall apart or anything. Your teeth look very sound.” He chewed vigorously for emphasis.

Roswald explored the aggrieved tooth with tentative tongue, checking all the familiar slips and fissures for evidence of a fresh fault. He found none, but the look on Kloan’s face was plain — at any moment the dental façade of that molar might be rent asunder, to lie on the highway of his tongue as so many slivers of devastated bone.

By the end of the meal, Kloan had given him the name of a little-known but trusted dentist who could ferret out the most minute discrepancy in the sturdiest of teeth.

Three weeks later, Roswald was knocked out with a general anesthetic. The entire inside of his molar was removed and replaced with temporary packing. Two more trips, and Roswald was the possessor of an ingenious miniature microphone based on bone-induction, much like a high-quality hearing aid, but destined to lead to other ears than his.

The installation of a sufficiently accurate transmitter stretched Kloan’s limited manipulative abilities to their utmost, but soon Roswald was relieved to know that his heart, rated weak and erratic on the EKG of a Washington specialist recommended by Kloan, was pumping right along under the direction of the latest in atomic-powered pacemakers. And indeed, the apparatus he carried would have passed muster for the genuine article under the most careful scrutiny (short of slitting Roswald like a hog).

The physical effects of these intrusions on Roswald were nil, but the influence they came to have on his mind was odd and (in all fairness to the someone directing Kloan) unpredictable. The sermon in his head was not so much one of words but of a pointing finger, directed, more often than not, at his never-changing circular pace.

Lately, however, it pointed as frequently to the ignominious mechanism delivering rhythmic pulses (or so he thought) to his heart. The finger ticked back and form between the realms, bringing them to a common focus until Roswald had come to equate the two. After a time he even became aware of the heartbeat itself, a living repetition which tided him over from one second to the next. It began as an echo or an overtone, but in time it thumped more and more to the forefront of his consciousness, until it came to dominate his external being.

He strolled along in time to the call of his ventricles, his pace varying with the degree of tension he felt, but on the whole slowing and lengthening in just the manner he had tried unsuccessfully to promulgate over the years. Soon the heart and the feet became opposing metronomes, a simply but efficient feedback mechanism which promoted the well-being of his body in their stately progression. His blood pressure dropped slightly, the nagging pains disappeared from his calves and he no longer had headaches. Even the sadness itself, which had enveloped him in layers of protective insulation, lightened to a sense of mild disquiet and, finally, to something approaching ease.

Roswald barely noticed this at first, for he had become so consumed with the rhythm that its side-effects were but a blur in the corner of his mind’s eye. But his superiors (and everyone he dealt with was his superior in bureaucratic power) did notice — at first with amusement, later with chagrin, then with vague suspicion. One’s instrument does not take on a personality without becoming a source of concern. So it was that, while Roswald remained ignorant of his status as a broadcast station, he nonetheless managed to draw down on himself precisely the sort of unfocused distrust that Kloan and his cohorts had congratulated themselves on having bypassed.

“I don’t understand it,” groused Swivel, a long-faced engineer with a preposterous cowlick. “The guy’s supposed to be a complete potato. He’s never done anything in his life that would draw attention. I don’t think he’s even capable of falling down in a public place. Now they’re sniffing all over him. Why?”

“Are you sure there’s noting in that broadcast pack that could alert them?” Kloan asked. “A power leak or something?”

“Not a damn thing. The transmission is so weak I have to use three boosters to get it up to half-decent. Even then you have to know where to listen for it and you have to be able to unscramble the signal before you know there’s anything to listen to. If they were that far along they’d have him ripped wide open. No, they’re reacting to him.”

Swivel was playing with a transistor. He was almost always playing with a transistor. His whole posture was in the “aw shucks” tradition of American invention, from the cowlick to the holes in his shoes to the nonchalance with which he scraped dirt from beneath his nails. Kloan might have thought to dislike him intensely if he hadn’t been too busy keeping his best face turned outward at all times, like the moon circling the earth.

The cumulative effects of such chronic dishonesty often lead to physical manifestations, even in the most amoral of us. With Kloan it was button-twisting. At the moment he was worrying the last button from the cuff of his left jacket sleeve, and it would soon join the others in a plastic snuggle in his breast pocket. Half his lunch hours were consumed in trips to the tailor, who harbored the notion that Kloan was somehow involved with monkeys. But in truth he was involved only with Getting Ahead, a process that requires a great deal of motion on one’s personal periphery, because the center of being is not consulted.

Roswald, meanwhile, was moving closer to the center of his being, a place he had carefully avoided for fear it might prove untenanted. He now viewed everything in relation to the new rhythm and a new sense of meaningfulness forming inside. For the first time, he saw the possibility that he might be part of some larger mechanism, the outlines of which were hazy but beginning to take, if not shape, at least extension.

Roswald the cog, the unit, was becoming part of the world.

It must be, he thought, because he was so near Death that Life had become so important to him (revelations tend to present themselves in simplistic terms). Not only had gracefulness slipped into his motions, but he also found that he could turn his mind to a multitude of subjects with increasing facility. The images of dampness and rot began to fade, Spanish moss on longer hung just behind his eyes. There remained a giant step between himself and gladness, but as his stride grew longer, that internal step grew shorter. He wished fervently, for the first time in his existence, that that existence might be prolonged indefinitely. He did not want to be defective. He did not want to die.

He decided that pacemakers, as trustworthy as they were reputed to be, might not be the ultimate in security for him. He would rather trade a chronic treatment for health, so he made his way to a cardiologist all his own choice who told him that his heart was as sound as a dollar. Others, in further consultation, agreed.

