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

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

[A story]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So, should I then blame myself?

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

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

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

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

*   *   *   *

Hastings Ave.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Hastings dogs, cats, and a mouse:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*   *   *   *

The latest announced proof of intelligent design:

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

*   *   *   *

When you piss upon a star,

The steam you raise will travel far.

When yo piss upon a star

It really stinks.

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

*   *   *   *

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

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

*   *   *   *

[Getting back to harmless nonsense]

*   *   *   *

Declaring war on useless adjectives:

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

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

*   *   *   *

And the  joust against idiot headlines:

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

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

*   *   *   *

An ancient absurdity:

United States currency, boxes and boxes of it!

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

*   *   *   *

Traditional hymn: “Leaning on the everlasting arm.”

Modern update:

Farting, farting,

Safe and secure, though somewhat crass.

Farting, farting,

Farting out the everlasting ass.

*   *   *   *

And, at last, a melon-coly ending:

“Come elope with me, honey, do!”

“No, I can’t elope with you, dear.”

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

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

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

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

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

Enough about her illness.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*   *   *   *

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

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

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

*   *   *   *

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

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

*   *   *   *

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

*   *   *   *

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

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

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

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

*   *   *   *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*   *   *  

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

*   *   *   *

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

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

*   *   *   *

Some terms and their unlikely companions:

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

*   *   *   *

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

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

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

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

*   *   *   *

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

*   *   *   

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

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

I love it when I come up with a half-assed idea that veers off in a different direction, gallops for awhile, then races back close to where it started.
I’d thought I’d mumble here about AI for awhile. I figured maybe I could be slightly more coherent that most of what I’ve read. (Unlikely, but worth the try.)
So I typed up a few quick notes. Then I went back and expanded on them because I realized gibberish like “check previous” or “didn’t I?” weren’t completely self-explanatory.
But I did actually “check (through) previous” rumins and found that most of the ideas I’d jotted down now I’d already covered a couple months back.
What next?
Take time off and read something that has nothing to do with what I had in mind.
A couple weeks ago I downloaded Bertrand Russell’s The Problems of Philosophy from the Gutenberg Project. Considering my usual snarls about philosophy in general, you may wonder why I did so.
My main problem with philosophy is that I find 95% of it either boring or bullshit, often both – and yes, that does include Plato. But I’m a fan of Russell and William James, who both seem to be talking about reality and trying to provide lucid explanations of their subject.
Russell has an often sneaky, sometimes overt, humor, and he talks in terms that a standard-issue human being might use in conversation with another standard-issue human being. He tries to explain, not just assemble impenetrable categories into which he can bundle outlandish conjectures.
So OK, I moved on to Bertie: No AI to worry about here, just a short romp explaining how philosophy works… in 1912.
About a third of the way through, it occurred to me that creating philosophy is much like writing fiction: You come up with a basic broad idea, then you establish a plotline filled with supporting incidents – categories in the case of philosophy – to carry you through to a satisfying ending.
A bit further on, when I thought I’d become safely diverted from my annoying flap of an article, Russell got into the problem of how we can prove that an object – or any form of “matter” – actually exists, independent of our mental experience of it. That is: Can we conclusively say that anything outside our self’s perception is real, when it’s conceivable that the entire universe could be a bad movie playing inside our one and only head?
At that point, bingo! It had me thinking that, just possibly, AI – at work in the real, not the philosophical world – might be able to solve a seemingly impossible conundrum that has bugged me for years.
Which is this: How do I know that a color as perceived by someone else corresponds to the color of the same name that I see? It’s entirely possible, even likely, that what you call “red,” if perceived by me exactly as you see it, might be what I call “blue.” We would agree that objects that we both call “red” have the same color, while each each of us is experiencing that color uniquely.
But, of course, with no possibility of proving that conjecture, one way or the other, because you can’t place another’s internal perception inside your own head.
Or can you?
It’s been only in the last half century that we’ve begun to directly study the “mind,” as opposed to the physical collection of neurons and other squishy folderol flopping around inside our skulls. Books on consciousness and the self are popping up all over the place these days, because we now have the beginnings of a handle on what those neurons and their buddies do to form a linked, coordinated system that produces “experience.” We’re even starting to move toward defining what that experience might be – not just what it does, in other words, but what it is.
This progress is a product of the overall blistering ramp-up taking place in all areas of science, not just biology. And within the study of life, as within the study of, say, particle psychics, much of this advance depends on the explosion in computational ability, which is on schedule to become unimaginably wider and faster once quantum computers reach their potential.
All of this has led, over tine, to the realization of AI, no matter how you define the term “artificial intelligence” – and believe me, that AI acronym covers as many variables as those unending food spreads in a Korean video series. Basically, AI is anything that a fine-tuned, programmable machine can perform as well as or better than the average human.
It’s the “better than” that has freaked out the ever-wary. But let’s put that part aside for the moment. Here’s the question that’s been sitting inside me for decades: If a near-unlimited computational machine could identify, read and duplicate every input that goes to creating an individual’s perception, couldn’t this machine then project that perception accurately into the mind of another, after modifying the input to meet the different range of inputs specific to the receiving individual?
And if so, could not your perception of “red” be duplicated in my mind for comparison with my perception of red?
This outline is ridiculously simplistic, and nothing close to it could be considered possible yet. And there may be other imperceptible limitations – call them “existential” – that would otherwise prevent it. But isn’t the idea of such a transfer, considering today’s rate of progress, at least conceivable?
Yeah, it would be a damned stupid waste of time, money and equipment to perform such an experiment just to make me happy. So, consider it a thought experiment, and since sillyass thoughts can get us in trouble, I won’t go any further with that.
Instead I’ll pick out some other points I may or may not have touched on previously.
How can artificial intelligence be any worse than the human variety? Is there anything, anywhere that we exalted beings, in our chest-beating pride, haven’t managed to fuck up?
With every major technological advance, we alternate between pseudo-religious adulation and atavistic horror, with little attempt at rational examination. So far, AI has gone from “cool-ass whoopee” to “them machine muthafuckas gone kill us,” creating a scrum of conflicting comments that run around our feet like the rats in Werner Herzog’s Nosferatu.
Much of the negative fixation on AI comes out of our evolutionary dislike of the “other,” whether that other be animal, vegetable or machine.
“Intelligent” machines were initially seen as potential aids to improving life and removing drudgery; now they’re being seen as evil inventions that can eliminate jobs and become our masters.
Similarly, UFOs were thought to be overseen by gentle extraterrestrial saviors in the 1950s; by the ‘70s their major activity was confined to ramming probes up our orifices.
Here’s a more serious area for investigation: Are there only levels of intelligence, or could there be fundamentally different kinds of intelligence?
I’d expect that a higher intelligence would look at the whole picture, shorn of our evolutionary basis, and this could lead to “good” outcomes – such as improved life and less drudgery.
Should the most intelligent life-form be the one in charge? If so, maybe humans are just another waystation.
Anyway, is humanity worth saving if we’re determined to be destructive?
Another funny thing that came up while pondering all this was a simple reversal that wholly changes outlook.
Consider the two words “nuclear” and “unclear.” The reversal of two letters flips their meaning on its head.
“Nuclear” sums up not only atomic annihilation, but a singular, central approach to problem-solving.
“Unclear” suggests that a problem involves a hidden multitude of ramifications to be determined through questioning and experiment.

* * *
Sign off: Got to admit, President Thump’s come up with the cleverest idea yet on how to deal with immigrants: turn the US into a country no one in their right mind would want to enter or live in.

[Her final appearance anywhere… except in the novel provisionally titled “Jenny”]

As Leslie and her sister Veronica leave the Ritz Five movie theater at 2^nd and Walnut, Leslie is developing one of her piercing headaches. No doctor or ophthalmologist that Leslie’s mother has consulted could tell them what the problem is. Leslie wonders why there is no “f” in “ophthalmologist.”

The girls have come to watch Polar Express because it sounds like fun and stars Tom Hanks. The  movie is showing on two of the Ritz Five screens. The other screens are dedicated to “art” films whose posters make Leslie nervous. She has never watched a movie in a foreign language.

