[This is a snip from the novel I’m working on. It has nothing to do with the plot, which is one of the reasons I really like it. Jenny is talking to Filt. No time to explain Filt here.]

Jenny looks up, gazing at a far picture playing on a far screen “After Penn, I spent a couple months in Canada, up along the Alberta-British Columbia border, a string of national parks, Banff and Jasper and this one –Yoho.”

“Funny name of anything, ‘cept a candy bar.”

“Indian. I suppose. Anyway, I knew there was a waterfall up there, read about it, Takakaw Falls. Way up the road, gravel road. I could hear it. It’s this low… not a rumble, an undercurrent you pick up and then it gets louder, walking up this gravel road with my backpack. I was hungry, but I hear or I feel the waterfall and I just want to see it. You know? The road ends and there it is –not right there, but a trail going off to 900 feet of water dropping straight down in a strip. One of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen.”

“Bigger than the one in California?”

“Yosemite? Naw, not that high or wide. But Yosemite doesn’t have water part of most years. This was… August? I think August, so Takakaw was thin, but the thinness made it look higher. Like it was up to heaven, if there was a heaven.”

“You don’t think there’s heaven?”

“I don’t so think. I wouldn’t like it anyway.”

“Why not?”

“Fucking angles playing crappy music. You wanta hear about the falls?”

“Sure.”

She leans forward, the old image coming clearer. “It never got real loud, maybe the sound just drifts sideways? And the water – it came down all those hundreds of feet and it was gentle. I went right up to it, stood under the spray – one of those wilderness areas, no dumb concession stands, no parking lot. No people. You’d think there’d be tourists in August? Just me and the water coming down form near the sky. Goddamn. That’s freedom, guy, you and 900 feet of dropping water.”

“That’s it? A lot of water?”

“I’m standing in the spray, facing back down the path, and I turn around, and right from behind the fall, the main drop of water, a tiny figure walks out. Then another and another and another. Kobolds or pixies or… whatthehell? Elementals. First it was, holy shit I think my body wanted me to be scared, but I wasn’t. They moved along, stepped to the side of the falls, the water, and looked at me – not staring, more like I was something they wanted to figure out. The way I was looking at them, I guess. The leader, the one that came out first, hunched up in a yellow poncho, he bowed.” Jenny stands and demonstrates, a simple tilt. “I waved. The… whatever he was bowed again. Then they all linked hands in a circle and started dancing. You know what I thought? I actually thought I was dreaming, some kind of earth figures sprung from a cavern of the mists. Such things aren’t real. Except I’d planned the trip, come up the road, part of the plan, so I must be awake. And I’ve anyway never dreamed with that much clarity, the detail and… sparkle, feel the heat and scatter of water whipping across my shoulders, doesn’t happen in dreams.”

Jenny doesn’t hear Filt at first, old visions filling all the receptor space in her head.

“Hey – so they disappear, float off like, into the sky? What? What happened?”

Jenny starts to snigger. “They stopped dancing, came around front, where I was, introduced themselves, shook my hand. They’re a circus troupe, on their way to Moosejaw, left their car down the road – I remembered seeing it, wondering, funny, nobody around – they’d gone behind the falls when they saw me on the trail. They liked to do that, goof on people. They were a hell of a good bunch, dwarves, like I’d thought at first, but professional dwarves doing their job. Gave me a ride afterwards and told me about the circus, not any Ringling, but kept them alive and on their toes.”

*   *   *   *

This may not be a subject that gets most people’s juices flowing, but I’m continually fascinated by the fundamentals of particle physics.

Thomas Hertog’s On the Origin of Time is the most lucid explanation of the Standard Model of physics I’ve read, and he manages to do it in just a few paragraphs. I have no background in higher math, and am not about to try to glom one this late in life. [I still have to get the laundry done.] 

Almost any non-mathematical discussion of the Standard Model cavalierly bumbles through a single aspect of the theory, which, for such a fundamental and complex subject, always leaves me hanging – what the hell is this actually about? Here, we get the whole log, not just a pickled pig’s foot.

Hertog even has me almost understanding the Higgs field, which I thought wasn’t possible [that’s the field involving the Higgs Boson, identified a few years back at the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva].

This is an altogether excellent book, mostly about Hertog’s association with Stephen Hawking during Hawking’s final years, and Hawking’s revision of his own theories of time. 

*   *   *   *

Trying to gain more info about my chronic lower back pain, I discovered that I might well be suffering from – among other things – lumbosacral radiculopathy.

Well, that doesn’t surprise me in the least. Probably comes from watching too many Looney Tunes cartoons.

*   *   *   *

People do not have values or outlooks because they are Dem or Repub, they become Dem or Repub because of their values or outlooks—a somewhat different way of viewing the political system and its varied supporters. 

