Linda and I were jawing along during and after dinner when I veered off, as I too often and annoyingly do, into my “unique” childhood… not so much that no one of earth has  ever had another like it, but that of anyone I’ve read, no one has recapitulated what I recall of being a child – of hating being a child, of feeling that I had no relation to a world – the world – that I could understand.

Somewhere into talking with Linda – always a revelation  – I started to realize that, through all these too many years, I’ve consistently viewed my childhood as having held no definable self; that this internal whatever had no reality that I could pin down to anything, to measure any thing or anyone else against. That I was a cypher, an absence.

But a bit later – lights out, on the edge of sleep over which I would not plunge – I suddenly decided that actually as a kid I had a huge sense of self – an almost monstrous one that obliterated or devoured the rest of the inscrutable world. No, I hadn’t just alienate the outer world to the side, as I’ve seen it for so long: I had actively negated it.

I had feared all external life, yes, but it was less a failure to accept the outer than a failure to believe in anything outside myself.

After this revelation [or whatever the hell it was], I realized how this fits with one of the main strains – what I think is the underlying yet overwhelming strain – of my current novel: that memory makes the self, that memory is the self, that anything I didn’t personally experience as a kid was non-self, because I was no one before my memory solidified, and that may be why I am still fettered by an obsession with memory.

It goes well beyond nostalgia or what someone else [not me, ever] might consider the trauma of my youth, but the understanding that without the constant play of memory, I would not exist as self.

[I’ve written previously about the most wonderful teacher I ever had, Robert Cantor, a grad student in math who taught a summer course in calculus, totally focused on every student learning every bit of what he had to teach.

[He later shot and killed one of his math profs and himself. One press report – only one that I recall – stated he was found with a handwritten note in his shirt pocket. It had to have been taken from the 3×5 spiral notebook he always held in his hand throughout the class. The note read, “I am not who I am.” The report may have been fancy, not truth, but I believe it without reservation. Robert Cantor is one of the great sorrows and losses of my life.]

If, in my own mind, I was not real, as I looked at the situation for so long, then there was nothing I could do to change or move forward, or become – no way to interact, since there was nothing to react with. Yet, had I alternately accepted that only I exist, that would have been far more malign, a massive negation of reality.

So how do I look at it today, when the terrors of childhood have returned, in lesser form, but as a possible second childhood of terror? Is there a way out of this self/non-self confusion? More important, should there by a way out?

If only I exist, then reality doesn’t matter, because reality is a glam within my mind; but if, as rationally tells me must be the case, that outlook is haywire, what’s left? Is anything left, should anything be left?

This confusion works so well with my novel that it’s mightily invigorating, though it may seem brutal and negative. For writing – and for living whatever years remain to me – it’s a relief. I doesn’t matter which side of the trail is true, or if neither is.

I’ve never wanted to die, even when things were at their most precipitous. It’s not so much a fear of death as a fear of the world continuing without me, a world I’ll never be able to know. But should there be no reality beyond myself, I have no reason to care. Alternately, if reality is real, it will chug along without me and without my need to monitor it.

Whoops! Tigger, my all-time wonderful, wise, and superlative cat, just sauntered in to devour his evening snack: a freshly snapped-up mouse. Now, I know Tigger is real – it’s simply impossible for Tigger to be other than real – so everything I’ve written above is beside the point, whatever I might have thought the point to be..

Good night. 

My favorite Guardian columnist, Arwa Mahdawi, went on a wonderfully controlled, funny rant about Elon Musk’s latest absurdity – riding the testosterone train, a favorite obsession of the social right. Apparently, loads to testosterone are supposed to make men better than women, and musclebound men brighter than wimpy intellectuals. 

Oh, who is Arwa Mahdawi? She’s a British Palestinian lesbian journalist living with her wife and baby in Philadelphia, which should be enough for anybody, even if she wasn’t also one hell of a writer. Wish I knew where in Philly she lived, because I’d love to meet her when I get down there to buy Indian snacks and Lebanese olive oil at the International Store on Walnut St.

But that’s just one of my side obsessions. What got me to writing this piece is that I think she, as well as Musk, have the wrong take on our animalistic nature. 

The basic assumption of most social commentary these days is that warfare, misogyny, tribal and racial animosity, and internecine conflict – all the woes of  the world – arise from social imbalance.

Unh uh. That’s secondary, at best. They arise from evolution.

We’re mammals, and as such we’re going to behave like mammals, to the good and the bad. As a species, we’re part of a genus (homo) that’s part of a larger family… that’s part of the animal kingdom, that’s part of, so far as it can be defined, “life.” We’re all and each creatures of evolution, trying to establish a concept of  morality that will support our particular warped assumptions.

We behave as we do because that’s what the world’s evolutionary program demands. We protect our young, our possessions, and our territory; we allow no one else to intrude without introduction and acceptance. Today, with the world on the edge of oblivion, we behave exactly as should be expected through evolution – we deny, we fight, we wield our weapons, and we cry “foul.” But it doesn’t arise from socially imposed foulness or antagonism. It’s simply who and what we are.

[My standard mea culpa here: I’ve said or suggested much of this section some time back.] Morality is a concept which differs for each individual human being. There’s no way you can define, codify or justify “morality” on a cosmic scale, yet on a lesser scale it becomes just mind games. It’s easy enough to say “the psychopath (or the ex-president) has no morality,” but likely the unhinged obsessions of the psychopath and the ex-president occupy pretty much the same realm of certainty for them as “morality” does for the religious or the secular righteous.

Humans invented the idea of morality and raised it to a higher plane than mere rutting mammalian behavior. It then appears obvious (to humans) that having a higher ideal makes us a higher order of being. But should someone – like me – not accept religious precepts as foreordained, the “moral” outlook can have no solid basis beyond mere acceptance. [In my case, that acceptance is pretty damned high: Wielding “authority” over others to their damage is to me as unforgivable as behavior gets. But how could I prove that my response is the better one or that it is “true”?]

It can’t be determined by any scientific measure, which I think is one reason many people these days don’t trust science – it can’t provide them with “truth” the way they want it delivered. They want “truth” to be beyond human definition, imposed by a higher source on a higher level of reality.

So, to take an honest stance, you have to dispose of “truth” altogether. If you, again like me, see science as providing the proper way of determining “what is,” then the hell with “truth.” Accept “what is,” and do your best to organize it for the greatest benefit of all – as if we’d all agree on what that benefit might be. 

But what would it look like if we could change the world through social exhortation and policy, could form ourselves into an anti-belligerent species? The world would not just be a different place, we would be a different “us.” We would no longer be human beings (animal – vertebrate – mammal – descendant of hunter gatherers); we would be a signally different form of life from anything that has ever been known on earth.

Now to take this discussion in a slightly different but dependent direction:

Humanity as it exists will not ultimately survive. Nor should it. We are not worthy, and there’s no way, again, to say what will make us worthy.

What makes “worth”? Whatever we, as humans, collectively define as being “worthy.” But why should we even yearn to take such a wacky tack? Because somewhere in a tumbledown part of our brains, a slithery side-effect of evolution has implanted something to which we’ve given the name “worth.” [Circular logic? You bet! That’s something we’re damned good at as a species.]

It isn’t that I don’t think the world (planet Earth) should survive, but that I see no way to expect it to continue as a place that can support life within the range of what’s possible today. Humanity will destroy the place for every lifeform.

As a living form, we have fucked up because we were evolutionarily programmed to fuck up. 8 billion of us – ignorant, uncontrolled, uncomprehending – have chosen to live from one generation to the next without interest in consequences, because that kind of ignorance is innate to all life.

In itself, I don’t think our planetary destruction matters much. There’s a lot of universe out there that has no concern for Earth’s existence. But if someone should fine a way around what seems to me an inescapable, catastrophic end game… maybe I might be delighted.

Nah, not likely. We’ve collapsed in exactly the way our brains have been programmed throughout evolution to collapse. It isn’t that we’ve failed, but that we’ve succeeded too well in a direction that can only lead to the world’s destruction. We’ve come to the end of the line, the only possible end; it’s not just inevitable but necessary. 

*   *   *   *

Come gather round, depressives,

And a story I will tell,

Of Pretty Boy Freud the doctor,

Vienna knew him well…

*   *   *   *

Despite the many years since the name change, I wish Top Ramen was still called Oodles of Noodles

Have you or anyone you know ever been congratulated by a mobile dog groomer on your 44th wedding anniversary?

It was kind of a complicated day for a “celebration.” The day before, two of our friends, a married couple, had been sentenced to jail. A little before dinner on the day itself, daughter Cait called to tell us about the excellent memorial she’d arranged for a friend of hers who had just died; it was moving and beautiful as she told it, but, following our friends’ debacle and during a marital milestone, there it was… death.

But to get on to planning our dinner celebration.

Should we choose a high-concept, expensive whirl with glitz and champaign? Is there such up here? And is that in any way us? We’d have to drive 50 miles to Williamsport; a hundred-mile round trip wasn’t quite what we felt in the mood for. 

We have 3-4 places we go for our weekly dinner, in no particular order, for no particular reason. On this special day we both leaned toward The Barn, outside Eagles Mere: a straight-forward bar setting with attached dining room that serves about 20. It can get rackety at times because of the ancient tin ceiling that reflects gayety, but it’s low-key, friendly, with good food and excellent service. The final selling point, for me: They cram every last drop of Yukon Jack into a way-oversize shot glass.

Since this was a Thursday, we figured it wouldn’t be crowded, but we were forgetting it was the first Thursday of the Fall Fair, which is a big deal up here. The dining room was filled solid, so we had to settle for a fairly isolated 2-seater near the bar.

That was just fine, still friendly and cheery, but how to get served? Would the waitress find us in this not-so-obvious corner, or were we supposed to order from the bar? Well, I solved that problem, as I almost always do, by sitting there waiting for something to happen. Eventually the very busy waitress did find us, and we ordered our simple but substantial meal of cheese steak and Barn Burger. And drinks.

We don’t usually tend to party or make a show of ourselves, but we did dress up a bit that night, with Linda wearing an amazing, high-sparkle green jacket that she’d put together for her character in a play last year.

We were really enjoying ourselves, reading the ad placemat – we love ad placemats – while waiting for our goodies to appear, when a strange but wonderful encounter took place.

A woman of 50 or so walked over from the bar, stopped, and asked us, “Are you on your first date?”

A couple thoughts came immediately: First, that’s an odd thing for any stranger to do or say at a bar. Second, she was saying this to an obvious codger and codgerette.

