[I found the following sheet used as a bookmark in Vol. 5 of a collection of Friedrich von Schiller’s plays on one of our bookshelves, where it has lain unmolested for several decades. Bad scholar: I don’t think I’ve read any Schiller.]

STUDENT INVOLVEMENT ACTIVITY

For this activity, you will write a travel brochure – the part that you were assigned to read – about the places Gulliver visits in Gulliver’s Travels. Your brochure will be used to give prospective tourist a preview of an exciting vacation spot and to persuade them to visit there.

You will introduce the brochure with a 650 to 750-word summary of the places Gulliver visited. The summary will include descriptions of the geographical locations, the local inhabitants and their physical characteristics, occupations of the inhabitants, systems of government, dining, other activities, and best methods of transportation to get there and back.

Use pictures or drawings to illustrate the topics in your summary, and write comments below them to make the topics sound appealing. *minimum 10; maximum 15

**Remember: you want to persuade people to vacation in this wonderful place. Use vivid and enticing language.

[You know, an assignment like this just might have made me enjoy school for a couple days.]

*  *  *  *

tune: a spiritual, “Going home to see my mother”

Going home to see my mother

Cuz home is where my mother’s at.

And after I have seen my mother,

I think that I will pet the cat.

 *  *  *  *

Trump may or may not be sliding into dementia (sure looks like it), but I’ve long wondered if he has dyslexia. Maybe he doesn’t just hate to read, but can’t do it.

 *  *  *  *

If we are ever visited by extraterrestrials, NASA has guaranteed our being recognized as intelligent beings: “Look – an advanced species! They have cat videos!”

 *  *  *  *

Dream #23

I’m on my way to meet someone (my brother Rod?) on 40th or 41st Street in Philly. I turn north from Market Street and walk beside with a heavyset, middleaged Black woman – no one I know, she happens to be there. After a few blocks, details look wrong and I realize I turned south from Market instead of north. So I turn around to walk north.

Unrecognized diagonal streets intrude, and I am forced off course into pointless doglegs and meanders. Slowly it sinks in that I am in a dream. I decide I should wake up. Nothing changes. I continue walking, into an ever more convoluted nest of streets, into a symmetrical valley where every side street leads uphill to a house and deadends, like a sort of driveway.

I am accompanied by one, possibly two young girls. I shout to myself to wake up. Nothing changes. I start to scream: “No, no, NO.” Nothing changes. I ask the girl (one of two girls?) if she has been in my dreams before. Has she been in someone else’s dream? I realize the stupidity of asking questions of “someone” who does not exist, an internal phantom.

“No, no, no, NO, NO.” I am less fearful that agonized, horrified. I seldom hear my voice in a dream, but these are reverberant screeches. At last I do wake up, but the waking does not seem to come from my intention. Once awake, nothing of the dream’s horror remains, only the images, when so often my dream content lies buried beneath the detritus of the mind’s closet.

 *  *  *  *

Last week we bought a bag of “baby peeled carrots.” How did they teach that baby to peel carrots?

 *  *  *  *

The current movie “Beekeeper” is rated R for “strong violence throughout, pervasive language.” You’ve gotten watch language. Once it gets started, it slams right through a culture. 

[I recently found this almost decade-old letter snoozing in my computer. I don’t know if it was ever sent, how, or to whom. There’s a female first name on the file, but I can’t recall the actual intended recipient, so I’ve substituted “Leslie” here, to avoid accidental discovery. Otherwise, no changes.]

Leslie—

I guess it’s a bit odd writing this to you, but  you’re someone I respect with a different (political) outlook from mine, and that’s important to what I’m thinking about. (We did kick the “gun control” idea around a bit a year or two back.)

I see the state of violence in the country and worldwide as excruciating, accelerating and horrifying. I don’t think there’s much you or I (perhaps anyone) can do worldwide, but I wonder if there isn’t a different tack that could be taken nationally, expanding from a local level.

Part of the problem, as I see it, is that we have fallen into a spiral of blame. The left blames the NRA, guns, racism, talk radio. The right blames immigrants, the government, godlessness, the mainstream media. The feeling seems to be that if we can annihilate the mindset of our “enemies” (or the enemies themselves), the violence would end or at least be markedly reduced.

It should be obvious (but isn’t) that this way of looking at things is far too simplistic. There’s no one outfit or outlook that can be blamed for the now almost universal explosion of violence. 

Social media have a lot to do with it, simply because they’ve introduced a whole different level of immediate scrutiny to the world. What happens down the road, five states away or across the ocean can no longer be swept under the rug or kept on hold for a week, a month, a year. We know within minutes what’s happened on the other side of the earth and we react – that’s inevitable, that’s human nature.

In a funny sense, it’s almost a retreat to tribalism, in that “we” feel ourselves invaded by “them” a hundred or a thousand miles away as surely as would a tribal village assaulted by its next-door neighbors. 

So how to deal with this, how to broker some sense of rational or at least sympathetic reality? There’s no cure-all, but within our country, maybe there’s a way to find a middle ground where we stop accusing each other and try to identify and deal with the common underlying elements of insecurity and distrust, bring the warring parties together to the point where, if they can’t actually agree, they can at least accept and work toward a positive outlook.

This, in theory, is what diplomacy is about, but I don’t think it’s been tried often on the local level, or if it has, it hasn’t been very successful. Can it work if we drop the “blame” items – stop screaming about the NRA, the guns, the immigrants, the over-reaching government – and try to identify what it is that’s fueling the violence, the sense of being under siege? 

