The US Supreme Court is going out of its way not to make significant decisions. In almost every major case of the last year, they have chosen to limit their decisions to borderline issues, then tossing the matter back to the district and appeals courts for further comment without examining the basic issue under discussion.

Compare this with Brown v. Board of Education [1954], that ended segregation in schools, under chief justice Earl Warren. Under Roberts, the current Supreme Court is an example of having a chief justice with no real backbone. He’s a swing vote, true – but how does a Chief Justice become just a swing vote?

Coney Barrett is a true swing vote who responds to her concept of what the law demands. That has pissed off Lump, but it is exactly what was said of her when she was nominated. Her religious peculiarities have masked this, but whether I agree with her decisions or not [as in most cases], I do see her following her view of the law, not of politics.

Neither the Roe or Dobbs decisions – nor any decision on abortion or other major health issues – should be decided by the courts, but by the medical community. But what happens when the entire social outlook is corrupted? Who is left to decide?

There’s no obvious or unequivocally true way to determine this, and if the administration decides to defy the courts and ignore the Constitution, what can those concerned effectively do?

Very little, immediately, but I trust in the youth of the world [not just this country] to form the new basis, once they see how fucked up the current situation is for their and coming generations.

There are no eternal truths, so how do we or they build a working middle truth? What do we pick as our guide or as our goal? And why should we do so – is it imperative to have a commanding vision?

At the highest level, there is no arbitrator, no basis for a universal set of ethics outside specific religious mandates. Decisions have to be made on the basis of what works to what ends.There is only fallible humanity, ever in the midst of its failed social evolution.

*   *   *   *

Dream #6 (lucid)

A bunch of us are celebrating in a little restaurant, but I’m not feeling connected to anyone. Then they all leave and I am walking alone near 40th and Market Sts. in Philly (an area where many of my dreams take place). Someone I vaguely know gets out of a car. He’s wearing a tophat, has massive curly hair and a clown-like mouth, like Richard Basehart in La Strada.

We start walking together, odd stuff happening around us, and I mention it’s like my dreams. I reach down and feel the wet grass and say it’s all too real for a dream. A little later, the street ahead becomes an alley or a pathway, and I say, “Oh damn, it  is a dream.” From then on, he and I talk about it being a dream.

I try to stay on the main roads, which keep changing to the lanes where I always get lost in my dreams. I turn 90 degrees, trying to find a way out of the dream, becoming pissed that I can’t turn it off.

Along the way, I invite him to visit us some time, then we talk about the fact he can’t do that because he isn’t real and has no way to talk to the real person he represents.

By this point, he’s become stocky, short-haired, with glasses, and I wonder why the dream would do that. I climb over a wall into an open area with low stone mounds a bit like gravestones, though it’s obviously not a graveyard. As I turn toward the street, a woman (my wife? my ex-wife?) comes up and tells me her father is dead and I need to come with her.

This is the trigger to wake up.

I started having lucid dreams only a few years ago, and never another one with such open discussion of it being a dream.

*   *   *   *

Got the top of my head removed last week… well, a half-inch circle that included the whatever it is lump that’s the problem and likely cancerous [haven’t got a report back on the biopsy, but it doesn’t concern me much]. The lancing lady gave Linda a bunch of sophisticated bandages to change every 2 to 3 days – since I can’t get a clear view of the top of my head to do it myself – that include some newfangled collagen-infused gunk that teaches the cells around the edge of the circle how to regenerate the missing center. I really, really like this woman, one of the few medics at any level who seems genuinely concerned not just with some indefinite “patient welfare,” but with treating the patient as an individual human being. Great fun to joke with while she was prying my scalp loose. 

*   *   *   *

Ad slogan for the Bob Hope’s invention of a water-filled bra:

“Tanks… for the mammaries”

During our Old Farts Tuesday discount run for groceries in Dushore, we bought a Chicken Thigh Family pack.

Wow! I thought I’d never get to meet the Chicken Thigh Family. Makes me feel like a dumb cluck.

