[Chapter two of Jenny’s story, wherein we meet Filt, who will long be with us.]

The outside world has grown hotter. Chestnut Street is crowded with – shoppers? walkers? What are they doing out in the middle of a sweating hot day, when they should be inside eating or at home watching the soaps?

In Rittenhouse Square, flowers struggle out of the recumbent browned greenery of an early, dry summer, doing their best to push upright along the wrought-iron fence. A few singles and couples, seated on cardboard or folded newspapers, annoy the almost grass. They smile, hoping some exhausted deity will bless them.

A covey of skateboarders skrinch through, rattling and intent. Jenny sits on one of the benches to watch them. Jenny likes skaters. A rare hope for the future, they slip, schlep and pirouette. One guy skitters off balance. The board shoots sideways. In a marvelous and unlikely backflip, it returns to him, slamming its end into his forehead, drawing blood that trickles into his left eye. Not again. But he paws at his face, then whoops a hyena guffaw that fills the canyons of the enclosed square. Sometimes it’s OK.

 She starts the block-and-a-half walk to an Indian restaurant that provides great heaps of cheap food, excellently flavored. The Indians know how to cook vegetables – disguise them within rice, spices and succulent gravies. Today’s destination offers dishes with goat, which tastes not particularly different from other meat but provides a sense of the unusual, along with rock-like bones that the shattered sidewalk woman would have found helpful.

Jenny’s spirits lift as she turns into the bustle of 17th Street. She shimmies in sympathetic vibration to the squalling life of the city, the blend of noxious odors, trash, ebullience and intensity that creates an almost palpable force. On her good days, it rubs against her like an affectionate cat (Jenny is a cat person). Other times, it gnarfs at her heels, a vicious dog, the accumulated destruction from too many beings crammed into too little space.

At Raj Palace on Sansom Street, she orders goat biryani at the counter, three-deep with customers awaiting orders, and sits at a tiny square table by the bay window. The Raj operates in a row of storefront buildings owned by an absentee landlord who holds large sections of Center City hostage in hopes of rising real estate prices, while his buildings deteriorate. Today is still her lucky day. Too often the upstairs tables are full and she must hunker in the windowless subterranean room that exudes tears and misery.

The counterman calls out “goat” and beckons. Jenny pays and choo-choos the tray back to her table. A large aluminum pie plate overflows with yellow rice, chunks of sturdy ungulate, peas and other trace vegetables. Jenny forks into the rice rapidly, picks out a gobbet of meat with her fingers. She gnaws at the impenetrable bone, holds it before her eyes, then drops it on the table. Bones. We’re all bones, inside.

A thin, t-shirted man of indefinite young age plops into the opposite chair. He looses a lopsided grin; his dirt-brown hair looping out and down from his head like a tiny umbrella. Something shadows his face. Probably more dirt. His plate holds a poori, the fat-soaked, deep-fried inflated-balloon of Indian bread.

“Hi, I’m Filt,” he says.

“Hello.” Jenny feels invaded but little troubled by the invasion. “Phil?”

“Filt. With a ‘t.’ And a ‘f.’

“Is that short for Fillet?”

“Fillay? Nah, it’s just… Filt.” He bites into the poori, deflating it. “Ya know, what’s goin on,” he says, a greasy flap hanging from his mouth, “the whole world’s all fucked up. It’s all fucked the fuck up.”

“Um.”

“You go out in the street, they try to run you over, they just try to run you the fuck over. You gotta be fast.”

Jenny studies the knots of goat in her rice. Bones. “There was,” she says, “a Roman emperor who liked to roast small boys and eat them.”

“No shit.”

“You can read about it.”

Filt shakes his head, swirling the hair parasol. “Only boys?”

“So far as I know.” So long, calm solitude of lunch.

“Wonder what he did with the…”

Jenny looks at him directly. “He said it was the best part. He ate it with mustard. Or horseradish. And shared it with his mistress. “

“Wow.” Filt takes another bite from his poori, looks around as though searching, then leans across the table, intent. “There’s other stuff.”

“I suppose there often is.”

“What’d you lose?”

The question bores into her, reaches her center through the hole it made. She studies him in a new, dark light.

“Lose?”

“Yeah.”

Her answer surprises her. “I don’t know.”