I know programs like this have been tried and in some cases worked well when dealing with inner-city gangs. The difference is that the gangs hold the same philosophy but are divided by different loyalties. I’m talking about bringing different philosophies together. Is it possible? Has it been done? If so, where and how?

This viewpoint lies at the basis of much Buddhist thought, which is where, I think, my own outlook has come lately. I’m not naive enough to think that Buddhist mellowness would go over well in a rural American setting. But is there an equivalent that might?

My wife Linda and I moved up to Sullivan County in 2000 from Philadelphia. As white city-ites, we were about as liberal as anyone gets (still are, at base). Landing here, in a place I dearly love in just about any and every way, we find ourselves knee-deep in undeviating Republicans. 

Two things: first, I’ve found most people here to be accepting of the person as opposed to the political viewpoint. Those who know us fairly well understand that we look at the world differently, so we just don’t discuss the areas of friction that would set us at each other’s throats.

Second, I’ve found that my own hardened views have softened. Hunting makes a whole lot  more sense to me; the absence of stupid regulations allows life to flow more freely; an ex-Catholic who will never again feel comfortable in any church now sees the energy, application and cohesion that the churches bring as the social centers of well-being. 

So maybe I’m in a place (internal and external) where I can look at the world in a moderating way. I find, to my amazement, that up here I can get along with and be liked by almost anyone. I don’t say that as self-glorification, but with mystification that has slowly run over into acceptance. I’m reaching out to you as someone I think may look at the world a bit like I’m beginning to but who would have a far wider range of interaction with people across the board. The questions I was asking above – which boil down to “how can we bring our country’s warring, beleaguered social communities together with a sense of common need to deal with its eruption of violence” – are ones that I’m sure you’ve thought about a great deal. So … what can we (I, you) do, practically, effectively?

Any ideas?

–Derek Davis 

I’m fascinated by dreams, not in a Freudian sense (I haven’t read his works on dreams), but how they’re put together, the elements that make them up and where they come form, the choices we make in their construction, what varied uses they may have. They make connections you can’t find while awake and draw together conclusions we seldom make consciously. Even when they’re ugly or terrifying, they’re beautiful.

All sorts of explanations have been floated, but nobody really knows why we have dreams.

One fairly recent “theory,” kind of mind-tingling, is that the brain is always tossing bits and pieces back and forth between its reasoning and emotive centers. In that view, dreams are the underlying give and take between the two, with waking life also being a form of dream, but constrained by reality: Dreams, then, are our basic state; being wake is an interfering nuisance.

Earlier on, the underlying concept of “meaning,” in the sense of “purpose creating content,” was central to Jung’s view of life: There had to be reason behind experience, and that reason had to spring from compelling need, in a metaphysical sense. His own dreams, those he recounts, are filled with symbolism and elements that obviously carry meaning – even when the specific meaning remains cloudy. 

One of my favorite explanations for dreams came out during the 1970-80s: they serve as a cataloguing mechanism for memory. All the muddle and effluvia that churns at night is elements of daily experience searching for their niches. Seems reasonable: When I’ve tracked down individual incidents or elements in a particular dream, no matter how weird, I’ve almost always been able to pin them to a specific, often obscure, image from my last day or two: Aha! That’s the thing that was sticking to the bottom of my shoe when I was crossing the street. 

What I’d really like to think is that dreams are the mind playing games, trying to escape or reject the expected. All day we pretend that what we’re doing makes sense, has some end in sight or a value of its own. At night, we plop down on the pillow and our unconscious snickers, “Oh, you think so? Well here’s what it’s really like”: wallop, whack, 3 Stooges, Laurel and Hardy.

But I also wonder if different people don’t have different types of dreams that serve wholly different functions. Listen to anyone ramble on about their dreams. They nearly always reflect that individual’s way of skewing the world. Some sound Freudian, some Jungian, some cataloging, some a chaotic jumble, some searingly realistic. Not being mental clones, we may not all live in the same universe of dreams.

I’m not a “meaning” person, for instance. I don’t find deep meaning behind life, and I think wasting time looking for it gets in the way of clear, rational examination. I’m fact-based, intensely interested in science and physical law, though I don’t expect it to lead to an explanation of ultimate causality.

So maybe my dreams and Jung’s serve wholly different functions. Jung’s, I think, laid down a road leading to a level of personal reality beneath or beyond what he could access in daily life. Most importantly, they reinforced his need for enshrining “meaning” as the pillar upholding human existence.

Mine, I’m pretty sure, have most often served as a way to escape reality. For years, most of my dreams had no emotional content – none of the fear that nipped at my waking heels. They were, in the best sense, a rest, a curative. 

I’ve also developed a theory that I haven’t run across elsewhere about disordered dream endings. Most often, getting lost in a dream is looked at as reflecting the dreamer’s feeling “lost” in daily life; I think that’s often the case. But time and again, I’ve had dreams appear to drift off their own internal path. Yes, there are a lot of varied ideas about the function of dreams, but I think it’s possible that within a dream the function itself, whatever it may be, can go astray: The dream fucks up, and the dreamer is kicked out of the resulting ineffective mess. 

Similarly, there’s this, which I’ve experienced but also not seen referred to: a “wrong” element intrudes into a dream and derails it: My dream’s moving along nicely, even if it follows no waking logic. Then suddenly my overseeing mind recognizes something that just doesn’t fit in. The sweep, the stream, the evolution of the dream comes a-cropper. When this happens, I usually wake up; the dream, thrown off track, can’t continue.

So, what happened? Did my memory-cataloger toss a wandering snippet into the wrong pigeonhole? Did my mind, cooking up a spicy dish in the wok of irrationality, apply the wrong logic-seasoning, like tossing ice cream into a stir fry? Maybe it was a dollop of “meaning” dropped into a “cataloguing” dream, or a day’s trivial memory trying to shoulder aside an archetype.

