The tailor who sat at his bench in the town square had sat exactly so for more years than the inhabitants at the other the stalls could recall. He had sat there before they had, any of them, been born. 

Tailoring was perhaps too exalted a word for his occupation. He made no repairs, and none could claim to have seen a pair of trousers, a waistcoat, or a bit of livery fashioned from the working of his hands. 

What then, did he form from his cloth?

Josfell tailored new thoughts.

An odd function, perhaps – but one so difficult to contemplate? When we sit to ruminate, old thoughts dominate our minds: the past, the changing social situation, the eccentricities of our neighbors, the state of the polity. Consider what we hear on the street, what we read or see broadcast, what the “experts” say, what is whispered from mouth to ear. Is a bit of it new? Yet, somewhere, new thoughts must be fashioned, lest humanity shrivel from inattention.

Josfell was one-hundred-thirty-three years old at the time of this telling. That great age was none of his doing or planning. He had long been prepared to sidle beneath the earth, which had paid him no special attention. But somehow the lanyards of life held him back. So in this public place he sat and formed new thoughts, though those who passed had no knowledge of what work he did, and little interest.

Until one late Friday morning, the 29th day of June, when the sun hung high and Josfell’s spirits swung low, a young man with a stark black beard and riveting eye leaned over him.

“I need a new thought.”

Josfell looked up, startled. Over the two centuries of his trade, few had asked anything of him, and none before for the one thing which he could, unfailingly, provide.

“A thought?”

The intense young man pointed to the small square of cloth on Josfell’s lap. “Come, old one, provide for me a thought.”

Josfell held up the snippet, inspected it, tendered it. “Take.”

The man shrank back and constricted his brows. “I cannot take! It can only be bought.”

“I have no use for money.”

“That is not my concern.”

After fruitless haggle, Josfell sold the small thought-cloth for four copper pieces and returned to his work – like most of us, not much enlightened by his experience.

But the mind of Akim, who had made the purchase, was ablaze. He held a freshly minted thought, contained in a square but two breaths on a side, capable, he hoped and believed, of expansion into a world of contemplation. He would use it well and soon, that its impact be not lost or sullied.

In the poor mud-walled home he shared with Tamara, his too-often sickly wife, he caressed the thought-square and smoothed the wrinkles it had acquired from reposing in his leather pocket. What sort of thought might it be? A pondering, a question, a tentative answer, a mental bauble as mundane as a market list?

The sun had crossed the meridian into afternoon as he laid it on his rough-hewn dining table and considered its contours. So much was open to him in his life, which had reached a forking of the ways where concerted thought was needed. What if he had purchased only a misguided triviality? He feared its transference, yet knew this was the required act. Akim breathed deeply and raised the oddment to his open mind.

This is what he thought:

I am a herdsman of twelve seasons’ experience, knowledgeable in the ways of sheep and goats but insufficient in understanding the ways of men. When I cross the road, I ignore the progress of oncoming wagons, yet they pass me by unharming, for when I attend the opposite side, I am in no way lessened or altered. But within me flames a yearning that I cannot name or yet extinguish. I have the wish to be, but know not what it is I wish to be. Should I call down the rains upon my head, they would not water me. Should I call up the earth from beneath its rubble, it would not cover me. Should I curse the clouds that hide the sun, yet would they still provide, without question, salvation from the heat.

Standing, he railed to his wife, “My slate is wiped clean of questions each day as I retire! What do I know with certainty? What should I advance toward?”

He glared at the flaccid cloth, its content transferred. For this empty beckon he had squandered a portion of his father’s meagre inheritance? A rage built in him like the spring floods, overflowing the banks of his reason and sweeping the season’s withered mental vegetation before it.

He crushed the thought-source in his hand and retrod the dusty path to the market. There he confronted Josfell, quivering in part from malignancy, in greater part, disdain. “What have you sold me, thief?”

Josfell looked up, wide-eyed, open to the long ages when none had requested a thought. “I sold you nothing. I gave, you bought.”

