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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*   *   *   *

A couple nominations for fictional character names:

• Ian Phlegming (master of nasal disguise)

• “Beef” Stroganoff (Mafia lackey)

*   *   *   *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*   *   *   *

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

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

“Refill?”

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

Another strange police charge:

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

*   *   *   *

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

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

*   *   *   *

Tune: Frosty the Snowman:

Futzi the Showman

Was a rancid little elf,

For if you tried to talk to him,

He would say, ‘Go fuck yourself.”

*   *   *   *

A spot-on cartoon:

*   *   *   *

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

Continual failure can be highly instructive.

*   *   *   *

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

*   *   *   *

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

*   *   *   *

Tune: Back in the Saddle Again

I’m ballin the cattle again,

Ballin the cattle again,

Yippee ti-yi-yay,

Not one will get away,

When I’m ballin the cattle again

*   *   *   *

Headline:

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

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

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

For example:

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

*   *   *   *

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

And what is fairness anyway?

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

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

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

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

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

*   *   *   *

Funniest award of the year!

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

“Total Knee Replacement Five-Star Recipient”

Well, knee me in the groin!

*   *   *   *

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

*   *   *   *

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

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

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

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

*   *   *   *

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

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

*   *   *   *

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

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

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

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

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

*   *   *   *

You ever wonder: 

Is Jack Shit related to Peter Out?

[Much of this collection is repetitious, a pastiche of elements I’ve sent out over the years. (Hmm, this may be the first time I’ve ever used the word “pastiche” in print. I’m not much concerned with its meaning, just like the sound, though it could be the name of a dessert I wouldn’t particularly enjoy eating.)]

After dropping my daughter Morgan’s friend off in West Philly on a Halloween evening, I stopped at a light on Baltimore Ave. Suddenly there’s a slam against the driver’s door – and a gorilla staring in at me. I snapped alert and then started laughing. The teen backed off, removed his mask and waved, laughing too.

I snorted and howled and whooped the whole way home. I can’t think of another single incident that so thoroughly delighted me.

As a kid on Halloween, instead of being my usual terrified self, I could become a fool for a day: There were no rules, no one or nothing I could offend.” I don’t remember what I wore on Halloween at Hastings Ave. in Havertown, but after we moved to Philly, age 8, Mom made me a strange costume based on a Welsh tradition of the “button king.” Or so she claimed – I can’t find any reference to it online, so maybe she just made it up.

At any rate, she bought me a one-piece dungaree work outfit, kid-size, and sewed buttons in patterns all over it for my third-grade Halloween. The next year, she added yet more buttons. It was something special, and I liked it quite a bit, though no one understood what it was about.

At least once I dressed as a girl. Can’t imagine doing that at any other time as a kid – I would have been mortified to the point of sinking into the ground like Rumplstiltskin. I was a gypsy girl in a long, flowing, patterned skirt, rouged cheeks, eye makeup. That was the year some yob tried to steal my goodie bag. I warn’t no girl, held on like a pit bull and kept the bag.

I don’t remember other costumes from my Philly kidhood, though I know I fervently prowled the city streets for treats. But I’m clearer on my adult party-going on All Hallows Eve.

I bought the one and only suit I ever owned in 1968 and wore it seldom. By the late ’80s, the seam on one leg had parted and I’d stapled it together. But for several years I wore it to Halloween parties, because dressing as a junior exec was, for me, the most ridiculous costume I could imagine. Though I did find that it made me stand straighter with a drink in my hand.

For another party, with no costume handy, I turned a jacket inside out, wore it backwards, tied my wristwatch to my forehead, carried an umbrella turned upsidedown and entered as an alien from an unpronounceable planet. Kinda dumb, and less inspired than it might sound.

When I was first courting Linda – when I was first thinking of courting Linda – I went to a party across Baring St. where she danced in a gossamer butterfly costume. I had tied a pillow to my back and thrown an old horseish blanket over me, carried a walking stick and hulked along as a hunchback. But ah, underneath I was the king in disguise, with a kilt and false medals.