*   *   *   *

We’ve been trying to get Lexie, our recently acquired German shepherd, to stop barking incessantly whenever… anything happens. Looking at training videos on YouTube, it turns out that dog training is really dog-owner training – “experts” telling you how to realign your mindset and objectives so that the dog will think it’s worth listening to you. [Or that you uncover your inner dog.]

My favorite example is a brutally obnoxious sod who starts off telling us in so many words that he knows everything worthwhile about how to train a dog and make you happy. Which turns out to be treating the dog like a military recruit who will never have the gumption to even consider barking back.

My owner-response to Sir Expert:

Go fuck a cactus.

*   *   *   *

Every one of you in rumination land should take the time to read this marvelous tale of a poor Brazilian boy who has lost his beloved flightless bird:

Gone, a Rhea

*   *   *   *

I’ve always been puzzled by the country blues standard, “Sitting on Top of the World.” Your girl’s done left you, “but I’m not worried, I’m sitting on top of the world.” Now, I’d be worried, or at least fucking miserable, so what’s going on here?

Looking up the song’s history, it turns out it was composed and recorded in 1930 by Walter Vinson and Lonnie Chatmon of the Mississippi Sheiks, a Black country band, after playing at a white dance in Greenwood, Mississippi.

So, a few months after the stock market crash of 1929, what might a Southern Black have been feeling? Maybe a bit of payback at watching white America in the same situation as “free” Black America had been for the past half-plus century.

“Sitting on top of the world.”

*   *   *   *

Mindless Generic Responses That Drive Me Batshit, #27:

“an abundance of caution”

A phrase suggesting an over-arching expenditure of time and effort given to investigation, following a negative incident, that anyone with half a functioning mind would expect the investigator to undertake as a matter of course.

Suggested alternatives: “a bum dance of caution,” or, for a bit more alliteration, “a cornucopia of caution”, “a cavalcade of caution”, a “concatenation of caution”.

Or, honesty, “a blessing of soundbite”.

*   *   *   *

I finished re-reading Theodore Sturgeon’s More Than Human for the first time since it came out in 1953, and it remains an amazing work, every bit as good as I remembered it. He was probably my favorite author of SF/fantasy at the time; the remarkable twists to his short stories and novels have never left me. So I decided to read up on his life.

He was born on Staten Island in NYC with the underwhelming name of Edward Hamilton Waldo. When his mother remarried to a man named Sturgeon, our would-be author adopted the stepfather’s last name.

Well, wouldn’t you?

But here’s the detail really grabbed me: During his early teens, probably around 1932, Sturgeon’s stepfather taught Romance languages at Drexel Institute in Philly, and the family moved into “a small apartment on 34th St.”

Wherever that house exactly stood, it’s probably long gone, considering Penn and Drexel’s decades of rapacious expansion. But I can’t help wondering… could it have been in Powelton Village, where I lived for over 50 years, maybe even around the corner from my last home there, 3311 Baring St., where I met Linda? Umm, not likely.

And who would have thought that Drexel, at the time known almost solely for engineering, had a Romance languages department? That’s nothing against engineers. My big brother Rod was a chemical engineer, and he was romantic as all hell – in his own non-obvious way. 

*   *   *   *

To end with, a weed-whacker’s lullaby:

Amazing grass, how sweet the scent

It blows me out of my gourd,

I once was low, but now am high,

I’m bombed, and I’m not bored.

How many people actually want coleslaw and a pickle served with a simple restaurant sandwich? How did this ever get started? And did it erupt at the same time as the now universal waitress refrain, “Let me get this out of you way,” intoned as she collects your plate, right before asking if you want dessert?

*   *   *   *

Something got me started wondering what has become of the Philadelphia’s most renowned foods in recent decades. [It may be hard for some of you to envision Philly as being associated with native food, but several mainstays come to mind.]

Of course, the Philly cheesesteak has become pretty much universal across the country at this point, but I can’t understand why it took as long as it did. I grew up when hot dogs, which never interested me, were the bedrock American fare, which slowly became replaced by overcooked, flavorless hamburgers. But the cheesesteak, arising from South Philly, is a monument to simple, inspired preparation that can be served in a little over 30 seconds.