“Actually,” I said, “this is our 44^th anniversary.” [I’ve always been obsessed with exactitude in numbers.]

Neither Linda or I can recall her exact reply – probably “congratulations,” plus some general reason for the “date” comment. Then she went on to tell us that, yes, she was a mobile dog groomer [that is, one who drives a panel track around to service the hair and toenails of canines; as a matter of fact, we’d noticed her truck in town]. We then had a nice chat, telling her where we lived and her telling us that she knew our road and the two ponds, etc.

She smiled heartily and walked back to the bar. About 20 minutes later, Linda went over to get refills on our drinks. Half a minute later the bar burst out in loud cheering and clapping. It was obvious: “Congratulations on your anniversary.”

Somehow that tied the whole evening together into something unique and wonderful, in a setting that could have been anywhere from fine to indifferent. It was probably the best anniversary we’ve ever had.

Maybe it’s somehow natural, during our talk at the table, that we did not ask the dog-groomer’s name, and she did not ask ours. But the encounter did leave us with a few ponderables:

What would have led her to think we were on any kind of date, much less our first?

Was it something in Linda’s shiny, exuberant jacket? [I’m pretty much Every-Geezer in settings like this.]

Had she just thought us approachable but didn’t know quite what do say, so came up with something chipper but unlikely on the spur of the moment?

Does she collect or enumerate encounters with people in bars as an avocation [she didn’t seem the type]?

Are Linda and I so closely bonded that we broadcast an ineffable giddiness when together?

Was it because it was Thursday or that she’d groomed an especially lovable dog?

Whatever: Our thanks to her for making the evening one that we can genuinely cherish. And I’m pretty damned sure no on will ever again mistake our dining table as the stage setting for a first date.

Most of existence bugs me at one time or another, but this is something that really bugs me: how the existence of  the individual is systematically ignored when discussing the group.

In nearly all our attempts to define who we are as humans, we choose to look at what’s general, not at what’s specific to the individual. That is, the assumptions we make – in research, in politics, in social action, in most fiction writing, in what we look for when we wake in the morning – are based on searching for the median or average that will help tell us what is “true.” 

This comes from a species-wide acceptance that there is always a ’normal” an “accepted,” a “widely-agreed-upon.” Most of the time, by doing this, we lose track of the fact that each of us is a unique being with a unique construction.

A few examples:

#1: Both Biden and Trump were over the last year set upon for being “too old” to be president. If you look at them as individuals, at any age, it’s perfectly reasonable to ask, “Are you fit to be president?” But to start off, before any data have been collected, with the assumption that anyone over 75 is a doddering loon is not just obnoxious but ridiculous.

[OK, the particular loon writing this is 85; I’ve mixed up people’s names all my life, as has just about anyone I know. It has to do with brain storage mechanisms more than age.]

As it turns out, there is serious doubt about either Biden or Trump’s fitness to run a country. In Biden’s case, it looks like his response to aging has left him struggling. As for Trump, at no age would I have trusted him to take random samples of possum saliva. The man’s a cretin with the cognitive acumen of a crankshaft. 

#2: At the other end of the age spectrum, the socio-political crap-collectors are now lumping all younger folks in the country into random “generations,” arbitrarily bounded by dates that make little or no sense, then assuming that these non-groups all think and behave like bonded clones. Worse, these “generations” are slapped with randomly-assigned letters like Z and X or derogatory labels like “millennial” [which can makes them seem like adherents of the 1000-Year Reich].

I have far greater trust in the country’s young [especially the women] than in my own cohort of codgers, but even in this case, for me to label them a solid forefront of hope would do them immense injustice. Every individual of every generation is a unique entity with a specific genetic heritage, personal background and conglomeration of experiences. They are not massed emblems.

#3: My own childhood. [Yeah, I know you don’t want to hear any more about that, but you’re going to. There’s a point to it in this case.]

When I spend time [with regret] reading about childhood experiences, related by adults relying on their memory, teachers relying on their charges’ behavior, or experts relying on their narrowness of outlook, I’ve have not yet, ever read or heard a description that matches my experience of childhood.

That doesn’t make my wee years in any way extraordinary or whoop-de-doo horrific, it just makes them mine in a wholly individual sense. Despite a range of experiences that I surely shared with any young human, my childhood did not match the general indicators for “being a child.” 

Maybe it’s because of this later-in-life realization that I now consciously try to emphasize the individual ahead of the group in almost any situation – not because I like the individual more, but that I find thit a more spot-on entry to understanding the whyness of the universe. [“Thit” is not a typo, it’s my newly minted pronoun singular intended to conflate “he/him,” “she/her,” “it” and “they/them”; I could have chosen “shit,” so as to include the “s” from “she,” but that would suffer from conflict with established connotations.]

My choice of focus also comes from having always felt myself to be totally an individual – not a in a good or bad sense, but in the sense of feeling related to almost nothing. I don’t reject others, but that I am not of them. 

So, yes – connections exist, groups exist, trends exist, and there’s good reason to keep them in mind and to study their construction. But we also need to remember that every social “unit” is a conglomerate of individuals in constant change, even when the group appears settled.

All is temporary, whether using a short time scale or a long. 

Of course, in attempting to establish the underlying laws of the physical sciences, we definitely need to concentrate on the general. If the law of gravitation only worked on alternate Saturdays when he sun was shining from the northwest, it wouldn’t be useful in definition or prediction. The scientist wants to know how the mechanisms of the physical world can be described in every instance – or as close to that as possible, as determined through experiment.

As for the social sciences, they aren’t really science; in fact, I wish the term “social science” didn’t exist. It’s a congeries of rambling approximations and pretty-good guesses about how to quantify a collection of individual responses.

But since social scientists like to think they’re doing real science, they compile simple-minded questionnaires that try to focus on general trends, then pretend there’s a universal lurking behind the answers.

What happens with these questionnaires is that the questions actually do elicit individual responses, but not often ones available to the subject, who instead has to choose, from the three possibilities offered, the one they feel comes closest to their actual response [the available choices are often “yes,” “no” or “not certain”].

*   *   *

Now, thank your lucky your stars: Nothing that follows relates to anything above.

*   *   *

A lawn is no damned good to anybody. You mow it and the result lies as a big green flop, doing nothing. No flowers, no differentiation, as you assiduously lop off every last tassel that might look interesting.

Some people just love to cut grass. When astride a riding mower, they may even claim it as a form of meditation. So, for awhile I wondered if I was missing something; maybe mowing really is a relaxing form of Zen.

But then the truth struck me: I had the whole thing backwards: In practice, Zen is probably as big a pain in the ass as mowing.

*   *   *

Headline: “Babe Ruth’s ‘called shot’ jersey from 1932 World Series sells for record $24.1m”

Not only proof of the stupidity of the rich who buy useless shit by the walletload, but consider how many housing units that 24 mil could have provided. Instead, it provided absolutely nothing of real value.

*   *   *

Should the plural be “jack in the pulpits” or “jacks in the pulpit”? And why is there no jack off the pulpit?

*   *   *

Now and then I want to pound my head into the wall, hoping that both my head and the wall will disintegrate.

*   *   *

My father could wiggle his ears. No idea how he developed that kind of muscular control. 

Today is the first time I’ve thought of that in decades, though it certainly should have popped up in my mind over all those years. After all, it says something delightful about my father. Yet there are other things I do remember that say nothing about him, one way or the other.

Memory is as fickle as a fly’s flight.

This first batch is quickie suggestions on how to improve life at home, online, and on the road. I know you’re looking for more stuff like that, right?

%   %   %   %

Refer to J D Vance as “Trump’s running mutt.”

*   *   *   *

I suggest that all organic food and drink cartons carry only one motto:

“No Stupid Claims”

*   *   *   *

I get most of my online news from the Guardian and the Daily Beast, which both do amazing in-depth coverage. But even with them there’s still an endless upchucking of articles about things happening with or to celebrities and politicians about whom I have no possible interest.

My suggestion: Collapse all this pseudo-news into one corner of a page and dedicate it to “Minor celebrities and politicians who are: accused, charged, convicted, diseased, maimed, or dead,” with a two-sentence summary of each incident.

OK, “dead” could get by with one sentence. Or just a date.

*   *   *   *

Assume that the coming spate of absurd and violent AI movies will not terrify the young and stupid, but become accepted like violent animated cartoons. I mean, who the hell mistakes Wile E. Coyote for part of daily reality [except metaphorically]?

*   *   *   *

A sign that I suggest for any very narrow road bridge: “Too Narrow and Too Narrow and Too Narrow…”

 *   *   *   *

For online info on skin problems, I suggest: “It’s a Site for Psoriasis”

 *   *   *   *

Concerning the angst some feel over the plea deal offered to 9/11 plotters to plead guilty to keep them from the death penalty: I suggest, instead giving them life in prison with the mandate to keep them alive for as long as possible by whatever means. That would be a far worse sentence than quick death.

<   <   <   < 

And now some personal screedings:

%   %   %   %

Recent headline:

“Birthrates are plummeting worldwide. Can governments turn the tide?”

I sure as hell hope not. The current eight billion people aren’t enough?

*   *   *   *

The sad decline of Marc Andreessen:

In the mid ’90s, Andreessen began a private expansion of the first real web browser, Mosaic, which was developed at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

He initially called his version Mosaic, also, but the finished product became Netscape, a giant leap in navigating the web.

During the build-up, Andreessen posted regularly on one of the newsgroups that were the major sources of info in those days; I downloaded each beta version of Netscape as he released it.

I went online around 1:30 am one morning, about 20 minutes after he posted Netscape 1.0, the first “full” release. I downloaded it immediately, so may have been one of the first dozen or so in the world to grab it. It worked like nothing that had existed to that point for finding websites.

Nowadays, Andreessen is a venture capitalist, one of the most frightening labels in this age of monetary strangulation. He and several other other ultra-rich dingleberries are buying up huge acreage in California to try to establish a high-tech city for 400,000 inhabitants that would take a massive swath of farmland out of production and overrun what little would remain of the enfolding county. The majority of the locals are in no way pleased and are fighting it tooth and nail.

Oh, Andreessen has also become cozy with Elon Musk. I know I once defended EM for his ornery humor and goofiness, but ya know, he ain’t funny no more.

*   *   *   *

Linda and I support a bunch of causes, a couple political, most charitable i in one way or another. We give each of them about $50 annually, according to a time schedule I’ve set up.

In return, we now receive unending streams of junk mail from not only every one of them [except for the two where I found how to opt out on their website], but from every other known or semi-known organization that covers a similar money-hungry territory. 