*   *   *   *

I understand how a person can be termed legally blind. But if I’m put in charge of a government department I have no competence to understand, can I be proved illegally blind?

I don’t personally know another non-musician who’s affected by music quite the way I am. Each piece – not just each symphony or song, but sometimes each word or note, can have a specific inherent context for me; playing it at the wrong time or in the wrong context can be ruinous. Yet accidentally tripping over the perfect time and setting brings on something close to ecstasy.

It wasn’t always this way. Growing up, after hating big bands and most ’40s pop, I disliked much of ’50s rock, preferring simpy ballads like Debbie Reynolds’ “Tammy.” I had no interest in classical music.

If there was a signal moment that changed my approach to and understanding of music, it was sitting in a friend’s apartment during my sophomore year at Penn and being introduced to Bach’s Brandenburg Concerti. What, this is classical music? – this bubbling, rampage coming straight from the soul?

Within days I was scouring record bins and picking up armloads of cheap classical albums, of which there were, then, plenty: Vox boxes, Nonesuch, Mace, Westminster, Richmond (the bottom-feeder pressings of Angel or Columbia, not sure which) and the Connoisseur Society. They put out classical and pre-classical albums for a buck, tucked into the back bins at a slim Chestnut St. record shop. 

I  also took a course at Penn on the history of Western music that introduced me to a sonic background I’d known nothing about. I loved it all – medieval, Renaissance, Baroque. I started my buying with the Baroque and spread out in both directions, up and down the centuries.

When I had enough cash to splurge, I’d get Heifetz playing Beethoven’s violin concerto on RCA (I left my first copy on my amp and it melted over the edge like a Dali watch; my housemates and I may have been the first people alive to play frisbee with Beethoven’s violin concerto) or Pablo Casals bowing Bach’s solo cello works.

Later, I’ve wondered why I dislike opera and most romantic classical. I think it’s because this music is designed to provoke images, and I almost never put pictures to music. For me, music, even vocal, is pure sound – 90% of music videos piss me off. 

Through lack of physical rhythm and small-muscle control, I’ve never been able to play an instrument. After college I bought a guitar, a banjo, a recorder, a harmonica, an African drum – and could make no sound remotely musical arise from any of them. I can sing after a fashion but don’t bother anyone with it; it’s not good enough to satisfy me.

I can’t read music, can’t grasp the idea of keys, of minors and majors, have never read or considered music theory. I can’t play even the simplest of instruments, like the recorder, because the impetus won’t translate from my mind to my fingers. Instead, while listening, each succession of notes, each word in a song’s lyrics, each interaction of instrument and voice elicits a specific welling of recognition – or a sharp rebuke aimed at the poorly conjoined.

I seldom use music as “background” because I can’t ignore it. When I put on something I love, I listen to every note. I can seldom read a book with music going (except “ambient” nonsense like Brian Eno’s early “ambient wallpaper”) because the music overwhelms the print. Sound that I dislike strike me like a personal offense – it should not be.

I sang in the choir in Catholic grade school – a rare pleasant escape there. I came to love Gregorian Chant, the purest melody ever constructed. Singing the midnight Christmas mass was magnificent. I loved the music, the pageantry, the smell of the incense, the sense of resonating place. I didn’t care what the Mass itself meant.

I watched nearly every folk act of the early ’60s. I saw Bob Dylan perform for about 200 people at the Ethical Society in Philadelphia before he’d recorded – a skinny 18-year-old with a mass of curls, looking as unfinished as an unlaced shoe. 

The Second Fret, a coffee house off Rittenhouse Square, run by Manny Rubin, was part of the East Coast folk circuit. There I heard Rev. Gary Davis, the Greenbriar Boys, Sonny Terry, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott (blind drunk as usual), Mark Spoelstra, Lightnin’ Hopkins, Jean Redpath, John Hurt, Judy Roderick, Jim Kweskin, Geoff Muldaur, and a couple dozen others. 

Elsewhere, I saw Doc Watson, the New Lost City Ramblers, Martin Carthy, Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger, Odetta, etc., etc. Never did see Joan Baez in person, just wept over her albums (these days I find her early work forced).

At a record shop in New York you could pick up seconds of Folkways albums for 94 cents. Each disc had a little hole punched through the label and came with only a paper liner, no dust jacket. One international sampler included a cut of Eskimo water drums, the funniest sound ever produced by human effort. I’d lie on the floor, convulsed in gasps. That album’s long gone and I can’t find even a reference to that particular cut’s existence, even among the Smithsonian’s supposed complete Folkways collection.