As for the others….

Over the past 10 to 15 years, Tastykake has spread wide, again taking longer than it should to push that Hostess crap off the end shelf and onto the floor.

What’s its background? 

Tastykake was founded in 1913 by a couple guys who had moved moved from Pittsburg. Its headquarters were on Hunting Park Ave. in the lower Northeast sector of the city, in the area called Nicetown, if I rightly recall, so named for the Nice Ball Bearing factory there.

I was surprised to find in my search that by 1954 Tastykakes were already available in parts of 9 states. Their Butterscotch Krimpets, of course, are the king of all frosted snacks. They’re still produced in Philly, but strangely enough down at the Philadelphia Navy Yard.

Breyers Ice Cream was founded in Philadelphia in1866 by William A. Breyer – the oldest manufacturer of ice cream in the United States. The company expanded to a wholesale manufacturing plant in 1896 and was bought by the Sealtest milk company in 1926.

Our family had Sealtest milk delivered to our door in the late 1940s, and the Philly headquarters were down along the Schuylkill River near South St. Breyers and Sealtest were sharked up by the food conglomerate Unilever and Breyers been produced in Englewood Cliffs, NJ since 1993. Unilever closed the last Breyers plant in Philadelphia in 1995.

Scrapple… to be honest, while some people swear by scrapple, far more swear at it. A Pennsylvania Dutch mix of pork oddments and various cereal grains, it is formed into small bricks, each wrapped in greased paper. It’s usually served at breakfast, sliced into slabs and fried. 

Growing up, I hated ketchup. Scrapple was the only nominal food item placed before me that I would slather with ketchup because the one food on earth worse that ketchup was scrapple – no wait, the real worst was, and remains, Necco Wafers, a candy produced by Lucifer to win a bet.

At any rate, the leading scrapple brand was, and I think still is, Habbersett, founded in 1863 in Middletown, Delaware County, outside Philly. It has passed through many family generations [and complaining intestines]. Since 1988, it’s been deliberately made in Bridgeville, Delaware, by Jones Dairy Farm of Wisconsin.

An old friend, Marshall Ledger, wrote a detailed Sunday-magazine article on scrapple production over 40 years ago; my kids’ 6^th-grade teacher at Miquon School, Lynn Hughes, referred to scrapple as “pig miscellany.”

Lastly, I come to Philadelphia Cream Cheese, which I discovered in researching was never a product of Philadelphia at all. It was created in 1872 by William Lawrence, a dairyman from Chester, New York, as a sort of accidental milk by-product. He didn’t know what to call it, but because the Pennsylvania Dutch farmers around Philly had a reputation for creamier cheese, he decided to market it as “Philadelphia Cream Cheese” in 1880. Later it was absorbed by Kraft and is currently owned by Kraft Heinz, which is, I believe, like every other food product, an arm or perhaps toenail of Warren Buffett.

*   *   *   *

Song of the Week

[to the tune of “I’m back in the saddle again”]

I’m ballin’ the cattle again

Ballin’ the cattle again

Yippee ti yi yay,

Not one will get away,

When I’m ballin’ the cattle again

*   *   *   *

A couple days ago, I suddenly realized that Rump has now assumed a Kaiser role. Tasty.

[The third part of Jenny’s narrative, introducing Reb. But first, a brief note.}

“Harvard Fires Star Business Professor for Faking Her Findings on Honesty”

Is this a great world or what?

*   *   *   *

Along Market Street, on the edge of gloaming, the expletives of traffic race behind and past her, filling her ears with mechanical mutter. Near City Hall, Market Street’s lanes have been narrowed, shoved aside for some massive underground construction in a deep – chasmly deep – channel with a scattering of trash along the bottom.

What’s down there? She should know, but she bypasses the local news. She knows that when things happen in Philly they often vanish without a trace.