If you support any animal rights outfit, the ASPCA will hit you up, even though you’ve never had any contact with them. If you support an environmental group, expect an appeal within weeks from the Disadvantaged House Flies of Uzbekistan.

The other day, we received 8 pieces of mail in our Dushore PO box. 7 went directly into the conveniently placed PO paper-trash receptacle. 

This generation of trash is annoying enough, but it’s a small point. What really gets me is that a sizable percentage of what I contribute to an outfit I otherwise believe in goes to mailing me crap I don’t want that asks for yet more money. And why he hell are they sharing their mailing list, with my name and address on it, without my consent? 

The worst effect is, rather than getting more out of me by hounding me with guilt and garbage, they’re beginning to convince me that I should spent less on my support of anyone or anything.

Maybe, instead, I should just bundle up my used paper from home and drop it in the PO trash box.

They recycle!

[a story]

Paul McGarrish felt no nostalgia as he looked across the campus, only the general bemusement that filled most of his life. It bemused him, for instance, that he was worth seven billion dollars (by Forbesian count), even though he had never felt any desire for large sums of money. He bought things, of course – lots of things – but most times ended up giving them away.

The bluestone of the main campus walkway had been replaced by octagonal tiles, some kind of asphalt amalgam. Much better. The bluestone, heralded as virtually indestructible when installed, had spalled and shattered. The new material could easily be replaced, tile by tile, if necessary.

Jaunty little flower beds languored under the trees where walkways met. The grass, that in his day could be made to grow only in leprous patches, was lush and assertive. Fewer aged trees, alas, yet the whole was one of the most attractive urban settings for higher education in the country.

Maybe he should not commit this action (less action really, than solidified intent). It might be considered mean. But it was something quite different, something like his incomprehensible accumulation of lucre. He needed to see it through so that it might tell him something.

He strode comfortably, hands in pockets, as he always did, up the path to the administrative offices and through the newly installed ornate wooden doors (removing one hand from his pocket to navigate the latch).

Inside, he turned to the president’s office and introduced himself to the secretary. The president herself would not be available to see him, he knew; one reason that he had chosen today to “drop by.” Short, thin and image-conscious, the secretary made him feel himself closeted with something infectious.

The assistant who ushered him into her office was young, blonde, with stunning grey eyes at once intense and non-committal. No woman on campus, undergraduate, graduate, faculty or staff, had looked like this when he had attended. Or perhaps he was simply more aware today. Seven billion dollars provides ample time for becoming aware, if one is so inclined.

“Well,” she said, after showing him to the obvious seat, “we’re so glad you could make it. Did you come by private jet?”

“There’s no landing strip on campus,” McGarrish replied. “It would be impractical and possibly dangerous.”

“Ha ha,” she mock laughed. “Sorry, that was just… I find it difficult to start conversations with Really Important People. I tend to say stupid things. Forgive me.”

McGarrish rose. “You are formally forgiven.” He extended his hand to her and they shook. Her hand was narrow, finely boned, with exquisite skin. Ah!

McGarrish sat down.

“I understand you had a gift in mind?” said Grey-Eyed Athena.

“I did, and I still do. A large gift.”

“Well, that will certainly… That’s very… I’m delighted. The president will be delighted too.” Her eyes almost spoke in time to her halting speech.

McGarrish smiled. “Good lord, you have no idea how delightful it is to have someone become admittedly, bumblingly confused. Half my day is spent with toadies whose prime object is to convince me they know exactly what they’re doing when they haven’t the faintest idea. Bully for you!”

The grey eyes turned momentarily candid. “I’ve never actually heard anyone say ‘bully’ that way before.”

“Don’t think I have either. You are the most relaxing person.”

“Oh, I don’t know.”

“I can see that, which is why you are so relaxing. All right, should we talk about details? It’s an unrestricted gift, except for one relatively small condition. Big, big dollars. Goodness, now you’re going to see that I don’t now what I’m doing either.”

“But you must.”

McGarrish chewed his lip and thought that over. “No, I don’t think so. Details.”

“All right.” Grey-Eyed Athena drew a yellow lined tablet closer to her and picked up a battered pencil, probably chewed on.

“I propose to donate a flat sum of one billion dollars.”

“Oooh, that’s… unparalleled. My goodness!”

“Isn’t it? I’ve never heard of anything like it myself, except for Ted Turner, and that was to the United Nations. This is to a single collegiate institution. It could be used to fatten up the endowment, or institute new programs or, ummm, well, God knows what else? Money, money, money.” His misplaced grin returned, broader.

“Well… unrestricted? Or… or almost unrestricted?”

“Yeah, just a weensy part of the total set off for a particular project, no more than, I’d think, about twenty-five million. Well, inflation, all right, say fifty million. That leaves…”

“Nine hundred and fifty million.”

“Not confused about math?”

“Women aren’t supposed to be. These days. And never were. Now, this fifty million, how is it restricted?” A sudden confidence solidified in her face, bringing out another level of beauty. Ah! Ah!

“It’s for a building, it doesn’t much matter what the building’s used for, I’d think research might be best, but I’d leave that to… the trustees, the board of trustees. The location is important though. Crucial.”

“You don’t want to tear this building down, do you?”

“For you? In a minute. But in general terms. No. My – I say my, but it won’t be named for me – the building must be a minimum of seven stories tall and face Wigand Street.”

“That’s quite crowded.”

“Oh, tear down a few things and it won’t make a difference. Pretty ugly bunch. Tear down that new mall, what a monstrosity. Hmmm, this could go beyond fifty million. There’d still be plenty left.”

“Can I get you some coffee?”

“You certainly can, you’re highly competent, whether you always realize it. But I hate coffee. Do you have any tea?”

“Oh dear, I’m not sure. I’ll look.”

“Take your time. Most places have forgotten it exists. I’ll even take Tetley. No silly herbal swill, though.”

She moved from the room with aching grace, and McGarrish moved with a shamble to the window. From there the campus exuded even more of a rightness about it, a sense of now, of time held in abeyance for four years so matriculants could experience a level of comfortable ease – interspersed occasionally with all-night madness – that they might never know again. Except for the business students, who would notice none of it.

Seven billion dollars “earned” through business and investment that mystified him still. Why come here to fight, if that’s what it was? What was he fighting against?

Athena returned with a teabag, which she held by the tag. “Ta da! Tetley.”

“Yum yum. We should be able to wrap this up pretty quickly. I’d invite you out to lunch afterwards, but that would by a form of noblesse oblige. It’s rotten for rich, balding men to inflict themselves on the young and beautiful simply because they can.” He held up his hand. “Don’t reply, I’m musing out loud. That’s one of the few blessings of being exceedingly rich that I do take advantage of. You know, if I weren’t rich… I’d be poor, but probably in a straitjacket.”

She frowned. “Why do you think that? There’s nothing crazy in being honest. Is there?”

“Damned if I know.”

She shifted her gaze to the yellow tablet. “So the building is the single restriction?”

“Yes. There’s a secondary restriction associated with the building, but the rest of the money is unencumbered. It’s just a big pile of dough, like Scrooge McDuck’s.”

“Umm? Oh, yes, somebody showed me one of those once. The comic. What’s the secondary restriction?”

McGarrish pulled up from a slouch and sat straight in his chair. “On a sign four feet in height directly above the front door, in letters not less than eighteen inches tall, the name must read ‘The Great Big Motherfucking Building.'”

The grey eyes flew wide and took on exuberant life. They expressed alarm, shock, vacillation, then, suddenly, humor. Athena snurfed a giggle into her hand that widened into a titter that rolled into a burbling guffaw. As this huge laugh enveloped her slim frame, McGarrish leaned back, head pointed almost toward the ceiling, and joined in. Their laughter swept on like a rollercoaster down its incline, careening around the breathtaking curves and into successive humps of lessening comedy.

Oh, what a lovely hell of a racket.

“Boy,  you caught me on that one. Whoo! Oh goodness. Do you really have a, pooHA! name for the building? You don’t want to name it after yourself?’

“I do. I don’t. I have a name, but not mine.”

“What is it?”

“The Great Big Motherfucking Building.”

“It wasn’t a joke.” The flame in the grey eyes extinguished.

“Oh, it is a joke. I guess you’d call it a joke. It’s not a joke about what the name will be, but naming it that – you think that’s what the name is? A joke?”

“I wasn’t trying to–“

“No, no. I’m not accusing you of anything, I just want your opinion. You think something like that would be a joke? Well, people would laugh at it, but that doesn’t prove anything. They laugh at an injured dog. It’s funny, certainly. But why am I doing it?”

“You don’t know?”

“I woke up one morning in my damned goose-down bed which is too soft to be comfortable and the thought popped right into my head. That’s how I’ve made my billions, thoughts popping into my head from nowhere, so I felt I should act on it. But it could have been an entirely incorrect thought, the work of the devil. Blast – people don’t say that either, do they – I’ve just gotten tired of my motives, if they even are motives, always staying in hiding. Who am I anyway? Have you seen me around anywhere?” He swiveled his head to check the corners of the room.

“I’ll get the straitjacket.”

Again, in smaller measure, their combined laughter swooped through hills and valleys.

“You’re not offended by this?” McGarrish asked.

“Just puzzled. It’s an awfully… aggressive thing to do, and you don’t look aggressive.”

“Gentle as a lamb, as they say. That’s what I mean – I don’t know why. But I’m dead serious. Serious in that sense.”

“An unalterable condition.”

“Yuh, yuh. Exactly.”

“They won’t do it.”

“You think that’s it? That’s what the test is?”

“Well… it would be if I were doing it.” And the grey eyes swept over him like cats in heat.

“I… don’t think… that’s it. Something else. I almost saw it when I was looking out the window there.” He pointed. “It’s larger than that. Hairier.” 

“A grizzly thought.”

“Good lord, you know, if I’d met you when I was younger… But I have to get going, find where I parked my jet.”

Athena stood and held out her hand. “I’ll convey your wonderful offer to the president.”

“One billion dollars. Oh yes, oh yes. By the way, if you were still in college, would you take classes in The Great Big Motherfucking Building?”

“I’d consider it an honor.”

“Perhaps if we changed the name of the entire university…”

“That would be asking a bit too much. Even from you.”

“Two billions dollars?”

“I’d think about it. I’d think about that… long and hard.”

Outside, the students moved between classes with casual aplomb, their crossings and tangential meetings reinforcing the geometry of the walkways. Perhaps that was all there was to it, a human geometry that could produce billions or a crude joke with equal, unthinking ease.