And maybe our categories of dreams change with the progress of life? Here’s what I recall over the broad swipe of time:

1) Around the age of five I had a recurrent series of dreams in which I was chased by a wolf who drove a hone-delivery milk truck with a screen door across the front where the engine should be. He would stop the truck, unhook the screen door and chase me. I couldn’t make my legs move beyond a drag-through-the-mush pace (reflecting physical paralysis in REM sleep, as I later found out), but he never caught me. I was, at most, mildly scared, never expecting anything really bad to happen.

What category would embrace this dream? Damned if I know.

2) For 30 or more years as an adult, 80-90% of my dreams were emotionless, usually bland mystery stories where I was a participant following paths and clues without involvement. I’d guess these were a relaxing form of escapism at a time when waking life was a pain in the ass.

3) In recent years, my dreams often involve urban settings (for some reason, or none at all, this focus became stronger after moving to our rural home). I’m nearly always lost somewhere in Philly, going through an area I should know but can’t navigate, to reach somewhere else that may or may not be definite. If I’m walking, the streets approach each other at odd angles, and trolley tracks traverse them where I know they shouldn’t. City Hall looms in the center of a linear tangle I can’t comprehend. I enter a subway station through constricted passageways filled with construction apparatus. I weave back and forth through corridors and stairways that meander up, down, around, under, within, entering buildings that I have to wend my way through – usually a restaurant at some point – either finding no way out or finally getting outside to realize I’m not where I wanted to go.

I also have a heavy emphasis on urban transportation – trolleys, the subway with its mazes of concourses, tight places to crawl through to get to a vehicle, missing the train, getting on the wrong one, not knowing where it’s going, the 30th St. train station transformed into myriad offices and shops.

Some dreams are filled with color and sweep and succulent, unlikely architecture. Even the most muddled or chaotic are stuffed with detail and mounded effluvia. Interiors, entered into like personalized trails, exude ancient trivia in narrow, littered exit hallways that shed deteriorating wainscoting packed solid with local memory.

Roadways (so many roadways, so often) are lined with every variety of house and junkyard, every imaginable frontage. Their geometry of line and curve – seen as though from a tower – spills out into a cityscape that harries itself through unidentified ages.

Other common themes of recent years: house renovation (multiple small rooms, intricately and confusingly arranged), leaking water — pipes, roofs, basements, rivers.

4) I seldom used to dream about people I knew. Now many of my dreams involve the family, people from Philly, and others from years ago that I hardly ever consciously think about. I’m often a peripheral or incomplete character – a helper or observer without fixed identity. The details are fuzzy and have little tactile quality, as through viewed and felt through a badly formed lens.

My only true nightmares were attacks on the basic level of my functioning mind. While a freshman in college, I dreamed that I was in a symbolic logic class where something grasped, strangled, shackled – christ, I still can’t come close to putting it into words – my ability… not to think, not to will to think, not even to want to will to think, but something so basic to existence that without it I would not be a working being. It created an imprisonment so fearful that I awoke in paralyzed horror. Then I fell asleep… and dreamed the same again. And awoke paralyzed and dreamed the same. And again, at least five times. If there’s ever a terror mechanism that mindfuckers could put together to force me to confess blindly, squealingly to plotting human annihilation… 

Many people apparently dream in extended-reality format. They relive, re-devise or extend their waking lives. I don’t recall half a dozen realistic dreams in my life. The elements in mine make little or no waking sense, show no logical connection; they larrup and trip over each other, crisscross, overlap, leapfrog, evaporate, oscillate, regroup, dissipate, intertwine, horseride, blend and crystalize, smear. They partake of everything and nothing.

Some hang by their dreamertips from their own cliffs of understanding, near to memory but unassailable. Many have a distinct “flavor,” a specific yet indefinable sense that if I can reach… out… along the track of what’s left at waking… if I can grasp that one blurred image by the ankle and pull its whole body back… there it is! Instead, I fall back asleep, wake half an hour later, all of it gone.

Why don’t we remember some dreams? Is it because we can’t remember them, that dream “logic” is so unlike waking logic that our mind, once awake, can’t grasp it?

Have you ever had a hypnogogic state (smattered flashes while on the verge of falling asleep) in which you’re assaulted by an immediate, pressing need to do something vitally important or to correct an overwhelming mistake, only to realize, thirty seconds later, that there is no such need or mistake, or even a realm in which such a possibility could live? I doubt it means squat, but it hints at a way of looking at the world that’s certainly non-Aristotelian.

We were visiting one of Linda’s nieces who let us into the psychic side of the family through one of her predictive dreams. For years she’d dreamed that she was driving and suddenly hit a kid in a striped shirt, flipped him up, killed him. One day she was out driving to college with her father, got the feeling “this is it” and braked suddenly. Her father asked why; the living kid in the striped shirt had darted into the street. (I have no idea what to make of this, because I don’t think time is a landscape, but rather an artifact of motion and entropy; there’s no fore-knowledge of the future.)

To sum up, as I see it, each of us develops the dream structure that fits our specific mental organization and personality; it’s not a matter of interpretation, but of worldview, of how we each envision what a dream should be and do in terms of our needs and desires. Our necessity creates our dreams, and our dreams then help create us, in a constantly evolving helix.

[I plan to drop in the occasional personal dream as I putter along. They will follow no chronological order. Some may be tied to the accompanying rumin in some skewed way, others will just be there to be there. Feel free to ignore them.]