Along with my aversion to opera (except Monteverdi) and most romantic (except Brahms’ first symphony, Mahler’s second, St. Saens’ third, and Franck’s only), I generally can’t listen to rap, Broadway, most ’70s rock and, for reasons that mystify me, Latin (except extreme samba school). Pop from almost every era interests me about as much as a melted Creamsicle. As for jazz, most diverts for a few minutes, though I get a charge from pianists like Mose Allison, Ramsay Lewis and, particularly, my (deceased) high school classmate “Father” John D’Amico.

I like specific pieces from almost every other musical tradition, especially those nearest the wavering edge: classical and poplar Indian; east, west and south African; Japanese; punk; the minimalists; Middle Eastern; Scandinavian; Inuit; Tuvan; satire (oh yes); Australian; early rock; gospel; and outfits like the Cocteau Twins that can’t be classified. 

Jim Knipfel introduced me to a range of ’70s-’80s cult or under-the-radar outfits like the Residents and Killdozer – the one band that always makes me bellow with laughter, no matter how sour my mood.

My major vacancy is the inability to share my response, the personal meaning that music has for me. If I put on a CD with a guest at hand and they start talking…

If you like it, shut up and listen.

If you don’t, ask me to turn it off.

Headline: “What is the meaning of life? 15 possible answers…”
C’mon. Isn’t it obvious that life has no meaning? It just is.
Live it.

• * * *
  Linda and I went to a concert of the Williamsport Orchestra last week, the first classical-music outing we’ve attended in several years. I’m not sure why I was keen to go, since the program was all dance-related pieces, which don’t, in general, attract me. But the closer was Ravel’s “Bolero,” a big whiz-bang-whoopee of a piece, always fun.
  Also, the Williamsport conductor is Gerardo Edelstein, who has done terrific work in the past, especially with Mahler’s Resurrection Symphony.
  The first half was mostly Borodin and Brahms dances, bouncy enough and familiar. The second half included some Johann Strauss waltzes. Strauss has always struck me as elevator music composed before there were elevators.
  A women’s dance group spun to the Bolero and other pieces in massive, elaborate costumes, but with what Linda and I felt was a lack of underlying spirit. Most of the audience seemed to love them.
  But the highlight for us was the opening performance after intermission, selections from “Swan Lake” conducted by Rebekah O’Brien. This may have been the first time I’ve actively enjoyed anything by Tchaikovsky, and it was because O’Brien, through her soaring conducting, became the music. I’ve never before seen anyone so completely embody the rich, unfolding sound she was drawing from the whole orchestra.
  Bravo to the nth power.
• * * *
  Have you noticed that whenever hydrogen sulfide is mentioned, its odor is always compared to that of rotten eggs? In these days of overpriced eggs nestled quietly in their cartons, which of us has smelled a rotten egg in our lives, unless we work on a chicken farm?
• * * *
  Another old-guy throwback: When I was growing up, Lipton’s tea ads credited its supposedly glorious flavor to its “tiny little tea leaves.”
  Years later, I visited a tea shop in Bala, a Philly suburb. The owner had an immense tea-taster’s table – a massive round of wood with an outer rim that revolved, so each taster could pick up the next cup presented, after they had tasted the current sample and spit it out, so as to avoid conflating the flavors.
  What he also told me proved enlightening as to the quality of American tea. Lipton’s, Tetley and our similar bagged swill is tea that is not even bid on at the European auctions. In other words, it’s exactly what it tastes like – floor sweepings.
• * * *
  I’ve come up with a weird way to clear the waking depression that floods my head many mornings. It doesn’t work every time, but often enough to be helpful.
  I find that I can overwrite the negative thought-assault by closing my eyes and allowing a splatter of random images to race across my eyelids. Where do these images come from, and why? No idea.
  Sometimes they appear as a ticker-tape rattle of printed words in boldface type, like isolated bits of headline or caption. They flash by so rapidly that it’s hard to tell how many are even complete words.
  Good god, do they indicate that my brain stores every read image that I’ve encountered in the last week? If so, why is it wasting it’s time with such semi-literate hooey? Maybe to keep it handy for exercises like this?
• * * *
  Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston is one of the top 2 or 3 research hospitals in the country. But where did that name come from – a health-care merger? As it stands, it reads like celebration some mahoff named Brigham, with a bunch of women tossed in as a quick sop.
• * * *
  Did you hear about the guy who was madly looking to buy a new fedora? But when a hat was placed on the counter, he shouted, “Bah, homburg!”
• * * *
  Despite the monumental blunder of he US intelligence and military leaders releasing top-secret info to the entire world, it does reflect one major success that our fearless leader Chump can point to.
  After what must have been an especially grueling search over many months, he actually did manage to assemble a group of underlings who are even dumber than he is!
  Would you have thought that possible? Me either, but he persevered.
  The only remaining question is how one of them, national suckurity devisor Mike Waltz, was able to add the editor of Atlantic magazine to the listeners. Did he suggest, “Hey, we need a Jew on here, there’s this guy Goldberg, whoever he is, has to be a Jew, huh? Let’s toss him in.”
• * * *
  To change the country’s mindset, we need to target the individual voters, not our political “leaders.” Once again, Lump has triumphed. He’s destroying the lives of every one of his voters. Way to go.
• * * *
  What our poor hemlock trees have to deal with up here. First of all, they are beset by the hemlock woolly adelgid. “This tiny aphid-like insect attaches itself to the base of hemlock needles and inserts specialized mouthparts to feed on the tree’s stored starches. Covered in a protective white, woolly wax that resembles cotton balls, a single adelgid can lay up to 300 eggs. The insects gradually drain the tree’s energy reserves, causing needle loss, branch dieback, and eventual death within four to 10 years.”
  Poor bastards. And this is just one of 3 diseases out to get the tree species that covers more than half our local forest.
  But wait! 300 eggs? Get these guys turning out product in our grocery stores.