I had planned to throw off the blanket at some point and announce my true identity, but when the sort-of time came, I couldn’t bring myself to do it. That kind of overt exhibitionism I didn’t have it in me – then.

But my favorite and most renowned Halloween appearance featured far greater exhibitionism, the kind of thing that I generally internalize, that comes through only in my writing but hides from daily life.

I was living in the infamous House on 34th St. in the early ’60s, after returning from the disaster of grad school at Stanford and my mother’s descent into dementia in Palo Alto.

At that time, Penn still dormed men and women students separately. The women’s dorm was a block and a half from the House, a textured-brick rectangle with alternating horizontal and vertical windows, designed by Eero Saarinen to look like a forbidding castle, complete with a bridge over a non-existent moat. The top was fringed with outward-curving metal prongs like sparse hair (pubic?). Oddly enough, the inside held an open, airy court used as a dining hall during lunch hours. Here, the “coeds” were allowed to mingle with male humanity (until curfew).

Come Halloween, I was taken with the idea of appearing as Christ on the road to Calvary. Dressed only in a loincloth fashioned from a hunk of sheet and a crown of thorns woven from a vine, I pasted a fuller false beard over my unimpressive real one, dribbled red food coloring down my forehead from the crown, tacked a scroll with “INRI” to the cross member of a hastily constructed cross, which I dragged along 34th St. (a major traffic artery) and into the women’s dorm. I even fell the requisite three times along the way. I have a picture somewhere that documents it.

Halloween for Linda and me pooped out over the two decades we lived in the rear of our Baring St. communal house. Few kids found their way back there, and of those, the majority were ferried around by their parents, who dumped them on a street corner and waited with the motor running while they hunted down goodies.

When we moved up to rural Sullivan County, we found that Halloween was a major decoration holiday (with contests!) that almost rivaled Christmas, but we’re invisible from the road, so no werewolf visitors appeared. Anyway, the official outlook on trick or treating up here is oddly conscribed, as though the local establishment expects that kids out on their own might be dismembered by ghouls.

In the two decades since, the decoration mania has become more muted, not sure why. Perhaps our imaginations can no longer hold nothing scary enough to rival the real world.

I didn’t watch the Weds. presidential debates, but I did listen to them, running as background while Linda was watching. But I feel like I don’t need to know anything about these cretins beyond their ability to roar at full bellow to cover the fact they had nothing to say and no concept of what they were talking about.

Could be that I missed an occasional snippet of sanity, but I doubt it. I mean… these things are running for president of our country? How have we slumped this low, to become a backwash of rationality?

And why the hell did they have a live audience, where each bunch of boobs could cheer on their own particular court-jester-in-training? I guess to make sure that no one would take the whole business seriously.

But for a far more balanced, modulated and well-presented view than mine of that evening, read this piece – by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, perhaps the greatest basketball player of all time, who is now one of the country’s finest columnists and writers:

https://www.thedailybeast.com/kareem-abdul-jabbar-on-the-2024-republican-debate?ref=home?ref=home

*   *   *   *

Headline of the week: 

“Singapore to execute a woman for first time in almost 20 years”

Yup, last time she was executed she was only 16. Third time will be the charm.

*   *   *   *

Why did the U.S. women’s soccer team not win the world title? Could it be because they’re human, or that no team anywhere, anytime has a cinch on three straight world championships?

But what pisses me most is how the media hyped this magnificent team to a level well beyond reality – then wanted to dissect what “went wrong.”

They did the same to Simone Biles in gymnastics, shouting that there was no way she could lose at the Olympics. What a godawful burden to place on any athlete or team. Smug motherfuckers who think they have the right and duty to tell somebody two stories above their level of competence how to believe, how to achieve. 