Akim withdrew his anger, for even in his wretched sorrow he recognized this truth.

“But what,” he asked, “what is this?” holding forth the cloth.

Josfell turned the proffered square in his hands. A strange light, perhaps from above his shoulders, perhaps from a greater distance, touched the uneven surface and raised a brief flicker of luminescence. “I form the folds and cut the lines, but I am not master of the weave. I do not know what meaning it holds. Perhaps… the thoughts speak only as they can, each to each, thought to thought, thought to thinker? So that the thought that speaks to one is not the thought that would speak to another?”

“Charlatan,” cried Akim, but only to fill the space that might otherwise envelop both if no word were spoken.

In Josfell’s hands, the thought-square slowly lost its shimmer, to lie, if not lifeless, in the gentle grace of slumber. A weight descended upon him that he had not before known. “What would you have me do? I can refund your payment, but that will not alter the warp or weft. Yours alone are the crinkle and the waver, the twist and the wander of the cloth.”

Akim shook in near fever. “I cannot find its meaning! I have thought the thought, but all that comes of it is rank confusion. See how my life at home unfolds: Each day, when I reach to take down the tin of rice, first comes the desire, then the remembrance of where the tin is placed, then the will to move my body, next my ambulation to the shelf, then my hand extended, and at last the rice container lies upon the table. All my thoughts work to that end. But within your cloth lies no end. The edges are frayed, the threads hang loose and threaten to drift with the breeze. It is a sham, a great misnomer – not a thought but  vague intimation that lead to… nothing.”

Josfell put the cloth aside and rested his hands on his knees. “I did not know my father, and in my ever-increasing age have forgotten my mother. Such is life’s movement, which we are geared to accept. What was, is no longer, what could be, may or may not appear. Tomorrow, the earth may split in two and the halves desert each other. Should we dwell on such a fearsome possibility?”

“This, your thought, in its weight is much like mine from the cloth. Was it then first yours, only foisted onto me?”

Josfell shook his head. “We are the children of our pasts. But the future for each and all is murky, a mix of muck and blundered contemplation. Is that not so?”

“You say my thought, though worthless to me, is yet true?”

Josfell took up a wide swath of fabric, and with small scissors excised a piece half the breadth and width of that he had before given Akim. “Perchance the first was too grand a thought. Take this in its place, so that you might think within a smaller sphere. We are creatures of the earth, not of the sky. With this, perhaps, you will find easier access to your rice.”

Akim stood back, hands palm forward. “I find my rice well enough.”

“Then look to see what lies beneath your table.”

“You mock me!”

“Life mocks us. Nothing I say can change the heft of that mockery.”

Akim threw his smallest coin onto the tailor’s bench and took up the dwarfed shred. Even here, while still it lay in his hand, a thought hovered.

“Sell me another,” he demanded.

Josfell scissored a second segment from the cloth.

“And another,” said Akim.

Josfell paused. “So much thought?”

“How can there be too much, too many?”

“Take care,” Josfell warned, but handed across both added snippets. “The coin you gave covers all three.”

Akim did not dispute the tailor’s reckoning.

“Wife!” he thundered as he entered their hovel. “Wife!”

Tamara rose from her pallet, coughing. “What is it?”

“Where are your needle and thread?”

“Where they always are.”

“Get them!”

“Have you torn your garment?”

“Do not question me!” again in a roar, before his better nature intervened and his voice turned more confidential. “Not my clothing. More than my clothing, well beyond.”

Tamara brought her sewing basket. Akim laid the three new cloth skimps by her elbow, fetched the original, grander thought to top the inconsequential pile. Placing a finger on the upper piece, he declaimed: “Start with that. Each of the others you will add to it. I will show you the order, which must be exactly so. That is essential. Place this first beside the large one, the second here, the third – ah, no! How is this? It will not yet connect! I must purchase more before the third will adhere.”

“You paid for these, all?”

“Too much for the large one, too little for the others. It comes even. I take what money remains to buy more thoughts.”

