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.