She reaches 8th Street, once the busiest commercial intersection in the United States, a devil’s crossroad where three behemothic department stores clashed swords. One has morphed into boutiquy iterations of the 19th century, retaining its fused iron store fronts. One remains, a bought-over remnant of its former self. One is a hole in the ground surrounded by parking lots, planned as a mini-Disneyland before Mickey said “No.”

Jenny is aware of the corner’s commercial past because it is part of history. She is aware of more history than most people believe exists. At the corner she hears screams for help: sonic ghosts, the choked voices of dead commerce. She closes her mental ears and pops spicy Indian snacks into her mouth, one by one or a few at a time. To herself she sings

If I were a carpenter

and you were a plumber

would you marry me anyway

would you be my kids’ mummer?

Another of her compulsive parodies – musical Tourettes.

A SEPTA transit bus rounds the opposite corner too tightly and clips a bollard, shearing off the passenger-side front wheel as cleanly as a knife through holiday frosting. The bus swings, hesitates, leaps the curb, halts, embarrassed. The passengers exit slowly, gesticulating without apparent rancor. Another absurdity in the growing chaos around Jenny. The whole world is fucked the fuck up. She tenses, waiting… for the scene to make a comment, assign blame.

It doesn’t this time, but the wracked tightness in her shoulders won’t give way.

Behind her, a Black man with a massive beard holds high a book – the Bible, the New Testament – and rants like a vacuum cleaner with a clogged hose. His voice rises, ratchets, fibrillates, hangs. 

She walks back west along Market St., then down into the dank concourse beneath 15th St., past its decaying post-trendy shops. Near the subway entrance three short, swarthy musicians in fringed Andean castoffs, two men and a woman, play the Pan pipes, guitar and hand drum that the Incas thumped and tooted while sacrificing children. The concrete floor responds with haves of appreciation in time to a lost land devoured by Spanish gilded lust, undulations absorbed by the Market St. subway as it rumbles down the line.

The musical trio push to sound spirited, but theirs is a tired spirit that would prefer to curl up in a doorway and be left alone. But Jenny stops to listen; you don’t often hear tuneful South American history fighting the echo of a subway. Their sign says “CD $5.” She buys a CD, shoves it into the back pocket of her jeans and stands outside the fence of the subway platform. She wraps her hands around the upright iron bars, a monkey on display. Here, without paying a fare, she can watch the people waiting for transportation or revelation, imbibe the screech of trains that make as much or as little sense as music displaced hundreds of years, thousands of miles.

Twirling mirrored balls spray torrents of colored light. She thought they’d flickered out with disco. Or is it back again? John Travolta slowed down for Pulp Fiction, a 78 dancing at 33 1-3, but maybe just because he was an old man.

On her fourth vodka martini, a side-slide from her Wild Turkey standard,she shambles onto the dance floor, tries to go fluid, but springs a leak. Dancing for Jenny is nearly always a mistake, one she makes only when blindly potted. The lights – or her eyes – are swirling too fast. No one dances with her but she is not dancing alone. She is part of the communal isolation, the sea of vacantly reduced inhibition. Turning slower than the music, then faster, out of time, out of space but not out of alcohol, she careens into a tall form in a wide-brimmed hat. 

“Scuse,” she hiccups.

“S’alright.”

“Gesuntheit.”

“Comes out loose.”

She blinks in owlish confusion, then bellows comprehension. Christ, I’m a fuckin idiot, but her idiocy bellows louder, leaning against a table, lurching it into its inebriated guests who alternately josh and whine disapproval, unaware of the difference.

“Zas funny,” her vocal cords skewed.

“Why don’t we, um, sit down?” asks the hat.

“Why doan we?” 

They sit.

“Ya know, today, tonight, I brought, I bought a CD of some Souf ‘merican shit. Ya know, the mountain thing with the pipes?”

“Plumbing music?”

Jenny explodes again. Under the giddy warmth, this demon of moron humor assaults her nerves. “It’s, it’s…. see,” she lines up the table cutlery so the tops descend in steps, Pan pipettes, “they go like this, diff’rent newts. Notes? Uh…”

“I get it.”