The world’s going to hell. Anyone half-alive knows that. So why aren’t the other ranters talking more about the one overwhelming determinant of planetary collapse?

It’s us – the sheer volume of humanity.

Various space probes and telescopes are checking the galaxy for “goldilocks” planets, those, like ours, that orbit in the region around a star where water remains mostly liquid, the only condition that can support life as we more or less know it. 

The goldilocks zone is determined by a combination of planetary density, distance from the parent star, planetary spin rate and other stuff we don’t need to go into here.

One major assumption is that these planets must have a dense, rocky center – but not so dense that its gravity would pancake all organic life. So a life-supporting planet can only be so large, so dense to be just right. Looking at that, you can readily see that no organic-life planet can successfully support 8 billion beings as bulky as ourselves.

Human life has more than tripled since 1950, from roughly 2.5 billion to roughly 8 billion. Though most experts deplore this explosion for various reasons, but they seldom correlate it directly with the continuation of a livable planet.

They catalog the quantity of our waste, the explosion of concrete, the expansion of landfills, etc., but not how the simple fact of our unlimited existence determines climate change (or more fundamentally, climate stability) through the next millennium.

Seriously: Unless the current population is reduced by about 3/4, there is no medium-term hope for the planet. I say “medium-term” because over the long-term we’ll either have learned to rein ourselves in or vanished as a species. Whichever we choose, the earth itself will outlast us – and laugh at us.

In the 1960s, ZPG – zero population growth – was a seriously promulgated goal. So much of the ’60s, I’ll readily admit, was hopeless hope, but ZPG was perhaps the most forward-facing idea of its time, a recognition that we, as a species, had done enough, gone as far as we needed to go (indeed farther than makes sense) and should just … stop.

Instead, over the rest of the 20^th century, the human planet went apeshit, supported by the idea that “growth” is sacred in every area of our existence, and that everything within our grasp is unlimited.

Evolutionarily, the population of every species – plant or animal – reaches a limit, attempts to extend beyond it, and collapses. That’s earth’s history. Today, we’ve taken growth farther, faster, to a degree of disruption and dissolution previously unimaginable.

Every extrapolation I’ve read listing the dangers of climate change (whether assumed to be man-made or god-made) is based on carbon emissions or current waste or energy expansion or plastic inundation, while taking into little account that unrestrained human propagation is what most inflates our output of rank shit. (I hate the European whining at population loss; they should celebrate it.)

Consider these points:

* If the population were to double in the next 100+ years, even if we halved the energy used per individual, it would come to the same amount of energy expended (1/2 x 2 = 1).

* Our individual human output – breath, sweat, piss, excrement – will remain constant per unit.

* Assuming every square inch of earth to be open for exploitation, we have not considered the physical and emotional need for minimal personal space.

* Each of us has a unique personality with unique perceived needs and expectations, so there will never be universal agreement on how to deal with any grand aspect of existence. We cannot impose a generally accepted regimen to achieve planetary salvation.

Still, it may all even out over time, you say?

Time… 

We don’t have it. Whatever way we extrapolate, our grandchildren will go through fire and hell. I didn’t do it, you didn’t do it, none of us individually did it, but collectively we produced species armageddon. Look it in the face or spit in its face, it’s still there.

Hope for humanity, if any, isn’t a matter of time but of evolution. We don’t simply need to be more understanding or more accepting, but to become something fundamentally different. By our nature, we have shat our nest beyond emptying. It’s programmed into us, inescapable unless every future newborn is reprogrammed before they pop out.

Could happen. Could happen about the same time as we discover immortality – which will really doom our sorry race.

Humans aren’t special, as religion assumes, and we aren’t infinitely tinkerable, as much of modern science assumes. We’re random bits of universal, then galactic, then stellar, then planetary, then environmental particularity. We’re blobs of circumstance. We need not puff our breasts in exuberance or wail to the stars in desperation, but recognize ourselves as whateverthehell we may or may not be. We can’t change most of it, and it’s absurd to say we have a destiny to do so.

Likely it’s the same throughout the cosmos. And you wonder why we haven’t tuned in intelligent broadcasts from the stars?

There’s scientific data that either support what I’m jeremiadly chuffing out or undermine it, depending on how you see the problem (i.e., whether we’re permanently fucked or only fucked for the next couple centuries):

Based on the latest data from the UN Population Division (https://ourworldindata.org/world-population-growth) the population growth rate has gone down steadily since 1960, though the number added to the population over that time has remained about the same – a billion more of us every 12 years (the total slowing to 11 billion total by 2088).

Some excerpts: “One of the big lessons from the demographic history of countries is that population explosions are temporary. For many countries the demographic transition has already ended, and as the global fertility rate has now halved, we know that the world as a whole is approaching the end of rapid population growth.”  (This quote assumes that we haven’t experienced something unparalleled and incalculable over the last half century. I’m seen other figures that predict that Nigeria alone will balloon in population to 750,000,000.)

“The 7-fold increase of the world population over the course of two centuries amplified humanity’s impact on the natural environment. To provide space, food, and resources for a large world population in a way that is sustainable into the distant future is without question one of the large, serious challenges for our generation…. Population growth is still fast: Every year 140 million are born and 58 million die – the difference is the number of people that we add to the world population in a year: 82 million.”

…”Population projections show that the yearly number of births will remain at around 140 million per year over the coming decades. It is then expected to slowly decline in the second-half of the century. As the world population ages, the annual number of deaths is expected to continue to increase in the coming decades until it reaches a similar annual number as global births towards the end of the century.

“As the number of births is expected to slowly fall and the number of deaths to rise the global population growth rate will continue to fall. This is when the world population will stop to increase in the future.”