We also have our repulsive ex-president cheering their loss because Megan Rapinoe dared to highlight our failures as a country. Well, here’s what she had to say a few days ago on her retirement, once again proving herself a superb human being (and a damned good prose stylist):

 “I’ll miss being able to represent our country. I think, a lot of times, that gets lost, when people talk about me in particular: ‘Oh, you guys don’t sing the anthem, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. You don’t love America.’ But we do love America. It’s just more in a James Baldwin kind of way, not in a bald-eagle-on-your-shoulder kind of way.”

*   *   *   *

Wife Linda came up with the best idea I’ve heard yet for the use of a chatbot. The bot would answer robocalls (whether the caller was human or AI) and engage in friendly, pointless talk for minutes on end, thus totally wasting their time and obliterating the sponsoring company’s profits. If adapted widely enough, it would put the bastards right out of business. Nobel Prize for Linda!

*   *   *   *

Another odd corner of etymology:

“toast” – how did it come to mean both verbal enticement to liquid celebration… and a charred slice of bread?

*   *   *   *

Bitcoin: 

I normally want to know how most anything works – the real mechanisms behind what’s going on in the world. But with bitcoin, I just don’t give a royal goddamn. If this isn’t a wholesale asinine scam, what is?

Give me the Shroud of Turin any day.

The odor in the hallway was probably imaginary, but if so, Michael’s imagination was getting pretty strong. Had a mouse died under the file shelving? Such things happened. Little bitty mouse, great big stink. Michael stopped at the water cooler, his thirst reduced by the thought, but what the hell, he came for a drink. He would drink.

 Delia, thin, tight, blonde with enrapturing grey eyes, turned the corner ahead of  him. So really he could not see her eyes, but he never saw any segment of “grey-eyed Athena” without picturing them, piercing, questioning, yet oddly distanced. Sometimes she would str-r-e-e-etch the perfect clear skin of her arms. It would bring him close to a shiver. 

She slipped into her office like dawn fleeing. He tried to dredge up an excuse to stop at her doorway, ask her some inane question, but knew he needed no excuse. She was always ready to engage, with her gentle, open smile.

He was smitten. He enjoyed being smitten but was properly wary of his smittenness.

“What’s that?” he asked, nodding at the sandwich unwrapped in her lap.

“Pimento and cream cheese.” Her smile took in the sandwich, the office and, bless the Lord, him.

“Seems kind of… old lady.”

She laughed a short bark. Her grey eyes dissolved the upper half of his body. “Oh. My aunt did eat them. These are from the deli. On 20th Street.”

“Oh yeah,” and Michael had run out of things to say. Things he could use to stay his return to a desk cluttered with trivia. He started to turn from the doorway.

“Are you going to the reception?” she asked as she bit her straight white teeth into the bread and cheese and his faltering heart.

“That? I don’t know. Uh, I wonder why they call them receptions? Nobody receives anything.”

“Adulation.”

“I suppose. And I guess… I’ll go.”

She snapped a light salute. “Good. I’ll have somebody to talk to.”

He floated a few inches off the floor on the short walk to his office but descended when  he remembered that she could talk to anyone. She blended, skimmed in perfect harmony with whichever group she joined. Publicity was her stated function, but she spread far wider, writing speeches for company dinners, editing the customer magazine, effortlessly weaving the corporate image within and without the company. She branded the outfit as smartly as any cowboy.

Michael’s official title was Relational Economist. He could never clearly describe what he did, because he wasn’t certain what he was doing. He saw himself as a glorified flunky, tossed whatever bits of jetsam no one else wanted. He had reached his Peter Principle level of incompetence and would be promoted no further, despite his age and “experience.” That nebulous experience would not provide him a better job elsewhere. 

He lived with his wife in an uncertain bond, not unhappy but hardly loving, continually questioning the why and how of who they were to each other. Her name was Desiree, but she did not desire him and he did not desire her (settled and accepting, a female sofa). The acceptance gap between them brought up a niggling guilt in Michael, but in Desiree it went unchallenged, perhaps not worth notice.

