[Many of you know Jim from his Welcomat and later NY Press days, by far the best columnist I had while editing the Welco. This new gem of his appears on Patreon, an online publishing site. If you click on the headline below, it should take you there, where, if so inclined, you can join the jolly gang that supports him, as all of us should. He’s not just my friend, but the real reason I still try to write the stuff here. I’ll get back to posting my own rants next time, though I doubt it will be up to what you’re reading here, this week.]

Snippets L (That’s “50” to all you non-Romans): At Blackthorne Manor (Patreon 03/31/24)

In the last collection of Snippets I questioned the validity of the exhausted protest chant, “a people united will never be defeated.” This is, of course, not true and never has been. Now jump ahead about fifty years. At present the reigning politically-minded bumper sticker slogan seems to be “Speak Truth to Power.”

Okay, let’s begin with Socrates in the 5th century B.C.E. and move forward from there. Name a single instance in which “speaking truth to power” has accomplished a damn thing. Speaking the truth has never ever had the slightest effect on power. Power by nature doesn’t give a toss about the truth, considering it a pesky annoyance at best. Throughout history those poor fools who have attempted to present those in power with truth have had a nasty tendency to get disappeared in one way or another. So if you’re one of those socially conscious sorts who’s dropped a bundle on “Speak Truth to Power” buttons, t-shirts and the ubiquitous bumper stickers, well, good luck to you there, partner.

***

You know what skill I never mastered? (Yes yes yes I know, let’s break out the spreadsheet, right?)

Alright, let me try again. You know what skill I never mastered? Spitting. Always wanted to be able to spit well, but never got the hang of it. Whenever I tried, the saliva always just kinda fell out and dribbled down my chin. It’s awfully hard to express your defiance and contempt when in essence you’re drooling.

Well, I’ll keep at it.

***

Here’s a creepy and annoying thought. I’ve never had any time for the idea of “souls,” “ghosts,” or any form of “afterlife.” Silly claptrap invented to keep the sad and desperate masses docile. When you’re dead you’re dead and that’s that. I’ve always found it a much more comforting thought.

Still, sometimes the disassociation takes it that extra step and leaves me thinking, “I wonder if I died awhile back and simply never noticed?’ I’d been in enough sketchy situations over the years it’s certainly possible. After an overdose in the mid-’80s a doctor told me I’d been clinically dead for a couple minutes. What if I never came back from that (or a hundred other close calls), and everything I’ve experienced since has been nothing but the echoed vibrations of the last straggling neurons in a dying brain?

If it turns out I really did die some time back, and it further turns out I was wrong all along and this really is the afterlife, well I want my money back.

I try not to think about this too much.

***

It’s always so sad to see friends get old. This has nothing to do with age. I’m not talking about a few more wrinkles and hair that’s turning gray and thinning out. I have friends in their seventies and eighties who remain more vital, sharp and creative than I’ve ever been. I’m talking about friends my age and younger who seem to lose a little something overnight, a certain spark and glimmer, the creative impulse, a sense of humor. I’ve seen it happen to so many people. One day they’re cracking wise, beer in hand, laying out their latest project, the next they’re focused on Wednesday’s Zoom call with a supplier, ongoing home renovations, the shortcomings of their kid’s soccer coach, investments and lawn care. It’s as if at thirty, forty, fifty, the world finally caught up with them, beat them senseless and turned someone who was once very much Alive into an adult. Adults are no damn fun to be around.

***

This used to be a much longer bit about the insipid low-rent carnival that will bedevil us for the next eight months and far beyond. Then I thought “oh, who the fuck needs that?” and cut it in half. Then I cut it in half again. Then again and again, saying “fuck it” all the while. At last I decided to leave only the last line:

“This is why I always give the big horse laugh to anyone who wrings his or her hands while fretting about ‘threats to our democracy.’”

***

I just read a history of the Crusades. Hilarious to consider the whole flapdoodle began when tens of thousands of Christian pilgrims, thanks to some cockamamie prophecy, descended on Jerusalem one weekend like a bunch of Spring Breakers to await the Second Coming. Justifiably annoyed by this flood of riff-raff pouring into town uninvited and making a mess of things, the Muslim citizens of Jerusalem were rude to them. Big mistake, and there went the next century. So in short the Crusades were all about tourism.

***

When the young autistic waiter returned and set the pitcher down on the table between me and Schizoid Gary he said, “That’s a very nice watch.”

My watch is not an exquisite precision-engineered timekeeping accessory encased in titanium and diamonds. It’s a cheap talking watch I ordered online for $20.

“Thank you,” I said. “Here, let me show you how it works, I held it up and punched the oblong button just above the face.

“The time is three forty-eight p.m.,” the tinny British voice announced.

“I have a nice watch too,” the young autistic waiter said. “It’s a Casio. I like it because it’s waterproof, so I can wear it when I’m washing dishes.”

“That sounds like a much nicer watch than mine,” I told him.

Then he returned to the kitchen.

***

Over the course of 2023, four different reputable, nationally-respected statistical firms declared Green Bay, WI:

1. Home to the Safest Drivers in America.

2. The third most peaceful city in America.

3.The Best Place to Live in America.

And 4. The Drunkest City in America. (Four of the top five cities in this category were in Wisconsin, by the way.)

I’ll leave it to you to fit them all together.

***

In accordance with Standard Operating Procedure, I’d been dropped in a chair in a corner with a beer to ensure I wouldn’t trample any wandering toddlers. It was my grandniece’s third birthday. I’m trying to avoid bitching about being obligated to attend kid’s birthday parties. I think I’ve made my point and it accomplishes little. Bitching was justified last year when this grandniece’s second birthday was held in some kind of nightmare indoor playland for the two-to-five set. This year it was held at my niece’s house in, um, “Hortonville,” so I had no immediate cause to complain. I liked their large and dangerous dog Pluto. Plus I was able to snag my grandniece a child-sized “Taxi Driver” t-shirt for her birthday. I was mighty pleased with that.

My niece’s in-laws are a sprawling and inbred clan. To give you some idea, the entire population of, um, “Hortonville” shares the same last name, and what a last name it is. Whenever anyone in the area throws a party of any kind, the whole town show up.

Apart from one guy who couldn’t run away because his leg had been shattered when a cow kicked him(!), at the Playland thing last year I found it odd that not a one of the Hortonvillians would speak to me. Not a hello, not a peep of any kind. Even if I asked a pleasant and innocuous direct question, they would step away or begin talking to someone else about farm equipment or the best spots to fish for bass.

“Well whatever,” I thought as we were leaving.

As the Hortonville clan began streaming into my niece’s house this year I pushed myself up from my safety chair in the spirit of convivial neighborliness and extended my hand in greeting and friendship. There were dozens of people there, but they either walked past without a word or consciously veered away. It was like I was invisible or a lingering bad smell. Noticing my situation, my sister stepped over and shook my hand, which allowed me to resume my proper place in the safety chair. There I would spend the rest of the afternoon petting the dangerous dog and not trampling toddlers.

.

I was more curious than offended by the Hortonvillians behavior. Was I really that creepy? Were they afraid blindness might be communicable? Were they so uncomfortable around the cripple they found it easier to pretend I wasn’t in their midst? I guess that’s just human. I’d run into it before, but had never been so completely socially quarantined by a crowd this big in such a small space. Employing Occam’s razor , I decided the most logical answer was that I was as irresistibly charming as ever, and they were all a bunch of stupid backward inbred redneck pig-fucking hicks.