Thus, the good news: Women worldwide are deciding to have fewer children, and the sperm count in men is falling – so maybe the situation will start to heal itself.

By which point it will almost certainly be too late:

• The need to expand the acreage of land given to agriculture (which is already a catastrophic polluter) will obliterate the stated need to protect at least 30% of existing open land and sea from encroachment.

• The need to increase solar and wind energy to both service this population and replace fossil fuels will have the same effect of encroaching one our shrinking pristine land – while also overwhelming potential agricultural land: Look at photos of the massive solar arrays in Australia and parts of the U.S. set up where crops might otherwise be grown.

*    *    *    *

My semi-apologies if my negativity upsets you, but I find it personally invigorating, because I see it as dealing with reality, leaving happy fantasies to wither, as they should.

But! Some really good news: Linda made the world’s most delightful, delicious blueberry muffins for breakfast this morning.

Muffins ventured, muffins gained!

I believe in as little as anybody alive. OK, as anybody I know personally. Not in god, or the soul, or religion, or mysticism; not in the spiritual side of human experience, or transcendentalism, or the broad consciousness of all existence.

I view all as material, from the ground (sub-ground) up.

Then why am I so affected by religious music? 

I was listening to Willie Johnson a few days back, a Black street singer from the 1920s and ’30s who’s influenced every folk or blues singer since. Most of what he recorded was evangelical-religious, yet it’s like hearing the walls talking to me – as elemental as the studs, the lath, the overlay of plaster and paint. No one could tug me any closer to the truth.

But what truth?

Nothing that’s spoken to me outside the context of music.

Johnson’s liner-note writers tend to exude a snottiness toward his religiosity, heckling his “naive” outlook, as though he was a low-grade spiritualized idiot savant.

But how about this, from “God Don’t Never Change”: “God way up in Heaven, God way down in Hell…” Are you listening, John Milton? That simple line turns over a couple millennia of Christian philosophy and examines it for fleas.

As modern Americans, we’re in a time and place where religion is either marketed in amorphous globs – Christian Contemporary music as Hallmark sentiments wrapped in weeping slobber – or pushed through an increasingly microscopic sieve to strain out the smallest lumps of heresy. In much of Europe, you can believe in nothing more spiritual than the asphalt roadway and still be considered Christian. In much of the U.S., if you don’t stoutly refute evolution, you’re the devil’s buddy.

So what’s happened with me – my love of Willie, of the Bach B minor Mass, of the Mozart Requiem, of the Staples Singers, Clara Ward, the Coleman Hawkins Singers, the Congolese Missa Luba, Elvis and Little Richard in their quieter Christian guise?

In Catholic grade school I joined the choir, not because I had an amazing voice or could play so much as the simplest instrument, but because I loved – and still do – the haunting melodies of Gregorian chant, especially the liturgy for the midnight Christmas Mass. There’s nothing today that can beat the sheer beauty of “Veni Creator Spiritus,” though I believe in not a word of it, in Latin or English.

I’ve been trying to figure out why, when people bring up god or “spiritual experience”or “there has to be something more” or “there are other aspects to existence” or “you have to expand your idea of consciousness,” I have trouble keeping a quiet, accepting face, yet Negro spirituals, bluegrass hymns, and Renaissance masses elevate me.

Is it enough to say, “It’s all an evocation of the spirit, religious or otherwise”? Or should I file it away under “Beauty” and forget about it? Or is it that it’s more difficult to write a tuneful, soaring celebration of the second law of thermodynamics – “Oh Newton, may the joules of thy knowledge and the prism of thy light illuminate each wayward quark of eternity.”

I wish I knew.

No, I take that back. Knowing doesn’t necessarily make everything clearer. I know how my vacuum cleaner works, but that doesn’t explain the delight I take in the way it sucks up stray dog hairs or desiccated moths. 

Maybe it’s just that we’re each the sum of all the accidents of our lives, of both our experience and our internal hodgepodge. I don’t limit “internal” here to anything as explicable as genetics. It might have been the emotional effect of a passing cloud on my mother’s horizon the moment I was conceived. It might have been a random radio broadcast when I was in my crib that stimulated my beta waves.

Most likely it’s a conglomeration of little things that I could not, even with a tunneling electron microscope, hazard to identify.

I hope so.

 *    *    *    *

Song of the Week:

The old oaken bucket,

Where once I yelled, “Fuck it,”

That rotten old bucket,

That stank to all hell.

I really think I should

Scrap the songs of my childhood,

Which started out lousy

And didn’t end well.

The things that bring back memories, and the memories that expand from there…

Among the Christmas music on my computer is this collection: “Music of the Medieval Court and Countryside for the Christmas Season.” Performed by the New York Pro Musica, it was just one of a string of astonishingly beautiful albums of Renaissance and pre-Renaissance selections produced by Pro Musica founder and director Noah Greenberg in the 1950s-‘60s.

But this note isn’t about the music itself, it’s about my friend Dave Liberman – who died way too young in the 1990s – and his odd inability to deal with the world despite his brilliance.

Dave, one of the original members of “The House” on 34^th St. in Philly that I’ve written about often before, gave me several reel-to-reel tapes while we lived there in 1963. They were a wonderfully odd collection of stuff he’d recorded; some I could trace, others came I don’t know from where.

One of those tapes included my first exposure to this Christmas collection, which he must have taped from an album, because a short but rollicking piece, “Riu Riu,” had the distinctive catch and repeat that was the bane of so many attempts to record scratched LPs. For some reason, whenever I played the collection, I waited for that defect with a weird glee, scooting the tape along to pass the worst of it, hoping I could reconnect at just the right place to make it a complete entity.