[A story]

Murky Gervaise, a short guy with straggly whiskers and pouchy eyes, worked for a porn monthly called Beaver Damn! Each issue featured pictures of nude women, often in groups of three, involved in athletic sex, along with a couple stories that relied on four or five verbs and a satchel-load of repetitive adjectives.

What made Beaver Damn! distinctive was that every photo or story had to include an image of a plant or wood in some form. A girl might, for example, be stroking a sapling or making cellulose eyes at a redwood, and there was much possibility for perversity involving twigs and blossoms.

Murky’s job was to check each feature for botanical accuracy. The editor, Chesley Frazier, had a policy that no two pictures or stories in any issue should contain the same species of tree or shrub, nor should there be a preponderance of sawn lumber over standing timber or flowering bulbs.

Over the years, Murky became an expert on birch, beech, poplar and hemlock, on poke, goldenrod, nettle and jewelweed, on twig, branch, limb, trunk, stand, spinney, copse and forest, on bark and heartwood, on stamen, pistol and calix. He even mastered the arcane study of erotic dendrochronology, the determination of the age of jailbait through the counting of tree rings.

His private life, however, left him less satisfied. The women – and sometimes men – of his romantic and erotic activities had begun to assume a disquietingly impermanence for him. They appeared pulpy, squishy, like a felled log invaded by fungi. In time, they lost form altogether in his eyes, taking on the insubstantiality that a moss-mat might have for a hound-dog.

His analyst believed, mistakenly, that Murky was suffering from the repressed recollection of a childhood trauma – perhaps a grisly woodland murder – or that disciplining at the hands of his parents had featured unduly severe paddling.

As treatment progressed, Murky was subjected to hypnosis, but nothing was revealed except dark whorls and pasted-on patterns of cheap panelling. His entire past seemed a peculiar wasteland, a desert arena beset by winds carrying organic detritus. His free associations seldom left the confines of the vegetable kingdom.

When he retired following 34 years at Beaver Damn!, Murky was presented with a pocket watch made by craftsmen of the Black Forest. Its case was ebony, its gears of lignum vitae, its filigreed hands of bamboo whittled by a needle. When he rose to express his thanks, no words came, only the slow creaking of his jaw hinges, the sound of a severed ash as it begins its fall.

Following three days of catatonic rigidity, he passed away with a soft sigh. His autopsy revealed mildew, black spot, and three forms of incipient rot. He required no embalming.

I woke up one morning recently – barely awake, half in dreamland – certain that what I need to do now is ask forgiveness. Not for any specific or even general failings you might recognize, but for failing to become what I was capable of… and for realizing that this lack is the result of deliberate choice.

Overall, I’ve failed those who chose, from necessity (my family), or from perverse association (friends), to believe in me. But the person I’ve most failed is myself. I am not who I would be.

I’m sure many of you are already patting my verbal back and telling me that I’ve done my best or some such rubbishy thing. After all, I’m a Good Guy chock full of Good Intentions. But intentions are so much sludge when you know you had the wherewithal to see those intentions become reality… but chose not to.

Throughout the years I’ve been incompetent in dealing with the drudgery of daily-living. I’ve show little deep regard for most human beings, being concerned, in the end, only with myself. I have failed at some fundamental level of decency which I wanted to embrace but have never been able to define.

I’m distant by nature, as my father was distant with me. I not only didn’t know the words to explain this to my kids as they grew, but doubt I’d have felt the drive to speak them if I did. It’s taken years of slowly percolating comprehension to drag these lacunae into the limelight.