My thesis was confirmed when my grandniece opened her presents and I learned no one in the room had ever heard of “Taxi Driver,”

As we were leaving I thanked my niece (whom I adore, by the way) for having us over, wished my grandniece (ditto) another happy birthday, then added “All your in-laws are fucking inbred assholes.”

I may not be invited back next year.

I am giving a tour to a fairly rich couple who have bought a house, roughly in Powelton Village, on which I probably did some renovations. He is older than me, his name is Sam, friendly, unassuming but somewhat ungainly. We are close to being friends. She is young, fairly sexy, dark to black hair, wearing a short, bright yellow caftan-type dress. I show them around the neighborhood, formerly a tumbledown mess that has been or is still being renovated.

I show them a lovely lot where a house used to stand. We go through their house, which is not yet in good condition, with peeling paint and/or paper. Sam and I look out the window at a house close by and I admire the frosted, figured glass of its bay window. I think somehow that my couple’s house is not one of the more interesting ones in the neighborhood.

We go for a walk or tour somehow down by the Delaware River. In the old streets, construction is underway everywhere, cutting through and under the streets and buttresses of bridges and old roadways or railways on  multiple levels. The sidewalks and streets are incredibly crowded with workers, shoppers, and walkers. Sam occasionally wanders off and finally I can’t find him, but the woman seems unconcerned.

She also wanders off and I have difficulty tracking her down, but find her high in the air, lying on a mattress or thick cloth enclosed in a clamshell-like bucket of a piece of what I take to be construction machinery. It has something to do with a pleasure or massage treatment with oil. I don’t understand it at all. (This may be a misplaced element in the dream.)

I’m late to going home to my wife but don’t know how to get there by public transportation, and I realize that I am dirty from wandering through the construction areas. I’m also not wearing a shirt and am probably in shorts, embarrassed to think of getting on an elevated line or a bus. My wife seems a distant consideration. I’m very attracted to the woman from the couple and think we may end up having an affair. At one point she leans back against me while we wait to find Sam but there’s nothing intense. My desire for her is muted, perhaps not desire for a woman as such.

We get temporarily lost trying to find their house but it doesn’t make much difference. We pass and go around piles of bricks and dirt under archways, through busy storerooms, past friendly construction workers. I mention to her that these changes they have made, the mishmash of old and new, is exciting and vital. She agrees. Earlier, I had taken her through a renovated courtyard complex that had once been a slum but was now lined with flower-edged brick walkways. She had largely ignored it. She is much more interested in this old-new mix, the chaotic.

She continually radiates a privileged lack of concern that is not in any way haughty. Instead, she seems a liberated soul with intense involvement and curiosity. At one point I tell her how the whole district used to be deserted in the evenings when I was a child, that it was all businesses that closed at 5 pm.

At some point her dress changed from the bright yellow one to an even shorter reddish-tan, earth-color one. From the back I see that it only reaches half way down her ass and wonder why/how she can walk around like that, though no one pays much attention. She doesn’t have especially good legs.

It’s getting late, we have not seen Sam for some time, and I ask her if she is going to stay over at their house (they seem to be on a visit, not yet moving in). I consider asking her if they would like to stay over at our place, but I realize that I shouldn’t bring home to my wife a woman I want to have an affair with. There is no answer or resolution to this and I wake up.

The dream was pleasant, friendly, but I wake deeply depressed, on the verge of tears. The woman and the chaos of the city under construction may represent something I’ve lost; maybe something (my writing?) that I lost once, found and am afraid of losing again. The woman with dark hair and only a shirt/short dress, me with light hair and only trousers or shorts, may be two halves of one person. Yellow is also a color I usually see with my eyes closed or in dreams, under psychedelics or intense emotion, though I felt nothing intense while in the dream. The intensity lay in the world outside “me,” in the city, the woman. I think I never heard her name.

The first time I read anything about TikTok was someone saying they were mystified by the sudden re-popularity on that platform of Patience and Prudence’s “Tonight You Belong to Me,” a song from 1956.

Now, anybody who has been around me for more than 15 seconds knows that I waste no time on the ’50s, the decade when I was growing up – a fearful, repressive time of war-escapist deadness. I looked on much of its vaunted music as crap even as I listened to it while washing the family dishes, my house duty.

But there were certain songs that reverberate – or should reverberate – through the decades. I mean, did none of these puzzled musers about Patience and Prudence have a sense of romance in their teen years?

Checking out its history, I was puzzled to find that “Tonight You Belong to Me” was first recorded in 1926 and became a big hit the following year in a version by Gene Austin. I haven’t heard Austin’s version and so have no idea how he presented it, but as done by Patience and Prudence, it may be the most perfect teen-romance song ever –  “I know, by the dawn, that you will be gone, but tonight you belong to me” – yes, presented as a dream, but holy shit!

They were real sisters, P&P (using their real names), daughters of a pianist and songwriter who worked with Sinatra. They were aged 11 and 14 when they recorded, promoted by their father, which now might be considered a subtle form of child abuse. But what a delightful piece of work, championing the sensually emancipated teens that we all wanted to be – but that none of us (that I knew) were.

*   *   *   *

“Average sperm counts worldwide have declined by half over the past 50 years, and more steeply still in the past 20.”

Whooppee! So there’s some slim chance for human survival through sustained population collapse? But, assuming this account is statistically true, can anyone tell me why the sub-Saharan Africa population is predicted to explode over the next few decades, with Nigeria alone said to reach 750 million? Maybe they count their sperm differently there?

*   *   *   *

Yet another celebrity I never heard of has died. Let us all mourn this otherwise inconsequential individual for having lasted as long as they did.

*   *   *   *

Two Russianswere walking down the road. One had feelthy pictures, the other did not. The one who had feelthy pictures asked the one who did not: “Would you like to see my feelthy pictures?” The other replied sternly, “No!” The first, taken aback, exclaimed, “But you must want to see my feelthy pictures.” The other repeated, “No I am a pure-minded soul and would not let such things pass my sight.” The first reiterated: “When I say must, I mean must” and sat on the pure-minded one’s head, forcing him to look at the feelthy pictures. The pure-minded one, immediately enflamed with feelthy thoughts, assaulted the holder of the pictures, then rampaged through the town and countryside, ravishing farmyard animals, hired hands, and innocent barflies. He laid low 4 hunters, 13 farmers’ daughters, 32 cows, 47 sheep, and a shock of wheat that he mistook for Steve McQueen. At last he found himself at the junction where the borders of Russia, Poland, and the Czech Republic met. One foot was held in Czech, while the other was impaled upon a Pole. The owner of the feelthy pictures, having recovered from his defilement, wrenched the feelthy pictures from the other’s hand, bellowing: “Vile criminal, if there is one thing I cannot stand, it is a thief.” No longer enthralled by the feelthy pictures, the other Russian reverted to his pure-mined state and retired to a nearby border town, lending free legal advice to villagers who had been bilked by a fraudulent Fuller Brush salesman. The first Russian left his pea-sorting job to establish Podgorny’s Porn Parlor, where he makes great quantities of feelthy lucre.