She should notice. Shouldn’t she? 

The chatter and rattle of the evening TV news did nothing to settle Michael’s confusion. He should be reading the New York Times, receiving the almost caressing wrinkle of its pages, but tonight he felt he could hardly hold it upright. Desiree preferred the buffoonishly over-coiffed female news anchor (anchorette? certainly not anchorite) with the pasted-on smile and mis-emphasis on minor syllables. That night, the woman revved up her ersatz excitement to burble over two murders, related by the gruesome manners of the victims being dispatched. The on-scene cameras showed white sheets covering possible human shapes.

Michael filled the marital gap with mild fantasies about every halfway decent woman he had continuing contact with. He had done so for 18 years of semi-equilibrium. But Delia was something different. Her sweetness bit into him. He had no idea if she was tied to anyone in her personal life. She never spoke of current private matters, though she mentioned past adventures that included “we,” without suggesting who “we” might be.

Was he in love, in lust, in lost hope? His memory transported Delia back through his years with the company, to days long before she had arrived – quiet, secure, lovely. He could so easily have always known her, her sandwiches, her taste in sleeveless blouses that accentuated her slim yet muscular arms.

He knew he was a sad, aging fuck, but at least he had his fantasies: Delia in pointed hat, stirring a cauldron, with grey delight at his presence as she passed a bowl filled with the remnants of her late lunch that she shared as though it was his ordained right. It smelled… interesting. Yes, interesting. He dipped his spoon and raised it. He felt blessed.

She was almost twenty years his junior.

At breakfast, Desiree handed him a slice of seven-grain bread slathered with cream cheese. She reached across the coffee table, her arm bare. The skin was mottled and puckered with the creep of aging. And where were the pimentos?

“This is Philthy,”

Michael presented a short, chubby young man to Delia.

“Phil… thy?”

“He does that,” said the companion. “Grotesque naming of people. It’s all in good humor. I think.”

“In your case, Philthy, not in all.”

“Well, I’ll take what I can get.”

“Then I’m pleased to meet you,” said Delia extending her wondrous hand. “Though I’m sure I would be just as much or little pleased if you were named Simon Bolivar.”

“That South American guy?” Maybe Philthy was smitten. It was hard to tell with him. Michael couldn’t imagine anyone not smitten with Delia. His eyes lingered on her hand, not with lust, but with an incipient question. What was the question?

On the way back to Michael’s office, Philthy rambled on about cooking. He was obsessed with making small, often French dishes that never came out quite right. “She’s lovely,” he said in a quiet change of pace.

“Yes.”

“You hardly ever see skin like that,” as though discussing a prize cow.

That was the question! Her skin.

On one stop at her office door she had told him about an accident, something in the mountains (she climbed, of course) that had laid her up for days or weeks. Something physical that should have left scars. But there were no scars on those arms or hands. But they could have been covered at the time. But when she had described the accident, something indicated exposure. But her face was clear of abrasions or anything else negative. Oh, why didn’t he know more about her, know any way to find out more about her?

He considered what Desiree lacked. She lacked scars. He wished she had scars.

He felt lightheaded at the reception. Maybe he’d picked up the flu everyone in the office talked about incessantly, like an imported delicacy that gave you gas.

 Delia wore a grey knit suit, an eerily close match to her eyes. Tonight those eyes… a witch stared from them, an emanation of frost and incipient malevolence. Christ, what? He must be getting that flu. His palms were clammy, he swallowed excess saliva, and a hot band constricted his forehead. He had to look away, but those altered eyes magnetized him. What was she saying to him? He could not comprehend it, why she was saying it, why she was saying it to him. The greyness flowed from her eyes into the weave of the cardigan hanging over the grey suit. She was shorter than usual, inches shorter. Did she usually wear heels? He didn’t know her feet. She mouthed a tight phrase that didn’t sound like her or anyone he could believe in, then turned away. She wasn’t there when he tried to search her out. His stomach roiled.