“Our money for the food?”

Akim laughed, harsh at first, then more softly. “This money will bring food, it will bring all.”

So it was that Akim accumulated thoughts by the handful, the armload, until all but a pittance of his small savings had been transferred to Josfell, who attempted to dissuade the herdsman, but he would not countenance the tailor’s protestations.

Nor would Akim submit to his wife when she begged him to withdraw from this foolishness, for they had nothing left to eat but rice, and grew weaker by the day. Indeed, he tended his flocks with ever-lessening attention, so that they wandered off, one by one, or were attacked by predators and devoured. He responded only to the widening growth of the quilt that Tamara sewed, piece by piece, under his direction. For within his mind grew a resplendent tapestry of philosophy, a world-thought that would upend the errors and incompleteness of those who for centuries had expounded but pale simulations of Truth.

The day arrived when the final thought received from Josfell lay in his hand. He passed it to Tamara and indicated an unoccupied space in what had become an edgeless, ragged conglomeration of shapes. Once she had stitched the culminating thought into place, a wealth of revelation filled the herdsman’s mind, a coherence that spread through the interstices of his brain and beyond, an all-ness so vast that its full illumination exceeded not only his own ken – but what is permitted a human to comprehend.

So! he quailed within. This limitation, this inconclusion is given to me as punishment?

He rifled his wife’s basket, snatched her scissors, and began to wreak havoc on the thought-quilt that covered the floor and lapped against the walls. He cut and slashed with the small shears, severing here a contemplation, there a query, elsewhere an entire ratiocination on the afterlife.

He dismembered them, then slashed the bits to lesser fragments, until he had obliterated all meaning. He stopped when the segment that remained held only what he had discovered in his earliest days: the ways of life and family, of work and reward, of the sheep and goats he had tended, of his wife, of his comfort – and of his ever-confounding inclination to ruin all.

These bits, both separate and together, had been with him always. They were not thoughts he had bought; he had once lived and nurtured them, only to strew them willy-nilly in his rash scrabble for the ineffable.

Great tears runneled his face as he carried these tatters to the tailor and placed them on Josfell’s bench.

“You sought to present these thoughts as new… I had them already but knew them not, nor did I recognize their repetition when once again you rendered them to me. Take them back. Keep them to bestow on those less blessed than me. Give them away if you can afford to do so, sell them cheaply if not. All should have access to them, that these thoughts might reach completion, that those receiving them might see themselves with wild clarity. Whatever life may be on the grand scale – that we are not meant to know. It is not a withholding of the gods, but the limitation within that prevents us falling into the great infinity of ignorance. Take!”

Josfell accepted the remnants, but he could recognize in them nothing that he had formed or trimmed from some larger cloth. Yet he could not protest so to Akim, for the herdsman was already at a distance, striding for home.

It took over 70 years to find the wreck of the Titanic, but only a couple days to uncover the wreck of the Titan submersible that went down to geek at the Titanic’s grave.

The Titanic drowned a few millionaires. The Titan squished two billionaires.

We’re getting better at some things down in the bottom of the ocean.

*   *   *   *

Two people I know well and respect share a similar and to me quite unsettling view of what science is, and especially of who scientists are. They seem to look at the average scientist as a sort of low-level goofball hampered by a predetermined outlook on the world, their knowledge based on outdated theories and a blindered view of present concerns.

Real science is exactly the opposite: a wide-open search for the truth of how existence works. It’s easy to point out bad or pointless research – there’s enough of it out there, and it gets picked up as gospel by dunderheads like RFK, Jr. (that swishing sound you hear is his father whirling in his grave) – but scientists, like any other collection of human beings, range from brilliant to incompetent, from upstanding to scoundrels.

[I confess to viewing nearly all psychological research as a vast wasteland of half-baked approximations and low-tier grant-grabbing, and I know that kind of generalization reflects a failure of acceptance on my part. Part of my reaction is that I don’t consider psychology an actual science, just a collection of disorganized flapdoodle.]