*   *   *   *

I’m delighted to see Kim Jung Un firing more missiles into the ocean. I guess it’s supposed to scare the bejesus out of us, but I look at it as a win for our side – he’s going to run out of missiles soon at this rate. (Actually, I think the real reason is that the damned things just don’t work, so he’s firing them into the middle of nowhere to get rid of the trash.)

Christian Contemporary has to be the worst religious music ever – not just in the West, but anywhere in the world, a bloated, slushy pile of reeking sentiment, the only harmonic glop I’ve heard that makes elevator music sound upscale. And it’s not just because I don’t consider myself a Christian (please, no!); I love both the Gregorian Chant I grew up with in my Catholic choir, and the Black Gospel music of Clara Ward and the Staples Singers.

Considering Gospel music, I’ve wondered how Black slaves managed to absorb the rancid religion of their oppressors – often stuffed down their throats – and revolve it into its opposite, a vision of beauty. After all, one of those same white Christians wrote the book-length “The Negro, a Beast,” in the year 1900, fiddling through the bible to prove that Negroes were not human beings – an approach that hasn’t changed that much today. 

(As an aside, it’s a damned shame that the white replacement conspiracy theory is a crock of shit. If there’s any hope for the country, it should take place as soon as possible.)

*   *   *   *

A plane that crashed on a Floria highway a couple weeks back, killing 2, was a Bombardier Challenger 600. Why would anyone in their right mind chance a ride in something called a Bombardier Challenger 600?

*   *   *   *

I’m puzzled by the number of international leaders of apparent good intention who have lost their minds once in power.

Here’s a current brief list of reformer heads of government who remain in power in their respective countries as election-manipulating dictators just like those they replaced:

Yoweri Museveni of Uganda

Daniel Ortega of Nicaragua

Paul Kagame of Rwanda

(Laurent Kabila deposed decades-long dictatorship in the Congo with his own authoritarian regime, but was removed through assassination.)

And it isn’t just heads of state who have performed a similar switcheroo.

Dmitri Medvedev served briefly as president of Russia before Putin snatched back the position he felt was rightly his. Medvedev dealt well with the West during his short term, but these days his unrestrained rants against anyone outside Russia have taken on a lunatic quality. 

And of course in the U.S. there’s Senator Lindsay Graham, who matured from a centric, sensible politician to the raving asshole of today.

So how does this happen? And with little hope, I’d love to have someone send me examples of those who have moved in the opposite direction, from dipshit to decency.

*   *   *   *

Can’t figure how anyone came up with the inspiration to drop carrots into a cake. It’s sort of like saying, “Let’s whip us up some possum ice cream.”

*   *   *   *

I was looking up how to pronounce “taoiseach,” the supplied English transliteration of the Irish Gaelic word for “prime mister.” As usual, this train-wreck of vowels does not lead to any vaguely English noises. Instead, the proper Irish pronunciation is “tee-shuh.” In much the same way, Cú Chulainn, the windpipe-choking Anglification of Ireland’s great warrior of legend, is pronounced, roughly, “Cahoulin.” It all reinforces my belief that such supposed transliterations from Irish were another practical joke the Irish pulled on the dopey English. Check out the words ending in “dhl.” Try pronouncing that on an empty stomach.

*   *   *   *

Most of the angst around the social media is misplaced. For now, they serve primarily as the voices for stupidity, but they’re still in their infancy, ironing the juvenile kinks out (and I stoutly refuse to pretend that “media” is a singular noun; I’ve retained at least that much from my three years of high-school Latin).

All media, social or otherwise, swing with the times and the social weather, as has always been the case. The ranting newspapers of the yellow journalism era were overwhelming portrayers of disinformation – deliberately so – yet we now bless our finest reporting with the Pulitzer Prize, named for Joseph Pulitzer, along with William Randolph Hearst, a chief purveyor of the “yellow” era.

And the halcyon nostalgia for “honest reporting” looks back to WWII and post-WWII figures like Edward R. Murrow and Lowell Thomas, who were no more definitive than any other members of a national information-processing movement. So let’s forget the nonsense of the “good old days.” Mostly, they were just “old.” 

*   *   *   *

Terminology: “Trump is a dingleberry on America’s butt.”

After he made his first million, Henry Fletter quit his indifferent executive position and established a quiet existence. He drifted from here to there on various means of transportation, but without hurry or ostentation. He was not photographed by the press and considered too boring by those who set the tone of social trends. He often had his nose in a book and his feet up. He refused to be ruffled by externals or attempt to achieve emotional highs through drugs or hectic activity. He threw occasional small-scale gatherings for friends who actually liked Henry, but he did not attend public bashes.

Then one day he noticed that most of the million was gone. How? He had done little that seemed to him rash or extravagant. But the figures from his accounts and investments were plain: He had frittered – he imagined a great green pancake on a greased griddle – had frittered it away, just as though he had bounced about laughing and screaming and buying useless antiques.

With this change in situation Henry had a sudden urge to take tai chi classes – to “find his center.” His million had built up through solid, unspectacular investment of his mid-level salary at a company that designed computer software. He had been an expert programmer, a natural talent, but by the age of 26 found himself shuffling staff arrangements on a chalkboard and overseeing tortuous meetings. Now, out on his own, his organizational ability had betrayed him when it came to financial management.

Perhaps a million is simply not enough these days, he mused. “A millionaire!” Though the high gloss had worn off that catchword of the Horatio Alger era, what thin sheen it retained had inflated his mind’s expectant vision. But the million had fled as though it were any paltry sum. 

In a narrow store stacked with counter-culture tidbits, he bought a pair of slight, black Chinese shoes and a loose-fitting top for his first tai chi class. The instructor, a young American, led everyone in that uncomfortable sprung-knees stance that Henry recalled from Japanese samurai movies. He was told to let tension and desire flee, and in their place find latency, the upcoursing of potential energy.

His thighs ached.

As the session progressed, his arms and swaying body learned to execute motions of such slow exaggeration that he felt like a dog straining against an invisible leash. But at the same time, an internal vision arose. While he hung suspended, a marionette whose pivot lay somewhere below his hams, he saw, set within a yellow-green plane of light, the profile of a medieval Japanese warrior – it, like Henry, hunched in the position of potential. It wore the strange padded-cloth armor of that age.

The lesson dew to a close with the seven initiates manipulating a ball of energy between their hands through excruciatingly restrained twisting of the forearms.

Henry’s arms also ached.

At each succeeding lesson, the envisioned samurai held that same position, the stance of becoming. Yet as Henry neared completion of the 22 primary moves of tai chi, the restraint holding both warrior and viewer in strained contention dissolved. They could relax now, together – into eternity if need be.

By then, Henry’s million had fully absconded. He owed amounts on his credit cards of which he would not, previously, have taken note. He put his large house on the market but could find no buyer, and so moved into a small apartment whose rent (along with food and clothing) was covered by leasing the large house to a communal group that paid good money but did a fair amount of damage to the walls and woodwork. Yet when he visited these former precincts, he was strangely untouched by their disarray. The warrior’s active passivity had taught him well.

In the classroom – a second-floor loft cleared of partitions, leaving small holes in the floor that snagged the smooth slide of the narrow black shoes – he became interested in a slim, fey woman who was returning to the lessons after some absence. He learned from her that she had mastered the full regimen, including a second tier that encompassed 105 further movements, but had let her concentration slide.