The Great Big Motherfucking Building would never be built, or if it was it would last only until his death, when it would be defaced, effaced. Its memory, like his, would become a footnote slowly obliterated by time, while Grey-Eyed Athena grew old.

The end

       *   *   *

Pie-plate volume elucidation

Following up on how Linda can determine the diameter needed to create a one-half-standard-volume ceramic pie plate.

the evenly slanted side wall of the standard pie plate has

an upper diameter of 9”

a lower diameter of 7”

so, an average diameter of 8”

[sorry how the equations below look; I don’t have a math program on my computer, so doing my best in Word]

 with volume equal to πr²h, and substituting x for r in the new volume, we get

 πx²h = 1/2  πr²h 

since  π and h are constants on both sides of the equation, they cancel out, leaving us with 

x² = 1/2  r² = 16/2 = 8 

^thus        

^{x = sq. root of  8 = 2.8 [rounded]}

^{using x as the new radius,}

^{new diameter = 2.8 x 2 = 5.6 inches}

^{Linda has a neat program, known and comprehensible only to potters, which also allows for the thickness of the clay wall and shrinkage of the clay in drying. For this problem, it comes up with a wet diameter of:} 

^{5.75 inches, or, in mathematical terms, “pretty damned close.”}

^{You may wonder why I have wasted your time and mine on this idiot side issue. I certainly do.} 

^{Well, kinda fun, in a lame-ass way.}

As I’ve mentioned all too often, my childhood was a time of terror. Nothing actually terrible happened, I just hated being a child, had no idea how the world worked, was afraid of almost every situation, and knew that, being a child, I was at the bottom of the human ladder.

Still, I thought now is as good a time as any to bring up a couple examples of those dread days. To me, they fit right in with the current world tune.

While I was living on Hastings Ave. in semi-rural Havertown, from age 4-7, I had no friends, but there were a very few kids I that I… played with? Flexible term.

That I did things with.

Donald lived down the block, same side of the street, on the way to the creek. He was a year or so older than me and, in retrospect, pretty much of a useless shit. We did things in the back yard I won’t go into, except to say that they often had to do with piss.

One day, down at the edge of the creek woods, he pissed on my leg. When I got home, my mother wondered why my shoe and sock were wet and, ummm, maybe smelled funny?

For some reason, I told her what had happened. I guess I couldn’t dredge up the proper lie, but it was stupid on my part. What I didn’t tell her was that he did it because I dared him to. Anyway, I was then forbidden ever to play with Donald again. [I did, but of course I was terrified of the possible consequences at home.]

The particular incident I’m getting to took place in Donald’s back yard but did not involve Donald. His family had bought a new refrigerator and the cardboard box was lying on its side back there with a big section cut out as a sort of hideout to loll inside.

This scene requires three additional characters: another boy, no memory who, sitting in the box with me, and two girls outside the box, holding us prisoner. The older girl was Barbara, who terrified me the most of any young human I knew. She lived on the corner of the block on the way to the creek. 

The only direct encounter I had with her, prior to the box, was on her front porch while I was talking to her younger brother, David. She told me in no uncertain terms that I was never to talk to David without her permission, with threats both implied and specific. Apparently she had assigned herself David’s ownership.

Barbara had a thinner, younger associate, maybe my age – I don’t recall her name – who acted as her lieutenant. Anyway, this day, behind Donald’s, they camped outside the box and told us we were not allowed to leave.

We stayed.

Why would we have allowed that to happen? Were we physically afraid of them? I doubt it. For my part, I think it was the local manifestation of my overarching terror. 

At some point Barbara had to go home – possibly to torture a small animal – placing her lt. in charge. I asked the lt. to let me exit the box. NO! Yet, oddly, I did flea, and there was no physical altercation.

Once I reached home I told me mother what was going on. [Again, why be such an idiot?] She handed me a corn broom to hold upright and demanded I go back to confront my captor. 

I remember walking down the block with terror in front, terror behind, but don’t recall what actually happened. Probably pointless posturing from both me and the lt. 

I look back on that day and that self with disdain for my fearful, insipid little schmuck, someone for whom I can find no empathy.

It’s easy – and psychologically more or less correct – to say I couldn’t help being what I was,. But I should not have been that! It feels unforgivable.

The second situation, which extended over a few months, happened during my freshman year of my Catholic all-boys high school. 

Those of you who might have shared the misfortune of growing up a practicing Catholic, especially in the routinely oppressive 1950s, may recall the horror of saying a Bad Confession.

It was one of the scattershot of mortal sins – which also included deliberately missing Mass on Sunday or eating meat on Friday – that could zip you straight to the tinderbox of Hell, should you be hit by a speeding garbage truck or have a block of serpentine marble fall on you from a highrise.

It didn’t help that a couple of our parish priests and a few of the nuns thought the best way to keep kids in line was to treat them as worthless scum escaping perdition by the skin of their evil-stained teeth.

As for a Bad Confession – wooee!

To take communion at Mass – by dissolving the remarkably pleasant body of Christ on your tongue – you had to be clean of mortal sin, preferably by going to confession the previous Saturday evening. But, should you deliberately neglect to mention a mortal sin in confession – meaning that sin could not be absolved by the priest – that was a Bad Confession, the rough equivalent of dropping your drawers and mooning the Baby Jesus. And should you dare ingest the body of Christ following a Bad Confession, it would tie your soul in knots that Thomas Aquinas could not unscramble.

Here’s what happened with me: One afternoon, in the backyard of our house at the end of the courtyard off 37^th St. in Powelton, I viciously kicked a pile of bibles that my mother had for some reason stacked against the brick back wall of the house. I kicked them because they were her Episcopal  bibles, thus not true, Catholic bibles. 

Mom, naturally, lay into me about my sectarian limitations. After a bit, I felt chagrined. Then I felt awful. Finally, I felt I had done something truly evil. This horrified me so much that I couldn’t even face confessing it; then it horrified me more because by not confessing it on Saturday, I’d made a Bad Confession.

That marble slab was waiting to drop on me.

Escaping evil is never easy for a confirmed believer. Until I confessed my Bed Confession, I could not receive communion. On a Sunday, that lapse could be somewhat ignored, since I went to Mass with only my Catholic father. But at high school we also attended Mass on Wednesday at the church a block from school; where I could not receive communion because of my self-perceived Mortal Whopper.

For the first couple weeks it wasn’t that bad. While everyone else in our pew went to the altar rail to swallow God, I knelt in my place, later explaining that I had forgotten and drunk water that morning [at the time, you could take nothing by mouth before receiving Christ’s body, including Philly’s foul tap water].

But this went on week after week – pew after pew emptying while I knelt alone – though I will never understand why none of the priest-teachers, always watching, asked me, “Why?” I’m glad they didn’t, but it made little matter, because I was pilloried in my own mind… singled out by the finger of God, again and again.

Somewhere along the line I finally confessed my Bad Confession to our parish’s most understanding and decent priest [to whom I should have confessed my bible-footballing to in the first place], who told me that, technically, it never was a Bad Confession, since my sin was hardly mortal.

When I took communion once again, it tasted good.

Thank you Father Whoever, and I hope your name eventually escapes my declining mind. You were a good man, and I pray the angels to provide you with a daily bowl of cookie-dough ice cream.

No, I do not actually pray for anything, not even whipped cream.

         *   *   *   *

This test is well outside the discussion above, but Linda, my beloved potter, wants to make a clay pie-plate  that will hold one-half the volume of a standard pie-plate that we put in the oven to bake a pie.

Besides the reducing the volume, she is planning, for simplicity sake, to form her model with a straight vertical side, rather than the standard slopped side.

Assuming that the figures below correctly represent a standard pie-plate, how should she determine the diameter of a one-half volume pie-plate?

height of pie-plate  – 2 inches

diameter at top – 9 inches

diameter at bottom – 7 inches

[These measurements assume an even side slope.]

Using the formula for the volume of a cylinder – πr²h –r being the radius, h being the height of the cylinder – what diameter should she use for achieve one-half the standard volume?

Please include your answer and reasoning. You will be quizzed on this next week.

[This week’s contribution was passed through me. I’ll explain about that down at the end. —D.]

As I was walking the seashore one day, I discovered, lying atop the sand, a golden coin of such size that I stopped to look out to sea, expecting a sailed galleon might be riding the breakers. But I saw no ship and, on the beach, no ancient, wave-battered driftwood. Only seashells, the empty carapaces of horseshoe crabs – and the coin.

How, I wondered, could such a disk come to be reposing so conspicuously on the shore? I picked it up. It felt too dense for the waves to have tumbled it in, and it was singularly unworn. Gold, though dense, is soft, often eroded even by a fingernail. This circlet looked freshly minted, alive with detail, though it had no date inscribed that I could discover.

I knew next to nothing of numismatics, but something Spanish lurked in the design and the dour righteousness of the monarch’s face. The small clusters of letters had a Romance cast, especially on the obverse, but none formed what looked to be full words, rather abbreviations or references, the hasty shorthand of an overwhelmed treasury.

How much might it weigh? Two ounces, three? Assuming it pure gold, as much as a thousand dollars in bullion value alone, and God knows how much accreted from possible historical associations. I slipped it into the waistband of my trunks and poked slowly along, quartering the beach for further hints and glints, but uncovered nothing more.

I am by no wise a rich man, but though this discovery represented potential cash in hand, I ignored its existence for almost a year after returning to my office and semi-urban home. It was as though it carried its own reality, like a visitor from a parallel universe. If I had not needed money for one of my sudden technological yearnings – a desire to update my aging stereo system by adding a graphite equalizer to contour the frequencies escaping my receiver – it might well have lain quiescent for the ages in my “scatter” drawer, the effluvia that accretes to a bachelor unconsciously tied to his past, lest the present swallow and digest him.

Resurrected from its cluttered nest, the coin shone bright and unlikely in the half light of an evening. The foundling had a hold on me, and I was loathe to let it go. But I am basically a realist – or am I?

I had often passed Fabricio’s Circular Antiquities, a coin shop and sole caterer to such hobbies for many leagues (to retain the nautical flavor), without the yearning to enter. I think of myself as a student of history, with emphasis on naval disasters and lost or mythological pasts, but the hoarding of such state-regulated items strikes me as a dry, withered avocation. Were I a collector, I would strike for more enlivening pursuits – goat tails, labels from imported liqueurs – but on this occasion I approached Fabricio’s with a light and inquisitive heart, eager to uncover the worth of what the deeps had coughed up.

The man behind the counter was mouselike in all aspects – short, somewhat stooped, with protruding upper teeth and a sparse, whiskering mustache. He held stubby arms forward at chest level, like paws.