“Things are gonna happen. Yeah.” His fingers pinch reflexively across the plate, but the poori is gone, finished.

“Would you like some of this?” Jenny lifts the dish of goat biryani, an offering.

“Nah, I don’t eat animals.”

“It has other things in it. Vegetables.”

“The animal meat – see, it shouldn’t be there. Don’t get me wrong.”

Another surprise – Jenny doesn’t think she gets him wrong. “I lost something,” she admits. “Way back.”

“Yeah?”

“I don’t talk about it.”

“What’s the use, huh?”

“So why would you ask?”

“Cuz that’s how you find stuff out.”

Unassailable logic.

Jenny pushes the aluminum pieplate to the center of the table. “I don’t want any more.”

Filt looks around again. “Things are gonna happen.” He takes his paper plate to the trash can without saying goodbye.

Jenny bends up the sides of the pieplate and deposits the remainder of her lunch in the can. She wants to slather someone with a couched obscenity. Filt? No, someone she appreciates. 

[This is the first chapter of the novel about Jenny that I’ve been working on in bits and pieces for the last couple years. It’s just to give you a hint. If you it doesn’t interest you you, you can clean out the cat’s litter box or make that phone call you’ve been putting off.]

Morning

The sun invades Jenny McGiver’s bed, its stain flowing across the sheets. Waking never feels good. Dreams are no better, but they finish. The living day starts and goes on relentlessly, bringing the creepy-crawlies, the heebie-jeebies, the slow, malingering gnaw of time. 

Fighting the mold inside, she rolls out of bed and snarls at the pitilessly shining orb. Useless bravado. She shambles around the room, searching for items not too wrinkled or encrusted with yesterday.

Is Jenny depressed? It’s chic to be depressed. People simper knowingly, there-there you and ask what you’re “taking.” Jenny would like to answer, “graft,” “umbrage,” “liberties.” Instead she says, simply, “Nothing.” The knowing simper turns to incredulity. Does she also wash her underwear in a mountain stream and beat it with rocks ? Does she plant asparagus by the phases of the moon?

Jenny can be likable, even engaging, if most often in a distant way. The etched bone structure of her face and almost corpse-white skin are enlivened by an electric undercurrent that turns men’s heads, though some feel spooked by their own attraction. Thin and tight-muscled, she could be an ad for exercise or for something exotic but unsettling. Aware of her unsettling beauty, she can glory in it or slap it aside.

She makes uneven attempts to eat nutritiously. She is not deliciously fond of vegetables but can accept them with suitable camouflage. She bolts down large quantities of proteins but gains no weight because her metabolism churns with aggressive vigor.

On the crowded street, kicking through the accusing June sunlight, she greets the traffic, human and auto, with snarl and sneer. Bloody fucking fools in their bloody fucking cars. Jenny cannot afford a car. Would she own one if she could? Something used and prone to confounding breakdown – a possibility. A ’60s VW bug, if any remain, or Hitler’s armored car, up for auction now and then (no one in their right mind can afford it; fortunately for the auction houses, those who can afford this super-bauble are not in their right minds).

People crossing the street dodge the vehicular hodge-podge, more or less successfully. There – a pedestrian nudged by a passenger-side bumper end. The driver does not notice. The pedestrian stares with impersonal anger, then continues on.

“Fuck,” says Jenny, encapsulating the scene, the driver, the not-sufficiently-injured party. Fuck and fuck again.

Moments later, she stands behind the counter of French’s Stationery on Chestnut Street in Center City Philadelphia. She smiles abstract radiance as she rings up envelopes, felt-tip pens and greeting cards mucilaginous with sentiment.

She is, to all external measures, an excellent employee: observent, organized, rapid at giving change. She can dash her hand into the register to snatch a complicated combination of coins in a single haul. This negligible ability provides a fleeting pride, as a housewife might hold up a perfectly ironed shirt.

Yet an undercutting nastiness enjoys sneaking out. “Customers…” She rolls the word across her tongue. “Cuss. Tumors.” Most of them look slightly lost as they pick up a card, open it, read it – actually read it – put it back, frown, pick another. A few giggle through the humor offerings, usually young women, usually in pairs. The men never know what they want. They might be choosing a chimp’s underwear or a toilet cleaner.