The  instructor adopted her as a model, or demonstration dummy. Her hands Mia Farrowed the air, trailing ether from the fingertips, but Henry found them somehow graceless and imprecise Why did the instructor hold her up for emulation when she failed the exactitude he championed? Possibly she alone of the students knew all the forms? Equally possibly, they were romantically or sexually involved. Her restrained adoration could be seen as a statement of personal attraction, or as appreciation of a higher-level exponent of the art.

Henry was initially repulsed by her weak, yielding mouth, yet his sexual fantasies became increasingly graphic, even to pushing the visionary warrior from his perch. He considered inviting her for an after-class indulgence at the Chinese restaurant on the street floor, below the classroom. But what could they talk about? Surely, she was deep into mystical things and must find the material world a necessary evil. Certainly she would not eat meat; no one with such an unengaging mouth ate meat or discussed society pragmatically.

As he slipped back into his street shoes, he noticed that their meagre piles of belongings had snuggled side by side in a lonely corner of the room. When she stooped to pick up her coat, he said, for no clear reason, “I’ve lost a million dollars.”

“Oh. Goodness. Where?”

“I don’t know.”

“Could I help you look for it?”

Henry’s laugh rose like the minor precursor to a volcanic eruption, then overflowed into orange-red lava. Together they would scour the world in search of his squandered cash. They would visit Singapore, Nairobi, Cape Town, Inner Magnolia, Haberdashistan, then return to discover a pot of gold behind a boulder in Kansas. Throwing back his head, he closed his eyes and was amazed to see the warrior likewise wracked with mirth.

He shook himself loose from both vision and hilarity to explain that the million had not been casually mislaid, but scattered by time to the financial winds. She listened in Bambi seriousness, her mouth releasing an occasional lopsided smile not shared by her eyes. Henry’s erotic fantasy, wallowing beneath the surface, disgusted him. This  stripped-down model of unadorned Woman, wraithlike and insubstantial, was a Munch scream tamed to an urban mew.

What had gotten into his loins?

In the Chinese restaurant, she ordered the predicted vegetable dish, a Szechuan tongue-sizzler that he sampled tentatively but could not imagine fully ingesting. Famished, as always, from 45 minutes of aped asceticism, he ordered shrimp egg fu yung and a plate of wor shu duck, dispatching both in non-stop slurps. The woman, Carole, masticated her fried hot peppers without comment or apparent discomfort. He did not attempt to pay her bill – the proper, liberated approach to equality.

They were headed in opposite directions that night, both by means of public transportation (Henry had put his various wheeled extravagances on the block long ago), so he could dredge up no reason to prolong their evening. He watched her walk down the street, straight-shanked and minimalist, and felt the visual perspective torque, sucking her into the distance where she might, truly, merge into the vanishing point.

For the first time in his life, he had an erection in a public place.

“Would you want it back?” she asked of his evaporated million following their next session.

“Of course.”

This evening he offered no Chinese enticement. Their steps led in the same direction from the simple expedient of Henry lying about his directional intentions. Do tai chi masters lie? he inquired of his half-squatting warrior. It may have shaken its head, but that was difficult to ascertain in profile.

“Doesn’t that feel, oh, materialistic?” she asked.

“To want it back? It seems realistic. I’m going to tai chi and practicing twice a day at home, reading Eastern philosophy and trying to understand unfamiliar diets, and that’s only possible for me to do because I have a pittance-plus left from renting my house and selling everything I can get my hands on. When that’s gone, the pittance, I’ll find some damned stupid job and stop reading and practicing and, eventually, coming to class.”

“You don’t have to.” Her mouth drooped as though the last restraint had fled the resiliency of her lips. He wanted to bite holes in her face, do her limp visage immense sexual damage.

“I don’t have to, but I will. That’s how I’m put together. I left being an executive because, whatever I am at any moment, I’m just that, no time left over to be anything else. Making money was an extension of being an executive, because an executive always thinks and talks work and money. Now I think only about mystical moves and spiritual expansion, no mental opening left for money. So I’ll be dead broke in about a month unless I can sell the damned house, in which case I’ll be dead broke in six months. The rent I got for the house the other day I’ve already spent at the bookstore on yoga treatises. And they all read exactly the same – you can speed-read down the middle of any page, absorb the mystical buzz words in passing, and you’ll know everything the books have to say. When I’ve read them all and spent it all, then my mind will flip back to money. The cycle will repeat.” (The warrior nodded agreement, or was perhaps shooing a fly.)

Carole’s fawn eyes widened. “You couldn’t have spent the whole rent money at a bookstore.”

“And Indian music. Thirteen CDs by people like Ravi Shankar, the one the Beatles liked. So far, they hurt my ears.” He did not look at her, would not again embarrass himself below the belt. No other woman, ever, had so directly excited him. Yet he could not envision her naked. And penetrating her through her loose black pantaloons… he dare not imagine it.

In bed with her, at last naked beside him, he tried to remember her clothed, swerving to the tai chi movements, her thin knees more nimble than his. No erection answered. So he told her he was mortally tired, on the rim of a magnificent exhaustion. Perhaps she accepted this as true, more likely not. Either way, she did not call him on it. As he fell beside her into pseudo-sleep, his mind focused on how to retrieve that lost million, not a thought of her body remaining, clothed or naked. 

His lost million.

Awake to a gloomy day, he played a morning raga by Ali Akbar Khan while she gazed as though he were something vaguely familiar if not quite comprehensible. He knew he had made a mistake. How major a mistake?

Was there no way out of it that would not include self-betrayal? “Should I kill myself?” he asked.

“My goodness! Why would you consider that?”

“I don’t.”

“Then why are you talking about it?”

“It’s exploratory.”

“I should leave.”

“Yes.”

She grabbed haphazardly for her clothes. “You are a disgrace, a peculiar disgrace.”

“That’s a good way to see it. I wouldn’t have thought of it in those, in that term. You won’t, then, trek the world with me to recover my lost million?”

“I would not now go to the street-corner with you to buy a newspaper.”

“Ah.” He stood, strangely dejected. He had made breakfast for them both, toast mostly, with things to put on the toast. “And tai chi?”

“One of us must leave the class. I would rather it wasn’t me.”

“I’d rather that too. You belong there. I’m somewhere else – not the place where the million dollars went. I’m just making noise, I have no centered being. Get some toast before you leave. I’ll be quiet, silent if you want, inconsequential otherwise.”

She dressed quickly, mis-setting buttons and having to redo them, glancing at him and quickly away. He wondered if she would cry or spit or… no, she would not scream imprecations or cry or spit. Her center – her pretend center? – would hold.

“Stay,” he said.

“You asked me to leave.”

“I acquiesced to your desire to leave.”

“Why are you talking like a thesaurus?”

He laughed, confused. “Maybe because it would take too long to talk like an encyclopedia.”

She waved her Chinese slipper, the last item yet to adorn her leaving-taking body. “You’re either a nobody or everybody who ever lived.”

“I’m the third son, the folktale failed son of a late-proliferating couple.”

“I could like you. I wish I did.” She inserted her foot in the slipper. “I almost do.”