Michael wished Desiree was a witch. He wished she were almost anything but her presence in the world, draining like oil from a crankcase.

In the open, on a city sidewalk, a heavy smell, a diffuse mist of evil. He stopped at the entrance to a side street, criss-crossed with yellow police tape. He had seen it on the damned TV news – a third murder. Serial killer, serial killer, serial killer. How that Bambi anchorette enjoyed the aura of violent death. But nothing in the street explained the odor, no dumpster, no decaying body. Antiseptic, if anything. 

Two blocks further along he stepped into a low-slung cube of neoclassical masonry that clutched a blop of small lecture rooms the company set aside for corporate outreach. There was not the slightest use to him in this particular groan-and-drone foisted on him, but here he was. He sat in the fifth row of the terraced seats, his gaze flowing down to the six chairs set in a semi-circle for those running the “discussion” that he knew would morph into a one-person lecture with five nodding heads mouthing occasional innocuous comments.

“That’s life,” he muttered, but it didn’t feel like life. It felt like yet another form of death. 

Two levels below him, the grey cashmere sweater. He felt attracted but uncomfortable. She must have arrived before him. Had she seem him enter? No indication – until, as though on cue, she turned her body slightly, her head slightly more and smiled up at him, unleashing a pheromonic tsunami. He nodded, attempted a wave, something shaky in his hand motion. 

The formulaic gabble lasted 45 minutes, a random concatenation of business-speak that told him nothing he hadn’t known, reinforced nothing he had known. For the break, a side table stood laden with pitchers of something innocuous to drink, stiff bits of good-for-you carbohydrates, and cardiac-inducing slabs of cheddar.

No sense in his trotting down there. But Delia picked carefully at the uninspiring array, partially filled a paper plate, and headed up to his row.

“Mind if I sit here?” as she shimmied between the tight rows, stopping two seats to his right. 

“Yeah. Sure, of course.”

“How bad would you rate this one?”

“On a scale of 1 to 10? Minus 2.”

He thought she was going to take the seat she was standing in front of, leaving a vacancy between them. No, she slipped over and dropped cleanly into the seat next to him, laid her hand on the shared hand-rest. God how he wanted to lay his hand on that hand. For a moment, he thought he saw his left hand hover above hers, but it lay in quiet repose under his right, just back from his knees. Whew!

Michael sweated through the next quarter hour of god-knows-what, thinking thoughts a married man should not think. He thought them with passion, but pushed the passion – an unwanted guest bearing demanding news – aside.

Was she the most beautiful woman he had ever seen? No, he had seen more beautiful women (where? when?). Was she the most desirable? Possibly that, but only because of his innate desire, not from anything she put forth. He desired, he resisted the desire, but did not desire the resistance.

It was finally over (the “discussion,” not the desire). He had to get away before his hand descended.

She pushed upright. “I hope they won’t feel the need to do this for another month at least.”

“Or ever again.”

“You would think if they planned these things they could come up with a mildly relevant program.”

“We think alike.” What a goddam stupid thing to say.

She smiled an oddly sideways smile. “Oh, I don’t know. I think there may be many ways in which we do not think at all alike.”

Michael felt diminished, almost emasculated.

There seemed no pattern to the killings that had come to occupy the talk of the city. Nothing ethnic (two white, one Black, one Asian) or obviously sexual (three men, one woman), all past sunset but ranging into the pre-dawn hours, in different parts of town – scattered like human-sized dust motes. No reprobates or prostitutes, yet no one obviously well-to-do. Just people, anyone you might meet anywhere.

Michael said as much as he leaned into Delia’s doorway

“I know,” she said. “Do you think it could be deliberate?”

“Deliberate? What?”

“To make it impossible to find a motive, to follow a trail or predict the next… depredation.”

“Just to kill?”

