[This is a segment of a revised and rearranged character study from the first novel I attempted, decades ago. Most of that would-be book was crap, but I think Rylla is worth it. Hope you do. And whether you do or not, I’ll likely bludgeon you with more of her later. X-rated material unapologetically included.]

“What’s that girl doing over there?”

Isa Roswald pointed his chin at a young, frizzy-curled someone performing a series of rapid motions with a contained nervousness that was almost electric. Her eyes held an alert, slightly mad look.

“She’s working on the mechanism for the production of glycine, Strudle explained. “That’s an amino acid. She’s one of the horizontals. I’m a vertical.”

They approached the bench. The girl was immersed in her work with an intensity out of all proportion to what she seemed to be actually doing. When Strudle spoke to her, she snapped her head back like a poorly articulated marionette.

“Rylla, this is Mr. Roswald. He’s from the government. He’s taking a tour of the project, and I thought you might give him a quick rundown of what you’re up to.”

Her expression, looking at Roswald, seemed to encompass both the experiment and herself. “Oh! Well. Each of these test tubes holds a concentrate from a different hormone, all to be tested for the same length of time… after the hormone has been added. To the solution. Thirty minutes. We test for how much glycine is produced – that’s an amino acid. What I do is take the concentrate and – ”

She snapped off a rapid-fire synopsis of each step in the process, finishing her sample as she spoke. Her accent was distinctly Irish, but there was no time or place in her express-train delivery for brogue or lilt. It poured out with an intensity that both dazed Roswald and etched every abstruse sentence into his brain. She finished her discourse in the corridor and looked across at him with nervous expectation.

What do I say now? “Uh, you… you’ve been doing this for long?”

“A furlong is at race tracks. About six months. Here. I might, would like to take up biochemistry as a profession. I never finished university but I’m going back now. Manchester. Part time. Then I’ll be able to… understand better what I’m doing.”

“You seem like you understand it well enough. A lot better than I understand what I’m doing, most of the time.”

“I mean, I already know the terms and things, but I want to know how it all fits together. Don’t you?” A shyness, almost unworthiness, seeped in. “Excuse me, but I have to get back in. To the lab.” She turned without further word and closed – almost slammed – the glass-paneled door.

Roswald paced back to Strudle’s office, where they traded bland observations, the kind that reminded him it was time to scrub his bathroom sink. “Thank you very much, Mr. Strudle. This has been a most enlightening visit.”

“You’re quite welcome. Can I show you the way out? It’s a bit labyrinthine, as they say.”

“No thank you, I think I’ve got it all right.”

Roswald snaked through the ranks of cubby holes, set for a quick exit, when he almost plowed into the girl again. She was pulling a cigarette from her mouth like unplugging a cord from a socket. He stood in her line of vision, afraid of upsetting a balance he couldn’t define, but the effect was as dramatic as before. She popped backwards, almost spilling the beaker she was holding with the non-cigaretted hand.

“Sorry, didn’t mean to startle you.”

“I shouldn’t be smoking, you know. They give me hell. Once I dropped a big ash into a flask and fouled the reading. Wow did they give it to me that time.”

“You do get a break?”

“Twenty minutes. I try to stretch it to thirty, half an hour, when I can.”

“Maybe we could talk for awhile for the other ten?”

“Oh, that sounds such fun.”

“It does?”

“Doesn’t it?”

They walked down to the lounge, where Roswald learned that her name was Rylla McKinna, from somewhere he couldn’t pronounce outside Dublin, that she had an opinion on everything imaginable, and that that opinion was likely not one he had heard before. She approached technical matters with a brash naïveté that splintered topics into fine particles according to her fancy, reassembling them as personal visions near an internal juncture between fantasy and cosmic relevance.

At the moment she was in an uproar about the sense of smell. Her instructor at Manchester, Swengdon, had posited that identifying odors was a response to stimuli excited by molecules that fit into microscopic niches in the upper reaches of the nose.

“Can you believe that? Tiny bumpy things floating through the air that just happen to be the right shape to fit into holes in your nose? That’s such – I wanted to dash up and ask him where he could come up with such an idea. But that didn’t seem a wise thing to do.” She puffed her cigarette and gulped another blast of coffee as though preparing to meet her fate. “Oh lord, I’m late, we’ve been three-quarters of an hour. I’ve got to go. Really.”

Roswald wanted to delay her by any means. “Is there anything funny going on here? Strudle acted like I should be followed by security.”

“That’s probably because of me. We’ve been… going out, together, and he’s getting, I guess, possessive. I don’t like that, it makes me nervous. How do I get into these things, I’m not his – you don’t want to hear about it, I’m sure. Well, goodbye, I wish we could talk more…” Her face slipped into a haunted vision of personal conflict, but through it he still glimpsed an overriding sense of purpose.