Later, I found and bought the record, which I taped to a cassette many years further along, then, later still, digitized to my Mac. Now I get a sad letdown when “Riu Rui” plays wholly unmolested. But hearing it the other day brought Dave back to me.

Dave was a gentle, delightful human being with an underlayment of intense anger, which I don’t think was induced by mistreatment or evil incidents, but part of his basic nature. A budding math genius, he was in his senior year at Penn when me met, graduating first in his class while spending much of that year lying on his back in bed, staring at the ceiling. He could have been, should have been, almost anything. (One thing he did become was the character Dorsal in my novel No Bike.)

Somewhere in that year I was removed from affection by my girlfriend Marcia, which affection she transferred to Dave. It was painful as hell for me, but there was no fault in Dave attached to it.

Marcia and I had reserved ship space for a European trip that summer, but after the rejection I switched to flying over. Was this decision to leave my ship space for Dave? Something like that, though the details are misty. At any rate, we were all to reunite in England.

Instead, Dave decided to ingest some heavenly-blue morning glory seeds, rumored to be a Mighty Hallucinogen. In Dave’s case, they brought on the worst of bad trips. He didn’t make it to Europe, and I didn’t get together with Marcia until Greece.

I should note, here, that Dave, though generally mild, non-threatening and probably no more than 5’9”, was a compact mass of muscle, immensely strong. One time I saw a trio of tall, lunking frat boys confront him, not sure why. That usually hidden anger settled on Dave like a canopy. Fortunately, nothing physical transpired, because I think he would have broken bones.

At any rate, the morning glory seeds (or something internal) drove him psychotic, and from what I later learned, it took five cops to restrain him. He ended up institutionalized for a short period. I’ve never figured whether that mad experience was a cause for later problems or an illumination of an underlying warp.

I was best man at his wedding a couple years later. The wedding was great fun, but marriage soon turned sour. I don’t recall what he was doing for a living then, but when I visited him some time later while he was living alone in Boston, he was driving a taxi and using that incredible mind to figure out how to steal from the fares he picked up. That was the last tine I saw him.

About a decade ago, I tried to track Dave down online. Alas, there is a surfeit of David Libermans and Liebermans in the wide world. All I could find about his later days was his funeral notice, which I didn’t copy – fool! But while checking for his background, I stumbled over a site listing the annual prizewinners for best math paper presented by a freshman at UPenn.

Not surprisingly, Dave had won in 1960. I also noted that five years previously that freshman prize had been given to Robert Cantor, perhaps the best teacher I ever had for any subject.

Cantor came to a far sadder end than Dave, as detailed in a past rumen.

 *   *   *   *

Leftovers Supreme:

North Korea should be encouraged to continue its missile tests. What better gift to nuclear non-proliferation than the Dear Leader shooting all his unarmed missiles into the ocean? 

*    *    *    *

Song of the Week

tune: “Till There Was You”:

There were turds on the hill,

But I never smelled them stinking,

No, I never smelled them at all…

Though they were poo.

*    *    *    *

Finally, there appears to be, in actuality, an archaeologist at Cardiff University named Flint Dibble.

I’m thinking of starting my official bio with “I’m an agéd straight white male with no pronouns and no real respect for humanity.”

*   *   *   *

I don’t believe in UFO’s because …

1) of the asinine assumption that anything humanity has accomplished, but for which we don’t yet have a detailed origin, was left here by a higher alien intelligence. This outlook is similar to the idea (see last rumen.) that Planet Earth is too incompetent to have produced its own water or oxygen.

2) on the opposite hand, UFO adherents paint intergalactic aliens as having the collective smarts of roadkill: After crossing hundreds of parsecs of space, they mostly diddle around our back highways spooking people, make silly circles in farmers’ crops, and can’t manage to land without crashing in New Mexico.

3) we now have had fly-by examination of all the planets in the solar system, and not one shows the slightest evidence of intelligent life (in fact, everybody got so pissed at Pluto for its pointlessness that it got demoted to dwarf planet (or was it midget asteroid?).

4) intra-galactic travel contravenes all scientific and common-sense limitations. No, you and your communication back home cannot exceed the speed of light, that’s just a neat SF handoff to make galactic colonization sound neighborly. And even if someone is just sending unpiloted drones here to peek at us, they’d have to wait for said drones to reach their destination, then broadcast their observations back home, a round-trip of propulsion followed by broadcasting that would require hundreds to thousand years for the round trip — not a sensible or economic proposition. 

*   *   *   *

My latest invention:

SWD (Some Wheel Drive): Each of your vehicle’s wheels is activated independently and totally at random, thus equalizing wear on each tire.

*   *   *   *

An illustration of how, even in this world of instant information, you can discover absolutely nothing.

I bought a pair of insulated-grip work gloves at the local hardware store. I had never heard of the company that made them, Showa, so I carefully perused the extensive cardboard tag attached.

Showa has offices in Georgia, Quebec and New South Wales (Australia). The manufacturer is listed as being in Japan. But the gloves are “Made in Malaysia.”

The back of the tag has three small graphics (one looking in outline like an open book, two like a knight’s shield), each surrounded by two letters and up to ten numbers. There is no indication what any of these symbols or numbers mean. There is also a short list of “Examination Certificates,” again with no mention of what they refer to. Between the two is the usual list of ridiculous warnings, which boil down to “Don’t hurt yourself.”

The other side of the tag features three circles enclosing: 1) what might be a snowflake, 2) a hand holding a… pipe?, and 3) a small wrench next to two meshing gears. These circles lie below a photo of a worker’s hands wearing a pair of the gloves and holding a large building block – which they are about to place onto a poorly prepared line of mortar.