Roswald was elated but puzzled. How could the original diagnosis, the consensus of technology and medical expertise, have gone so awry? He confronted the installer of his pacemaker and observed an inexplicable confusion and blustering, underlaid by what looked to a layman’s eye like panic. Why so much fuss over a botched diagnosis? It seemed to go beyond fear of being sued.

He left the office scratching idly at his memory for fleas of the past and recalled odd scenes and table talk, most of it centered on the boyish earnestness of Kloan. An image came to him of the Assaulting Oyster and, in a flash of insight that would have been impossible for the Roswald of a few months before, he realized that he had been had.

As a loyal servant, he turned in his body as evidence. On November 21, 1963, he was poked, prodded, sliced, sewed and relieved of one molar. His superiors — some so superior that he had never before seen their faces — rushed in individually and in packs to congratulate him on his acumen, his patriotism and his fine teeth. He received an immediate promotion, indicating that they could no longer put trust in their loyal servant to carry messengers when, for all they knew, his very shit might be wired for sound. Nor, based on his past performance, could they think of much of anything else that he could do.

He was given an office, a title, a secretary, and left to wait for any mail that might be routed his way in error. The hours were long and, in those days following Kennedy’s assassination, particularly empty. For that brief period the government behaved as a person, sad and waiting.

It was the perfect time and place for Roswald’s incubation, for he too, no longer sad, was also waiting. It was one of those rare times when something new can begin or something old increase in tempo and be driven to a merciless conclusion.

Reb tosses up popcorn and tries to catch it in his mouth. He connects one time in three. The theater’s mostly empty. Movie theaters are mostly empty these days.

They’re watching a Tom Hanks’ movie, Cast Away. Tom’s plane has splashed down in the Pacific and he lollygags on an island, alone. A beard covers his face, hiding that peculiar slice of mouth. He’s made friends with a volleyball he names Wilson because that’s its brand. He slaps together a ludicrous raft and pushes off from the island with Wilson, his mascot, tied to a hunk of crap. Wilson washes away in a Mighty Storm and Hanks, absurdly fit in  a Christ-like loincloth, rolls around on the raft and cries.

And cries.

And cries.

And cries. 

Jenny snickers, then belches a restrained hoot that erupts into guffaws. Reb joins in. They keep it up while Hanks cries for five minutes, until a dissolute patron screams, “Shut the fuck up, fuckin shitheads.”

Outside, on First Friday night, they poke through Olde City art galleries thriving in 2nd St. storefronts where wholesale businesses thrived for over a century, then died after World War II. Back then, the area had hustled and bustled during the day, lay dead as Lenin at night. Now the vibe is the opposite.

“I’ve been to Altoona,” Reb says as they laze out from an exhibit of photos of tattoos.

“Nobody goes to Altoona.”

“I wanted to see if there is an Altoona.”

“Is there?”

“More or less.”

“What am I supposed to do?” she asks after blocks of trit-trot silence.

“About what?”

“I need to make a difference. To help make life work right. Or better, anyway.” She kicks a composite ball of trash into the street.

They stroll north through the emptiness of Independence Mall, an emptiness like the city her father had told her of, decades before, the one that died at 5 pm and could not be roused until 9 the next morning. 

My father.

Forget it. 

But she can’t. Not meaning to, she lets loose on Reb the gray outline of her father – distant to her, distant to anything except math and her own almost unlimited ability to do math.

Where is he, her father?

Reb nods an appreciation as distant as the man she’s describing. Jenny can let her guard down with Reb, but once it’s let, it lands with a blop in the mud. Is this togetherness?

As it’s been after every date (not exactly dates… figs?) they have sex in Reb’s condo loft on Spring Garden St. near 4th. It’s not a trendy loft, not a down-and-dirty loft, just a former factory with immense multi-paned windows, a middle-of-the-road loft with Home Depot lampshades hatted on trash-picked lamps, and framed Old Masters hung on badly deplastered brick walls.

A tufted bedspread. Dynamite sex (of course).

Then they walk again, two miles, three, past the art museum, across the Spring Garden St. bridge, it’s rumpled corrugated siding featuring the painted faces of previous walkers, celebrated by the city’s street-mural agency.

The last edge of the sun, ahead and to the right, sinks into the soup of a late August evening. 

Reb’s arm sags on her shoulder, a yoke. He squeezes. “You know, you kind of run off sometimes, just do stuff without thinking about it.”

“I don’t think about all the things most people do, and I don’t think about them the way people want me to think about them. This bridge is creepy, all boxed in. You can’t see what’s under it. It doesn’t stop and it goes around a curve.”

“I’m here to protect you.”

Jenny shakes loose his arm. “Why would I need you to protect me? People don’t mess with me. I sneer them flat.”

“I’ll bet.”

Five steps, ten. “What are we doing anyway?” Jenny asks.

“Walking.”

“Us. What are we doing?”

“Walking.”

“What if I want to run or climb? Huh?”

“I could beat you.”

“The fuck you could. You’re always walking. Even if you ran you’d be walking.”

“And even when you’re walking you’re running. Ever occur to you to slow down?”

“No.”

“Might be it could do you good.”

“Christ on a fucking slice of toast. That’s it? ‘Could do me good.’ Maybe Buddha or Yahweh could do me good?” She plucks a handful of nothing from the air, changes the subject, more or less. “You think religion serves a purpose?”

“I guess.”

“Don’t you have a fucking answer that uses your mind?”

“What’s with you?”

“Nothing’s with me. Being alive… something has to matter. Doesn’t it?”

“My so-called mind isn’t going to mess with that.”

“I need to do something, find a way to change things.”

“I know somethin.” The voice is behind them, thin and raspy, squeezed through sandpaper rollers. 

Jenny doesn’t turn. “Where do you keep coming from? Don’t follow me.”