There was no comeback to that. Had she made an offer of hope only to assure him it would be abandoned?

As she reached the door, he placed a hand on her shoulder, not in restraint or affection.

“We couldn’t have found it, searching for it together, what I lost. It’s not the kind of thing you put down somewhere and pick up again. It’s lost in dribs and drabs. You have to recreate it, to multiply it for the next time, so that when it’s lost again it’s just part of something larger and doesn’t really matter. It can stay gone that second time yet be replaced again. And again. And again. That’s an assumption. Some people’s assumption. And it works for them. An investor’s assumption. I think it could work for me. If I continue to care. I care about this first loss, but not sure I could care the second time or a third. First loss, first love? I didn’t love that million, I just lost it. I’m pissed at my carelessness. Wouldn’t you be, to lose a million of anything? That much money is intangible anyway, so why should it become more important if it’s more money or more often or a longer time that it’s lost? Whatever we might have done together, the looking wouldn’t be pointed just to that, to retrieving the lost million, maybe not to that at all. Hard to say, wouldn’t you say?. Eh?”

Carole spun the doorknob a quarter turn. “How big a load of manure is that?”

“Half a ton. About. No more than that.”

She released the knob. “So if we weren’t to look for it directly, the money itself, we could perhaps replace the million? Together?”

“It’s entirely possible.”

“Likely?”

“That would be stretching it unreasonably.”

In time, the million came back, not invading as a big gruff bear, but softly as a thousand skittering mice that nested in a questioning cosiness. Henry has his house again (still), and Carole shares it with him. Would they want a second million to keep the first company? Unlikely, because they were not looking for the million while they found it, they were following the ages-dead warrior, unskilled in the battles of today, but a giant at finding. Pennies he scoured from under couch cushions, dimes from decommissioned parking meters, quarters from the ghosts of pay phones. Dollars that floated in the breeze, unremarked by common mammon hunters, the warrior sliced into his armor with his samurai sword, leaving no stray change.

The house has antiques now, not those of great fashion, but grubby leftovers from deserted alleys, gifts from sympathetic tai chi classmates, misaligned thrift-shop oddities that rest on slanting shelves. Are they happy, Carole and Henry, Henry and Carole? If happiness is things, things such as piles of bills and coins, they are likely neither joyous or sad. If it is a state of being, a space where questions lie without seeking easy answers, they may be happy. They very well could be.

Knock on their door and ask them.

[I have no recollection of having written this, but I don’t think some strange being inserted it into my “finished stories” folder]

The road stopped but the car did not. It went on. I often feel that the car is the one who drives. I say, “Go, car,” and I get somewhere. This time I got lost.

I should provide some background. For a while, I believed I was an investment banker. For a period of perhaps 17 weeks, I shifted great amounts of money around, but then one day I saw that I was still working in a direct-mail office, pasting labels on letters. It’s strange the lives your mind can occupy.

I also believed, now and then, that I was married and the father of two children, a boy age 13 and a girl age seven. This is the composition of the ideal American family, though not the mean age distribution  – I thought myself 12 years older than my wife. But then I found myself living, as usual, in a small apartment with my cat, who is illegal according to the lease. My cat says “Meow” and I say “Shush,” because the cat should be seen, not heard, or I will be put out of my apartment. I tell the cat that if it cannot be quiet it will be homeless and have to live on refuse.

This may sound like a sad life to live, but it is (was) not, by any means. It was full, since my imagination took me to so many places and circumstances. I once climbed to the top of the Eiffel tower stairs unaided and shouted my glee so loudly that it was heard two miles away, in the center of Paris. That is, if the center of Paris is two miles away from the Eiffel Tower.

At the moment, I have no idea exactly where I am, and my car won’t say. My car is a Honda, a Japanese car, and it becomes smug if it thinks it has the upper hand. Possibly it does not know where we are either, but it would hardly admit as much to me. I wouldn’t if I were in its position.

Last April, when the tulips had just begun to bloom (but before the cherry trees had come out), we went (the car and I) to a small state park noted for its display of bulbs. They had been planted originally by a group of Dutch settlers, then maintained by their descendants for over 200 years. We drew off to the side and admired the view, but when I got out of the car to walk in amongst the plantings, the car tried to follow me. I was severely reprimanded by a park ranger, who said I had no regard for growing things and should never come back to the park. After that, I gave the car its head more often, thinking that if it planned the route, it would be less apt to cause me problems once we had reached our destination. Instead, I think it simply became spoiled.

We are somewhere in a pine forest, or perhaps hemlock, large feathery coniferous trees (I’ve never been good at tree identification). I very much enjoy the feel of the bed of needles under my feet, the sinking-yet-supporting of semi-resistance. I have gone far enough into the trees that my car cannot follow, but if I go much farther I will lose sight of it (the car) and perhaps never find my way out.

You may wonder, If this man does not know what job he is performing or whether he is or is not the head of a family, isn’t it possible that he may, in fact, be not in a forest, but rather in the small company lunch room?

As it happens, I have been considering this myself. Normally, I simply look up and notice that where I have been is not actually where I am. The change comes without warning but is not, as you might expect, disorienting. I find it almost refreshing, even though, almost invariably, where I have been was preferable to where I find myself actually to be.

This is the one reason that the question of where I am at this moment may be of importance. I feel somewhat frightened, mildly afraid that I will not be able to return to my small apartment and my cat. Yet if this woodland is not where I truly am, and if it is preferable to where I will find myself when I return to where I truly am, my condition when I return may turn out to be far worse than in the past. I can’t understand why that should be the case, why any sort of catastrophe should suddenly strike my contained life. Nonetheless, the possibility is unsettling.

You might think that if I could turn the car around (or ask the car to turn itself around), I should be able to retrace our path and find the end of that road that gave way so abruptly to woodland. But there are two problems with that approach. First, the trees and shrubs hem us so thoroughly that I don’t believe the car has maneuvering room. Second, when the car stopped and I looked back, I could see no continuity of trail, no specific ruts, no straight line that we had traveled.

Of course, it’s difficult to get completely lost in the modern world. Hunters in the wildest spots imaginable find bodies left by rapists and serial killers; it happens all the time. So though I see ourselves (the car and me) as lost, it may only be a matter of relative displacement, not true concealment. If we sit perfectly still, in time someone will come across us. I might starve, I suppose, but the car would not. A good lube job would have it back on the road in no time.

Shortly after I was an investment banker, I delivered secret documents for an undercover agency dedicated to finding and exterminating terrorist organizations. One time I delivered a bomb which was used to obliterate the headquarters of a fanatical Libyan faction. Strangely, when I returned to my pasting of labels, I read about the bombing incident in the morning paper. Somehow, my worlds had tended to spill over into one another.

I hear the beep of a horn. Perhaps my car has relented – I’ve felt all along that it knew the way out. In one sense I feel relieved, but in another, disappointed. The possibility that I might move forward into nowhere, trek into the great beyond and be swallowed by time and space, is exhilarating. I might eventually reach the point where all the lives I have inhabited merge into the single sparkling entity that supports my existence.

Far more likely, though, I would come to the overpass of a superhighway and be pinned in place by the realities of modern transportation, the inescapability of external connectedness.

So I expect I will get in the car, say, “Go, car,” and return to my apartment. And feed the cat.

Why?