I set the coin on the counter and released a knowing smile (a mild cheat on my part).

The rodent turned the coin over, over again, studied the inscriptions, turned it a third time. His nose twitched.

“Where did you get this?”

“From the sea.”

He repeated the coin’s revolutions yet again, aided by a magnifying glass. He polished the item’s front with a soft cloth, possibly a gesture to gain time.

My smile ebbed. “How old is it?” I asked. “Spanish? Portuguese?”

“We have never seen another like it… From the sea?”

“On the beach. On a clear day. A week of solid sunshine.”

“It does not have a date.”

“It looks almost new.” Unworn, I expanded.

His paws raised from the counter and reverted to their repulsive at-rest position. “One moment.”

He skittered into a back room and quickly returned, accompanied by a grotesquely fat man in stained clothing. The substances on his once-white shirt adhered in layers, each pushing the preceding farther into the weave. You might have traced his lifelong habits through its close analysis.

He picked up the coin between tubular thumb and forefinger and held it a few inches forward of his chin, tilting it slowly as if to see how it reflected light. Then he released it from some eighteen inches onto the counter. It thumped with almost no rebound.

“Solid gold by its feel,” he said, “eighteen karat or better. Or some odd, dense alloy. Sixteenth century Andalusian inscription technique, Leon figuration, but in no language ever spoken on earth. Quite impossible.” He handed me the coin.

“I’d like to sell it.”

The fat man shrugged. “Assuming gold, I can give you base metal value, nothing more.”

“But a sixteenth century coin….”

“A chimera. A bit of this, a smidgeon of that, all slopped together into a dog’s dinner. It’s unique, but worthless for that reason. Someone knocked this together as a jape. A counterfeit at best, or a Spanish doodle. One of a kind’s of value only if a remnant of an official issue.”

I felt confused, also annoyed. “Why on earth would a single coin from five hundred years ago pop out of the ocean? There must be others like it.”

“Never,” said the fat man, shaking an encrusted finger, “underestimate the machinations of chance.” He placed the orphaned disk on an electronic scale and made rapid calculations on a pad, his hand trailing sweat and filth across the paper. “Eleven twenty-five for the gold, if it tests pure, a hundred for curiosity value. Twelve and a quarter.” He looked at me with languid expectation. The mouse hovered at the far end of the counter, his face nodding in short jerks.

“What if I find more of these?”

“Bring them in.”

“Wouldn’t that increase their value? Prove that they were from a legitimate currency?”

The fat man swiveled like a log on end until he came to rest leaning against the wall. “Unless we can trace it to a known region of a known era with a known government that issued a known currency, this is a freak, and if it has friends, its friends are likewise freaks. I can have it tested, as I said. But even should it prove gold, if it comes up modern, I’m out my hundred, because there is zero curiosity value in a modern fake.”

“You think I made this thing?”

He shrugged, and I could sense the air shy away from him. “It looks old, it feels old. I’ve seen hundreds of ancient counterfeits over the years, but if so, it hasn’t worn. It’s an unlikely, an absurd piece of work.”

Almost unwilled, my hand dropped onto the counter and palmed the coin. What could I desire it for? A graphite equalizer, if sold. Yet my hand appreciated retaining its rude weight.

“I’m gong to keep it. For now.”

“A chimera,” said the fat man again.

I have no use for the ocean or the beach. I find the waters frightening and empty, the sand unmanageable for walking or enjoyment. I annually visit the shore for one three-day weekend, as a form of cultural imperative, and to remind myself, lest temptation suggest otherwise, that the experience is every bit as vacant as I recalled. My interest in naval history is divorced from the reality of the sea itself.

As for my official place in the world, I am a financial analyst, in the broadest encompass of that term; in truth, something closer to a compiler of data. About that work I have no interest whatsoever. Only an income substantial enough to support my actual interests, coupled with my demand that I work no overtime, ever. At my “job” (that currently flexible noun)  I am considered surly or difficult, when considered at all. So be it.

The following year, I had spent the first week of my elastic month’s vacation reading through the accumulation of books creeping across my livingroom floor, until obsession fell upon me, and the coin hung heavy in the pocket of my shapeless trousers as I poked a metal detector into the sand over a half-mile run of beachfront.

Days of prodding had brought me nothing. Worse, I had spent more than the equivalent of the coin’s potential value on the detector and the exorbitant rent of a minuscule shore apartment. Not one cent on a graphic equalizer. Then, on the last day but one of my vacation, as I walked the beach almost resigned, I saw, just above the foam line, a disk of reflected sun – a second coin, as like the first as any two guppies.

Through simple association and man’s desire for mystery, I had assumed that the first had come from the sea, though nothing had suggested the ocean floor. Much more likely to have fallen from the hand of a lubber. So too with this addition. Yet, though I spied four couples on blankets, a party of three in an unsettling amorous arrangement, a scattering of cellulite widows, and a frolicking gaggle of adolescents, the coin, restive in my hand, muttered, I belong to none of these; I resent the implication.

I withdrew to the boardwalk, where a small, disheveled food counter sported two rusty tables and four rusty chairs, from any of which I could survey the beach. After purchasing a sickeningly sweet orange soda, I settled into one of the chairs, its arms tacky with substances half human, half comestible. I was protected from the sun by a faded umbrella, askew in the table’s center socket.

There I sat until near sunset, and there I returned the following morning to continue my vigil on my final day of vacation. Would I know my man (or woman) if I saw him (or her)? The owner of these rare and, to me, priceless relics should stand out as surely as a trash collector in a tuxedo.

Every hour or two I made my way to the tiny counter, peering over my shoulder lest I lose a second of potential revelation, to order some liquid or solid refill: iced tea, root beer, hot dog, ham sandwich, doughnut – each more unpalatable than the last, as though the stand’s owner possessed a philosopher’s stone that transmuted all food to dross. Where, I wondered, was that owner, and how could he make a living from this unfrequented dead-end? The tremulous counter woman, the spirit of a mollusk reanimating a corpse, could hardly keep any business functioning.

My attention was riveted, as always, on the beach, when a chitter of conversation broke out behind me. Had some fool come to join me in being poisoned? But the arousal of my neck hairs alerted me to a subliminal recognition. I knew that squeak.

I turned so suddenly that I almost parted the decaying elements of my seat. Exiting from behind the counter scuttled the very rodent from Fabricio’s. I bellowed at the troglodyte waitress and pointed to the rear doorway. “Who is that?”

“Whatcha mean?”

“Is that man the owner?”

“Naaah, him?”

“What is he doing here?”

“Whatcha mean?”

Panicked that the mouse might elude me, I dashed round the counter,  through the doorway, and into a miasmic space with the odor of a crypt.

Yes, there were worse things about this establishment that the food. One was the fat man lounging like a discarded bolster in a flattened easy chair, his unimaginable rump not four inches form the floor. The mouse shrank against the wall, as though I had come armed with broom or trap.

The fat man coughed, raised a hand and chuckled.

“Found us,” he said.

“You’re Fabricio.”

He waved the comment off like a persistent fly. “There is no Fabricio. Italians know nothing of numismatics, can’t hold a coin without spending it. It is simply a name. Fabricated.” He chuckled again.

“How often…?” I gestured toward the beach, unable to sort my words.

“We allow ourselves one catch per season. You are this year’s – as you were also last year’s – an unmatched sequence. A year of anticipation, then contact renewed, like the embrace of a lover.”

His lover!? “You are a pig,” I said.

“Oink and curly tail. At your service.”

A vision arose of his chair ablaze with him sunk into its defeated springs, too corpulent to flail his way to freedom as the flames fed on his grease. This apocalyptic image sobered me. I was, after all, but the victim of a practical joke.

“I suppose you will want your coins back,” I said.

He looked peeved. “The coins must remain with the finder. That’s the hook.” He reached to a shelf and, with a grunt, pulled a wide-mouthed crock toward him. “I have more than enough.”

The crock, of greater than gallon capacity, was half or more filled with coins, the pinch-faced royal figure staring from each.

“My God.”

“You are the first to track me down.”

“Then why did he show himself while I sat there?” I said, pointing to the rodent.

The fat man shrugged. “He was hungry,” then to the lapsed creature, “Sit down, Willard, for God’s sake, he doesn’t care about you.”

The mouse skittered to a wobbly bentwood chair set at a card table, frothing with anger: “No one understands Willard. Lard! Lard!”

“You dare call me that?”

“I call you that. Lard!”

“Piteous squeam!”

“Lard!” Then Willard began to cry. A more horrendous sound has never reached me, not simple sorrow, but a misery that delved to a depth I hope never to know.

The fat man made patting motions in Willard’s directions. For comfort? Restraint?

“Lard,” the mouse repeated, but in a receding voice, as though swallowing back his failed rage.

“The air conditioner’s broken,” said the fat man to me. “Why don’t you sit down also?”

I distrusted the rickety seat across the card table from the mouse, but my knees felt weak from the heat, so I acquiesced. The odor of the place ate into my nasal lining.

“I don’t understand the point of this. What are you looking to achieve?”

The fat man held up a coin. “Reaction. Finding one of these lies outside the experience of anyone alive. How will the finder place it in his internal landscape, explain it, adapt to it?”

“You can’t know their reactions, they can’t all come to you at Fabricio’s.”

“Some do. And I have my helper.” He wave a hand to the mouse. “Also Louisa, out front, serving drinks. She has eyes, and she works a camera. This stand has but one true function, to register each find, by sight, by photograph when possible.”

“How long has this been going on?”

The fat man laughed and slapped the table. “Fifteen years. That long. A shelf of folders and notebooks. But that is none of your concern.”

“It costs you. The stand, the food, the tine to forge these things. The gold.”

“All that is worth doing costs, whether it be in money or time or… whatever. The metal passes from me and returns, in one form or another.”

“You spout facile babble,” I said, realizing, in saying so, that I had let anger get the better of me.

The oleaginous lump bristled. “Do you think you know me? No one can know me.”

“I was impertinent,” I said. “Forgive me, if you will. So then, you keep continuing record of these reactions?”

“Some finders I lose track of, others I see changed in subtle or not so subtle ways. Converted, you could say, by a truth they did not realize they had embraced.”

“Truth?”

“Have another of our marvelous confections. A hotdog!” He leaned forward and slapped the table, as though his abysmal food lay there, ready for my consumption. “You believe there is no such thing as truth? Of course, the truth of truth itself cannot be proved. Then let me amend my facile babble to, ‘internal assumption.’ Something changes within those who find the coins.”