 Reb turns. “Who’s that?”

Jenny waves her hand behind her butt. ”Go the fuck away.”

“You should work in a hospital,” rasps the voice.

“Everybody wants me in a hospital! I’ll put you in a hospital, fucker! Get out of my life.”

“Who is he?”

“Filth.”

“Filt,” Filt corrects, “like filter.” The air’s gone too gray to see his lost eyes.

Reb, hands up, moves to block him off.

Jenny turns Reb back the way they were walking. “Leave him alone.” 

Reb grabs her arm. “What is this?”

“It’s the voice of doom, OK? Let go.”

Filt rocks on his heels. “Doom’s OK sometimes. Doom don’t have to be bad.”

Jenny wrenches herself from Reb’s half-assed grip. “This shit happens when I’m around. It’s like I’m a jinx.”

“Jinxes don’t exist,” Reb declaims.

“I don’t exist? I don’t fucking exist?” Jenny slams her toe into his ankle in cadence to her anger. Then she runs, a streak dissolving into the evening air turned to silt between the bridge’s corrugated panels.

Reb, inches taller, lights out after her. He can’t get close.

Where are the required jokes about Pam Blondie, the U.S. Attorney Jokeral?

*   *   *   *

Chump appears ready to hand parts of Ukraine over to Russia as a friendly gesture to a fellow autocrat. We should in turn agree to give Rump a third term as president if he agrees to return Texas and Oklahoma to Mexico and Florida to Spain. It’s not like the rest of the country would miss them.

*   *   *   *

I’ve ignored pop music from almost every decade, while choosing oddball or forgotten non-hits. And even when I find an artist or album that grabs me, it’s often because of a particular song that may have gone ignored or at least unheralded.

My favorite Bob Dylan Album is still Blood on the Tracks, from 1975. It got mixed initial reviews but sold beautifully and is now considered something of a masterpiece. It may or may not be about stresses in his personal life at the time, but that’s the sort of discussion that interests me not one bit about any piece of music. Music is what it is and needs no justification.

But it puzzles me that I’ve seldom seen reference to the song on the album that sits deepest with me, “Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts.” One of Dylan’s longest, with 15 verses running close to nine minutes, it’s probably the best “story” song ever put together.

It’s not about a state of mind or the state of the world or politics or society. It lays out a short story that features four main characters: the three of the title, plus Big Jim – the town boss and Rosemary’s husband (legal or assumed?) – plus a cabaret, an acting troupe, a drunken judge, a bank heist, a murder, lost love, found love, charismatic attraction, and just about every other imaginable emotional interaction.

That’s the setting, but it’s the telling that matters. It’s stuffed solid with detail yet never approaches explosive overload. And it’s a compendium of Dylan’s almost unique use of rhyme (closest I can think of is Tom Lehrer). The sense I get is that when Dylan ends a line, then picks a rhyming word that will sound the best, even if it doesn’t fit the temper or motion of the story. So he changes the temper or motion to better fit the rhyme: that is, the words determine the story more than the story determines the words.

(OK, I don’t know jack shit about writing lyrics, but I also don’t know how else to explain something like this that makes it work:

“Be careful not to touch the wall, there’s a brand-new coat of paint

“I’m glad to see you’re still alive, you’re lookin’ like a saint.”)

And there’s also Dylan’s unlikely sprung grammar and sense of language:

“Then everyone commenced to do what they were doin’ before he turned their heads.”

They commenced to do what they had already been doing? wrong word, except… it turns the scene sideways, gives it a 3/4 profile emotional slant.

Well, enough of that. This is one royal hell of a song that merges folk music with a modern sense of Byron.

*   *   *   *

Recent headline:

“Cherry tomato-sized space rock that pierced roof and hit floor of metro Atlanta home is 20m years older than Earth.”

To be followed, I suspect, by a zucchini-sized chunk of the Big Bang.

*   *   *   *

How much of a legend do you think Batman would have become if his sidekick had been named Pigeon?

*   *   *   *

Growing up, I thought all tornadoes were in Kansas.

Back then, in the ‘50s, the East had no tornadoes that I was aware of, and only one hurricane, Hazel, had reached Philadelphia, in 1954. It lifted the roof of the apartment house next to where we lived on Race St., took the entire quarter-block rectangle of material and raised it like a dust-covered blanket. It should have scared me, I suppose, but I didn’t get beyond amazement and a sense of privilege.

 Since moving up here, to the top of PA, we’ve had at least three reports of tornadoes within a couple miles of the house. The most recent (2019?) shuffled a weird line dance around our immediate area, then trashed most of the older trees in Dushore – the town three miles from here – and its recently restored church tower.

The same sort of repositioning has happened to “woodland” animals in recent decades. As a kid in semi-rural suburbia, I thought of deer as near mystical beasts. By the time Linda and I left Philly, they had invaded the city parks and were doing enough damage to need control through a limited hunting season.

Coyotes, formerly roaming the legendary West (and cartoons), now inhabit every U.S. state and major city. They inhabit all parts of our Sullivan County and sometimes howl in a semicircle maybe 50 feet up the hill from us. I occasionally ask a bear, politely, to leave our front porch.

As we’re wrecked the world’s animal habitat, the beasts of legend have banded together to loudly annoy our quiet retreats.

*   *   *   *

General Paul Tibbets, who piloted the plane that dropped the first atomic bomb, on Hiroshima, Japan, had few if any regrets about his mission, which he considered necessary to bring an end to World War II.

My favorite quote of his: 

“Morality… there is no such thing in warfare.” 

*   *   *   *

Think about this: An ethical absolute is impossible.