But the physical sciences – the “hard” sciences – have long been focused on finding the physical laws behind everything from the universe to the human mind, and at no time have been more strenuously and widely studied than now.

Over the last century, and especially the last couple decades, the advances in health and disease prevention, in cataloguing the workings of the human nervous system, for example, have been astounding (though with the unfortunate side effect of quadrupling the human population). 

At opposite ends of the physics spectrum, both cosmology and quantum mechanics have in the last decades brought us more knowledge of how the universe is governed and constructed than in all of previous human history. It’s interesting to set this progress against that of political and social behavior, which has barely evolved over tens of thousands of years.

I’ve been reading Science News magazine for the last 40 years. A less technical summary of current advances in the sciences than Scientific American, it goes to great lengths to present the widest array of research in all areas of science, and to hold it up to close examination, by discussing the experiments or advances with experts across the field – those who support and those who, often enough, point out the inherent shortcomings in the various researchers’ approaches.

I’d recommend a subscription to Science News for anyone with the slightest interest in the progress in understanding brought by the elegant use of the human mind. Under the current editorial staff, it has been especially good at shining the light on young researchers who are upsetting established views.

As a side comment, over the past half century, academic research has moved away from the time when graying university profs held all the power and often took sole credit for advances within their departments. It’s no long uncommon these days for grad students and post-docs to be cited as lead authors in academic journals. Also, ongoing studies can be accessed on free sites like arxiv.org or PLOS.org. These are wonderfully healthy developments.

Remember: Einstein was 26 and working in a patent office when he published his special theory of relativity.

*   *   *   *

The Great Replacement Theory: A rightest sneer that there is a deliberate attempt to minimize the relevance – if not the existence – of white Americans through unleashed immigration. 

If only it were true! I’d love to see the dingleberries who come up with such asinine conspiracies become the least uncommon denominator.

Which brings back memories of our World History class in high school. In those days (the late ’50s), “world history” was almost entirely Western Europe over the past roughly 2500 years. It started with ancient Greece and Rome, who saw everyone to the south and east as barbarians and looked down their aquiline noses at Northern European white trash. Too bad, because I kinda liked the Goths and the Vandals.  

Every week I read the crime blotter in the local paper up here, because… well, you want to know what crime is like in your little area, right? Yeah. But mostly because it’s good for giggles and the enduring touches of absurdity that are the core of a well-rounded life.
Almost all law enforcement here is through the PA State Police in Laporte. Yes, we have a county sheriff, but he seems mostly responsible for salting away those who need to be removed from the public sphere for the Greater Good. (We don’t even have our own jail; we export our crooks and crooklets across the county line to our neighboring incarcerators.)
Anyway, awhile back I started to note that the charges in the blotter filed for various crimes (mainly DUI, weed possession, and some form of harassment) were getting… a mite strange. I was no longer just “DUI,” but “DUI and…” a variety of added unlikelihoods.
Online, I further noted that either things have changed throughout the country and wider world, or I was just getting more observant: The same creeping charge sheet was happening everywhere.
So here’s a random selection of weird crime charges I’ve collected over the last roughly three months:

• “causing grievous bodily harm with intent.” Yup, only that – “intent.” So is this the same as or different from “causing grievous bodily harm just for the hell of it”?
• “recklessly causing grievous bodily harm, assault occasioning actual bodily harm, and common assault.” I guess there must also be “virtual assault,” “highly uncommon assault,” and possibly “egregious assault with Indian spicing.”
• “assault with a deadly weapon with a hate crime enhancement.” As everybody knows, hate crime will enhance any assault.
• “obstructing an official proceeding, assaulting police with a weapon and robbery.” I don’t remember the details and can’t quite envision the context.
• “DUI combined with substance.” It really was pretty substantial, since it involved a drunk-driving Mississippi state senator.
• “obstruction of official business.” A fairly laidback charge when applied to a man climbing 73 stories up the exterior of a South Korean skyscraper, barefoot, while wearing only shorts.
• “grand larceny and mischief, as well as misdemeanor counts of conspiracy and criminal trespass.” A bunch of teens, slapped for roasting and eating the town’s swan.
• “voluntarily causing hurt by means of a heated substance.” A woman in Singapore, for scalding her husband with boiling water. (Well, it could have been an involuntary whim.)
• “criminal solicitation in the second and fourth degree, tampering with physical evidence, and conspiracy in the fifth degree.” Just shows how many degrees you can heap on a guy for his second attempt to hire a killer to off his wife.
• * * *
  I see a tendency among political commentators (I try to avoid them like the bubonic plague but don’t alway succeed) to equate Trump and Florida governor DeSantis. This is a mistake! Yes, both are vile, repulsive human beings, but that’s only the unlettered surface response.
  As I’ve probably claimed before, Trump is stupid but wily. The stupid is obvious, but the wilys of the world are skilled at a kind of street smarts that has little to do with intelligence: It’s an ingrained ability to see how to take advantage of the weakness in others to order to create your own personal advantage.
  People in places like up here judge you by who you are (or by who they think you are), not by your looks, position, or smarmy pretense. I think Trump appeals to many of them not because he’s a good guy but because they see him as a straightforwardly bad guy, right up front.
  DeSantis, alas, is actually smart, which gives him a different kind of advantage. He can form his asininity to sound like it’s based on logical reality.
  How about a wider contrast. Trump’s raucous hatred is intensely personal, not ideological; he hates anyone who is not himself. DeSantis’s hatred, by contrast, is less personal than ideological; he hates anyone who does not share his warped beliefs.
  Now let’s take this yet a little further.
  The fear that either of these two miserable examples of humanity might become (again, or for the first time) U.S. president calls up specters of Nazi Germany. I’ll say it – right of the bat – that I think that’s ridiculous. This isn’t Germany in the 1920s, and neither of these guys has the heft to pull off a Hitler, no matter how much they might want to.
  But…
  Again thinking back on Nazi Germany, I see an interesting pair of analogies:
  Trump as Goering
  DeSatis as Goebbels
  Goering was a blithering dumbbell, placed several levels above is competence, with no concern beyond his own festering skin.
  Goebbels was a clever, probably brilliant believer in the Nazi ideal of racial superiority.
  Make of that what you will (or won’t).

One last partisan gasp:
I’ve been wondering right along whether Trump’s pronounced reluctance to read anything handed him might reflect a learning disability: not that he avoids the written word by choice, but that he simply can’t fully comprehend it.
Recent extracts reported from his interactions with his lawyers in the secret-document retention case now make me wonder if there isn’t something deeper at work. Take this from one ecorded conversation:
“They presented me this—this is off the record, but—they presented me this,” Trump continues. “This was him. This was the Defense Department and him. We looked at some. This was him. This wasn’t done by me, this was him.”…“I just found, isn’t that amazing? This totally wins my case, you know. Except it is like, highly confidential. Secret. This is secret.”
Does this represent someone, even in private conversation, who can speak or understand basic English?

[I was about to apologize if I had offended anyone of an opposing political persuasion, but I quickly withdrew that incipient apology. In your case I intended to offend and exquisitely enjoyed the offense.]

All you Rastafarians are, of corse, familiar with Ethiopian emperor, Haile Selassie, revered by your faith as God. But did you know he had a cousin who never made the pantheon? His name was Haile UnLikeli.

*  *  *  *

This is a tale from the 14th century. An “itinerant” (read “bum”) visited a French monastery and convent. He begged for something to eat and was well received, becoming so accepted by the monks that they offered him a menial job, the pay being a monastic cell and meals, which suited him just fine.

But he had a talent of which, initially, the monks were unaware. He dealt with a variety of tradesmen who quickly learned that he was an expert at relieving them, manually, of their sexual tensions.

Word of his digital prowess spread rapidly to the attached convent. The Mother Superior asked if he might like to visit and bestow his favors equally upon her charges. This he did, to their immense delight.