Jenny sidles up to an almost elderly woman thumbing anniversary cards.

“Did you hear about the man who jumped in front of the subway train?”

“Oh goodness, no. I didn’t.”

“Neither did I – isn’t that a coincidence?”

“I don’t – what are you talking about?”

“Imaginary animals with very long tails. Do you see them? Out of the corners of your eyes?”

The woman holds the card before her, a talisman to ward off craziness. Jenny lays a hand lightly on her arm. “It’s nothing to worry about. Lots of people don’t and still they survive – nearly all of them.” She backs slowly away.

Long fingers grip Jenny’s shoulder and she spins around, part stunned, part enraged.

It’s Pamela, her boss. Jenny and Pam work well together. Most of the time. Pam gives her leeway, because when Jenny isn’t a volcano on the edge of eruption, she’a the ideal salesperson of cardboard sentiment. Pam likes her, as do most customers and many passing acquaintances.

But Pam sets limits.

“Goddammit, you can’t chase customers out of the store. This is a business.”

None of my business. “I was giving her advice.”

“What, ‘Go screw yourself’?”

Jenny leans against the counter in a seductive ’40s pose. “Really, dahling, you should use a more distinctive perfume.”

“Come off it.”

Jenny straightens. “I’m off.”

“You know about the sale next week.”

“From the Aisle of Man to the Islets of Langerhans, everything 20% off. Except for the small print.”

“I never know what the hell you’re talking about. Here. These are the forms to fill out.”

The skewed type has been copied from copies of copies of other copies. It could be in Arabic or cuneiform.

“I can’t read it.”

“The ones with the little squiggles, see, are numbers. The rest is sales items.”

“Why do we work with crap like this? This is the 21st century, if barely. Hasn’t anybody seen a computer, or a printer?”

Pam’s eyes turn to hard marbles. “Do you want to work here?”

“No.”

Pam’s eyes sog. “I don’t friggin get you. When you do it, you’re the best I’ve ever had. Then you dive down a manhole, into the shit. What do you get out of it? Doesn’t look like it makes you happy.”

Jenny winces inside but doesn’t let it show. When reality strikes, either throw spitballs or go silent.

As she’s wending her forlorn way back to French’s after a flavorless lunch, the woman in front of her takes a inexplicable stumble and slams to the sidewalk. Her right leg twists and snaps, adding a joint where none had been. Her scream cuts the air, gouging the buildings. 

Overcoming a wave of revulsion, Jenny drops to one knee beside the stricken woman and touches her arm, her shoulder, her forehead. “You’ll be all right, really you will,” she says without knowledge or effect on the woman.

A man with a power tie streaks in and waves his hands. “Don’t move her! Don’t move her!” 

Jenny looks up, perplexed. Why would she think of moving the stricken woman?

“Don’t move her! Leave her there!” The man’s palpable hysteria passes through the circled onlookers and ricochets off the storefronts, fighting for space with the woman’s wails. He and Jenny stand outside the henge of need, along the periphery of observation. Jenny touches the woman’s cheek, her arm again. 

A policeman slides through the crowd and squats beside her. “What happened?”

Jenny points at the woman’s leg. “She just fell.”

You think so? asks the accident, unasked, so many things to watch, so much to unfold across the universe, why should this happen right now, right before your face?

Jenny makes a strangled sound, flips her head side to side, a confused-dog wiggle – what the hell is this? – but hell doesn’t answer. 

The policeman returns to his patrol car and calls for an emergency wagon, then takes up station near the woman without looking at her. The man with the power tie speaks in staccato bursts into the officer’s ear, his hands fluttering, darting, clenching. The officer nods a few times, grunts once. The woman has passed out. Jenny asks the cop if there is anything she can do. The officer shrugs and tells her the emergency crew is on its way.

All’s well (really?), so back to selling predigested emotions spewed onto rectangles.

At the late afternoon laundromat on 22nd St. her hand dives into her backpack, solid with books, picking volumes at random. She reads Buddhist dharma during the wash cycle, Bertrand Russell’s arch pronouncements on logic through the rinse, a chapter or two of Anthony Trollope along with the hum of the drier, all while listening on her iPod to The Residents, San Francisco’s most cultly anonymous band, or Tom Waits, or Renaissance dances, or Tuvan throat singers. Unceremoniously combined, the music, the words, the abstruse ponderings make delicious sense. 