Ethics are a human invention, not an externally imposed truth. Going back to Plato and before, no one has provided a universal definition of  the good” or “the correct,” nor will there be one. Religion as a guide is, at best, a passport to easy opportunity.

So, if “goodness” and “decency” are not just unsupported illusions, what are they, and how and why do we support them? 

*   *   *   *

Another headline:

“Action needed on plastic additives linked to sperm decline, experts warn”

I agree, absolutely! We should immediately increase distribution of semenal plastic to help solve the problems of both waste-disposal and population.

[further adventures of Jenny]

No goat today. The Indians have a lot, but they don’t have everything. Democracy, you say? Five hundred thousand villages full of rape and sewage and tiny homes with no escape route for smoke from their cooking fires. And gods with elephant heads. Our gods come down to get nailed to pieces of wood. Huh!

Jenny spends a hell of a lot of time wandering Center City ferreting out places to eat. When she makes her own meals, it’s just ingest, digest, egress. But it matters to her what a bought lunch tastes like.

She turns in at her third- or fourth-favorite mid-day haunt, Son of Diner, pretending it recalls the ’50s. She always takes a counter stool when one’s vacant. The dingy formica tables in back reek of loneliness.

A single counter seat open today. Halamotherfuckinlujah. She slips in without looking right or left. No one talks at the counter. They eat with swiveling jaws, the counter-back mirror for companionship. Jenny reads a Nabokov short story as she munches her chicken wrap. The chicken tastes better than seems reasonable and the cheese is fresh. She wishes they didn’t toss in rippled chips made of reprocessed potato waste.

“Oh crap,” yaps the waitress at the soda machine.

“What?” queries the short-order cook, chasing beef strips and onions around the grill.

“It’s stuck or something, nothin’s coming out.” The waitress slaps hard at the machine handle. A sharp crack, and a plume of soda shoots toward the ceiling then down again, spattering over the waitress and seated customers. She grabs a handful of napkins and wraps them around the broken faucet but they quickly sog and shred, she switches to her apron as stopper but that only shoots the spray directly into her face. She lets go and the geyser resumes its merry way. 

Her hair sopped and dripping, Jenny finds it 3 Stooges-hilarious. She laughs and slips back off her stool. Then a voice pitches in from her left. “The whole world’s fucked the fuck up. Fucked up.”

Filt, sitting on the adjoining stool where he must have been the whole time, why didn’t she see him? shakes the liquid from his sandwich and bites into it, deeply. 

“You little shit, where’d you come from?”

“Come here a lot. Seen you. I knew it.”

“You knew – you’re part of it too?”

“You’ll see.”

She cuts to the door, slipping in the scatter of liquid on the floor.

The Philadelphia County Fair is a stripped-down nephew of the Pennsylvania State Fair, itself an enantiomorph of state fairs throughout the mid-Atlantic, all trucked in by an outfit somewhere in Maryland. A bundled nostalgia feast, it retains something genuine under the duplication – kindness or caring or a sighing lost memory.

The tawdry midways and Day-Glo stands of grease-saturated food make Jenny happy in an alert-relaxed way, like leaning back with a knowing expression to watch her DVDs of “Twin Peaks.” 

“I don’t know what you find in this,” says Rachel, swiveling 270 degrees.

“That’s because you’re a Negro.”

Rachel stops mid-stride. “What you call me?”

“One of those brown-skinned people who don’t know about carnies.”

“What the fuck, carnies?”

“Shut up and have fun.”

They climb on the whir-a-gig and Rachel throws up. They schlep through the aging X-Files fun house and Rachel laughs so hard she almost pisses herself – laughing at, not with. They stare at the glitzily restored merry-go-round and Rachel mumbles why anyone bothered. They sit on a midway bench and watch little girls and boys play rigged games to earn prizes worth less than a penny.

“Pisses me off,” says Rachel.

“What?”

“Lookit that, what they’re doing. Nobody wins any of the real stuff.”

“Of course not.”

“That’s no-way fair.”

Jenny crams Cracker Jax into her mouth and nods. “They know that.”

“Yeah, that’s what I mean –”

“The people playing. They know it’s fixed.”

“Naw.”

Jenny leans forward on the bench. “Everybody knows it. That’s what makes it so much fun.”

“Wha-a-at?”

“Everybody wins and everybody loses.” Jenny waves her arms. “It’s make believe.”

“Make believe losing your money?”

“No, you really lose your money, but it’s a little bit of money and a whole lot of living – so you win. They always give you something, some piece of junk no matter how you fuck up, so you feel good. Look.” She flourishes the loose-stitched Raggedy Ann she won tossing a single ring onto an array of Coke bottles. “I love this, I love it.”

“Somebody makes and everybody loses. These guys go home and count their cash.”

Jenny sticks her finger toward the moon-faced man behind a counter where two kids throw darts at balloons. “You think he’s making money? You think he goes home?”

Rachel blows a razz of disbelief through her lips. “They’re no kind of gypsies. They go home and watch TV.”

“Look at him, all of them. It doesn’t matter where they go, where they live. They live in little rundown houses with paint peeling off the clapboards, even if they don’t. They… they just subsist, but they subsist off the happiness of the people they rip off.”

“You’re certifiably sick.”

They get up to walk along the midway – more raggedy than Raggedy Ann – where games of chancelessness bloom.

The few remaining freaks wallow listless, remembering lost heydays. The Iron Man rams nails dispiritedly up his nose, and a Malaysian midget lady lies back in a folding chair inside a tank-like depression, knitting a sock and occasionally glancing up to chat. 

“You want a corn dog?” Jenny asks.

“What the fuck I want a corn dog?”

“Stuffed intestines wrapped inside a saturated grease blanket – like chitlins, but with cornmeal instead of pig shit.”