“Are you doing anything for dinner tonight?” Roswald snapped it out on impulse and as quickly felt himself an aging failure. Why am I panting after eighteen year old lab assistants?

“Tonight? That would be good. Yes, it would be fine,” a smile shooting across her face like she had changed masks.

He looked at the tight muscularity of Rylla (when had she shed her clothes? what had he been doing not to notice?), eyes too large, chin too small, but a body that did things, that stood with simmering motion, yet in Victorian terms “pleasingly plump,” roundly sensual. How did she manage all of it, her body forming a deliberate manifestation of herself? Her body must call men down from the trees. It had called Roswald in from the dryness of bureaucracy to the center of himself, though he could not have named that center, and now had no power left to do so.

He reached across and ran his fingers down the lines of that pleasingly sensual, plumply round body. He leapt into the moment with an intensity which blotted all considerations, ground into her, humped, banged, tupped, snorted and screwed. He did not make love. He needed something above and beyond love, verification of an existent self that could interact – the more brutally the better – with another.

They lazed through a long post-coital silence.

Over the days, Roswald grew more gentle in his lust. Once, in the moments before they came, Rylla spoke and continued to speak through climax, gasping around phrases, emphasizing adjectives with her nails, spiraling into cessation with words rolling from her as tickertape spills.

“Women are the dark side of the moon, they’re supposed to be the moon, Diana, huntress, but nobody, men, thinks they’re hunting, they think women have already found, found everything at home or inside, they can’t want but they do want, I want, keep doing it, don’t stop I can talk and still – I’ve wanted everything I’ve ever done, almost done everything I’ve wanted, no, wanted everything I’ve done, even if I’ve regretted it afterwards, years when I regretted every last thing I’d done because I didn’t know how… to… want… oh yes Isa yes… wanted to want the right ones, the ways best for me, I didn’t, didn’t know what to want, I’m beginning to know, frightens men to find a woman wanting, frightened you when you first, first time didn’t it, you had to learn… are you going to Isa are you yes… wanted to know, be able to tell what people were thinking, why they weren’t better than they are, you went ahead like I didn’t frighten you but I did, frightened, all the time, both of going to come, feel it Isa, not like anything anybody says it is because it satisfies, nothing else quite satisfies, inside and under what you are comes up and overwhelms and completes you-u-u-u-u-u-u yes-s-s-s-s I’m crazy crazy let everything fall into satisfaction what are desires why do I have desires when I’m satisfied other parts of me still looking for satisfaction martyrs looked for completion end point so final they could burn out easy while their flesh burned smell themselves roasting… in England executioners roasted entrails still attached to martyrs who knew nothing done in their lives satisfied like that smell satisfied the senses a physical thing in us telling us this is… what happens when I die I find I have a soul that must go roaming or there’s a heaven or I  come back as someone I’ll never know, or I’ll be a man next time to find it no more complete to be a man I thrive on being me thriving… thriving… thriving say a word over and over it’s just noise, dirt and worms, what’s more complete in death if you aren’t complete here you’ve failed a martyr to win every bit back at the last second I want to be satisfied before I die smell in my nostrils flowers living not flowers on a dead-woman coffin so easy to spill into death-asleep the way dreams fit together explaining what they are exactly by the way they are nightmares a different completion we don’t want to face I don’t want to face but good dreams in the night soft not clouds or heaven, heaven is hard night is good… good night…good night. With dreams.”

Rylla fell into sleep as a tree falls, a non-rational rustle accelerating through snapping conscious connections, crashing into the otherland where obtuse angles define the geometry of cubes, her head on his arm, slowly deadening it, the loss of feeling in his forearm creeping up past the elbow where it met the resistance of his biceps. That great muscle fought anesthesia, but lost.

There are three three things that bother me in the construction of most scientific studies, polls and philosophical discourse:

1) the subjugation of the individual to the general

2) the failure to clearly separate thing from relationship

3) the failure to define terms being discussed

I’ve rambled about some of this in snide bits and pieces, but I’d like to get further into them.

This rumin I’ll grumble about number one, and go on to the other two later. I’ll try my best not to be terminally boring, but I’d suggest keeping your finger close to the “delete” key to be on the safe side.

*   *   *   *

Whoops, wait… first, I have to insert my fuckup du jour:

My daughter Erin commented on my last post about our family’s lack of musical-instrument instruction:

“Well… Miquon [my first two kids’ superb grade school] had Morgan and I play the recorder; I took a guitar workshop there too. Mom made me play piano using the John W. Schaum books, and I took flute while I was in Teaneck. I wasn’t good or comfortable with any of them.”

Sorry about my previous claim that nobody in the family took instrument lessons, but sorrier that Erin had to piddle around with stuff that made her uncomfortable.

*   *   *   *

OK, on to the general vs. the individual (see the Eisenhower joke, hee hee?)