But nothing, read or heard, contains a hint of mathematics. No.

Rachel will likely visit after dinner. She spends two or three evenings a week at Jenny’s. Rachel is Jenny’s counterweight, the friend she thought she would never have. Theirs is the relationship binary stars might experience if they turned sentient: close and embracing, with an easy trading of essential matter.

Rachel shines a rich cocoa-brown, exuding sensuality as a tapped maple exudes sap. Roughly half American slave descendent, a fourth Southern cracker and another fourth Haitian, she draws men like flies. She creates no conflict in their minds like Jenny does. They simply want.

Jenny eats her dinner, a grilled cheese sandwich – crumbly cheddar that melted non-uniformly and tumbles from the slightly burned bread as she bites. She crams a  romaine lettuce leaf into her mouth, chews rapidly and swallows without enjoyment, then back to the cheese for its fleeting pleasure. Jenny is an indifferent cook at best, at worst a culinary blunderbuss.

After washing the single dish and the black iron frying pan (which, she knows, should only be wiped clear with a paper towel), she turns to the shelf of books she has begun reading over the last months. She counts 21 volumes embellished with bookmarks. Tonight, nothing on the “begun” shelf appeals to her. Is the laundromat her truer intellectual home?

The doorbell rings. The apartment has no intercom, so Jenny ratchets down the stairs to answer. Rachel stands in the vestibule, swinging her arms, humming to an internal tune.

“Oooouuu,” Rachel moans around the smoothness of a chocolate truffle. “I spose now you’re gonna tell me ’bout the decline of Western civilization.”

“Why bother? You know all my rants by heart.”

“Do I ever.”

Jenny pours Rachel a glass of red jug wine, inexpensive, not unpleasant, properly alcoholic. Jenny takes her first glass now; she will take multiple glasses later.

“So this accident?” Rachel scooches down into the charmingly lumpy armchair, treating it like a hammock.

“Just wham, she’s on the sidewalk, bone sticking out, a compound fracture. The day before, a piece of a … gargoyle falls off the building across the street and hits a guy on the head.”

“Heavy.”

“He bled like a pig.” Jenny licks at the remaining taste of cheese on her lips. “That kind of shit just happens.”

Rachel waves her hand to entice the philosophic round. “And that’s because…”

“There are too many people, too much tension, too little time to think or react, we’re pressed together like rats in a cage, with tail-biting –”

“Whoa, lady. You sound like you’re biting your own tail. Ease off. In the Middle Ages we would’ve had the Black Death. Lot less people die these days than once did. I mean, we all die in the end, but we don’t most of us because of shit flowing down the middle of the street.”

“Open sewers.” A Jenny smile peeks out. “I know your rants too.”

Rachel’s laugh sloshes the wine in her glass. “Gotta get me some new ones. Oh dear, oh dear, so what’re we gonna talk about tonight that’s new and exciting and doesn’t have to do with death or the mad sad state of the world?”

Jenny tops off her glass, ignoring the internal simper for restraint. “What’s happening at work?”

“Same old same old. Ummm, there was a case today, sorta like what you were saying. Guy walking down 57th Street and a tree limb falls on his head. OK, a civil suit. But he says it’s deliberate, that this neighbor he’s feuding with rigged it to drop on him. So, turns out when they look, the limb was sawed two-thirds through. OK, so it’s a criminal case – except, how can you make a limb fall just when you want it to? And the other guy, of course, says he never touched the tree, must of been some kids. But the guy got hit’s bringing charges.”

As the DA’s office top-drawer paralegal, Rachel conducts interviews, collects facts. She’s in closer touch with more cases than the assistant DAs, her nominal and certificated superiors. Every legal excrescence in the city drifts across her desk or into her ears. She has developed the ability of seeing the futility of trying to untangle all these skeins of sordidness, while keeping the meshed particulars from exploding her head.

“How do you put up with it?” 

“You don’t expect justice and you don’t get justice, so it’s got a kind of balance to it – you don’t got what you don’t waste your time lookin for.”

“You go on about the evil ol’ world the same as I do.”

“Now, girl, I never said it was evil. I just said it was awful, both ways: Horrible but leaves you chock full of awe if you’re payin attention. Downright  righteous awe.”