“When’s the last time you had chitlins?”

“NEVER SHALL I, UNTO MY DYING DAY, EAT A CHITLIN!” Jenny barooms to the midway stragglers, who pay no attention.

“Girl, chitlins don’t come singular.”

As the sun sidles down to escape the temporary fairgrounds – by Memorial Hall, the last grand leftover from the Philadelphia exposition of 1876 – they rest heads on each other’s shoulders and shamble out across the spotty parkland grass toward Rachel’s venerable Camaro, now listing toward the driver’s side.

“Damn, a tire.”

Jenny peers under the chassis. “I don’t think so.” 

Rachel joins her. “Lookit that, some damn thing sticking out of the ground and I parked right the fuck on it, ripped the strut out. This baby’s not goin nowhere.” She reaches into her purse for her cell phone. “We sit till we get a tow truck.”

Jenny walks in slow circles, kicking at non-existent flotsam. A small thing sticking out of the ground. It could have been anywhere in the city, the world, but it was right here, waiting for us, for me. “What are the chances of that? Hitting the only obstruction within” – she snaps right and left – “a couple hundred yards? Probability – do you think it gets clumped sometimes? Squnched, shimmied?”

“I don’t, actually, think about, know about, try to compute such-like things. That’s your job.”

“How so?”

“Ain’t that what you think about?”

“Stop talking like that… that stupid Black shit.”

“O… K.”

“What is my job? I mean, what’s a job? Suppose you didn’t have a job and just had to do things – just do whatever it was you were created to do, not think about it, just do it. What?”

“Tell me what in hell you were created to do.”

“Make a difference. I’m bright enough to change things, to get rid of the fuckedupness.”

“Fuckedupness?”

“I want the world not to be the way it is, because it doesn’t work. I’m not responsible that it doesn’t work, but I am responsible for not trying to make it work. I need to find out what makes it so existence is such a mess, and can we fuck it into place to make it work better. It’s everywhere, fuckedupness, the way the universe doesn’t work – the way stars devour their planets.”

“You, by your lonesome, you’re gonna make it so celestial bodies don’t eat their babies.”

“I didn’t see it all before. How it’s everywhere, but if I learned how it worked, what the laws were behind it that… the fuckedupness down here, for people, I could… Aw shit, I can’t.”

“Girl, you may be the brightest woman on the face of this particular planet, I’ll give you a good maybe on that, but yeah – you can’t. I can’t. Everybody can’t.”

“I could do something. Something.”

“You could change bed pans in a hospital.”

“Huh?”

“Shut up, got a couple bars here.” She shakes the phone like a cocktail.

“Bars.”

“Found something, some car place.” Rachel taps at her cell phone while she looks into the declining evening sky. “What you should apply for is a job to change your native language. Whatever it is you’re speaking makes no damned sense. This phone’s for shit.”

”There’s no answer until you know the question to ask.”

“They oughta shut philosophy off after 5 pm.”

This week’s title is swiped from Thomas Pynchon’s 1984 collection of his early stories, where he talks of what he sees as his late start in learning/writing. Since he had his first short story published at age 22 and his first novel, V., at 26, I feel kind of left in the dirt. It took me close to 35 years to grind out Evolution Unfolding in a Small Town in Western Pennsylvania. Now at age 86 – two years less five days younger than Pynchon – I’m trying to wrap up my 4^th novel, each of them more or less self-published and every one gloriously unread by all but a signal few of you.

*   *   *   *

Somebody recently asked me if I’d be interested in writing a short story about utopia. I made a couple blundering false starts that fizzled out, but did come up with an idea that I’d rank as a high maybe.

One view of utopia would be a world without war – oh, shut up, I know that’s not possible, just hold your imaginative horses and listen:

When some animals, mammals at any rate, get too crowded, they start biting each others’ tales in frustration. So suppose, whenever any two groups are at each others’ throats, we attach tails to all the would-be participants, confine them to a restricted space and leave them free – even encourage them – to bite each others’ tails off.

I tell you, within a generation all wars would stop dead.

*   *   *   *

 In the latest attempt to quell the continuing explosion of human genders, the White House has decreed that any state having the misfortune of harboring a Middlesex County must change the offending district’s name to Ungendered County. Any state officials who oppose the decree will be met by burly white dudes swinging knotted nylons filled with ball bearings. 

*   *   *   *

With nothing better to do while Linda was having her teeth attended to, I sat in the dentist’s waiting room staring at the wall-to-wall carpeting. Try as I might, no matter where I looked, I could find no example of a repeating pattern. None. Steph, the receptionist, told me that it had been installed in “pieces,”though of exactly what sort she couldn’t recall. 

Here’s the thing: Pieced carpeting (or tile) is usually installed in squares, rectangles or obviously interlocking geometric shapes. If this carpet had a basic shape, I wasn’t able to discover it. The entire spread was laid out in parallel lines of cord that were maybe 3/16 inch wide. That made it a labor of more than love to try to pick out a seam somewhere in these unending parallels. Four or five times I thought I had at least caught a dividing line perpendicular to the cords, but each time, on closer exam, that certainty disappeared.

The constantly mutating color of the cords varied from straw yellow to dark, mottled green, including virtually any shade in between. Some light or dark cording formed small, mostly rectangular blocks of various sizes and lengths. I looked to see how or if these sub-bits repeated. As far as I could see, they didn’t. No two areas, whether they held blocks or not, seemed to be identical anywhere.

I don’t know enough about pattern design or anything about computer coding, but is it possible to generate a truly random pattern, not over just a small area, but across an entire 8 x 20 foot entryway? And if so, does this mean that the factory producing this carpet generates an unending, continuous, random-pattern collection of segments? This might be theoretically possible, but mind-boggling to implement, and, at base, the absurd fixation of a warped  mind.