Near the corner they are met by three young males with somewhat unsettling grins. The trio’s middle grin belongs to one of Leslie’s sometime boyfriends. She doesn’t know the other two. Veronica recognizes none of them.

“Hey,” says the sometime boyfriend.

“Hey,” Leslie echoes.

“Doin’ down here?”

“Watchin’ a movie.”

“Which one?”

“Polar Express.”

“Kids’ stuff, huh. Any good?”

“It’s all right.”

The quintet form a pentangle partially blocking the north-facing crosswalk. Evening jaunters mutter “excuse me” and brush past. 

‘Ya wanna, I dunno, get somethin’ t’eat?”

“Could. But gotta get home by 10. My mom gets all upset.”

“Boy does she,” Veronica adds, her version of talkative.

“Jim’s Steaks, down South St.,” says the non-boyfriend on the left.

“That’s blocks, half a mile. Issit safe?”

“We’ll pertect ya,” says the non-boyfriend on the right. He giggles.

“I dunno,” says Leslie.

Veronica shakes her head and pulls her earlobe. “Not me. We’ll get late.”

A bulky young Black bulls his way through their obstruction, lightly bumping boyfriend’s arm.

“Watchit, you,” says boyfriend.

“Shove it, fratboy, you hoggin’ the whole fuckin’ sidewalk.”

“Talkin’ like that in front my girl?”

The Black looks back over his shoulder. “That what she is?”

Boyfriend takes a step forward, but Leslie pulls his sleeve. “No. Gotta get home, told ya.”

“Hey, ya know what we can do?” asks lefthand non-boyfriend. “Right here? We can sing.”

Leslie seeps into confusion, “Whaddaya mean? What sing?”

“A trio. Us three.”

“How?” asks the bewildered lab tech.

If you have listened to Alan Lomax’s capture of Genoese longshoremen bursting into sublime, controlled cacophony, what these three produce is not that. It is, instead, the edge of heaven tipping toward a tired, stumbling city, at the upper edge of South Philly.

Leslie listens, the trapdoor of her mind drops open and the headache relents as she tumbles into a state of superbity as sure as a smack of magic mushroom, an enlightenment that suffuses a part of her never before encountered, so completely and so into all the further days and years of her life that you have no need to hear more of Leslie. 

*  *  *  *

Those attempting to communicate during a bout of hacking and coughing can be said to be speaking Phlegmish.

*  *  *  *

An interesting thing with the English language is that almost all words ending in “ump” have a negative connotation. So, from here on, when I find myself facing the misfortune of mentioning the latest president of the United Stoats, I will refer to Dump, Bump, Thump, Pump, Stump, Lump, Chump, Clump, Crumpet [a bit of leeway there], Frump, Hump, Jump, Rump, Slump and Sump. Probably missed a few, but these allow us a fine verbal smorgasbord.

I should also note that Lump is appealing all his convictions, which makes him simultaneously the most appealing president in history, and the least appealing human being on the planet.

*  *  *  *

Confirmed fact: Nearly all companies involved in AI are already run by Artificial Intelligence, otherwise known as Crass Stupidity.

*  *  *  *

Dream #11

I am having a conversation with Einstein at a gathering, He then comes to stay for a few days at my brother’s. Einstein is very old and being honored for something. He laughs a lot and seems to be enjoying himself, but we talk about nothing significant.

I think the conversation had mostly to do with apologizing to him for having to move his bedroom from one room to another. The physical details were clearer than usual for me.

*  *  *  *

My favorite line by the Scottish rock band the Mekons: “Keep on hoppin’, oho, little stunted arms and legs out in the big wide world.”

More so every day.

*  *  *  *

Noses are red, dear

Earlobes are blue,

Angles in heaven

Wish they could screw.

Linda and I dropped by the Bullfrog Brewery in Williamsport for a Sunday concert and found the whole experience fun in a bunch of different ways.

Linda had checked online and saw that the Greg Burgess Trio, a group we knew nothing about, would be playing there two days after our 47^th Unofficial Anniversary. We had not settled on anything specific for the day itself, so we chose that as our mildly delayed celebration. 