What I find most peculiar is that someone, somewhere, deliberately designed this tag. It did not fall from a passing pigeon.

*   *   *   *

There was a young man of Gdansk,

Who in public would lower his pants.

To make matters worse,

Near his grandmother’s hearse,

He exposed himself to his aunts.

*   *   *   *

I don’t understand drag queen story hours. I mean, I don’t care about them one way or the other (people who are scared of drag queens may be the saddest folks on earth), but how did the idea  take hold of drag queens having a particular connection to kids’ story-telling?

There used to be (and I’m sure still are) clown and witch story-tellers and those who dress up as mythical or folk figures to give bounce to a tale. But none of those became either ubiquitous or controversial. The meeting of drag queens and kids’ stories just seems to me an unlikely development. Anybody know the history?

*   *   *   *

Memphis Slim has a great song about losing his girlfriend Kay. It’s called “If You See Kay,” but as sung, the initial “I” is silent. You can pick any tune you choose and sing it to yourself.

I tend to get obsessive about numbers, but, despite my Scots/English/Welsh background, I ignore 1066 and instead get tied up in 1054. Why? Because it was a year of delightful confluence: the supernova that create the Crab Nebula, and the schism between eastern and western Christendom, one of the few positive developments within the then-Catholic Church; whenever our late-breakfast hits 10:54 on the stove timer, I feel blessed.

(As for 1066, the Normans were the scum of Europe, not outdone until the Nazis came along. They’re worth their own rant here, or even a full book at some point.)

But this year, the magic number has been 84. It’s my age, and also the age of my deeply beloved brother Rod’s death. The obsession also spills over into the calendar: Orwell’s 1984, which passed without national degeneration (that had to wait until Trump and 2016), and my daughter Cait’s birth that September.

I’ve somehow managed to sidestep a lot of what most people take for granted. Despite living on the edge financially, I’ve made absolutely no attempt to search out a career or a well-paying job. It’s not a stance taken; the urge has just never been there. Linda and I now have a (to us) tidy sum in investments, but I never read the annual prospectus, just every now and then check out whether the amount has gone up or down, with little caring one way of the other – it will change direction within the next couple months, with or without my help. Financially, I’m a true ignoramus and I suspect always will be (“always” stretching maybe another decade).

But there are some other things I should finally be catching up on that I’ve spent my life ignoring, hating or blundering against. The  most personal of these is promoting my own work. I’m goddamned proud of the books I’ve written but done nothing whatsoever to promote them or even make them known. They sit, self-published,  unread, on Amazon, along with roughly 15 million romance novels and dragon fantasies. (I think one of mine is ranked 5 millionth in whatever category they tossed it in.) 

So suppose (just suppose) I now want to promote this stuff. How would I go about it when I steadfast, insistently refuse to join social media. The idea, literally, makes me want to puke. 

OK, first step: All of you are now commanded to visit my author page on Amazon (amazon.com/author/davisderek), and if you don’t want to fork money over on one of my books, I’ll send you a free copy (postage-free if hardback, a mobi file if Kindle). I am, seriously (guffaw!), unconcerned about making money on what I’ve written. I’m only concerned about it being read. And it deserves to be read.

What else should I be learning at this late train stop? The ins and outs of science and history that I’ve missed along the way. How to be less angry at myself and the world, how to forgive my own mistakes and those of others – oh crap, that’s not going to happen. Maybe to get out of bed in the morning and not wish it was a different day.

*   *   *   *

A couple nominations for fictional character names:

• Ian Phlegming (master of nasal disguise)

• “Beef” Stroganoff (Mafia lackey)

*   *   *   *

In the last few decades, there’s been increasing attention paid to familial and spousal abusers who replicate the abuse done to them at an early age. Part of the thinking is, this is what they know, what they’re familiar with, so that even though such abuse created huge misery in their lives, they pass it along as “how things are done, how families behave.”

But something popped into my mind recently that I haven’t found covered seriously elsewhere: Can the same outlook also explain, by extension, the behavior of the ruling segments of a society, culture or nation? I’m thinking particularly of the current explosion in the Mideast between “neighbors” Gaza and Israel.

Both the Moslems and the Jews have suffered centuries of oppression, and while as individuals they have reacted in multiple different ways, both Hamas, theoretically representing the Palestinians, and Netanyahu’s government, theoretically representing Israel, have taken on extreme, abusive and damming positions that mirror, to a remarkable extent, the evils done to their people.

The fact, of corse, is that neither Hamas or Netanyahu represent their people. They are carrying on an age-old feud passed down as “normal” by their ruling caste. 

And this in itself may be a reflection of the obnoxious religions that have arisen in the area, ever since Moses (or whoever it may have been) swiped monotheism from Akenaten in Egypt, over 3,000 years ago. 

The god of the old testament was a nasty son of a bitch, though probably with good reason – I mean, if you were omnipotent and had created the human race, then watched what it developed into, wouldn’t you be pissed at everyone and everything, especially yourself? (“Lucifer, did you put weed in the brownies again?”)

Next, Christianity came along and was quickly co-opted by the Church machine that threw all the blame on human beings through the absurdity of “original sin.” Finally, Islam, to further acerbate a crappy legacy, adopted the worst smash-the-non-beliers errors of its predecessors.

These religions, arising in a small crossroads between continents, have engendered over 2,000 years of expanded depredation throughout the world. And no good, doable way I can think of to roll it back. The damage has been too enormous.