The mouse, seated with his elbows on the card table, raised his paws to his mouth to nibble at a sandwich of wilted lettuce and cheese.

Breaking the extending silence, the fat man made an astonishing proposition. “Perhaps you should join us in our rewarding avocation. There is little – almost no – remuneration involved, as you have succinctly indicated, but the fascination, the insight into human behavior! Seeing your fellow humans at their most disoriented, approaching expansive discomfort. Hmmm?”

What an appalling suggestion. Seeing my reticence, like a comic-book villain he scooped a handful of the golden coins from the crock and dribbled them through his fingers in clacking cacophony. He tossed one to me, which I clamped to stillness on the tabletop.

”Hold it, lift it,” he commanded. “Can you not feel its influence?”

I could feel the same need to possess that had attached to my own find when I saw it threatened with loss at Fabricio’s. I flipped the would-be doubloon high and caught it in my outstretched hand. “I cannot work with you,” I said. “We would make a ludicrous couple or trio or quartet, as it might be. We would tear at each other and progress nowhere.”

Yet I fought a strong pull to acquiesce. I have long thought that there is more width and depth to the winds of the world than we choose to accept in our quotidian lives, and I acknowledge unnamed influences that others reject. Something – perhaps its assumed centuries – burdened this metal with astonishing weight. Uncharted history pressed into my palm, the timbers of wooden ships groaning beneath an undulating surface.

“It ill-suits your temperament?” smirked the fat man.

“It ill-suits the situation and the personalities involved. Did you mint – create – these? How could you have produced them? Where?”

He shook his swine-jowled head. “They were left to me, along with the shop and – of that, later. The coins came to me” – laying an almost fondling hand on the crock – “complete, as you see them, the container near full before I decided to… release a few, piecemeal.

“If I cared for such things an had left them complete, I could have become wealthy! The gold in its entirety, like an enchanted sampling of a lost Spanish fleet. Instead… you see me! I gained no wealth, and these malicious fakes… have served only to further my monstrosity. I have no memory to prove my conjecture, but once, I  believe, I was limber – not a figure of grace, but a human of perceptible form. These coins” – again patting the crock with obscene affection – “have made me what you see.”

“How is that? What effect on your person could they have?”

At the card table, the rodent loosed an obscene chitter of laughter that propelled me upright, overturning my chair. He pointed to the fat man, to himself. 

“Willard! I will cut your rations!” snapped the fat man. The mouse ducked his head under his paws, still holding his sandwich, deflating to a hissing intake of breath. What  might have invaded the rodent’s past to leave him an eviscerated mind in a collapsed body? Except for that day in the coin shop, I had never heard him speak an extended sentence. He acted as the fat man’s familiar, a leftover from times of witches and minor devils.

“Pay no attention to him,” the fat man admonished. “In him, in me, you see the coins’ effect. Not how or by what force that effect has been accomplished, but the result. They twist, gutter, snake, deny, reduce, envelope – the result tailored to the individual. Or to circumstance, perhaps.”

“You knew Willard before, enough to witness this change?”

He waved a dismissive hand. “That makes no difference. What you see is what you would have available to work with should you join us.”

I shuddered at that assertion. “I have no desire to ‘work with’ any of it, any of you, under any circumstances”

“It is ordained. Two coins you found! That makes you an accumulator – the only one besides ourselves. And thus one of us.”

I was torn between a cloud of negative responses – ignorance, confusion, disgust – and intense attraction. Were the coins having effect on me, or was it all manipulative nonsense? I reached to release the coin. But it did not (would not?) leave my hand.

“So,” said the fat man. He smiled almost sensually and tapped the table as though it could supply information. “You have not asked my name.” 

“And you have not offered it.”

“Because I do not know it.”

I was sideswiped.“You don’t know your own name?”

“I do not. You are now permitted to ask me why.”

“I do not want or need your permission! That would be a scurrilous requirement. I ask on my own: How can you not know your name?”

“I found myself in the shop, some years ago. Of the time before that I retain nothing definite. The years of my past – I say ‘my,’ though I have no proof whose past it might have been – lie a vacancy.” He raised his hand in negation or restraint. “Words do not paint the picture. What I mean to say is that something… awoke, without a sense of being or concept of its own origin. It must have been, yet what it may have been is lost. Isolated memories percolate through me, presumably from my self, though how can I consider a connected self? These flashes of previousness could as well be a collectivization of another’s memories… though that I refuse to entertain. How – think it – could another’s memories invade me, and how appear to be mine? What remains, the question that bedevils me, is what was I before, how did that ‘I’ become lost, and how had it returned to its shattered home? All I have of self is what you see. If that is not enough for you, think how much less it is for me.”

I could add nothing of substance, so I asked, instead, “The shop? Do you see it as having been yours, before… whatever?”

“It could always have been mine, but then, where could they have come from?”

“They…?”

“Willard and Louisa appeared with me, with the shop, in the shop. I… became, as a sudden vapor, in a place I knew not, them with me, two addled creatures I knew even less of than I knew myself. Together, we four – myself, the shop, the two of them – we form an inescapable whole. Four and one other. The crock, with its coins.”

“What have you learned of their origin, Willard and Louisa, what –”

“Ask nothing more of them because there is nothing more to answer.”

“But what of the coins?” I persisted.

“At first I attempted to track them as thoroughly as possible, their age if old, who had cast them if new, but gradually such details became of less importance. They simply were, these false jewels of mystery, they are, which is their sufficiency. I am not given to uprooting the esoterics of history. I am a merchant, like any merchant. What I sell is expected to be bought – to pass through my hands and be forgotten once sold. In normal circumstances, they are items of trade, of little value beyond that. But these? No date on them and nothing of their kin known from the ancient trading world. I could have the metal fully analyzed; there would be no ethical breach to shave one and present the bits removed to a chemist. That I have not done so stems from internal restraint, and were you to apply external measures – tie me to this seat – I would burst the bonds to prevent your going further. Is such a reaction an effect of the coins themselves? I believe so. They have so altered my mind that I remain barely an independent being. What is left to me is to play my game of drop and retrieve.”

I turned over my hand and released the coin it had been holding, clenched. Why could I not do so before? I had merely fallen for a line of hypnotic patter which no longer constrained me. I felt certain that this repulsive man had attempted the same manipulation with others before me, employing the coin as a talisman to bind my attention.

“Is it not a likelihood,” I said in attempted diversion, “that these coins are, in effect, ‘real’ fakes, modern specimens masquerading as ancient copies to create peculiar value precisely from the murkiness of their origin?”

“There is the likelihood of almost anything in this confounded world, but as it happens, I know that they are modern, as I could prove to you. But I have said enough.”

“Do not play games with me,” I bellowed, as though I could have legitimate power. “You may have lost interest in their origin, but to me their origin is essential – who made them, and for what purpose?”

The greaseheap heaved a prolonged sigh and rummaged through the coins, placing handfuls on the table, shifting them. “Feel their rims. Discover anomalies and misdirections of the metal.”

I glared but did as he asked. After perhaps twenty minutes of making comparisons, noting similarities and differences, I announced my findings.

“There are sharp abrasions along the edges of all, and several have a dent of sorts on the back, the obverse. Those are the main peculiarities. Beyond that, they have only the individual ticks of difference you might expect to find in any collection that has known use.”

He waved his hand like a flag. “Be specific! What sort of abrasions? What ‘dent’? What percentage have one or the other?”

Somewhat chagrined, I examined the coins again, more slowly. “Some have the abrasions on the bottom edge only, below the figure, some abraded on both top and bottom. I have found none showing only top abrasions. The rear depressions seem exclusively on some with the bottom-only roughness, but not all. I cannot determine exact percentages. I would have to examine all the coins – and from doing that, what would I learn of their origin?”

“It is not their origin, it is their formation, how they were cast. Since I have sorted through the entire, I can state quantitatively that one-half have abrasions top and bottom, one half only on the bottom. Of those with the bottom anomaly, one-half feature the obverse depression. What does this information tell you?”

I was becoming rankled. “As someone unfamiliar with the manufacture of metal castings, it tells me exactly nothing. I imagine you will now delight in illuminating me.”

“It tells me that the items were cast in sets of four, the metal poured into or, more correctly, through two segments of a mold while it was set downward on its top edge, not flat – one coin above the other in each segment. One segment had a slight bump on the upper form, which would produce a depression in that coin, and which the designer perhaps did not see as significant. The metal was poured into what would become the lower coin in each segment, running its way down to what would become the top coin through a gap between the two, similar to the entry gap where the pour originated. The top coin has only the bottom abrasion, the place where it was broken loose from the lower, once cooled. The lower coin has the reciprocal rough spot from that break, plus an opposite break from removing a short entry funnel. Look carefully and you will see that the bottom abrasion of the doubly abraded is less jagged than the upper, with slight striations where the original, more jagged snap has been softened, using a tool such as a file, or by being rubbed against a stone. It would appear that the edge sharpness, like the depression – caused by an error in the mold – was again considered of little importance.”

I tried to absorb this unfolding explanation, but admitted myself overwhelmed by the wealth of detail. 

“How do you come to know so much of casting?” I asked.

“I know little of foundry specifics. I work from logic. My deductions are what I – or you, if so inclined – would conclude from the evidence presented. I have seen nothing similar in the formation or manufacture of any ancient coin. What may look, to the casual eye, like usage wear is essentially duplicated on each example of the coin cast, according to one of the four positions in the mold. Therefore the ‘wear’ is bogus. Thus, the coins are a modern cast.”

I was astonished that this gelatinous creature could produce so full an explanation of a problem that I would not so much as notice. If inherent, why should his ability remain intact while his physical form slid toward dissolution? 

I swept the table clear of coins and hauled them by handfuls to the crock. One or another dropped to the floor, the fat man and I nearly colliding heads in our rush to retrieve them.

“If I had the means, I would melt them to ingots,” I growled.

The fat man swiveled like a spun bowling ball. “They are mine, where they came from or why is of no matter. They were given to my keeping!”

“Let them be damned!”

Why should I have taken such rapid and violent exception to the very existence of those coins? That they offended me at some deep level was obvious, but what brought out my extreme reaction? I have nothing that you might identify as a spiritual component. The soul, which appeals to so many as a separate realm residing within us, is to me the coordinated working of neurons and other cells assembled as a human machine. Perhaps this might seem lifeless, but to me it is the essence of life as lived, day upon day.