Over time, his fame encompassed the countryside, where he became know as Jack Off All Trades and Masturbator of Nuns.

*  *  *  *

Two Afghans were walking down the road. One was a bedspread, the other was not. The one who was a bedspread asked the one who was not: “Why are you not a bedspread?” The other replied: “Because I am a purebred dog.” The first sneered, “Foreigner,” and turned away in disgust, causing him to fall over a cliff where he snagged to death on a hemlock tree. This made the purebred dog sad, because now he would have no one to sleep on.

*  *  *  *

This parody does not follow the original past the first line, but I sang it on our answering machine in Philly:

I’m an old cow hand from the Rio Grande

And you might think I’m dumb,

Just four fingers and a thumb,

Or maybe I’m dead,

‘Cause I don’t have a head,

But it sure is grand,

Bein’ an old cow hand.

Thank you.

Roswald was the main character in the American arm of the plot, though I can’t recall his job, his position in the world. He was pulled into a crazed situation because, while being supposedly treated for a dental abscess, the dentist clandestinely installed a miniature radio transmitter in the affected tooth.

That was the opening foray of my first attempt at a novel, which had to have been in 1973 or ’74, because everything driving me to writing then was the result of reading Thomas Pynchon’s Gravtiy’s Rainbow.

No other book has hit me with the same intensity. The day I finished it, as I sat on our improvised couch on Hamilton St., I cried for 45 minutes.

Why? I don’t really know, but it may be because I’d experienced something as complete, as right and true as I’ll ever encounter. Three or 4 times since I’ve gone back to GR but simply can’t read it again. It stymies me. The attempt comes to a full-stop, a roadsign that won’t let me past.

I hope to break through before I die, but somehow I doubt it. That book is telling me I’ve had an experience I can’t repeat – and shouldn’t, even if it were possible.

But as a limping Pynchon acolyte, I decided to write a novel that would encompass all of my life, all of the world’s life, a monumental work that would summarize everything I had to say in a single volume. 

Kind of a stupid idea.

A really stupid idea.

I was 35 years old, having written a daily column in the UPenn student paper in my senior year, typed random blather while living in The House on 34^th St. in the mid 1960s… then let it all dissolve, dissipate, while I did ill-paying, often incompetent freelance carpentry. 

But thanks, Tom Pynchon, for awakening in me the possibility of doing something Significant.

Julie (my first wife) and I had bought a twin house in Philadelphia’s Powelton Village neighborhood. We lived on the first floor, rented out two apartments on the second floor, one (or was it two?) on the third. When the second-rear tenant moved out, we expanded our area to include a better bedroom and study upstairs.

As our marriage collapsed, that area became my refuge, while Julie stayed downstairs. Me, my typewriter, a single bed, and my father’s (originally great grandfather’s) walnut desk with its 15 sq. ft. surface, upon which I spread an expanding sweep of 3×5 and 5×8 index cards, each filled solid with typed notes for some aspect of what I wanted to include in my magnum (or magma) opus.

Between minimal carpentry jobs, I plugged away at the typewriter. Later, once I’d taken the maintenance job at Morgan and Erin’s private school, Miquon, I left Powelton and moved, no longer married, into a delightful garret in Germantown, where I forced myself to produce at least 3 typed pages a day. After that, it was back to Powelton and the Baring St commune where, bless the fates, I met Linda.

Altogether, I kept at this blundered, blindered literary effort for about 4 years. What I produced was something not only unfinished, but harebrained and ultimately inconsequential. So why bother you with its history? Because that’s what I do here in the ruminations, I try to explore and explain my life, more for my good than yours.

Though I can’t recall what Roswald himself was up to, his Irish girlfriend, Rylla, was based (sometimes word-for-word) on conversations with my first great love, Ronnie. 