“Good.”

The hand of the hat reaches across the table. No face in the brim’s fuzzy shadow. “You want to, um, do something?”

“I’m dune somethin. Gettin drunk. Tha’s dune somethin.”

“I meant something else.”

“So… what’s else? Where?”

“My place.”

“You got a place? S’good t’have a place. More people should have a place.”

“Come on. Let’s go.”

“Pfoof. Done wanna go. Wanna stay an get drunk, drunker.”

“C’mon.” The hand grasps her wrist and pulls.

“Say.” Her wrist resists.

“C’mon.”

“I done wanna c’mon. Wanna stay here.”

“There’s a nice bed at my place, nice soft bed, soft music, soft pillows, more wine.”

“Martini.”

“Martinis. Whatever you want.”

“Wanna stay here.”

The hand yanks harder. Jenny lumbers half upright and leans across the table.

“I wanted suck yer cock I’d fuckin get up an crawl over table an suck yer cock. But I done wanna suck yer cock. I wanna finish my drink, get nother drink, finish that, maybe nother, an you try stop me I fuckin RIP YOUR BALLS OFF,” a blast that breaks through the pulsating house-beat rhythm.

“Shit.”

“Yeah, shit eat shit drink piss climb a pole an fuck a monkey mister fuckin hat fuck a goddam fuckin monkey,” as she slams back into her seat.

The hat departs.

Is it worms in your meal, Mona Lisa,

Or is it something else that makes you fart?

“Pissant sometime little fucker. Fokker. Airplane.”

Her head slumps toward her arms on the table but misses, whacking her forehead. Something about skateboards. Skateboards? What? She blinks upright. In an instant the wooze is gone and she sees herself in a crystal internal mirror. “Holy fucking Christ, lookit me. There’s no fucking excuse. There is none.” Upright, staring straight ahead, she cries great crocodile tears.

“Can’t be that bad,” says the voice of the man who sits across, where the hat had sat. This one wears no hat, only a tightly curled ginger mass of hair tying into itself like a Brillo pad.

“Can be. Is. Where you come from?” 

“Moseying.”

“‘Can’t be that bad,’ that’s a lousy, shitful pickup line. Watchin movies.”

“Name the movie.”

She can’t. It makes her hiccup.

“You were singing, what was that?”

“Sing ta myself. Don’t sing you, don’t sing t’nobody else.”

“Forget it.”

“Hey.”

“Hey?”

“You lettin that go, not sayin ‘What the fuck?’”

“No.”

They sit together, no talk, then,

“Let me get you another drink.”

Jenny snickers. “You got hands, you could do that. Don’t wanna drink. Yet. I want… f’I fuckin knew what I wanted, I wooden be here drunk, gettin smashed,” the loose shaggle of drink taking hold again.

 “Why are you getting smashed?”

Jenny thinks about it. “Because… don’t want to get anything else. It’s, uh, kinda negative thing, what’s left over ’cause there’s nothin else, good way be angry bout everything. It all shits. Maybe lesser of two weevils. Know that joke?”

“No.”

“Yeah, can’t remember. It’s a joke.” She looks at the almost empty martini glass. “No more.”

“I think you’re interesting.”

“Lines gettin worse. ‘What’s my sign?’”

“Stop.”

“Stop what?”

“Stop sign.”

Jenny relaxes a little because for now it’s all right. Not forever. “We gonna fuck your place or mine?”

On the way to her place, Reb (that’s his moniker) holds her arm as she slews and totters.

“Don’t you think th’universe should be a better place?” she asks, shaking his arm for emphasis.

“Isn’t it?”

“Isn’t it what?”

“Better?”

Jenny pulls herself loose, almost into the gutter. “You dunno fuckin logic.”

“Well…”

“’F’I ask, ‘Don’t you think…’ wha wassit I ast?”

“Don’t you think the universe should be a better place.”

“’F’I ast that, it means, shoont it be better than it is, right?”

“OK.”

“An you say, ‘Isn’t it’ means isn’t it already better’n it is.”