However, I have long been intrigued by elementals, those supposed nature-entities that lie behind so much of folklore: pixies, the “good folk,” kobolds, and the like. There has been the off-and-on question of whether they represent the communal memory of the pre-Celtic inhabitants of the British Isles, for example. Sometimes the Stonehenge folk are thought to have been the original Britons. As often, these figures of near myth are looked upon as proto-Britons, a short, squat people lost to history, to archaeology, even to paleontology.

But “elementals” may be an unfortunate term to have unleashed. I mean to indicate neither scurrying dwarves or beings of pure spirit: souls without a body to inhabit. I intend rather a broadened definition of what constitutes a living being, which might include those two extremes, but also any life form not clearly akin to our human. A distinctly “other.”

What, really, is a non-believer such as me, a mechanist, to make of such things? Let us posit that one may not believe in something but still make assumptions about what might be possible if one did believe.

In effect, I feel that I have fallen into an in-between place of neither belief or dismissal. Could it be that Willard and Louisa, those humanesque absurdities, are a form of co-existent, non-human life? Forming a bridge between the spiritual and the mechanistic, could they result from some mechanism that provided them with “bodies,” as surely as we, but based on principles we cannot conceive?

I do not mean this to sound dismissive of Willard and Louisa. So far I have said too little of Louisa, portraying her as a semi-autonomous functionary not worth consideration. Over time I came to see her as a fiercely frightened being, though one of a higher order of mind than Willard. I can’t say where her fear springs from, but it is intense, extreme, and does not appear to result from any misuse by the fat man, who, after all, provides her with work and food (if the proper term for what she ingests and prepares for others), as well as shelter. In return, she acts as lookout, with a remarkably keen and discerning eye.

Willard, by contrast, exists at his own whim, only occasionally serving as intermediary for the fat man, much as a dog might bring in the morning newspaper. Both he and Louisa teeter on the collapsing edge of terror, but each, I think, nurtures a distinct personal terror of their own. If they spring from an alternative, elemental world, it is one that has afforded them no solace.

There matters might well have rested undisturbed, as things often do once concentration has passed, had I not gone back to the fat man’s hidden back room to sort through the coins once more. I have no idea why he kept them there, rather than in the shop, and did not ask. But there the crock sat, otherwise undisturbed, on the shelf where he had first identified it to me.

Pawing through the flow of metal once again, I uncovered something unnerving. Among the coins with only a lower break, they divided equally between those with the casting dent and those without. Among those with both upper and lower abrasion, they divided in equal numbers between two groups. In what way did these divisions show separation? All the breaks of each subset were exactly identical, yet wholly different from each other subset.

Let me try to frame this in a more explicit telling. (The fat man had trained me well in the care of expressing my observations.) Within each of the four groups – the two upper, the two lower – the correspondence in breaks was exact, snap for snap, sharpness for sharpness, skew for skew – yet completely unlike the break in each of the other groupings.

Now, take any collection of identically cast items, break the bond between their connection, that break will not be identical across the collection. Each sundering will have minute differences when compared side by side. Not so here: Even under my 20x microscope, I found it impossible to uncover a significant variation, one from another.

The first question is, how could this be even theoretically possible? The second, why had the fat man not pointed this out to me? The final question, assuming he had indeed noticed this oddity, why would he have constructed such an elaborate diversion, positing a casting mechanism which, clearly, could not have taken place?

I was at first reticent to approach him, assuming he would fob off on me another complex and unlikely explanation. How angry would I then become – or how divorced from reality, should I accept his new explanation?

Instead, I waited a week, two weeks into my already overextended “vacation,” to the point of threatening my employment until, after downing another of the execrable sandwiches prepared by Louisa, I emptied the crock to repeat the comparison. I expected to see my obese companion exhibit signs of suspicion or discomfort, but he did not.

What did I find this time around? That each of the four groups was again uniform in its abrasions, yet different from each of the other three. But I also saw, to my heightened amazement, that the precise pattern of each break, under microscopic examination, was different from my previous observation.

The coins had mutated, both individually and by group!

I shook in my seat. Some things are acceptable, others are conjecturally possible, if unlikely. Others simply cannot be.

It was past time to confront the fat man with my findings. But could I trust what my mind told me I has seen? Why had I not arranged to take photographs to bolster my claims, rather than prepare to rattle off blatant idiocies that would, at best, only provoke laughter?

It was of course conceivable that the fat man himself had made these substitutions, but why and how? It would have involved numerous hours of trading every single coin for another. I can say for certain that the crock containing the coins had not been switched for another; I was by then familiar with its individual defects, its chips and idiosyncrasies of pattern. No, the entire lot which it held would have had to be substituted, including the precise denting defect in one-quarter of the total. 

Inconceivable!

I had been fiddling with my conjectures on “elementals” long before my initial explosion with the fat man. Now, a yet stranger conjecture rested itself upon me, an extension of my consideration of Louisa and Willard.

What if I were to turn my original assumption on its head? Not only might an elemental take a form similar to ours through bodily mechanisms wholly foreign, but might a completely different internal formulation produce an external semblance that we might recognize as familiar but not consider alive? Furthermore, might this unrecognized living thing change outward form as it grew or mutated?

Now, you say, I’ve gone fully off my nut. But I prefer to think instead that, like the fat man, I am working from logic. Thus, if you can accept my basic unlikely assumption as logically sound, by extension its successors should not be considered logically false.

Or to sum up: An elemental of an extreme type might take on the form of a cauldron of coins, and that these apparent coins could adjust their construction at will.

Oh, a range of problems accompanies such a rash conjecture, and I have since attempted to focus on them. For example, how much can I believe of what the fat man told me of his partial amnesia and his, shall we say, peculiar bequeath of the coin shop? I must admit that I found him strangely convincing in his presentation. That is, I believed in his own belief in them. What may be the actual case is anyone’s guess. And, counterintuitively, his apparent failure to note the identical “breaks” within the four collections of coins, or their transformations over time, somehow reinforced my acceptance of his tale: While astute, voluble and informed, he is yet capable of the same critical blindness as any of us; myself, in profusion.

Beyond all that, if I agree to accept my observations and my conclusions springing from them, I must go another step further. Were the four coin assemblages originally identical, or could they have changed “on the fly”?

Finally – though there is no end to such questions – are the coins, if living things, a single elemental – the source of their own creation – or a “family” of individuals?

I did not see the problem then – and do not see it now – as one of physically defining these things, living or not. Rather, it all, taken together, fills me with a monstrous dread that I cannot parse or properly transmit. I see that I am on the verge of running off into tumbled verbiage again. So, leave it that I am frightened. Terrified. Not so much of what these things are, but of what they might portend if let loose on the world.

They should be destroyed, obliterated! That is my gut response. But when I step back to consider what this might entail, the terror only rises to a higher level of intensity. How might they, it, react to any attempt at destruction, and how might failure to achieve this destruction create a wider catastrophe?

Though I dare not make such an attempt, I can, or so I assume, secrete them in a way that makes their discovery as unlikely as the ascension of human decency.

It would be best, perhaps, that I not even mention their existence, as I have done here in too painful detail. But should they, or their ilk, reappear, someone must be their recognizer. Thus it is that I have selected five email addresses of people, unknown to me in any manner, to receive these excretions of my mind. You, receiving this, are one of the five. Hopefully, nothing you read or otherwise hear will require action on your part, but I am  hedging my bets.

Why not simply hurl these conjectures into the leaky net of social media? Read what I have sent here, read it again with attention and intention. In the social wilds, it would read as another conspiracy theory with which to bludgeon the public, then fall into righteous ridicule.

No, this is much too serious a matter to be left to the porous inattention of those fishing the stagnant depths of the human mind. However absurd all this may sit with you at the moment, at some later date, it may reassert itself in ways that you will shudder to recognize.

[So, you see, I was somehow appointed one of the five that he, whoever he is, picked to receive this absurd tale. It may be a mistake for me to send it out to this group, since the guy is pretty ambivalent about what wider effect its distribution might have. Still, I like taking chances – at least at a distance. But tell me if you’re aware of any similar experience to the ones described here. – D.]

A century ago, doctors could cure almost nothing They were friends of the family who tried their best to make you feel better, to ease your fever and your pain. 

Today, a vast raft of diseases can be cured or alleviated, resulting in 8 billion people on our beleaguered planet, at least half of them homeless, miserable and ill-fed.

Ah, progress.

*   *   *   *

Westclox still makes an alarm clock that’s almost identical to the one I got as a present on my 8th birthday. For some reason, I remember that the most of any birthday present I got.

Grinning like a goof, I picked one up at our local hardware store. The current version’s no longer a windup, but battery powered. The alarm I’d set went off while I was out, but according to Linda, it makes the same deafening clatter it did back then.

The down side in my old-guyhood? It’s engineered to tick as loud as if it was still a windup, and there’s no way to mute it. If I wake in the middle of the night, it’s like a little critter trying to pound its way into my head.

I may try sticking it in an open-faced box of foam insulation. I think in this case they’ve carried nostalgia a little too far for me.

*   *   *   *

The Van Pelts were a major family in Philadelphia, as were the O’Hares in Chicago.

If Maisie Van Pelt of Philadelphia were to marry Clark O’Hare of Chicago, would she become Maisie Van Pelt O’Hare?

*   *   *   *

When my mom was writing minstrel shows [yes, I composed a whole column about that some time back] and I was about 12, she bought a black Halloween skeleton costume and brushed over all the bones with luminous paint so I could – and did – dance on the darkened stage to the cast singing that “knee bone connected to the thigh bone” song.

As all too often, I was feeling sick during one of the performances but soldiered on – and had great fun doing it.

*   *   *   *

Alexander the Great – hell of a guy – died at age 33. That was historically noted. I’ve wondered if that recorded fact influenced the later assumption that Jesus died at 33, considering there’s no clear evidence of exactly how old he was when they strung him up? 

*   *   *   *

I’ve never liked “popular” music of any era I’ve lived through. The closest was in the ’60s, but then it was more the folk-revival musicians than pop.

Though I loved David Bowie as an actor, I never much enjoyed his music and was totally indifferent to his Ziggy Stardust persona. I think that started when I first heard “Space Oddity,” one of the dumbest, most annoying songs I’ve run across. As for The Police, they made me want to puke. 

I recall almost nothing of the ‘80s and haven’t heard 90 percent of the current pop singers. [It’s not as hard to avoid them as you might think form the headlines.] A week ago I finally heard something recent by Taylor Swift. It was totally predictable pop, sounding like everything else, as I expected. 

*   *   *   *

Around age nine I bought a weird ring advertised on one of the 15-minute radio serials that ran at supper time. (For some reason, I link it mentally to the Tom Mix western show, but far more likely it was Captain Midnight, tales of the leader of a fighter squadron.)