I know I’m a good enough writer to have developed a limited following beyond a few close friends – had I bothered to contact publishers or agents. But somehow the process has always left me with a sense of revulsion. Oh, perhaps I’ll be “discovered” after I’m dead, but somehow I’d like it to happen while I’m around to know it, rather than through pilgrimages to visit my corpse on the Body Farm.

My one exculpatory wheedle is that I take full responsibility for my life; I blame no one else for my lacks.

So, should I then blame myself?

That approach is generally claimed to be counter-productive, and I’ve accepted that claim in the past: Technically, I cannot blame myself, because, like everyone alive, I am an accident of evolutionary unfolding and circumstance, of DNA, of where I was born, of how and why I was raised, of the personalized anvil dropped on me from the leaden sky.

Of late I’ve come to feel that embracing self-blame could be a key part of liberation, of a clear-eyed look at… not external reality, but that internal monitor that oversees the ultimate unidentifiable: the self.

Yet accepting personal responsibility for what I could not have changed leaves me a partial cripple, with one malformed leg to stand on. So what it comes down to in the end is that I can ask forgiveness of no one. Definitely not of myself, who am far from offering it.

What I should do, instead, is try to mitigate my failure by spending these bumbling, humbling final years bringing intensity to how I meet and greet the ever-incomprehensible world, how I deal with my family, my friends – and those I don’t give a damn about.

*   *   *   *

Hastings Ave.

While I worked at the Welcomat, my Austrian friend Goetz Mayer started bringing in articles he called “Suitcase Memories,” random, unconnected recollections from over five decades of travel, delivered as a convoluted heap. They and he taught me one way of presenting tidbits from life, unconcerned about outcome. 

Here, as a tribute to Goetz,  are a few higgledy-piggledy childhood recollections from 130 Hastings Ave., south Ardmore, PA. 

Late fall, about age five, Brother Vic told me that Santa’s helpers roamed everywhere – they might be dressed in dungarees, could be walking down any street, evaluating the goodness or badness of us quivering urchins.

I believed in Santa. I believed in Vic. What might I do wrong in the coming days or weeks to foul up Christmas?

Our next door neighbor, Gus Geigus (sp?), had a pinball machine in his basement. I’ve never met another human being with a pinball machine in their basement. It ran on the insertion of a penny. Did I bring the penny each time I visited? Did he give/lend me one? Gus was a college football referee. Sometimes he also reffed professional games, possibly the Eagles.

As a radio operator in the Navy’s Pacific fleet during WWII, Brother Rod worked first on mine-sweeper destroyers, then on the battleship Missouri, where he witnessed the signing of the unconditional surrender of Japan. He and Mom would exchange letters that were censored – with bits considered militarily or otherwise sensitive eliminated with scissors.

According to Mom, she was worried that Rod would be assigned to handling munitions and so addressed him as “Dear Butterfingers.” Did she really do this? If so, would it have had any effect on a munitions officer reading over Rod’s shoulder?

During WWII, you took your excess bacon grease to the supermarket, to be incorporated into the making of munitions [don’t ask me me how – I’d think it would make them awfully slippery]. Dad kept lots of it at home for cooking – bacon grease was his universal frying medium.

At the end of the war, on VJ (victory over Japan) Day, everybody on our 3-block-long street dashed out to celebrate. We stood on the asphalt, yelled, cheered, and blew our horns along with the rest of the country.

Did I know that meant Rod would be coming home to stay? I must have.

The Hastings dogs, cats, and a mouse:

We had an orange bruiser tabby cat with torn, pustulating ears that never healed. He was an inveterate scrapper, though I don’t think I ever saw him in a fight. I seldom wanted to touch him because he was such an unappetizing mess.

We also had two dogs. Judy, a mid-size collie, was hardly friendly to strangers. One time Rod came home on Navy leave from Brooklyn. I don’t recall which ship he was serving on at the time. He went off to the woods with Judy, who unwisely disturbed a skunk. They both came home stinking like armageddon.

Rod slept in the hammock slung from our apple tree, and next morning Mom put him and Judy through a cleansing operation (tomato juice?). He came out OK by the time he was back on board his ship, though his watchstrap remained suspect.

The other dog was an Irish setter, Sheila, dumb as a concrete post – something I’ve often found with Irish setters. But she was determined. Dad would lock her in the back room when we went out. Over time, she chewed halfway through a solid oak door. Her tail was like a shillelagh. When she would stand by the stove looking for a handout, her madly wagging tail left dents in the metal trash can.

One night she tried to clear the wrought iron fence across the street but ended speared on one of its arrow-head points. Vic found her and pulled her off, and the vet sewed her up, leaving no physical repercussions. When she came home, I was sitting on the kitchen floor, systematically pounding little blocks with a wooden mallet through one of those mindless shape-fitting toys.