Because it’s time to send something out, but I have no coherent ideas on hand that aren’t political, and who wants to hear that shit right now?

This may be the most convoluted nest of dreams I’ve had in one night. It must have been during the Christmas holidays at my sister-in-law Ginny’s house some years back. (I never think to date my notes; I suppose I should, but that’s the least of my endlessly badgering worries about what I “should” be doing.) Ginny died a couple years ago. It’s now my daughter Morgan’s house.

Elements that likely entered into this dream clump:

• the novel I was reading about a murder trial, with overly detailed examinations of the minds of those involved, especially the accused, a 19-year-old, philosophically astute artist
• the sunlight in the bedroom at Ginny’s, the first sun in many days and a particular light we don’t get at home while in bed
• a talk with Ginny in which I learned that my last remaining cousin, Celeste, had died a month or so back, and my saying how blessed I was by the love and help of my elder brothers, both now dead, which lead me to realize that I, as the last of the siblings and cousins, was now “in charge” of that generation’s continuance
• cleaning my workshop the previous Thursday, sweeping the floor with a wide, inefficient broom before vacuuming
• my Christmas present to Linda, replacement of the doors to the lower cabinets in the main room, a last-minute blast that succeeded in a considered and competent way that’s unusual for my rapid-fire projects.

The first dream segment is vague, a group of people, indoors or moving between places, with young, intense relationships, no details retained.

Next, street and building renovations under a volunteer group along Lancaster Ave. and surrounding areas in Philly, none that I could identify with real places, clearing out dead parts of buildings, cutting street trees, rearranging the local reality as a civic project. I am a junior participant, then somewhat later part of the cleanup team, assigned or self-choosing to rake/broom bits of dead branch along front “yards” or concrete aprons?, alone, looking for help. I insist (to whom or what?) that someone join me. A composite creature comes, an owl-figure who leans on its broom but does nothing while I meticulously rake leaves and tree detritus into a tight pile, though I scold the figure, incensed. I go somewhere, come back and it is gone.

Hiatus. 

Going “home,” possibly from the previous setting, on a trolley, similar to the West Philly subway-surface trolley system, on underground tracks, with someone who changes – possibly sex, definitely attributes and relationship to me – as we travel. It wants to get off at the first stop downtown, east of the river. That stop has a name, not a cross-street number as it would in downtown Philly; I describe how to get there. I plan to exit myself at the last stop before the trolley tunnels under the river, which will most directly take me home (roughly Powelton Village), but somehow get off a stop earlier (roughly 32nd St.). The other passenger, now definitely male, possibly Black (I never see him clearly; he stands partly behind me) gets off with me.

Outside, we are in one of my elaborate dream warrens – tight, short streets converging at all angles, with buildings in various states of decay or renovation, all of reality being rearranged. I recognize this element, and announce it to him, as my dreamworld. For once I feel comfortable with it. This seems not a fully lucid dream, since it is both dreamed and real to me. We talk about what, from my angle, that is, how it works.

Unlike at Lancaster Ave., I am clearly in charge, explaining things to this somewhat important figure who would outrank me in a “real” situation. I suggest different directions to walk to see how to get out of the dream convolutions and find a straight road “home,” though that outlook seems less important than my finding it a duty and/or challenge. The sun is out and brilliant, a good day, one that invigorates me.

We walk into and through small buildings of various types, mostly indistinct (the light intense, but the details not in focus), all being worked on. We don’t talk to the workers. At the entrance to a small, Frank Furness-like museum being ripped apart, I say, “There’s always one of these,” meaning always a museum in my dream, always being reconstructed (in most of those dreams, the museum is based on a specific one, such as the University Museum at Penn, but that’s not so, here). Again, inside details are indistinct, the workers seem bemused by our intrusion.

The attempt to find the road out continues until we reach  a wide flow of water outside one building. The water runs between buildings, through sorts of courtyards. I see this as a pointer to the road out, which I envision as a clear, straight street. I jump in the water and am carried to a small waterfall and washed gently over. The sun is still shining, encouraging. The dream here dissolves into something I can’t recall; it was not important to reach the actual road out, but to find the pointer to it. 

During, slightly before, or possibly after the water interlude, I thank the male figure for collaborating with me on forming the dream, the whole creative process, making it fuller, telling him that my discussions with him (mostly my pontificating) had made the dreamlife and life in general richer, building on my collaborations with daughter Cait (not identified as such in the dream, but female and in retrospect obviously her).

This dream was a shining, active growth process, overt in its implications, not the kind of removed self I normally dream, which includes no discussions of “meaning.” It seemed to indicate a major shift in how I was looking at the world, one I hadn’t been conscious of. I can’t say what, if any, the after-effects were.

I’m old enough to have passed over an internal divide that I didn’t see coming: 

I’m dying.

Not in the sense that I’m about to keel over, but that I can feel that I’m decreasing, becoming less, moving toward an end. The end? 

As a kid I never envisioned death in any conscious way. Odd, too, because on Hastings Ave., when I was about five, the guy across the street died and I watched the hearse pick him up. And I already knew that we were able to rent our house – right after WWII, when almost nothing was available – only because the owner had fallen off a ladder and broken his neck, so that his wife had moved out and rented the place. But I never attached death to myself or to the world. It was a “something,” at best.

In Catholic school (4^th to 12^th grades) I feared the afterlife, not death as  such. Heavy-duty Christians, according to various studies, often have the greatest fear of death – Perhaps they feel they can’t make the grade into Heaven. Whew, I was sure I couldn’t.

But since I first entered college, I’ve never for an instant considered the possibility of anything remaining beyond death. What? My brain turns to soup, while a wispy “self” flits off into the Beyond? I gained a horror of death in my 40s-50s from not being able to picture a world continuing without me there to observe it. Unfair, damn it!

Now, I still want to know what happens next, as observer, much as I wish I’d been around throughout all of history – OK, maybe not the last ice age or the Inquisition. And I still can’t wrap my mind around the idea of not-being, even though I haven’t read Sartre.

But about 30 seconds before death, an “Aha!” will arrive that will make not-being obvious, even enjoyable? Total horse crap.

The altered outlook that led me to this ramble doesn’t feel lugubrious, just a realization that something has changed that I didn’t want to change – but that doesn’t matter now that it has changed.  Things peter out (Peter Out – the last philosopher of the middle ages) in an inevitable way. There’s no glory in it, certainly, but no shame either – shouldn’t even be a reluctance, I suppose, but there it is.

Along the way, I see this evolving in tandem with the wind-down of the country, which, despite its equal inevitability, saddens me. The obvious and predictable end of the American empire was fine by me – we’d bumbled and annoyed the world long enough, imposed on it, taken from it, given back quite a lot, but most of it destabilizing, debilitating. So, no more empire: Good thing. 

But I didn’t think that we’d choose to slit our own national throat in the process. That too is probably inevitable. Our elections, decided by an anomaly of the Constitution rather by than any “will of the people,” show that a massive percentage of the “people” prefer national suicide to a possibly enlightened decline. 

How can decline be enlightened? Through acceptance, through a bit of relaxation. We could sit back in our comfy chairs with a good cocktail or a shot of rotgut and reminisce, laugh over the good times, frown and shrug over the bad. It’s not a nasty way to go when the exit sign’s flashing.