The plotting expanded along two non-parallel lines, one set in Philly, the other in the Australian Outback. In Philly, along with (but mostly unrelated to) Roswald, sat miserable, repressed Michael, living in the apartment I loved up the fire escape at 37^th and Chestnut Sts. There he talked to his one true friend, Zeralda, a cockroach who was the reincarnation of an ancient Egyptian scarab. (You might think this was not a conventional plot. You would be right.)

Three characters – Tweaser, Klaxton and Bjornstrom – predominated in the Australian plot arm. Were all 3 astronomers? I’ve lost even that hold on memory, but the setting was an observatory that had picked up emanations from a planet orbiting a star that – once they had deciphered the keening messages – the trio came to understand was about to go nova. Mixed in with apocalyptic cries, the outer space broadcasts included pointless snippets of alien life, such as a recipe for chicken dinner.

Independent of either continuig stream, I also introduced interludes featuring Popeye and Wimpy, who argued about Blutto and things like 12^th-century polyphony.

But I became most obsessed by how to separate yet identity the non-parallel plot lines. There were close to 20 chapters set in Australia, 30 in the U.S. Toss in the Popeye freebies and the total came to 51. 

Could there be, wondered I, such a thing as a collection of 51 similar “objects” that broke into two sub-collections of roughly 20 and 30? Of course not! Ridiculous! 

By contrast, 52 would have been easy – the number of cards in a deck, the number of weeks in a year. Any fool could fiddle with that! And if you did uncover 51 of anything, the collection would most properly be divided 3×17 (for those as numbered-crazed as me). 

But this is what I found, no idea where, years before the Internet existed (though the quote included here is taken from today’s Wikipedia):

“The molecular formula of human insulin [my note: the first enzyme to have its protein structure determined]… is a combination of two peptide chains (dimer) named an A-chain and a B-chain, which are linked together by two disulfide bonds. The A-chain is composed of 21 amino acids, while the B-chain consists of 30 residues.”

It may not seem possible, but this actually happened to (for) me: Serendipity had entered my bedroom and hoisted her skirts.

I sat for several days, arranging the chapters into the two plot chains, with the Popeye interludes flexibly assigned to either one as needed. The titles I gave to the chapters? The three-letter codes for each amino acid in the insulin sequence.

That gift should have sealed the deal: All was destined to fall into place with almost preternatural grace.

Except… the typed product was total crap. It’s gone now. I officially obliterated its traces a couple years ago. Why hold onto a major error for close to 50 years? Maybe it springs from my personal fondness for a failure that illuminated something about my underlying humanity (which I often come to doubt).

And it’s not entirely gone. 10,000 words remain from the Rylla segments. Something could be done with them, but likely (and rightly) will not be.

As for Ronnie, their muse? I last saw her in 1971, last heard from her in 1973, her one and only letter, sent from Vietnam or Laos, claiming that she had been fired on while boating down the Mekong River.

Who knows?

It’s possible.

At her request, I responded c/o post restante, in Bali of all places. The writing of that letter is yet another example of blatant absurdity. To save weight and (supposedly) postage, I typed my tale of the dissolution of my marriage on both sides of a sheet of onionskin paper. When I removed it from the typewriter, the type from both sides showed through as soon as the light hit it. I was unreadable. I inserted a new sheet of standard copy paper, retyped the entire thing and mailed it.

The letter was returned, undelivered. So Ronnie remains in my life as a packet of memories written down and attributed to a weird skewing of her name (itself an adaptation of a character’s name from Ray Bradbury’s Martian tales).

A lousy mishmash of writing, that almost-book, which never received (or earned) a title, but still not a total failure, because from its impetus sprang, in ways I can’t begin to explain, the complexity and compulsion of Evolution Unfolding in a Small Town in Western Pennsylvania, a novel that took me 35 years to complete.

That novel is in no way a failure. If there’s any continuing blunder attached to Evolution, it’s my deliberate failure to promote what I sincerely believe is a beautiful and extraordinary piece of work. Yeah, it will die with me. But should anyone want to read it in the meantime, it’s there on Amazon.

Second only to my marriage to Linda, it’s my greatest success, the one object I’m most proud of in my life.