I looked up and said, “She looks fine, just fine.” I was four years old, and hearing myself utter this ridiculous adultism left me chagrined. I can still see that scene, hear those words, feel that shame.

Why do I retain such shit from a simple action at such an early age?

The lady next door, to the left, had an all-white cat named Squibby. Who the hell would name a cat Squibby? She (the owner) referred to all cats as “she,” all dogs as “he.” Our cat was male, both dogs female. 

I was inordinately fond of a white lab mouse, probably a gift from Rod, now at UPenn in chem engineering, who would scamper up inside my jacket sleeve and hunker down in one of my pockets. I didn’t have it long.

A thick hedge enclosed a yard at the end of the block. When you walked by, a booming, menacing bark would reverberate behind it, a hell-hound on watch. It was a dachshund, blessed with a deep chest.

Rottweilers were not a feared, ferocious breed in those days. King lived one street over and two blocks down from us, a giant, quiet, magnificent beast. The neighborhood kids rode him like a horse. His owners tried to keep him confined with various restraints. They attached him to a clothesline. He broke it. They attached him to metal pole. He uprooted it. They attached him to the stone pillar of their front porch. He Samsoned it and wandered off in unconcern. 

When he visited our yard, he would woof mildly at our inelegant dogs as they tried to keep him at bay while he nonchalantly uprooted half a raw of Mom’s Swiss chard with a sweep of his paw.

King was a living legend. I’ve never met his equal

*   *   *   *

The latest announced proof of intelligent design:

“Male blue-lined octopuses inject females with venom during sex to avoid being eaten”

*   *   *   *

When you piss upon a star,

The steam you raise will travel far.

When yo piss upon a star

It really stinks.

[I’ve really done it this time, unfolded a segmented politicalesque screed, just to get it out of my system so I can go back to my usual disembodied nonsense. Sometime we have to sacrifice our sanity and artistic decency to take a few deserved swipes at the “real world.”]

*   *   *   *

• I’ve been wondering for awhile, and last seek’s shitshow brought it to the  forefront – is Chump, beyond being power -mad, truly mad, in the sense of clinically insane? He’s not only gone after his enemies with rhetoric that would confuse a bedbug, but has cut his supporters off at the knees, wrecking the lives of those who voted for him and undermining every promise he made to them. 
• I didn’t watch Stunp’s attempted evisceration of Ukrainian president Zelenskii but did listen later, while doing the dishes, to what he had bubbled and squeaked, and was appalled beyond what even I thought possible. I could pick up maybe a quarter of the words, but the words weren’t what was important. It was his tone of voice, the suppressed scream of madness: This man is out of his mind, not just an unhinged orator spewing bilious anger, but the mania of a damaged mind without a shred of attachment to reality.
• God, is America fucked. But we are in shit shape not so much from specific policies as from a man’s mental instability that should not be entertained, much less supported, by any functioning government. And since Lump’s behavior is the outer manifestation of a damaged mind, there’s no way to lay blame on him. But blame, of course, serves no useful purpose. What’s needed is a societal change so embracing that this episode can be erased from our history.
• In a different direction, I’ve also long felt hat Slump has a severe learning disability; it is not a matter of “I don’t like to read,” but that he can’t fully comprehend written words, especially within a specific context.
• Read an opinion piece, about Thump’s foreign policy, by someone who seemed to find something consistent behind it. The mistake she made was believing he gives a shit about the US beyond its benefit to and glorification of him personally.
• Besides refusing to print Dump’s given name, I’d suggest that every one of his quotes be labelled “fiction.” Also that, rather than the day’s news remaining “All Crumpet, All The Time!” each media home page reserve a Rump Corner, roughly 3 x 4 inches, in the bottom right hand, with one-sentence summations or links to inane articles covering his antics. Finally, use the pronoun “it” in all personal references to him/it.

• Within a couple days a week back, a close friend and my eldest daughter both sent me a link to Heather Cox Richardson, who writes a daily fact-filled rundown of our national freak show that summarizes the texture and stench of the whole crap casserole. She must spend at least all her waking hours reading the background material [linked each day in the bottom ‘notes’]. You can read or subscribe at https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com. Highly recommended.
• I wish more foreign-policy commentators knew extended Russian history. Russian aggression and tyrannical leadership have been consistent for at least half a millennium, through Ivan the Terrible, Peter and Catherine the Great, the 19^th-century Tsars, Lenin, Stalin and Putin. For all of that period, Russia has been the largest country in the world – and always wanting to be bigger, a bizarre state of  mind geared to more, more, more. I admit it must seem a shame to stereotype a country so blatantly, but it would be more of a shame to ignore it as historical fact. The Soviet Union took that mania to a territorial extreme, yet after World War II, Russia attempted to annex all of Eastern Europe. Chomping bits from Ukraine is nothing unusual, though repulsive.
• Of late, the media have been talking about “the MAGAs.” But who are the MAGAs really? Sometimes an article seems to refer to Republican billionaires and their associates; other stories appear pointing at the right-wing 30% of the worker electorate. These are two very different groups that should not be subsumed under a single term. I’d suggest that the billionaire class instead be termed “the MAGGOTS.”