It wasn’t a “decoder ring,” which became popular somewhere in there, but a simple circlet topped with a small torpedo shape that you held up to your eye to see an “atomic explosion.”

It turned out to show a few pinpricks of light randomly hopping around. It was enough of a disappointment that I never ordered anything else advertised on the radio or in the back of a comic book again.

*   *   *   *

“Williamsport, the City that Hates Visitors!”

When we took Marigold in for some minor surgery at the Wolf Run vet clinic about ten days ago, we decided to spend the waiting period in Williamsport, about twenty minutes further away. It’s the largest town in the area, with its own symphony orchestra [quite good] and the home of Little League baseball.

Now, I want to make clear at the start that I have nothing at all against anyone we’ve met or dealt with there. They all treated us splendidly. It’s about the glooming feeling of the place itself that if you don’t live there you should go elsewhere as rapidly as possible.

The main streets will suddenly turn one-way against you for no discernible reason. Any road near I-180, the main highway, runs you through an absurd tangle of traffic circles, often leading you back to where you came. The feeling I get is, “You can’t get there from here, and don’t you dare try.”

We wanted to stop for a late breakfast. Any town of any size up here has a café or deli. We walked for blocks along 3^rd St. in Williamsport, their main drag. Nothing that opened before noon, until we found a side door to their major hotel.

Yes, serving breakfast! A lovely, pleasant young woman pointed us to a room with an amazing array of serve-yourself goodies. Yum. Linda chose a muffin and cream cheese. I got an English muffin and butter. How were we to pay, where and when? Somehow, when I tracked down our “server,” I couldn’t get that request to register with her.

While we ate, a few stranglers came in and it became obvious that the restaurant was really set up for the hotel guests. When our server came back, we explained that we “came in off the street.”

Oh, then we’d have to pay the basic rate, since the area was set up for guests to eat as much as they liked. So, $14 each.

Fourteen dollars for an English muffin. 

After our break-the-bank brunch, we stopped at the Thomas Taber Museum, which covers the history of Lycoming County. Lovely place, wonderful reception and explanation at the counter, and though a few exhibits seemed a bit out of date, really pleasantly arranged to feed you through the interconnected rooms.

What really gets me about central Williamsport is that huge areas are set aside for parking, but none are kosher unless you’re the patron of a particular business – and if you dare choose to park where unwanted “you will be prosecuted.” 

Even so, I later parked on a spot reserved for clients of a law firm. They have yet to send us a citation. Previously, I had parked on the street by the most complicated parking meter on record; couldn’t figure out how to put money in, so we were again illegal. But we appear to have escaped unscathed, though I was surprised we could tramp the sidewalks without being asked for our ID.

[It’s too hot to think, so I’m cramming in a few oddities, with the usual disclaimer: If some look familiar, most of them sit in my head for hours on end, so I can’t tell whether I’ve used them before or they’re making one of their periodic internal revolutions.]

A conjecture:

God and Popeye the Sailor are closely related.

Here’s God (Yahweh) in the Old Testament:

I am who am

Here’s Popeye in the 20^th century:

I yam what I yam

Considering that E. C. Segar, who created Popeye as a comic-book character in the 1920s, and the Fleischer brothers, Max and Dave, who produced the 1930s Popeye animated cartoons, were Jewish, it’s likely that they would recognize such a spiritual brotherhood.

 *   *   *   *

What’s happened to the golden manufacturing companies of my youth? How many of them still exist, beyond a name bought by a faceless acquisitions group? 

Let’s start with McCormick spices. These were once the upscale brand of cooking spices, usually kept at the right-hand end of the supermarket spice shelf, higher priced but dependable. Today, they hold close to a monopoly on those spice shelves, driving other brands to extinction in the average supermarket. If there is, by any chance, a house brand available, McCormick will be twice as expensive, flavorless piles of bottled dust.

3M – originally Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing – invented Scotch tape, and anything else they sold used to be an industry standard-. Over the years, 3M continually expanded; it now produces some 60,000 products, including health-care items and the N95 respirators used to challenge covid. 

Much, if not most of their expansion came from buying, selling, or merging with other companies. I don’t know how they rate across most industries on quality, but the consumer line of Scotch-Brite sponges and scrubbers that dominates supermarket cleaning-tool shelves is crap – the fuzz pulls off the sponges and they disintegrate rapidly.

If you’re one those who worry about people getting too old to be effective (and if so, please shut up), could be it happens with companies too.

There’s a different but equally telling tale with Diamond matches.

At our family kitchen stove, we used Ohio Blue Tip matches, clearly the best in those days, with Diamond OK but not as sure-strike.

Diamond was the older and larger match-making company (today, still the largest). And as I discovered while writing this, Diamond was part-owner of Ohio during the 1920-30s, though Ohio became independent again in the ‘40s-’50s, when we were using them, until its demise in 1987.

Amazon offers “Ohio Blue Tip today,” but it’s not clear who makes them, even when labeled “Diamond”; I haven’t seen an Ohio match with my own eyes in over 50 years. 

Ohio started with “Strike on Box” matches; Diamond and others later developed “Strike Anywhere.” Strike Anywhere matches are illegal in many areas because of safely concerns but are available in PA, notably at Sinclair’s Hardware in Dushore – the best hardware store I’ve ever set foot in. Sinclair’s boxes are Diamond Strike Anywhere.

Why am I wasting your time with matchbox minutia? Because I think it says a lot about the decline of consumer quality that parallels the expansion of consumer “choice.”

I’d been using the Diamond Strike Anywhere for some years, and they worked fine to set a fire safely. Then, maybe five years ago, I found I often couldn’t strike them even on the box. I started calling them Strike Nowhere Matches. 

We had three boxes on hand, and I noticed that strikability varied depending on which box I picked up. I looked at the fine print.

The three boxes showed manufacturing dates from three successive years. Those from two years worked, the third ones didn’t. The matches in the working boxes were marked Made in Chile. The ones that didn’t were proudly Made in the USA. I recently, I bought a new box. They worked. Made in Chile once again.

Isn’t it depressing that we can’t figure out how to correctly construct our own simple products? But are they our products? I think the real problem is outlined in the recent history of Diamond, taken from Wikipedia:

“Private equity firm Seaver Kent acquired Diamond Match Company in 1998. Following Seaver Kent’s bankruptcy in 2001, Diamond was purchased by Jarden in 2003.Newell Brands became owner in 2016 after the merger of Jarden with Newell Rubbermaid. In 2017, Newell sold Diamond (except the cutlery line) to Royal Oak Enterprises.”

Who are these people? Well, they aren’t “people,” just “entities,” investor line-dancers who give not a rat’s behind about the products they produce. They’re like autocrats on the political stage, who, by coup or popular upheaval, assume the role of redemptor, then quickly repeat the autocracy they fought against. 

*   *   *   *

Lat week Linda and I cruised past a marvelous highway sign:

“Caution: Road Work Next 0 Miles.”

Think of it as “Zeno’s paradoxical road sign.”

*   *   *   *

I have a strange bump on the very top of my head. It’s been there for a couple years, and my doc occasionally remonstrates that I should have it “looked at.” Personally, I doubt it’s worth anyone’s time to look at, but I couldn’t figure where it came from.

When I whacked my head against the edge of a kitchen cabinet a month ago, it bled – just a bit –  and didn’t seem to want to heal properly. Later, a half-lost memory emerged from 50 yeas back, when I was working as the maintenance goof at my kids’ school, Miquon. One winter, the company making the heating-oil delivery somehow forgot about us. The heating pipes in two of the small buildings froze, burst and flooded.

One building was the art room. After I cleared the mess, I had to replace the vinyl floor tiling. This required hunkering down and shouldering the taller furniture around. I knelt in front of a five-foot-tall cabinet and gave it the old heave-ho. Something slammed into my head, and I saw every mental eruption ever documented; yes, like those comic strips where someone gets hit on the head and is besieged by multi-colored stars and flashing lines of force. There, surrounding me, lay the shattered, life-size, hollow plaster bust of a Neanderthal.

Well, shit, I’d seen that bust before, but hadn’t looked up this time to be reminded. Fortunately, our family is known for its rhino bones, so my skull did not crack, but I was bleeding like a stuck long pig. I trotted over to the little office building, where those on break yowled that I needed to get to a doctor or the hospital, quick. I waved them off and stuck my head under the cold-water faucet in the back room for 15 minutes, which brought the blood to a standstill. They were still horrified when I popped back out, dripping pink. So I put on a hat.

I didn’t go to the doc, and I didn’t have a fracture or concussion, though the paleo precursor must have weighed 20 lbs. But last week, I began to wonder… might a smallish bit of Neanderthalic plaster be attempting to escape my scalp?

You see, while re-flooring the front porch at our Baring St. house a few years later, I jumped off the side onto a pile of old boards I’d levered loose. I failed to account for the cut nails sticking up – the kind from the mid 19^th century with square, blunt ends. It was summer, I was in sandals, and one of those little fuckers snarked right through the sole of my sandal and an inch into my foot.

As usual, I did nothing about it except hobble for week. With no after-effects until, a month later, I noticed a smallish bump on the bottom of my foot. A fragment of the sole of my sandal was exiting my foot. I shad have kept it.

That’s what came to mind about my head lump. If nothing untoward happens – and how often does even something toward happen? – it would be archaeologically delightful if my dome popped a shard of plaster Neandertal.

[Half an hour after writing the above, I’m sitting at the kitchen table and Linda tells me there’s blood running down my nose. This goddamned lump just couldn’t stand me writing about it!]

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Speaking of Neanderthals (which I do with true reverence – they invented art, for shit sake), another funny idea floated past:

Finnish and Basque are two European languages with no clearly identifiable antecedent. What if one was the original Neanderthal language, and the other was Denisovan – the latest hominid species to be IDed from the DNA of finger bones found in an Asian cave?

Nobody can say for sure that these two species didn’t have language, and given the increasing evidence of Neanderthal complexity, it’s a pretty reasonable assumption.

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“Cornhole games” at festivals and church picnics are a big thing up our way – maybe in rural areas across America, for all I know. If so, cornholing sure has changed meaning from what I remember.

Now it refers to throwing corncobs or beanbags though openings in a wooden or cardboard backdrop. But in the days of William Faulkner’s Sanctuary, as one example, the hole referred to was not in a flat upright, but in a 3D human male leaning forward. And the hole itself was, umm, definitely animate, if sometimes uncooperative.