*   *   *   *

I suggest that the Israeli military ask leaders of the 1985 Philadelphia government about the most expeditious way to handle a potential uprising. On May 13^th of that year, in an attempt to dislodge members of the Black alternative-lifestyle group MOVE from a row-house on Osage Ave. in West Philly, the police ordered the dropping of a C4-explosive bomb on their roof.

Not surprisingly, the house caught fire. 11 MOVE members, including 5 children, died in the blaze. The fire then spread and obliterated an entire city block of homes, 61 houses in all. And the local authorities brought that off within just a few hours, with hardly a trace of forethought! 

*   *   *   *

Read an article earlier this week about an airbnb renter in London being sued by the apartment’s owner for $20K to cover damage to furniture and other items. One of the pix the owner sent was the one below, showing a purported crack in a wooden coffee table. It didn’t take long to prove that the photos were fakes, but the article didn’t note something that would be obvious to anyone who has ever worked with wood: the crack shown, even if not obviously fake (as it is) is simply not possible: Joined wooden boards cannot break that way.

Ignore the outlined pause in the “crack.” Even if King Kong had whacked that table across his knee, you wouldn’t end up with only a wandering diagonal across a series of boards. The grain has to split lengthwise, probably in several places.

Tom Lehrer – 1928-2025

Lehrer was the most positive force for my mental expansion in the wasteland of the 1950s. His first album of lancing parodies was a gift from my mother. I have no idea how she came to know of it – it was often that way with her, as with the stories by Theodore Sturgeon and Ray Bradbury, and earlier with the Pogo comic book subscription she got for me in the late 1940s, before the Pogo daily strip started.

Who told her about this stuff or directed her? She was tuned in to something unlikely that was little reflected in her bad cooking or her years as a church secretary.

That first Lehrer collection was initially distributed directly by him, before any label dared pick up his sneers against orthodoxy (this was the time when comic books, fore shit sake, were being banned). But it wasn’t just his anti-establishment outlook (or whatever it would be called today), but the fact that he wrote the funniest songs ever recorded featuring a sense of rhyme that met if not surpassed that of the tin pan alley greats. His eviscerations of “proper” outlook flowed out as neat and bitingly sweet as maple syrup on blueberry pancakes.

How many of you have listened to Lehrer lately? For anyone who’s missed out, grab his Songs and More Songs collection that includes most everything of note – including “I Got if from Agnes,” not released in the early years – oddly, though, not “The Vatican Rag,” which you’ll have to track down separately.

I won’t waste your patience listing the range of song titles or the realms of asininity that he lampooned. They’re all worth it. But I have special love for the “The Irish Ballad,’ wherein a daughter serves up her entire family in various cannibalistic dishes, and every verse ends with an  “in” rhyme that stretches language to its limits. And who else would give voice all “The Elements” in the periodic table in no logical or scientific order, but with a grand sweep of mind and memory.

A few years back, Lehrer released everything he’s ever written from copyright, free for any use whatsoever by whomsoever. Thanks, Uncle Tom, from myself and the entire thinking world.

Here’s a neat article of observations by several folks who have interacted with Lehrer:

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2025/jul/29/wit-of-tom-lehrer-by-those-who-knew-him

 One last aside: Lewis Carroll and Tom Lehrer were both mathematicians. This says something significant; I wish I knew what.

*   *   *   *

Meshing of broken gears

As a child, I didn’t understand how the world worked – any of it. Virtually every aspect of existence was a mystery to me. The only distinction I held: there was me, and there was everything else.

Now, in my “second childhood,” I’m coming to re-experience how much terror lay behind  that vacant outlook, and how it never completely left over the years.

But along with that realization has come a wider one that weaves together a tapestry of negativities that could otherwise flap separately.

My life has been stymied by an underlying horror of making mistakes, something I’d not earlier taken into account in the past.

I think that it most likely arises from that sense of not knowing how the world works, leaving me continually afraid that I’ll say the wrong words or do the wrong actions in almost any situation, significant or insignificant, large and small. 

That, in turn, has released the intense, voluble anger I express when the slightest thing goes haywire – screaming imprecations against myself, the situation and the world, throwing tools, breaking machinery, hitting myself in the head with my fist (remember that Bob Dylan line?).

Basically, I cannot trust myself, because every action presents a new opportunity for error, and those perceived errors, however simple, coalesce to a form of overriding self-humiliation.

My first conscious memory of this comes from when I was four yers old and our Irish Setter, Shiela, managed to impale herself on the iron fence across the street from our Hastings Ave. house. Brother Vic lifted her down and got her to the vet, who fixed her up. When Vic brought her home, I was standing in the kitchen, to the left, by a window. I looked across at her and said, “She looks fine, just fine.” Instantly, I felt not only wrong but humiliated. I had spoken using the phrasing and cadence of an adult, which I had no right to use!

Today, I still have this lurking dread of wrongness, if not as excruciatingly as in my childhood: a fear of standing out of being noticed when I have no right to say or do whatever I’m saying or doing at the  moment. I dread asking questions or seeking advice or making suggestions because I’ll have acted like an dundering fool yet again.

And I wonder, too, if that outlook is part of what pushed me to becoming a writer (insomuch as I am that). Internally, I sense the spoken word as a trap; once said, it can never be unsaid – it exists forever in the world exactly as uttered.

But once I’ve written a word – printed or cursive, long-hand or typed – for sense or clarity I can erase it, obliterate it before it’s seen by anyone else. No record of my humbling error, no need to ask forgiveness.