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[Getting back to harmless nonsense]

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Declaring war on useless adjectives:

Quote: More than 10 million people worldwide are living with Parkinson’s, and about one in three have troublesome anxiety that affects their daily life.

So, 2 out of 3 Parkinson’s patients have only non-troublesome anxiety that affects their daily life?

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And the  joust against idiot headlines:

Among other studies, previous research has suggested people who drink tea may have a lower risk of stroke, dementia and even death.

I think we can guarantee that no one involved, here or elsewhere, will have a lower risk of death.

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An ancient absurdity:

United States currency, boxes and boxes of it!

An actual line that no one on earth would ever say, uttered following an explosion of cartons of cash in Big Ben Bolt (or another equally worthless comic strip) in late 1950s.

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Traditional hymn: “Leaning on the everlasting arm.”

Modern update:

Farting, farting,

Safe and secure, though somewhat crass.

Farting, farting,

Farting out the everlasting ass.

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And, at last, a melon-coly ending:

“Come elope with me, honey, do!”

“No, I can’t elope with you, dear.”

We met her at the humane shelter outside Ulster in Bradford County. She was about two years old and they’d named her Gidget. What a hell of a thing to do to an innocent dog! We brought her home and quickly renamed her Marigold.

She was probably a whippet mix, skinny and put together like the barely fleshed skeleton of a dog. Linda likes that look. To me, dogs, even mid-sized ones, should be burly and physically assertive.

Marigold was definitely and rightly Linda’s dog. I didn’t cotton to her at first (another of those truly weird expressions), and for the first couple years I didn’t know what to make of her.

But as I walked her every morning, down the trail I’d made through our woods (almost always accompanied by Tigger, the world’s best cat), we developed a slow accommodation.

About four years in, she showed a lump on her left hind leg. I didn’t pay that much attention at first; Linda was a lot more concerned, Last year we took her in to the vet’s, they biopsied, and yes – cancer. During the operation, they found more on her abdomen: two different forms of cancer, one a type that always recurs. So, the outlook was, keep an eye on her, but know that her time was limited.

Enough about her illness.

This is really about Marigold the person and what she taught me, what I learned from her this year, and how I ended up seeing her as one of the finest people of any species I’ve known.

As she brew gimpier, and the morning walks more problematic, I spent more time with her and came to realize that she was weirdly empathic. She knew when my spirits were down, often before I did, and was there to comfort me while I was trying to comfort her. I came to like her more, then like her a whole hell of a lot, then love her.

This week, when she had almost stopped eating, we took her back to the vet for stronger pain and appetite pills, but nada  – she moved slower, was more uncomfortable, uninterested even in roast chicken, her favorite.

So yesterday we made the choice that she couldn’t. She’s gone, and I’m more stricken that I thought could be possible. The good side, for me, is that I did find out who she was and that I let her see it. And I know she did. She as much as told me. Thank you, Marigold, from the bottom of my so often constricted heart.

I wonder what I’m supposed to do with grief? All the well-wishers tell us it’s for healing or some other form of resolution. I would not include it in my design for a universe.

So now I need to concentrate on the wonders I have left to love. There’s Tigger, who, as I continually repeat, is the best cat in the world. There’s Linda, who is simply beyond belief, beyond good luck or reason, beyond anyone or any blessing I could have imagined.

Think of this as a strange Valentine thanks to Linda, to Tigger, and, in the depths of my feeling, to Marigold, who taught an old man a lesson he should have learned long ago.

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All mapmakers must now relabel the salt water dish below our country the Gulf of Asinine Dispute.

And celebrate the resurgence of Mt. McKickme, renamed to its original, indigenous name of Denali, then re-renamed for an American president who loved tariffs.

And I personally suggest that the Oval Office now be referred to as the Anal Office.

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At Amazon, Jeff Bezos pretty much invented online shopping as we now know it by putting customer satisfaction first in every consideration. Later, he bought the Washington Post and did the exact opposite, making decisions that pissed off his subscribers, who are leaving in droves.

Yet he has been consistent in his treatment of his workers. At Amazon, they were and are a form of poorly maintained machine. And at the Post, he has gone to lengths to piss off his leading workers, the reporters.

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I plan to create a computer program for the rapid development and distribution of humor. It will be called the Giddyapp.