“Awe, shit.”

Rachel almost snorts wine onto the faded throw rug.

“You got any cranberry juice?” she asks

“No. What? – you never drink anything like that.”

“Wanna try it. Sposed to be good for the digestion.”

“You could digest the iron curtain.”

“Feels like I did.”

Jenny points to the empty truffle container. “So why did you eat the whole box?”

“Because they’re good.”

Or mental scarification

When I started sending out these ruminations in 2011, a couple people called them – or me – “brilliant.”

I hate that.

The brilliant people of the world were/are Einstein, Bertie Russell (arrogant sod), and Richard Feynman in the West, Buddha and the Indian inventor of zero on the other side of the world.

I’m bright – brighter than, say, 98% of the overall population – but you have to be way higher up the lightbulb ladder to qualify as brilliant. As a writer, I’m no Joyce, Dostoevsky, Shakespeare, Melville, Tagore or Pynchon, though I would be if I could: a candle that wishes to be a bonfire.

For eight decades I’ve been interested in quantum mechanics, particle physics, and the other convoluted secrets of creation, but I’ve never learned the higher math necessary to truly master any of it. 

I finally took calculus in summer courses after college, got straight A’s – I always got straight A’s, in everything – but had no idea in hell what anybody did with calculus, where it fit into understanding. It’s been easy for me to capture the “what” of what I’m studying, but far less often the “why.”

 Somehow I assumed that I was not intellectually qualified for the big ideas. Turns out, more honestly, that I was really mind-lazy. It takes work, dedication, care to capture advanced math or physics at a deep level. You have to read complicated explanations more than once! to understand them; they don’t drop like manna from heaven or pollution from Philly skies.

But what set this current yadder off? 

It comes from working on what, if completed, will be yet another novel by me that no one will read, about a woman so brilliant she can barely function.

Aside from a few shining exceptions – and you know who you are, because you’re on this mailing list – I don’t relate to men. I hate sports, team spirit, the celebration of ignorance, power over the oppressed, and creating the oppressed through personal arrogance. Most of those I consider my real friends (Linda beyond all) are women, because I see them, in the main, as more closely attuned to the “soul” of humanity, whatever that might be.

This novel – every chapter – centers on, follows along with, reflects Jenny, a math genius reared by her mathematician father from age four to become the next Goedel (look him up), only to be anathematized by that father when he decides she cannot achieve his inhumane aim.

In response to being stripped of her expected future, Jenny, at 16, activates the button in her brain that cam obliterate her entire understanding of math. 

Who is Jenny, otherwise? It took me some while to realize that, through Jenny, I was recreating my own rejection of my search for the underlying whys of existence. Her choice to negate her intellect is what mine would be if I were someone with guts; someone with the determination to fight the world on my own terms through a smothering haze of failure.

I ripped math away from Jenny because a) I see math as the secret to everything, the structure that binds together all existence, the Gorilla Glue of why; yet b) since I can’t myself do that math, having her excise it seemed the defining way to extol someone who can do it but chooses not to.

Often, when I slam my narrative vehicle into a fallen hemlock, I talk to Jenny, ask her questions – about herself, the book, my reasons for writing such a thing – and she responds with a forthright honesty that floors me. 

Does that mean that I accept her as real?

It means that she is real: the first shimmer that, somewhere within my dark caverns, flounders something that could be… brilliant.

Jenny is bright as a meteor shower, absorbing everything: history, anthro, philosophy (to laugh at), world music, Gregorian chant, the Residents. To keep her dirt-solid believable despite her disavowal of math, I’ve been collecting material on chaos theory, probability, relativity, cosmology. Etc.

This from me, who can’t do the supporting math that makes them justifiable and comprehensible? Well, poking through all this, I’ve come to realize that… I could have done it. I could have done the necessary work. Instead, I threw in the towel because that work is hard (and because it reminds me of those hideous high-school evenings when I did nothing but homework).

Consider an exemplar of the proper way to overcome the difficulty of learning: Isaac Newton.

It wasn’t an apple falling on his noggin that slammed him into gravitational revelation, it was his endless determination to badger every problem through hours, days, weeks, months of thought, beleaguering every evasive concept into submission. 