Oh, don’t mistake it, I do take pride in what I’ve written, whether anyone reads it or not, because each of us has a unique voice, even those who try hardest to sound generic. Whatever I’ve written, no one else could have written it exactly so.

Is that individuality likely to be erased once AI takes hold? I doubt it. AI creates a new assemblage from old creations, but can it then inject inspiration? Isn’t inspiration something more than or other than the complex interactions of what-was?

Taken further, all this may be why, for gaining knowledge, I generally prefer reading to listening. Something in me trusts the written word as having evolved, of having thought growing behind it, whereas the words of a podcast have a single, immutable existence.

OK, that makes no sense in the real world – but then, as I said, the real world makes no sense to me.

[Just the next chapter in Jenny’s story. Anyway, the news is too sickening to talk about.]

Words in a veiled box

Reb fucks like the whole world’s his personal vagina. It’s what Jenny needs, what the vagina aspect of her needs, but in every other way he’s becoming a growth on her skin, itchy and increasingly unwelcome. He stands too close, he follows her when she wants to be somewhere he isn’t, and makes jokes Joe Miller wouldn’t have put in his books. Something is brewing in her head, unfiltered grounds.

“Reb, what do you think about? When you’re alone, you know, before bedtime when I’m not there to get you off?”

“Jesus.”

“You think about Jesus?”

“Why are you yanking at me?”

“Because I want to.”

“Well, I don’t like it.”

“I don’t like celery. You know what I do with celery?”

“What?”

“I stay away from it.”

The massive stone church on 13th St. is the descendent of the one before which Ben Franklin raised his electric kite – or so the historical marker attests. Inside, it’s set up for confession in the old-school model. Here, the priest still lurks in a penitential closet behind an obscuring screen, the penitent still kneels. No relaxed face-to-face sin-discussions.

“Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.” Pause.  “That’s the right formula?”

“Yes. How long has it been since your last confession?”

“I don’t know. Maybe never? Probably never.”

“Have you strayed from the Church?”

“Poor little lambie? No Father… I don’t think I was ever consciously part of it.”

“Are you considering joining, or rejoining?”

Jenny rubs her nose, flexes her nostrils. “I don’t think so. No, I’m sure not.”

“What brought you here?”

“My feet. Bad pun. Bad penitent,. Sorry. What’s your name, Father?”

“Father Umble.”

Jenny stifles a giggle. “More sorry.”

His slight smile bleeds through the gauzy cloth separating them. “It has that effect on people. Some people.” 

He waits. Jenny delivers nothing more.

“How have you sinned?”

“I think I have a boyfriend.”

“That’s not normally considered –”

“I treat him like sh – whoa, don’t say that. Here. I act like he has no mind. But he does. He understands Bertie Russell, or maybe – Bertrand Russell, the mathematical philosopher or philosophical mathematician. With Whitehead. Never mind. Why am I nasty to people like Reb, the sort-of boyfriend. Almost nobody’s nasty to me. Mostly. Except when I deserve it. I give bad for good. Like it’s a motto I picked up.”

“Why do you feel that you do this?”

“Because the world deserves it and I can’t change the world –  I can’t change it. I hope. So I take it out on people. Like Reb.”

“Have you spoken to your boyfriend about this?”

“I hate that term, but everything else is worse. Insignificant other? He’s a… sexual mechanism. A human dildo. And we didn’t even have sex. The first time.”

Fr. Umble coughs and coughs again.

“Wow, sorrier. I drink a lot. Why do I drink a lot? Well, I like it. It’s not like I’m drinking motor oil. Anger’s why, I said to him that time. Or to somebody. Maybe because of the things, a thing anyway, that my mind… can’t… accomplish. A hole in my thought-works.”

“You seem concerned about your mind.”

“I’m an intelligence snob.”

“Do you consider yourself more intelligent than most people?”

Jenny pauses. “Everybody. Almost everybody. Everybody I’ve met.”

“If your assessment of yourself, of your intelligence, is correct, do you feel that gives you permission to act poorly toward the rest of humanity?”

“No. Yes. I don’t know.”

“But you suspect that it does not.”

“I, uh, suspect that I’m lost in some place I don’t understand. The world, life, the universe, I don’t understand any of it. Not enough experience? But if I really am brighter than everybody, shouldn’t I be able to understand the way things work? The way they don’t work? And if I understood, wouldn’t I maybe be good for something? Useful to getting it to work?”

“Perhaps you are too hard on yourself.”

“My life’s easy as pie. I can’t make pies, they get gooey. I ride on easy street and bitch about it. You’re in there, in your box, Father, but you’re doing something. You make it better for people to be alive. To feel like it’s better anyway. It doesn’t matter if it’s true. Well it does. Truth  matters. But not much… in regard to feelings. People don’t think about what’s true when they decide things, just what it looks like. Feels like. I’m little. Inside, I’m so tiny I could fall through a crack in the floor. But even a roach can be useful, down in the crack, a roach with a mind. I – this isn’t going anywhere, doing anything.”

“Wait.” Jenny is half risen from her knees to leave. “Are you looking for absolution?”

“We haven’t figured out my sins. It’s a sin to be me? This morning I woke up and I was me: I’m sorry, and I confess it. Does absolution make it OK if it can’t be changed?”

“If you have contrition for true sins, that allows absolution to take effect, for forgiveness to enter.”

“I’ve got old sins in the closet, in the clothes hamper, so go ahead. I’ll take what I can get.”

He makes the sign of the cross and bestows three Our Fathers and three Hail Marys as penance for an unstated collection of possible sins. The sign of the cross reaches out like the Gregorian Chant she listens to on her iPod. An unrecalled symbol.

She drops at the altar rail and tries to remember prayers she should never have known, never been taught. Yet there they are, in bits and pieces at first, then spread like a tattered tablecloth of benediction. Where could they come from? She must haul them out, examine them.