You could order free tickets online. Linda did this, printed them out, and we hauled ourselves the 50 miles to Williamsport along Rt. 87, a lovely creekside road to travel with an almost total lack of cars on Sunday morning.

“They’re all in church,” Linda hazarded. As most of you would guess, that’s the last place I’d want to be, any day of the week.

The concert was on for noon, and we arrived about 20 minutes early to avoid any crunch. Lots of people there already, but most just seemed to be there to have a late breakfast out.

We showed our badly printed tickets to the young receptionist, who seemed mighty puzzled. “Tickets? I’m not sure what to do with them. I’ll check.” She scooted back somewhere and returned to say that, basically, nobody bothered with the tickets. She’d just seat us.

Maybe because the faux tickets somehow reflected our stalwart musical interest, she steered us to a for-some-reason vacant high-seat table… right next to the performers. 

We ordered our own late breakfast from an explosively cheerful waitress (I won’t call anybody a “server,” that’s the electronic device where your email messages squat while somebody you will never see reads them and laughs at the idea of “privacy”).

The trio was busy setting up, but at least I wasn’t in their way. I love music of all sorts, but I can’t play any instrument, so I always feel a little intrusive around true musicians… an interloper-doofus. 

Here’s what got me first: This was a geezer trio; by that I mean they were almost as old as me. As soon as they started playing, all other considerations went away. Through two sets of reinvented  jazz standards, they were spot-on musicians who perfectly melded style and personality. 

Burgess, on keyboard, has long, investigative fingers that each find their way across the keys with a sensuous certainty. He’s been there, he’s done that, and he’ll always do it the way it should be done, with, exquisite taste.

Bill Stetz plays standup bass like the instrument has been out surveying the world and come back bearing the truth. God, it’s good to see a real bass in action, huge, assertive, defining.

Drummer Jim Ruhf – I tend to focus on the dummer most times, because the best can carry any outfit from underneath –  is a master. His riffs are excellent, his flourishes inspired, but what got me was the way he places individual slaps and quiet ticks like he’d found them hanging in the air and pulled them down into their homes.

Along the way, especially during the second set, they were joined by friends who had been sitting nearby, nodding and tossing the occasional comment. Bill Kane took over the keyboard for a bit with a more pointed style that openly asked for the keyboard’s complete cooperation. Tony Konan joined to sing a few songs, and Paul Jozwiak’s delicious sax ignited the buzz.

I’m not a jazz fan as such, leaning more to folk, blues and whatnot (especially whatnot), but within jazz I’ve leaned toward piano masters, particularly Mose Allison and Ramsay Lewis.

That’s to say that I don’t feel competent to talk about how the Burgess Trio fits within the realm of jazz. I feel music as sound and sight without much nod to categorization. So if I kept on talking here about the music itself,, I’d slip further into bland muling and sputtering platitudes.

Anyway, the whole afternoon at the Bullfrog was a wide, delightful experience, besides just the concert. 

Between the sets, Stetz, the bassist, stopped over to chat with us. I was amazed, but shouldn’t have been. In group settings I blend into the woodwork – more as stained, aged oak than sunny poplar. But people gravitate to Linda, to her obvious openness and “thereness.” They trust her and want to know more.

Burgess soon joined Stetz and somehow I got into my lament that I’ve never been able to play an instrument (I stumble somewhat at kazoo). The intent to take any physical act forms in the brain and and has to flown through our neuron to prod our extremities to perform the action. With music, for me, somewhere along the run to the wrist or lips, it trips over the curb.

Altogether, what a fine time we had, with Linda especially delighted to hear a live concert for the first time in years. Same with me. During the ’60s folk revival (or whatever you call it), I saw almost ever coffeehouse performer or act in existence, but that was long ago. 

One final note: the Hat.

Linda made me a a winter hat that I’ve worn every frosty day for the last 15 years. It’s high, round, made of thick grey fleece – no, not fleas, they’d jump off – with a rolled rim and a muted blue ribbon circling about a third of the way up. It’s warm and feels right in my hand and on my head.

In all the previous years, I can’t remember anyone commenting on this hat. Then, in the last couple weeks, three people spontaneously declaimed they liked my hat, each in the same simple words: “I like your hat.” 