Delia laid her delicious arms across her desk. “Haven’t you just done things now and then that seem to make little or no sense, that just plop out of your mind? Something inside says, do this, you don’t know what the something is – and you may not know what it’s really trying to tell you, but you do it.”

Had he done things like that, unplanned, erratic, brought on by unrecognized prompting? Probably, but now lost in the fuzz of recollection. What if he thought like a serial killer? To know the mind… He could make a good detective, possibly, if he could figure such things out. If you want to see how something works, there are better options that becoming an ersatz serial killer. Yet he found himself drawn to the death locations, spread across the city, places deserted or ignored at night.

He would check them out.

He did check them out. One was along the river, where they had cleared the decaying warehouses and installed pleasant stone seats (too ass-chilling most nights) where you could gaze across the river at the decaying warehouses on the other side. A white man in his mid-30s had been knifed. Probably first in the back, the reports said, then his stomach slit open. Left there, sitting. Michael was put off – disappointed? – that no blood stains remained. Which was the right bench? There were others.

Leave it.

The woman, Asian, country not specified, had been leaning against a lamppost – a utility pole with light attached – lampposts were hardly the thing these days – when her throat was cut. How could they determine she was leaning? She had been discovered in a fallen heap. A bit of editorial excess. Michael was on the right block, but again, which pole? It had rained since, so the blood would wash away. Had it rained the night she was killed, leaning?

The Black man, in his late 60s, had been found around the corner from a Chinese restaurant, him and his takeout order, garroted with what the police suggested was a piano wire. It could have been a guitar string, but guitar strings are shorter, probably wouldn’t have done the job. Some kind of wire that bit deep. Why had this one been lumped together with the knifings? Not the same MO. Someone was convinced it was linked, and the convincer or convincers had convinced the media who had convinced the listeners and watchers and readers.

The other white male victim’s place was the one he’d stumbled across, early on. 

Michael had had enough of his obsession and learned nothing useful. What would “useful” have been if he had found it?

Go home, spend the night with Desiree. What decent husband spends his evenings tracking down death?

And what decent husband invites the object of his other obsession home to take tea with his wife? Not just tea (for him and Delia, coffee for Desiree), but rich store-bought desserts, a late-afternoon squat of the three of them in Michael and Desiree’s living room, tastefully decorated with art and items in which Michael had no interest. He tried his best not to ogle Delia, may have succeeded but knew he was on the edge of something that could become emotionally destabilizing. At the same time knowing Delia had no romantic interest in him.

The difference was not just age but inclination. Whatever floated her boat was not a late-40s male with few distinguishing characteristics. But why the hell did he also see himself the same way?

“You visited some of the… sites? Of the murders?” Delia looked startled. Repulsed?

“It’s fascinating, however horrible. What’s it about, to do that kind of thing? Assuming it’s one person.”

“No copycats?”

“They don’t think so. They say.”

“Well, they say a lot of things.”

“Too much and not enough.”

She raised her index finger for emphasis. “I think I passed by one of the… places. The one by the river? With the benches?”

“Yes. That. You can’t even sit down these days.”

It would be hard to design a more inane conversation.

“It might make an interesting afternoon jaunt, take in the morbid sights.”

An invitation? He dared not consider it.

She left with a delightful wave of the hand. It was the first time she had entered his doorway and settled herself, rather than he standing and blocking hers.

Something lay on the chair where she had been sitting. What the devil? A sliver of stone, like you might skip across a stream, but bound with light string or heavy thread. No, some plant fiber, still damp. Did it fall out of her purse? She wasn’t carrying a purse. A pocket? He should take it to her.

Later. It wasn’t something she’d want immediately. 

He needed a stamp. He could ask her for a stamp. Not at her desk, dammit.