“Well…”

She latches onto his arm again, “Bertie Russell, Sir Bertrand Russell, philosopher – know him? – s’OK, he’s dead, he had a yacht – thas the story – had a yacht and prob’ly he did, he was a sir, lord, had the yacht and invited friend over, ‘C’mon over, Cedric, see m’yacht.’ Cedric says, ‘OK,’ they get there, atta yacht, Cedric says, ‘Lawd Ruzzell, I thought your yacht was bigger than it is,’ an Bertie says –”

“‘It’s not… bigger than it is.’”

Jenny whoops. “Yuv heard it. Woowee.”

“I just got into it, what you were getting at. That logic.”

“I tole it right? Prob’ly never happened, erpin legend, see, but thas how Bertie would’ve said it, f he did.”

“You told it just right.” 

“You don’t read Bertie Russell. What kinda crap you read?”

“The news, online. Sci fi, like that.”

“You should read Dostoevsky. Everybody should read Dostoevsky, ’specially you.”

“Why especially me?”

“’Sobvious.”

Half a block ahead, a man nearly as drunk as Jenny lurches into the crosswalk against a red light. A small, smug white car bears down, full speed, headed for mayhem, swerves, missing him by centimeters. The man stops, wobbles, walks on.

Jenny squints through the alcoholic fog. “Dint hit him. Ain’t that somethin? Huh. Shoulda hit him, like evthing else when I’m ’round.”

They stand at the foot of the steps to her place.

“You comin up?”

“Sure.”

“No.”

“But we’re –”

“No. Done wanna fuck tonight. My cunt wooden work. Go ‘way.”

Reb looks stricken, his intertwined hair threatening to unimpact. “Damn it to hell.”

“Can’t curse for shit either.”

Reb is half a block gone when Jenny’s key finally agrees to find its lock.

She lives half a block south of Chestnut St. on 21st, in a seldom tidy apartment on the second floor of a rowhouse fronted with rectangular whitish stone. Philadelphia boasts more rowhouses per capita than any other U.S. city (she read that). A sad asphalted area runs from her house to the corner, a one-car-deep parking lot topped by a massive billboard for a legendary antediluvian radio DJ. The remaining houses look lost or disgruntled. How different might the row look if it still extended to the corner? Did it ever?

Jenny wrestles herself out of her t-shirt, opens the shower stall and sticks her head under the muted torrent of cold water. It smashes directly into her brain, driving the alcohol from her neurons with efficient belligerence. 

She towels her hair and stares into the mirror. “Nobody.”

She hits the speed dial on her phone without looking. It holds only one number.

An answering machine picks up on the sixth ring. 

“This is Rachel Ann Melrose, chief assistant to the assistant chief district attorney of the city of Philadelphia. This is also the coolest Black chick you’re likely to meet in your sorry life. Whichever one you’re calling, I’ll answer if I’m in the mood. Or you can make it easy and just shout a message.”

The beep sounds. “You’re going to get your sorry paralegal ass in a sling with that stuff, chocolate chicklet. Crap, did I get blasted tonight. You think I’m an alcoholic? I think I’m an alcoholic. Reb knows I’m an alcoholic. You don’t know Reb. It’s hard to juggle half a conversation and talk like a human being. Be even harder to talk like a pangolin or a pineapple, huh? Two pineapples trading the latest: ‘I got canned.’ ‘I’m King of the Juice.’ I said some funny stuff when I was drunk, wonder what it was. Know why I’m angry? Pissed? When I’m not making funnies? Cuz a mind like mine could have done so much in the world –  could do stuff in the world still – but it got taken away. Still getting taken away, bits and pieces, more took alla time. Taken. Thanks for listening. You do, huh? Listen? Gonna take aspirin, many, many aspirin.” 

Jenny hangs up and looks at a blank spot on the wall.

[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?

…upon the slithering approach of my 86^th birthday

I discovered something interesting about invasive plants over the last week. Apparently, Europe gave us dandelions. In return, we gave them ragweed.