Me? For most of my life I’ve avoided intense intellectual labor; while growing up, my intelligence seemed a simple absorptive process, something easy. 

So, a few months back, faced with my latest hemlock obstruction on the literary highway, I decided that absorbing math and particle  physics – tough, intellectual learning – was necessary to finishing a piece of writing that could be my (again unread) legacy. If I couldn’t recreate Jenny’s rejected math, this novel would fail. I’d end up like a sculptor attacking marble without a chisel, trying to form an icon using bleeding fingernails alone.

Recently, I ran across an article on Stephen Wolfram, about whom I knew nothing. He claims that he and his crew have come to believe that a few simple, iterative selection rules can explain all of existence: space, time, mass, energy, momentum, the whole murky ball of wax that constitutes the universe. 

You think so? Me neither – but his outlook is fascinating, especially its undercutting of math’s assumption of increasing complexity. (String theory, the most dense and involuted math dive yet, does not help you tie a shoelace; in contrast, Wolfram suggests that one of the “rules” he’s working on, by its very nature, leads to the theory of relativity… as though Einstein needed only to find an “Aha!” dust bunny under the couch.)

Still… even Wolfram’s  “simple” approach requires complex understanding. Just to grind all the way through his explanatory overview, I’d have to learn a smoldering pile of the abstruse shit I’ve avoided for decades.

Something that delighted me, though: Even without untangling all his overlying abstrusities, I managed to unearth a couple of his assumptions that I could challenge. And Wolfram’s outlook helps support an off-center idea propounded by Robert, the scientist in my Evolution Unfolding in a Small Town in Western Pennsylvania.

So… “Huh!” – as Jenny so often responds to the inexplicable – maybe I do know something sorta big, without knowing that I know it.

But what am I really getting at with this rumble-ramble?

• That, at age 86, to complete my proposed pyrotechnic outing I must perform metal calisthenics that would exhaust a mind-jock of 20;

• That, should I accomplish this, I may be able to prove to myself that my life was been, if not wholly worthwhile, at least up to par;

• That, should I accomplish this… goddammit, I’d be fucking brilliant – by my own definition.

Will I do it? I much doubt it, not just because of the effort involved, but because Jenny must remain a human being, the sum of far more than massaged mental rigamarole. She’s a woman who reveres knowledge – all knowledge – as the pinnacle of being, yet who must continue, day-to-day, to exist believably in a believable world.

There are many human endeavors – wonderful human endeavors – that have no need to probe behind the Brainiac wainscoting. A plumber doesn’t have to know – would be impeded by knowing – the existential meaning of plumbing. And the world would be far worse off without plumbers than without writers.

As individuals, we each assume a position in life, simple or complex, hidden or obvious. If we live up to that assumption, fine. If we do not, the result can range from periodic bouts of internal hives, through mental dissolution, to suicide. 

My expectations for myself have, in large part, gone unacknowledged. And trying to uncover what’s unacknowledged is like peering up your pantleg to see where you’ve put your socks. 

As I’m signing off, please don’t mistake this flow of mental sweat for anything other than self-serving. I’m serving myself on a pewter platter; if you ingest without investigation, beware lead poisoning.

*   *   *   *

Song of the week:

Fairytales can’t come true,

It won’t happen to you,

You’re a dumb old fart…

Maybe we in the U.S. have been getting it all wrong. Judging by the recent election in Canada, those folks really pay attention when they vote.

The Liberal party, under its new prime minister, Mark Carney, won handily in large part by focusing on the absurd and threatening rants of our own Ronald Chump. So, instead of Canada becoming our 51^st Disunited State, why not make the U.S. Canada’s 11^th province?

My fondness for the Canadian outlook [except for them limiting the alcohol content of their Yukon Jack] hit a high point after a peculiar decision by the UPenn radio station, WXPN, in the late ’80s or early ’90s. I can’t recall if this was when the university admin decided to bring in outside management to “upgrade” [beware that word] the station content, but the choice was made to include the Canadian Broadcasting System morning news. I still don’t know the reasoning behind this – and of course it didn’t last – but it was their one stroke of near genius.

Every morning we listened to the Canadian take on both their and the U.S, news, and it went leagues beyond what our “public” stations, like NPR, where shoveling out. We could listen and actually understand what was going on. To my personal shame and chagrin, I haven’t followed the Canadian radio news since. I should check it out again, if for nothing else than to see how it holds up today.