“Why the hell aren’t you there when I call? I thought I was sober, almost, when I left that message, but can’t remember anything I said. Did I say something really horrible? What an ass –”

“You are the most self-concerned human being this side of St. Augustine.”

“Oh. Hi. When did you read St. Augustine?”

“I didn’t – read the Cliff Notes. Are you drunk now?”

“No, wish I was.”

“I’m coming over.”

“It’s the middle of the night.”

“Think about that when you wake me up with the goddam phone.”

“I confessed today.”

“To what?”

“I don’t know.”

… and month, and year, and century…

On the way back from one of our numerous visits to one of our multifarious medical specialists, Linda and I stopped in Towanda, 20 miles north of us, to visit on odd little café we’d been to once before. I remembered it to be, yes, odd – interesting and, in some ways a bit unsettling – but I couldn’t remember exactly why.

We recalled as soon as we walked in the door.

The menu.

It hangs, a good 4 feet high, and runs the full length of the serving counter, which must be at least 25 feet long, posted on a collection of separate blackboards, listing every imaginable edible or drinkable, in no, to me, obvious order, hand-written in semi-cursive with white chalk.

Since this is a modern-era coffee shop, a least a couple of those blackboards catalog all the various insidious combinations of ingredients that can be injected into a serving of coffee.

I hate coffee – the smell, the sight, the thought of its taste. My father drank coffee incessantly, until it gave him a headache, then a bit later he’d take  more coffee to cure the headache. Beside it’s general repugnance, this impressed on me that there is no rhyme or reason to coffee’s use.

So, to start off, Linda and I both ordered hot black tea.

“Would you like that in a cup or a disposable mug?”

I assumed by “cup” he meant something non-disposable, therefore, “A cup, please.”

The sandwiches seemed to be relatively contained on a single blackboard. Linda ordered some form of quesadilla. I ordered whatever was the last line of the menu because it was the most clearly legible. What was it? Ummm… can’t say I remember, but it turned out to be pretty good. 

Once we had wrapped up the order, the counter dude asked, “Will that be for here or to go?”

Think about that a moment: a couple minutes before, he’d asked if we wanted our drinks in porcelain cups, before knowing if we planned to plop our order in a bag. Would he have let us out the door with two of their cups sloshing around in a paper bag?

We were handed a black plastic block with the number 2 on it, to take to a table of our choice. We supposed the order would be delivered thereto. Just as we sat down, two cups of tea were placed on the serving counter and left there. Were they ours? Had anyone else ordered tea? Should we pick them up?

We did, and they were the proper temperature for tea – near boiling. Good. So we began studying the massive paintings on the side wall. They were three framed landscape snow scenes, maybe 5 x 6 feet, sear and overwhelming – tortured bare tree limbs in all three, and an orange fuzzy globe slightly above the middle of the central one, which could be the sun rising, or setting… or it could be Mount Doom.

I immediately christened the whole “Mordor in Winter.” Then I noticed that the three pieces were continuous, possible (probably?) a mural cut into sections and framed. Ummm… why?

The sandwiches, delivered to the table, were both quite good, satisfying. But the real treat of the day was sporadic. A tall, enticing young woman in an almost floor-length dress of possibly Mideastern design floated past from somewhere up front, passing us to the back, then from the back to the front, then back again to the back. She seemed to carry a magic inner light with her, sexual, certainly, but a whole lot more, an outpouring of essence. As far as we could figure, she was a patron visiting the rest room in the rear. But if so, what a lovely journey for such a basic purpose!

You don’t generally get such an array of impressions in a somewhat overpriced coffee shop. The memories we brought back will linger more clearly than they did from our first time. But I think we’ll pass on a third visit.

*   *   *   *

The sadness of the gone cows.

Sometime back I wrote an appreciation of the abandoned cattle farm down the road from us that reopened maybe 10 years ago. At the time, I gave something of its former horrific history:

In the 1950s, the then owner was grinding feed for his herd on one of those immense upright machines for chopping corn and grain. You stand near the top and hurl in the raw feed. Somehow, the owner managed to drop himself in. Please, don’t think about it. You’ll have  a much pleasanter night.

The farm was abandoned for the next 60 years, owned by a woman in Florida, presumably his widow, who made no ongoing attempt to sell it. Perhaps she died, perhaps she needed the late income, but she at last sold the place to someone (we’ve heard that it was two partners) who decided to raise cattle, mostly Black Angus, for market. 

First, the barn, in a state of near collapse, was fixed up. Gradually, over the next half decade, trees in the swampy area by the road were cut down, the swamp itself drained and filled, and peculiarly expensive fencing was put up in places that didn’t obviously relate to how the land was being used.

A new small herd of cows would arrive every year –  new mothers and calves (we call all the bovine inhabitants “cows” out of probably misplaced fondness) – be fattened up, then sold along to the next stop on on the road to slaughter.

Huge bales of hay arrived, loads of gravel were moved from one area by the barn to another, a couple horses spent time in a secondary barn for several months, then were replaced by a smaller herd of cows. A path was cut through a small wooded area but never used. Things we constantly being done, but it seemed like the disordered motion of our national government, a massive wind of whim.

Then, a few months ago, the fattening cows were picked up and… no replacements arrived. There’s now a sign that says “acreage for sale.”

All of the farm, some of it?

Meanwhile, where the hell are our cows!? They were our friends.

*   *   *   *

Suggested update of the song  “Simple Gifts,” in honor of our current national administration:

When true complicity is gained,

To bow and to scrape we shall not be ashamed,

To squirm, to squirm shall be our delight,

Till by squirming, squirming we prove our might.