The get-outta-the-way, reckless abandon with which dandelions grow, I’d always assumed they were native. But though they were established in Asia and Europe, they hadn’t made their way across the Atlantic until the western Europeans nations introduced them, along with slavery and capitalism.

In recent decades, ragweed has spread from the U.S. along the coastal areas of Europe, from Norway to Portugal, bringing hay fever to places that hadn’t previously experienced its joys. 

(A couple hundred years ago we also sent over democracy, but we now regret our intrusive error and are intent on removing its stain as rapidly as possible.)

*   *   *   *

Waiting for an electric bill, a request to support a candidate you never heard of, or a physical letter from someone you love? Better pick it up soon. Here’s the latest on Sump Pump’s hopes to destroy the USPS:

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2025/apr/24/usps-workers-sound-alarm-over-trump-efforts-to-dismantle-service-the-hounds-are-at-the-door

*   *   *   *

Here’s part of why I place what little trust I have these days in the country’s young women:

“While Church membership has been in steady decline, Gen Z women are leaving church at a faster rate than men, according to a 2023 survey conducted by the Survey Center on American Life at the American Enterprise Institute.” 

So, if there’s any hope for the country – and that’s definitely debatable – I’d place it in the enlightened competence of the next couple generations of women.

Yeah, there are many crappy women that you could point to – and most of them seem to gravitate to Congress – but they are so wildly outnumbered by crappy men.

I think a lot of it has to do with humans being mammals. Male mammals of most species are shitheads, especially where their treatment of female mammals is concerned. Once again: a paean to evolution and “intelligent design.”

I think part of my belief in women comes from my mother, who was the force in our family. But first I have to note that both my elder brothers hated her with a remarkable passion. I don’t know what went on in their youth – they were 12 and 14 years older than me – but when I came around, she gave me open support and encouragement as a writer and as a blindered, always-first-in-my-class intellectual. It was a mixed blessing, yes, but I think she did form [skew?] my outlook on women as leaders.

I’ve been particularly taken with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a young, charismatic ass-kicker in Congress. Do I think she have the chops to be the next President? That’s asking a lot, and I don’t have any fact-based answer. But though she was one of the youngest Congresspersons ever, she turned 35 this year – the constitutional age requirement for becoming chief of state. (And my dog would make a more able and intelligent leader than Lump.)

I’ve never gotten into campaigning, but I’d love to start a group called “Old Farts for AOC.” 

*   *   *   *

 Our beloved VP, “Just Die” Vance, has been sent to India to visit its prime minister, following a rewarding weekend with the Pope. Watch out, Mr. Modi!

*   *   *   *

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth must be one of the dumbest critters ever to stand upright. Just look at any given picture of the man, with that empty squinch of “I’m trying really hard to think.”

But at least he does help reinforce Chump’s superb ability to hire guys even stupider than he is to serve as his inferiors. And it’s good for a president to have at least one solid ability. 

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PA governor Josh Shapiro this week escaped a weird arson attack on his home. Not quite sure what his attacker thought he could pull off, but he planned to take along a hammer to bash Josh’s brains in (if he didn’t fry him first).

The up side: Now Shapiro can run for President behind thumping beat of the Talking Heads’ “Burnin’ Down the House.”

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The continuing push by Musk and others to terraform Mars for human expansion strikes me as a destructive insult to the solar system. Just because we can do something doesn’t mean we should.

There’s no upside in this for the human race – or for the other not-very-inhabitable spheres – seeing as how we’ve turned our home planet into a giant dog turd.

Most of this space travel rah-rah originated from a childish love of science fiction and an innate wish for folk and fairy tales to reflect some alternate view of reality – a longing for wish fulfillment that has nothing to do with actual reality.

Why should we have any hope of improving reality? Look at the world today and it should be obvious… though, on the other hand, why not let it all go down the tubes?

We don’t even have to visit the Moon to achieve that.

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I’m Poopass the sailor man,

I shit in a garbage can.

I took off the lid

And I’m glad that I did,

I’m Poopass the sailor man.