Yet another “to-do” that will probably become an “I-dint.”

*   *   *   *

Last night, for our weekly Friday dinner out, Linda and I stopped at D&D Brew Works on Rt. 220. Over my opening shot of Yukon Jack I checked out the week’s specials… and stopped dead at the most outlandish dish I’d ever seen described on a menu.

It so blindsided me that I didn’t fully register all the ingredients, though I immediately decided to order it. I didn’t care whether it would turn out to be editable, I just had to have it on principle.

OK, it was a burger topped with a mishmash of cream cheese [cream cheese!?], dried cranberry and a third equally improbable ingredient that ran screaming from my mind. All that served on Swiss cheese and candied bacon. How in hell do you candy bacon? With caramel? Mashed 3 Musketeers?

I told the waitress exactly why I was ordering it – because it was the most bizarre item ever offered in a restaurant – and that lovely lady did not threaten to heave me bodily from my counter seat.

Yeah, you know it already: It was sticky, slimy and really good. Hat and socks off to the chef.

But what will it be next time? Penguin with horseradish and daffodils au gratin?

*   *   *   *

I’ve been reading the daily comic strips [or “the funnies,” as they were referred to back then] since I was about 5 years old. In my ancientivity I no longer subscribe to a physical object known as a “newspaper,” but I can get them online from a couple distribution outfits that allow me to choose those – and only those – that I wish to read every morning.

In all those years, I can’t recall another period where almost every strip has been making social, political or environmental comments day after day, often howlingly funny. I mean strips like “Hagar the Horrible” or “B.C.” or “Shoe.”

Yesterday I was thinking, “yeah, just about every comic except ‘Blondie.’” So, this morning, there it was – “Blondie” too.

The world, or something, may be coming awake.

*   *   *   *

I may have mentioned that a couple of my friends and a few of their friends have started a small book-creation outfit in Philly called Frankford Publishing. Their first short-story collection focused on SF, fantasy and such. Their second foray, Farewell My Zombie: Short Stories About the Undead, is now out on Amazon, also Barnes and Noble.

Warning: Zombie includes two of my stories, “The Children,” taken from my Back Alleys collection, along with a recent absurdity, “Zombie Dispatch.” Even so, the collection is worth buying, since it includes shorts by brothers Paradox Pollack and Jackrabbit, as well as those friends of friends.

On Amazon, you can absorb the undead on Kindle, as a paperback, or even a hardback – though I can’t yet imagine a hardback zombie.

For some reason, this damned site won’t allow me to insert the Amazon link, but here’s the cover:

*   *   *   *

I like to envision a declining President Clump yodeling to Hank Williams:

“I’ve even lost the won’t to live

I’m so loathsome I should die.”

*   *   *   *

Late in the evening, sitting around the firepit behind the rental cabin down by the pond, Linda and I, my daughter Morgan, grandkids Sammy and Abi, stepson Ben and his wife Meagan, got into the usual lament on the condition of the country and the drainage of meaning from life today.

All the younger squad – it’s unnerving enough to think of a daughter and stepson nearly ready to tumble into their 60s as “younger” – got to musing about which country they might move to if America did not take a sudden, unlikely turn toward sanity. 

This outlook on the failure of the future really hit me for a number of reasons.

First, though I live in a heavily Republican area, I don’t feel personally threatened by the shit hitting the multiple fans of government. I’m where I what to be, happy to be here, and avoid politics in local discussions.

Second, despite five years of studying French and three of Latin, I still can’t speak any “foreign” language beyond cartoon stumbles. I think it stems from being terrified of trying to put together a coherent sentence in another language while a guest of that language’s speaker. I would feel stupid, ungrateful, unprepared, ridiculous, altogether beyond redemption.

[OK, I often feel that way by my nature. At heart, I’m still terrified of making verbal mistakes, especially in the presence of innocent listeners.]

Third, I’m convinced that Lump is an aberration who will be undone by his own blithering ignorance, and by the upwelling of those in the coming generation – once they realize that every last one of them has been abandoned by this foul fool who doesn’t care a helicoptered flying fuck for any of them beyond their vote and praise.

Ah well, what the hell, Mehitabel?