Almost all scientific studies are designed to uncover a general principle or mechanism, and almost all opinion polls are designed to identify the general outlook of a given population. Both, by design, ignore or minimize the individual, viewing the specific as irrelevant at the moment.

Scientific principles are general, and it behooves us to discover them in their generality if we want to know what’s going on in the universe (that curiosity thing, if nothing else). This is what hard science – physical science – is about.

But the social sciences (a term that makes me squirm) deal with human populations that are the sum of the individuals that comprise them. Same with those polls that call while we’re eating dinner to tell them what they want to know (I tend to tell them, succinctly, things they’d rather not hear).

Each of us is an individual, but it’s not unlikely that each individual finds him or herself as an unviewed or neutral object at times like these. But there should be ways to see both the individual and the general at the same time, or at least take both into consideration when looking at the results. Because the failure to do so can skew what the results look like, especially in the social sciences.

Example:

I hope you all have more sense than to fill out social questionnaires geared to uncovering political and psychological attitudes. They usually attempt to identify or sort out personal and group bias, yet the studies too often have such bias built in.

How?

It often lies in the order or grouping of the questions, more than in the individual question themselves. (I wish I had saved specific examples, but they piss me off so much I usually toss them immediately.)

The worst are the causist “questionnaires” (lead-ins to a petition or request for donation) which are – purposely – designed to pin you into a narrow mindset where one question assumes you already agree with the organization’s outlook, and the following ones pressure you not to just support that outlook but reinforce it – with no allowance for nuance.

With the actual scientific questionnaires, I don’t think the similar problem is deliberate, but an unconscious leaning in humans to sort items by type. 

A couple examples of questions listed in sequence – made up, but closely reflecting ones I’ve seen quoted :

Yes or No:

1. Do you view men and women as equal in rights and abilities?

2. Do you support the feminist position?

OK, if you’re a decent human being, you will say yes to the first. 

But… there are those, both male and female, who might be ambivalent about the term “feminist” – in part from their individual definition of the term. Yet those who answer “yes” to the first question will almost certainly be pushed toward answering “yes” to the second, whether or not they have personal reservations about the term “feminist.”

Might there be a different split in yes/no answers to the second if the questions were separated or placed in different contexts? I think so.

Dog or Cat:

1. When choosing an an animal for your home, are you more a “dog person” or a “cat person”?

Yes or No:

2. Would you adopt an injured cat from a shelter if it might otherwise be killed?

With these questions presented in sequence, I’d bet the cat lovers would say “yes” more than the dog lovers to the second. But if the second question were placed in a different context that stressed the ideal of “animal lover,” the answers would likely be more equal.

You don’t agree? Good! That only goes to reinforce my idea that such questionnaires tell us nothing useful and should be junked.

 *   *   *   *

As for the proliferating opinion polls – stop taking them! They just codify whatever panic is in vogue at the moment and again, reflect nothing of value while cluttering news space.

The small changes in opinion from year to year, week to week, day to day usually reflect regular fluctuations – as well as, once again, the order and framing of the questions. As in all human activities, opinions change constantly, depending on personal circumstance and social setting, especially given the clothes-drier rollover of social media.

 *   *   *   *

A last yowl, about ignoring and downgrading the young:

The habit of ladling idiot names on ill-defined “generations” over the last few decades is yet another way of denying the importance of the individual. You, kid, aren’t a person, you’re a “millennial” of “generationPDQ.”

 *   *   *   *

“Wild Rose Hips”is listed as an additional ingredient on our bottle of vitamin C. 

Wouldn’t it be a great name for a burlesque chorus line?

[Bits and pieces of what follows have appeared in this very space previously, but never all together, plus I’ve made quite a few additions.]

Realized something odd last night, and it amazes me that I hadn’t consciously noted it before: No one in the last three generations of my family has played a musical instrument: not my father or mother, either of my brothers, myself or my children.

All of us have loved music of one sort or another. Dad would sing variants of what I think were English music-hall songs from the early 20^th century, such as:

I’ve got

Rings on my fingers,

Bells on my toes,

Elephants to ride upon,

My pretty Irish rose.

So say we’ll get married

And next Patrick’s Day,

Be Mrs. Mumbo-Jumbo Gittiboo Jay –

O’Shay

Mom had a record player. Was it a 78? Probably, though it could have been a really early 33. Just a few records, such as Tchaikovsky (sorry, I’ve never been able to take Tchaikovsky), Ravel’s Bolero, a couple others. I don’t recall her ever singing.

No memory of what brother Vic might have sung, though he liked radio songs of the late ’40s like

 With a knick-knack paddywhack,

Give a dog a bone,

This old man came rolling home.