*   *   *   *

At the Covered Bridge – a restaurant, now sadly closed, near the village of Sonestown – the most heart-poundingly sexy woman ran the few tables – boisterous, succulent as ripe cantaloupe and dead-on with every order, especially the drinks.

I once made an internal bet that she would spot my empty gin and tonic glass within 15 seconds. At my count of 13, her finger shot out and

“Refill?”

They can’t teach that in bartender’s school.

Another strange police charge:

A woman’s body is found in her boyfriend’s fridge: “Stevens is charged with tampering with evidence with the intent to impair a human corpse.”

*   *   *   *

How to create a European detective series which will then appear on Netflix in the U.S.

• It must feature a female police detective in the lead who is
  • smarter and more intuitive than her fellow detectives
  • returning to the force after a traumatic absence
  • despised by at least one officer in charge
  • involved in a difficult or disintegrating marriage, preferably interracial
• The department must be fully interracial with this fact never referred to
• The timeline must ratchet back and forth at a dizzying pace to leave you confused
• The plot must focus in part on the owners of a corporation run by an unpleasant family of at least two generations
• One of the younger members of this family must be considered an outcast for showing honesty or decency
• The elements of the central crime (usually a series of grisly murders) must be contradictory or incomprehensible enough to leave you further confused
• Several of the charters, male and female, must look so nearly alike that you spend much of your time trying to recall who you’re watching
• A totally unrelated subplot, usually involving the detective, must turn out to be crucial in solving the mystery
• The detective must conspicuously tail a suspect in her car without the suspect noting this for a moment
• Forests and murky bodies of water must be involved, whether central to the plot or not
• The music must be constant and either poundingly ominous or feature a pop song sung in English, no matter in which country the action takes place
• You must be left with the positive feeling that the writing, directing and acting were superb throughout and you’ve had a lot of fun, even though the story was pointless

*   *   *   *

Tune: Frosty the Snowman:

Futzi the Showman

Was a rancid little elf,

For if you tried to talk to him,

He would say, ‘Go fuck yourself.”

*   *   *   *

A spot-on cartoon:

*   *   *   *

Thought I openly admit to being a total klutz at most physical endeavors, it doesn’t stop me from giving advice to others on how to do plumbing.

Continual failure can be highly instructive.

*   *   *   *

The proper terms for today’s political system and its leaders: Moronocracy, Moronocrats

*   *   *   *

The British are still dickering on returning the Parthenon marbles to Greece: now they may be willing to at least “loan” them to the Greek Parthenon Museum. As if they had the least right to them in the first place. Lord Elgin performed the most egregious art theft in history, carting them out of Egypt, to “protect” them, I suppose. The usual combination of British international brutality and smarm.

*   *   *   *

Tune: Back in the Saddle Again

I’m ballin the cattle again,

Ballin the cattle again,

Yippee ti-yi-yay,

Not one will get away,

When I’m ballin the cattle again

*   *   *   *

Headline:

“Respiratory infection clusters in China not caused by novel virus, says health ministry.” Of course not! It’s a short-story virus.

Sprinkled throughout tis week’s rumination you will find samples of odd signage, supplemented by equally strange pairings of absurd names and terms.

Just stuff I’ve tripped over in my linguistic jogs.

For example:

Is the Gutter Master a cousin of the Back Door Man?

*   *   *   *

Fairness is impossible in most human situations because some will not want fairness. They’ll want to get the best for themselves, regardless of consequences to others.

And what is fairness anyway?

It’s not giving everyone absolutely equal shares, which ignores the differences of individual need.

It’s not giving each their preferred choice if that choice will negate the choice of others.

There are no cures – physical, social, political, environmental – that will fit the needs of everyone in every situation. We are each an individual, a member of a local group, and a statistical point in the overall scheme of things.

And when you’re dealing with people, there aren’t only the individual and the general population to consider; between and around them lie the variable (determined by change in need or situation) and the cyclical (the historical repetition).

Though some suggested cures will work more widely and effectively than others, for the most part we can’t expect to fix or even define anything “human” on a broad scale, only raise the likelihood of comfort or acceptance somewhat higher.

*   *   *   *

Funniest award of the year!

Seen on a plaque in the reception area of the hospital where Linda and I waited for her annual ophthalmology exam:

“Total Knee Replacement Five-Star Recipient”

Well, knee me in the groin!

*   *   *   *

When I first heard of neatsfoot oil, I had a horrifying vision of the poor little neats, footless, bleeding to death in the snow.

*   *   *   *

Why do archaeo-geologists give our poor planet so little credit for its role in its own evolution?

They’ve made a recent claim that attack by massive asteroids was necessary for our planet to develop hydrogen cyanide and thus release atmospheric oxygen, a necessary basis of life. It’s as though Earth could not possibly be responsible for its own progress without the help of huge, extraterrestrial aliens.

Instead, I propose that we consider what was going on right along at the bottoms of our oceans, which produced, among other things, Ancient Sulphur Spewing holes.

Without these ASSholes, there would be no life on earth.

*   *   *   *

You know that ubiquitous road-sign-from-hell, “Road Work Ahead”?

Did you ever consider it would mean almost exactly the same if the sign read, “Road Work Afoot”?

*   *   *   *

When Linda turned onto Lick Creek Rd. the other night, a doe and two fawns turned away from the verge to run back into the field.

For the first two decades we were up here, the deer preferred to dash straight into the road (in one case, directly into our car) and get obliterated.

But in the last couple years more deer are scampering off to live another day. They may have actually learned something important about survival.

You think there’s any hope that humanity might reach a similar level of revelation ?

Oh, roll over, howl with laughter, and kick your feet in the air!

*   *   *   *

You ever wonder: 

Is Jack Shit related to Peter Out?