Staccato phrases falling from his brain like tears leaking down his neck. Tears on my neck. He opened her desk drawer. Isn’t this where she would have a stamp if she had a stamp to spare? Four pencils and three sturdy ballpoint pens in the front trough. He counted them before it registered that he was counting them. No stamps. He pushed a few papers aside. Under then, behind them, more small bits of stuff bound together, unlikelihoods brought into proximity. Talismans? Talismen? What plural? Who makes talismans from chunks of trash? Who makes talismans anyway?

“Did you find what you were looking for?” her voice not accusatory, faintly amused, perhaps quizzical.

“A stamp. I was looking for.”

“They’re in the top side drawer. The price is going up again. The postal service isn’t a ‘service’ anymore. They should change the name.”

“The United States Postal Ripoff.”

“Right!” A high woodland trill, He took a stamp from the designated drawer and reached his hand into his pocket. She waved away his offering. “No need. I’m not totally broke. I haven’t found enough things to spend money on. Yet. I haven’t seen your friend again.”

“Philthy? I don’t see him that much either.” Once, he could hold decent conversations, he was sure of it.

“I bet an evening at the theater would do us all good. That new Tom Stoppard sounds particularly fun. You and your wife and me? What do you think?”

“Umm… Desiree, uh, isn’t that big on theater. Live theater. I could ask her.”

“Good. I like to write little plays, you saw, didn’t you, the skit I did for the year-end?

“That was yours?” Of course he knew it was hers.

“It isn’t part of my official duties, I just do it for the hell of it. It takes the edge off… everything else.”

Another killing, another white male, so possibly a trend? He tried to avoid the TV news for “details.” Better to spend the evenings reading Dickens and Trollope (Trollope had loathed Dickens). The life of 19th century London, low and high, a relief from today’s news, though the low of London sounded about the same as the low and medium of today.

“Didn’t you know him?” Desiree asked, pointing at the TV, which she kept on low because the sound bored into Michael.

“What? Who?”

“The one who was killed. This one.”

“I don’t know who got killed.”

“You had a ridiculous name for him.”

Michael laid his Kindle on his knee.

“Like dirt or something.”

He looked at the screen. Good god, it couldn’t be. Philthy. “Turn it up.”

A knife again, the right kidney probably the first stab, then his back through to his heart. Michael said something enraged, stricken. Why the kidney? A stray memory of Jack the Ripper. Desiree laid her hand on his arm but did not take her eyes from the screen. 

Desiree had had no interest in seeing the play. She disliked Stoppard. “That Hamlet thing, an insult to Shakespeare. When you can’t write well you make fun of a genius.”

“I don’t think it was meant that way.”

“What other way is there to mean a joke?”

Oh, the ways.

Michael decided this Tom Stoppard didn’t measure up to “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern” – but what sort of judge of theater was he? He hadn’t told Desiree he would be going with Delia, but he hadn’t said he was going alone either, so technically not quite a lie.

“Philthy,” he said as they walked the street after the show. They both tended to sway while walking, Delia to the left, Michael to the right, their shoulders bumping lightly. 

“Filthy?”

“The guy I brought in, introduced you to. He was… murdered.”

Delia put her hand on his forearm. “That’s horrible! Oh.”

“It was… it seemed to be the serial killer.”

She pulled to a stop. “What a strange thing. Isn’t it? That it would be someone we know.”

“It’s unlikely, yeah, but, I don’t know it’s strange. It’s a coincidence.” They were half way to the bus stop. “Do you want to get something? Ice cream, or I don’t know what, some treat.”

“This evening is a treat. Let’s extend it.” She took his arm, fully.

They shared a huge slice of cake and tea at a quiet, almost sad shop. Outside again, Delia asked, “Mind of we just walk around awhile, I’m not quite ready to slip off home.”

Michael followed her implied nudges, right, left, right again, no clear idea where he was or where they were going. She seemed to know the city far better than he did.

As they turned their fourth or fifth corner, something clicked. He held his hand out like a crossing guard.

“Wait.”

“What is it?”

“This… it’s one of the killings, one of the places. I was here.” 

“Oh good.” She smiled at him in the late summer twilight.