So many of us don’t see our national choice as suicide; we view the invitation to political and social insanity as a form of salvation. Is this a normal approach to death? Any death?

Damned if I know. But I feel a huge sorrow for the country that I don’t feel for myself. And I know it’s misplaced, because when I’m dead, I will be truly and certifiably gone – vanished – whereas our country could conceivably experience resurrection. 

It’s not likely, but possible. The horror that the country and the world will be put through in coming years could be what’s needed to reign in our decline – not of empire, but of human decency. Can we find the best, rather than the worst, in our collective soul?

As for me, I’ll go on dying, and it bothers me far less than I would have thought. As I said, in middle age I didn’t at all like the thought of the vacancy of non-being, the certainty of blankness, the eternity of no-knowledge. But maybe it’s all been enough. Enough of everything. 

*   *   *   *

When I was growing up, it was the age of departments stores. 8th and Market streets in Philly had three: Gimbel’s, Srawbridge and Clothier, and Lit Brothers, all situated at what was rumored to be the busiest single intersection in the country. (Can’t recall who lounged on the southeast corner; can you?)

Lit’s, with its Christmas Village, and Strawbridge’s, to some degree, made the holidays a semi-interactive joy. Lit’s also held smaller gatherings  throughout the year for local kids-show radio hosts, etc.

But he thing I most remember from Strawbridge’s was that, instead of lighted push-buttons to announce whether an elevator was ascending or descending, once the doors opened, you were greeted by a canned female announcement. It was delightful yet startling to hear a purring, sexy voice announce, “Going down!”

*   *   *   *

Tune: “There’s a hole in the bucket, dear Lisa, dear Lisa”

There’s a hole in your logic, Lord Berkeley, Lord Berkeley,

There’s a hole in your logic, Lord Berkeley, a hole.

With Hume shall I fill it, dear David, dear David,

With Hume shall I fill it, dear David, with Hume?

*   *   *   *

Dream #13

I ‘m taking a part-time job with the FBI, and my boss introduces himself as J. Edgar Hoover. He is a kindly, bumbling old man, like the one in Being John Malkovich. His office has no files, just a cramped space with a couple pieces of furniture.

I’m sure that Hoover died years before – “under Nixon,” I suddenly remember. I’m talking to a friend who’s a level of hierarchy above me: “Maybe it’s J. Edgar Hoover, Jr.,” I say, but we finally decide that it is the original Hoover, preserved or somehow resurrected, which makes me uncomfortable, not quite believing and wondering if there’s some other boss figure around.

But the most ludicrous aspect is that all the office records are slices of bread collected in 3 or 4 wrapped commercial loaves tossed on the floor in a corner. The slices aren’t encoded, they are the records themselves. Whenever you want to find something – and Hoover is continually asking me to check for things – you have to rummage through them.

My partner/higher-up is trying to convince Hoover that searching through the bread is not efficient and to establish a reasonable filing system – short wall shelves with little boxes on their sides, about the size of DVD cases. Hoover seems confused but not averse to the change. 

That’s all that remained of this dream.

*   *   *   *

While in my late teens, working one summer as an Ordinary Seaman on a Sun Oil tanker, I was told by a fellow Ordinary (not Smitty), in part-drunken seriousness:

“There’s only two things in the world that smell like fish, and one of them is fish.”

Another fellow worker (Bell, as I recall) was the first to alert me to the six categories of farts: fizz, fuzz, fizz-fuzz, poo, tearass and rattler. 

You may have picked up a similar but slightly different hierarchy, but you probably weren’t listening carefully.

When we added two rooms to the house, close to 20 years ago, we had our incoming electric line moved from the south side to the new north-side mud-room, but I never thought to block up the two-inch hole leading to the original breaker panel (which I had removed and wall-boarded over).
Several years later, we noticed bees flitting in an out of the outside hole. They’d set up a hive inside the partition between the bedroom and the old bathroom. Lying in bed, it sounded like a motor running in the wall. By this time, we were ready to tear out the partition so we could expand the bedroom and move the bathroom from its tiny, skinky, pink-plastic-tiled alcove to a Real Bathroom with the a clawfoot tub.
Anyway, we called a local beekeeper, I think his name was Kaufmann, to come by to see about removing the bees safely and taking them with him. Thing was, if he broke down the interior partition, we’d have the entire unhappy swarm throughout the house, and the exterior cinderblock wall was resistant to simple tinkering.
So Mr. Kaufmann decided he would attach one of his small hives, housing young bees (he called them “babies”), to the exterior siding and fit a narrowing cone over the existing hole that would let “our” bees out but prevent them from returning. They should then colonize the new hive, and gradually the whole troop should transfer; the old queen would either tell the remaining bees to swarm and scram – or die of neglect, which wouldn’t hurt the rest of the new hive.
He saw that the bees had also found their way behind the aluminum siding by pulling out the caulk around the bathroom window. He put duct tape over it. “If that doesn’t work, I’ll come rip off some of the siding” – we’d told him we intended to remove it anyway – “and attach the cone right to the cinderblock.”
It could take 3-4 months to complete the transfer before we knocked out the partition. Ideally, we could video the stages of the attachment and transfer, but somehow we didn’t. Too bad. I did keep running notes, because I found the whole process fascinating, and Kaufmann said he’d never encountered a situation quite like ours – and had never personally attempted this kind of hive transfer, only heard about it.
As he set up, he shared some interesting facts and ideas about the continuing die-off of bee colonies. For himself, he now only raised “wild” bees: He had bought some commercial swarms from Georgia and “they were the laziest bees I ever saw.” He seemed quite disgusted with these slacker insects. He theorized –“ but what do I know, I’m only a milkman,” his day job – that most commercial bees have been so coddled by humans that they can’t look after themselves.
As a f’rinstance, they get mites on their backs, as do the wild bees, but the commercial bees can’t remove them. The wild bees have longer legs and can reach back and kick the little bastards off.
Since the mites otherwise slip off fairly easily, the commercial growers dust the bees with powdered sugar or the like that causes the mites to fall on their butts. It’s said, in studies of evolution, that any trait that requires extra energy or resources – but that with time or circumstance becomes no longer useful – tends to die out. So maybe long legs have become a useless trait in commercial bees? One theory for why humans don’t produce our own vitamin C is that we developed in a part of Africa where it was plentiful, so we lost the “unnecessary” mechanism for its production.
Kaufmann also noted that the almond growers in California, who produce something like 70% of the world’s almond crop, set up thousands of hives – I read, somewhere, about 800,000. “You get one infected hive, and they’ll spread it around to all the others. You just need one bee from each of the other hives to pick up the infection and bring it back and poof those hives are gone.
“I never put any medicine in my hives. Nothing. If the state bee inspector comes by and says I have to put medicine in my hives, I’ll just burn the hives.” He paid $10 to register his hives. “No matter how many you have – you have 10,000 hives – it’s $10 to the state.” The state requires access to the hives to deal with mites, etc. “I don’t mind, if it will keep the bees healthy. But I paid my $10 and in two years I’ve never seen an inspector.”
What else did I learn? Bears, he said, aren’t looking for honey as such. They hear the buzzing as they amble along, find the hive, and go after the bees. ”100% protein. Sure, they’ll eat the honey, but that’s not what they’re after.”