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A tech-designed online site upgrade, when not tested by actual users, is like hiring a butler who deals ideally with the family but has no concept how to greet someone who comes to the door.

What’s worth talking about these days? What makes sense, what’s a waste of time, what can make a difference or have an effect, what constitutes indifference or actively hiding from the situation?

Everybody has an opinion, but opinions don’t make change.

I have no answers and wouldn’t want to pretend to. We’re far enough up shit’s creek to spot its source, but I don’t see a paddle handy at the moment. Hope that I do some day.

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I may have mentioned our good luck in running across a couple of remarkable music programs online from the radio station KDHX in St. Louis – especially “Music from the Hills,” hosted by John Uhlemann on Sundays, 5-7 p.m. E.T., covering music from Eastern Europe and the Mediterranean. Wonderful stuff and brilliant commentary by John, he has visited just about every country whose music he presents.

Well, last week I tuned in and the program wasn’t there. Basically, the whole station wasn’t there, just feeding through crap pop from, I suppose, there archives, with no hosting.

With some effort we tracked down the problem, which is that the station’s CEO and board had fired all the volunteer DJs and claim not the have the funds to staff the production end.

The uproar form the fans has been huge, and the incompetence of those “in charge” remarkable, even for these days. We’re hoping that something sane is figured out soon.

This reminds me of what happened to WXPN, the UPenn station, in I think the late ’80s or early ’90s. /formerly student run, at that point it had been taken over by former students and have perhaps the most free form programming I’ve ever run across, where the DJs played whatever the hell they wanted at the moment, so you might [and I did] hear Beethoven followed by The Residents. But they got in a tangle with the FCC for letting little kids say obscene words on-air through the phone line. Penn’s response was to have the station taken over by an outside outfit that trashed the whole idea of what the station had been about – making it more popular, as far as number of listeners went – and introducing a major afternoon show of singer/songwriters [still running] that I found about as entertaining as a toothache.

By the sheer accident of whatever happened to be playing at the moment, I learned a hell of a lot from the old XPN, nothing much since, except that Johnny Meister still runs the Blues Show every Saturday evening, as he has for the past 40+ years. 

One song, “Numberless are the sands on the seashore,” would pop up at odd times, taken form a collection called The Real Bahamas. As a result, I bought the collection, which decades later someone called “the greatest album ever made.” That’s a bit expansive, but I just might agree. And “Numberless are the sands on the seashore” is still may favorite track, unlike quite anything else, complex construction of interweaving spoken and sung religious chanting, as beautiful as a wildflower bouquet where you can’t identify any single flower. 

As this week’s gift I’d hoped to upload the cut of ‘Numberless,” but good old WordPress doesn’t allow it. Well, nobody reads this anyway.

*   *   *  

Just wondering: Is there bird flu over the cuckoo’s nest?

*   *   *   *

Coming soon to Amazon, a short-story collection called Farewell My Zombie, published by folks including Paradox Pollack and his brother Jackrabbit, both fellow ruminators on this list, along with a few of their friends whom I don’t know personally.

The collection includes two of my stories, which I was delighted to have them accept, also ones by Paradox, Jackrabbit and others in the collective. I’ll say more when I get the official release date. 

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Some terms and their unlikely companions:

• I can act in an uncouth way, but I can no longer behave with couth, which once meant good manners but sounds like an unpalatable substance that’s fallen off the dinner table.
• If I am ruthless, I am acting without ruth, a former term for compassion. But shouldn’t compassion be called gladys?
• On a church organ I can hear a trumpet voluntary, but I have never heard a deliberate trumpet involuntary.
• I have been taken aback, but never taken afront – though I have been affronted.

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Just read that David Hogg – spokesperson for gun control and survivor of the Parkland school shooting in Florida – has been elected vice-chair of the Democratic National Committee.

While our creaky, anachronistic two-party system is much to blame for the rancid descent into political absurdity in the US, we’re stuck with it for the near future. The Dems haven’t been able to figure how to fight against the current chaos, but more folks like Hogg could help pull in young voters and show what real progress might look like.

As for the two-party system: There is no one perfect way for “the other side” to respond, because people’s takes on politics, as in other human areas, are not simple reflections in a mirror held by the opposition. They are individual and scattered to the winds. “Independents” can’t even vote in PA primaries.

OK, no more political crap here. The rest gets flushed into our leach field.

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If you have any old car tires to dispose of, send them to France. I understand that they have issued a call for tires to burn at their eternal street protests.

*   *   *   

There’s been talk of late of using lucid dreams – those in which we’re aware of being in a dream – to perform tasks while we sleep.

What a ghastly idea. Don’t we perform enough useless tasks while awake? Leave our dreams he hell alone.