Brother Rod was a puzzle with music. In his late years he’d be wandering his house at 3 am singing “Danny Boy.” Earlier, because he’d do most anything for his wife, Ginny, he’d drive her to Philly’s Academy of music to hear the Philadelphia Orchestra, but he never went in.

Not sure were he wandered during the performances, but likely it had to do with nature and animals, always his great passion (while he spent his working years with Sun Oil in R&D, which never interested him). He also sang annually in Handel’s “Messiah” at St. Andrew’s, our Powelton Village Episcopal church. He had a good, solid voice, but again, this was just to be with Ginny in the choir; he told me more than once that he had no interest at all in what he was singing.

My daughters, Morgan, Erin and Caitlin, have an appreciation of a wide range of music, but if any of them have played an instrument, I’m not aware of it. No piano or guitar or ukulele lessons, and don’t recall that we ever talked about the possibility of arranging any – they will let me know if my memory is in error.

As for me, though I listened to the radio for up to 12 hours a day in the late ’40s when I wasn’t in school, I never got into pop music, and couldn’t stand the last-gasp big bands like Tommy Dorsey. I did like the odd songs that popped up in comedy routines – and, of course, Spike Jones.

I wasn’t much further into pop in the ’50s, though I listened while doing the family dishes, actively disliking maybe two-thirds of what was being played. So why was I listening? Masochism? To this day, I just don’t know. Peculiar, whatever it was. 

I didn’t fully appreciate music of any kind until my college years and the following ’60s “folk revival” (I still love that fold era today, but hate the term, which sounds like some form of disease). Mom’s few records had made me think I hated classical music altogether until, some time in my soph year of college, I heard Bach’s Brandenburg concerti. I sat there, mouth hanging open thinking, “this is classical music?!”

I started to buy piles of classical 33s, mostly $1 cut-outs at a record shop down on Chestnut St. I also took a wonderful course on the history of Western music, which gave me a great appreciation for 12^th-century polyphonics and Monteverdi.

But back then, and in all the succeeding years, I’ve never learned a damned thing about music theory or terminology. I can discuss quantum mechanics with some semblance of knowledge, but have no working concept of time signatures in music.

In the ’60s, I spent many an evening at Manny Rubin’s Second Fret, a coffee-shop near Rittenhouse Square, where he brought in nearly every major folk and blues performer (and many not-quite-major, such as Mark Spoelstra). One of those times in my life when I’ve felt blessed for being where and when I was.

Sometime in there I decided I should learn to play the guitar… or the banjo, or something. I didn’t have the money for lessons (abetted by my universal fear of embarrassing myself to suffocation through acting the fool), so I tried to learn from those big, floppy manuals by Pete Seeger and the like.

Well, I failed to learn to play the guitar, the banjo, even the recorder. I seem to be missing some vital connection between brain and extremities when it comes to rhythm or repetitive motions. Impetus does not lead to performance.

It’s the same way with me when it comes to dancing and most other physical processes. In my workshop, I can design nifty bits of woodworking but mis-measure at least twice before I get the layout right – if then. (But the absence of half my right thumb and index finger are the result of simple carelessness while shutting down the table saw.)

I don’t think any of this, or all of it taken together, proves a damned thing about me or my family. It’s just another of life’s larruping puzzlements. But waiting 85 years to take note of so obvious a familial trait says something about me that I don’t like. Though at least it gave me a topic for another sideways rumination.

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

Well, I’ll keep at it.

***

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

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

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

I try not to think about this too much.

***

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

***

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

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

***

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

Then he returned to the kitchen.

***

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

1. Home to the Safest Drivers in America.

2. The third most peaceful city in America.

3.The Best Place to Live in America.

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

.

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

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

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

I may not be invited back next year.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*   *   *   *

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

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

*   *   *   *

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

*   *   *   *

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

*   *   *   *

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

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

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

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

*   *   *   *

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

*   *   *   *

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

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

Yoweri Museveni of Uganda

Daniel Ortega of Nicaragua

Paul Kagame of Rwanda

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

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

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

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

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

*   *   *   *

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

*   *   *   *

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

*   *   *   *

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

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

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

*   *   *   *

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

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

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

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

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

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

His thighs ached.

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

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

Henry’s arms also ached.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Oh. Goodness. Where?”

“I don’t know.”

“Could I help you look for it?”

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

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

What had gotten into his loins?

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

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

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

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

“Of course.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

His lost million.

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

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

“My goodness! Why would you consider that?”

“I don’t.”

“Then why are you talking about it?”

“It’s exploratory.”

“I should leave.”

“Yes.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Stay,” he said.

“You asked me to leave.”

“I acquiesced to your desire to leave.”

“Why are you talking like a thesaurus?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“It’s entirely possible.”

“Likely?”

“That would be stretching it unreasonably.”

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

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

Knock on their door and ask them.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why?

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

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

Elements that likely entered into this dream clump:

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

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

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

Hiatus. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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