A few days later he brought the new brood in a cooler, but the cooler got too hot, so some of the workers died in the honey at the bottom. He talked to the bees and seemed genuinely upset when he accidentally killed a couple while attaching the new frame.
He was very reticent and concerned we would be upset if his experiment didn’t work, but he was doing a great job. “Seems to be working, seems to be working.”
His daughter, Brittany, helped him out. He calls her Bert, so the conversations sounded something like an old Piels Beer commercial, with Bob and Ray as brothers Bert and Harry Piel.. She’d been working with him for years and only been stung once. She helped me put on bee gear, and he showed me a drone, pointing out that it has no stinger. A queen mates only once, he explained. “She can lay 3,000 eggs a day for four years.” (My grandmother was one of 13, and I thought that was mind-blowing.)
“I gotta warn you. If a bear goes after the hive, don’t go out there. Those bees will be really mad and that can go on for days or weeks. Don’t go out there. I had a bear got seven hives, put them all in a pile.” That cost him around $6,000. “You never make any money from this, I lose a bundle.”
He loves to talk about bees – endlessly. (He’s another of the typical non-laconic Sullivan Countians, always leaning in a little, even when they aren’t leaning against something… just an incipient lean.) I think he takes his bees more seriously than he takes himself. He’s the keeper/observer of his “people” who do the actual work and he admires them immensely.
He became apologetic for not having foreknowledge of everything that might go wrong with this unusual set-up. Here is a man, honest to the core, humble without broadcasting humility, speaking the truth as he knows it while imparting his enthusiasm: libertarian and environmentalist in the best sense.

* * *
Headline of the week: “Woman rescued from Welsh mountain after fall while scattering father’s ashes”
She was found on a narrow ledge above a 300-foot drop. Rescuer’s quote in article: “This was someone properly worrying for their own life. It wouldn’t have turned out well for her if she’d slipped further down.”
Ya think so?

* * *
My choice for the next Belgian superhero: AntTwerp

Pardon me, but I want to request a bit of equanimity for Elon Musk.

He’s getting dumped on a lot lately, and for mostly good reasons: anti-semitic comments and not policing the fat, rotten side of Twitter (now X). But earlier he had been lauded as an entrepreneurial visionary, or something of the sort.

What gets me is that, in both instances, he has not been treated as a full human being. I mean, yes, he regularly comes across as larger than life because of his money, the multiple companies he controls, and his unrestrained ability to make a damned fool of himself. But shrink him down to normal size and he’s a human being, with the standard range of good, bad and indifferent points that we all share, to one extent or another.

I’ve never joined Twitter/X (and never will), so can’t comment on his extended range of views posted there. But from the numerous examples that do escape its confines, he seems complex, comical, confused and confounding: someone for everyone to hate and enjoy hating.

What I like best in these off-hand, off-mind memos is his sense of humor. He can’t seem to take himself or anything he’s doing fully seriously (remember The Boring Company!?), That’s something that definitely can’t be said of his righteous detractors. Yeah, his humor is juvenile often enough, but what a relief from the mock seriousness of the corporate heads, social mahoffs, and commentators who shake their knowing fingers but don’t give a royal fuck about any of us.

Some of his ideas, ballooned into companies, are brilliant, at least as starter-concepts – Tesla, Space X, Starlink, Neuralink – yet he’s an amazing wacko who doesn’t seem to care much what anyone thinks of him. Loathing him for his Scrooge McDuckian piles of money (which, based largely on investments, doesn’t really exist) is beside the point – though I wish he’d just give it away, especially if he did so with the same unpredictable shrug.

Speaking of money, how could he ask his directors, straight-faced, for an obscene payout of $56 billion? Ummm, I haven’t heard anyone say this directly, but maybe it’s to pay him back for buying Twitter – which I recall cost him about $45 billion. (I’m convinced he bought Twitter to deliberately destroy it – the only explanation for his first year’s behavior as owner; if so, bless him).

Each of his companies (except The Boring Company, which, really, had to be a  joke – it’s never produced anything) has a solid, well-developed idea behind it. And each has major downsides.

Tesla has captured the electric-car market, but it’s based on lithium batteries, which are far from being an end-product in battery design – heavy, expensive, short-lived and environmentally brutal. To make the world electric, it needs a real battery which doesn’t yet exist.

Space X will likely become a viable alternative to total government control of space exploration through NASA, but so far it’s shown wild failures during launching (though early failure has been true of every technological advance throughout history), and Musk’s idea of polluting the rest of the solar system with humanity gags me.

Starlink is a major advance in non-terrestrial communication, but it is fouling the outer atmosphere with crap and astronomy with light pollution.

Neuralink looks like it will allow paralyzed humans to form links with computers. Good stuff, that, but likely just as much or more bad by promoting even greater destruction of privacy.

Here’s the thing I’m getting at: More than at any other time in recent history, we as a society demand that everyone be firmly this or that, that they fully confirm (or deny) what we each believe in. So I’m just trying to present Musk as either god’s right hand or the devil’s bosom buddy.

And please remember: Leonardo was gay and wrote backwards, but he still did some pretty neat art (though not Salvador Mundi for Christ sake – I mean, look at the Lord’s dead eyes and silly, twisted fingers – Leonardo, who was a master of hands).

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Two ghosts were walking down the road. On had substance, the other did not. The one who had substance asked the one who did not: “Why do you not have substance?” The other replied: “The Saints’ Commission on Ghostly Well-Being has stated that the purer the thoughts, the more ephemeral the state of attenuation, culminating in gradual absorption of all mundane matter into the All-Encompassing Spirit of Nirvana, much as sugar is slowly dissolved into a bowl of oatmeal. This argument has subsidiary ramifications, which may best be summed up in the phrase, ‘Somebody up there likes me.'” 

The ghost who had substance found this to be a snide and absurd explanation and attempted to kick the other ghost in his keister. But since the other had no substance, the first ghost merely stubbed his toe on a solemnity. The second ghost went contentedly on his way until he chanced to step in a bowl of oatmeal and was slowly absorbed into an aged Scotsman’s breakfast.

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Dream #17

Around 6 am. I have a spotted wild cat [we’d been to the zoo that day], about the size of a small puma to start with, that tries to swallow one of our house cats, I pull that one out of its throat, let the wildcat loose, it swallows my favorite cat, Cali. I know I can cut the wildcat open, which means several minutes of trying to knock the thing out by swinging it by its tail and slamming its head on the floor. But every time I grab it and try to operate with a little Xacto knife, it wakes up and wiggles. Lots of people around, don’t seem too interested, hand me the knife if it falls but won’t help. Finally hold the wildcat down with one hand on its throat and cut it open, no blood, pull Cali out, but the gastric juices have dissolved her hair and she looks like a lumpy football. I’m in a vet’s office and he takes her and hangs her to dry, now orange and green and dried out, a cross between a wicker hot-pad and a potholder. I wake up without finding out if Cali will make it.

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Two updated spirituals:

Ezekiel copped a feel,

Way down in the middle of the hair…

If I could, I surely would

Crap on the rock where Moses stood…

Oh Harry don’t you weep, don’t you moan,

Oh Harry don’t you weep, don’t you moan,

Pharaoh’s air force got grounded,

Oh Harry don’t you weep.