Bill Stetz made it four, as we got up to leave – “I like your hat.”

The hat’s the same. Have I changed? Has my head flattened?

It was the kind of day when everything I could think of went the way it should go, along with a whole rittle and rattle of happenings that I had no reason to expect, but that incidentally blessed me and Linda.

OK. Linda is the blessing of blessings. The next 47 years should be a gas.

[The selection below is from the novel I’m working on. It is noted in the story as an incident that may or may not have happened to a character of little interest. I’m particularly fond of it. That’s odd.]

For $13 Leslie buys a summer gingham dress with short, puffy sleeves, She thinks the blue and white pattern goes well with her blonde hair, and this may be true, but she has no real reason to think so. Leslie’s thoughts go off on their own without her encouragement or by-your-leave, enjoying an independent and fuller life than they are likely to find when closeted in her mind.

She tries to picture herself walking down Chestnut St. wearing the dress, but fails. She should have kept it on after trying it in the fitting room, but she never does this. Perhaps it’s a fear of the checkout clerk thinking she is going to steal it, put it on and leave wearing it without paying for it. But Leslie always pays for anything she wants to keep or eat or drink, she has never stolen so much as a penny in her life.

She also thinks the dress or any article of clothing she buys may need adjustment, so that wearing it in the street might make her look unkempt. It’s a funny word, “unkempt,” where did it come from? But at home, with her mother and younger sister, she can put it on again and her mother will “realign” the difficult parts. Leslie has never learned to sew for herself, though her mother has tried several times to teach her.

On the other hand, Leslie is a good cook. She cooks simple dishes, always exactly the same way every time, and always tasty. “Very tasty,” her mother will say almost every time Leslie cooks a meal. Her sister, Veronica, never comments on the food except to occasionally remove some small item that she doesn’t like, or what she will later claim is a “bug” that had fallen in.

Her mother wonders aloud why Leslie has never been promoted at Dr. Folger’s lab, though she has been working there now for at least four and a half years. “I don’t think anyone’s thought of it,” Leslie suggests, though she herself does not think of it except when her mother asks, because Leslie has all the money she needs to buy what she really wants and can always find a short-term boyfriend to take her to a movie or a small restaurant. None of these boyfriends stay with her for long, but she doesn’t mind. What would she say to them every day if they were with her every day?

Leslie shows her mother the gingham dress and her mother says, “Very pretty,” though she thinks it plain and undistinguished. She never wants to hurt Leslie’s feelings. Leslie puts the dress on, her mother appraises its length and the evenness of the hem. She suggests no improvement or rearrangement except a slight tuck at the waist. Leslie has a slim waist over average hips.

All her life Leslie had said her bedtime prayers until one night, about a year ago, she realized that she could not picture God and so could not find a way to talk to Him. She did not say anything about this change to her mother, and of course never said anything to Veronica about anything that mattered.

Now the idea of talking to God has faded to forgetfulness. As she pulls the sheet up to her chin, she pictures herself in the gingham dress but still cannot picture herself wearing it out on the street.

The picture is just Leslie, herself, in the dress.

*   *   *   *

Recent headline: “Chess: Carlsen disqualified in New York after refusing to change out of jeans

“The world No 1 was defaulted from the World Rapid Championship”

Who set up such a rule?

The King, the Queen, the Bishop?

Did the Knight ask him to change into armor?

Did the Pawns have a say?

*   *   *   *

Blue is the official color of conservative parties in Western Europe, with red the liberal shade.

Over here, the political colors are the opposite.

How did red come to signify the right in the US, considering the anti-communist chant of “Better dead than Red” in the 1950s?

*   *   *   *

Back in the heyday of Morton’s pot pies, they had planned to market a one-person serving to be eaten alone, in your private room.

It would be called Morton’s Chamber Pot Pie.

*   *   *   *

To celebrate the coming New Year, we bought a bottle of

Christian Brothers Ruby Port.

I now plan to establish my own brand: 

Atheist Louts Gutter Red.

*   *   *   *

Song of the week:

My wild Irish nose

Has the greenest snot that flows,

You may search ev’rywhere, 

But none can compare 

With the phlegm

From my wild Irish nose.