“What’s good about it?”

“You told me about coming but I thought maybe you wouldn’t recognize it. Again.”

“You brought us here… deliberately?”

She shuffled in place. “I was naughty, I admit it. I really wanted to ask you…while we’re here… why do you think serial killers kill?”

“That’s why we’re here? For questions and answers?”

“It’s difficult to explain.”

“I can’t wrap my mind around the whole idea, that people just kill. It’s a mental aberration, grotesque.”

“Always?” She poked his upper arm to start him moving again.

“Normal people don’t hunt other people and kill them, one after the other.”

“They should collect them in groups?”

“It isn’t funny. For god’s sake – Phil.”

“No – I wasn’t trying to make light of it. It’s just that there can surely be different reasons for any human activity, depending on the person performing it.”

Michael nodded. “Of course, but killing people, it’s not within your usual range of… you know what I mean.”

“Watch where you’re stepping, a dog has preceded you.”

“A large dog.” He skirted the canine gift. “You’re getting at something. What? what are you saying?”

“That there can be, let’s say, types of serial killers. With different motivations, leading to different approaches and results.”

“Results. Gah. List some of these types.”

“Suppose someone had a deep-seated wrong done to them, early on or, a continuing form of abuse. He might hold a grudge that eats further into him, fills his entire mind, overwhelms him so that finally he… not cracks so much as excludes all other considerations, thinks only of revenge, so he tracks down his vile enemies and exterminates them, one after another. Maybe quickly, more likely over a longer period, keeping the most abhorred for last so that they’ll know he will be coming and suffer, waiting, the way he, the killer, suffered in the past.”

 Micheal watched the sidewalk as they moved along. “Is that really – I guess it’s a form of serial killing. It is, but not what I was…”

“That’s what I mean, the difference in motivations but with similar results.”

“But it’s not the same – not random victims.”

She laughed lightly. “OK, think of this changeup: You have a warped outlook about a kind of person, a class of persons, could be race, age, gender, sexual proclivity – I’ve always liked that phrase – a whole class of persons who you don’t see as individuals but representatives of a group you hate simply for their existence. So you see one of them walking the sidewalk and you beat this person to death. In one sense it’s focused on a group, in another it’s random – killing anyone who happens to fit the limiting definition.”

“You sound like a psychology textbook.”

“Sorry, I didn’t mean to –” 

“A well-informed and clear-thinking textbook.”

“That’s good?”

“That’s good.” And dammit, he was holding her hand. And dammit, she was letting him.

His turn: “The sexual sadists are obvious, they take up too much of the foreground, especially in movies. Their choice of sexual object may be focused in part – whores, gay-bar attendees, children – or random slice and dice. And the wholesale loonies who think the entire world is against them. Fully random.”

He scratched his head with his free hand. “Are we talking in circles?”

She shook her head determinedly. “No, we’re going right where I want to go, by judicious zigs and zags.”

“I mean verbally, logically.”

“Oh, that.” She stopped and raised their joint hands to point. “See where we are?”

“No. I don’t know where this is.”

“And you think you watch the news.”

“What?”

“This is where Phil was killed.”

“I did see the news but no photos of… the place. Wait – you said you didn’t know about Phil.”

“That was a bit of a fib. Just let it go. Here’s what I really do want to get to. There’s another type of killer – we’ll say serial killer, though I don’t like the term in this case – who’s filling a clouded need, reaching for something… undefinable. They try to move toward an end but may not know either what the end is or when they have reached it. They keep killing to get closer to that end. But does the end continually recede, or was there no end, just a pointless obsession they’ve given a spurious meaning?”

“That’s, I don’t know, a level of philosophical abstraction –”

“Internal abstraction. Within the killer.”

“Yes, well. How did we get into this?”

She swung his arm and released a long sigh. “I’m trying to explain how this has worked out, and why Phil was a mistake.”

“Mistake?”

“Don’t interrupt, OK? This kind of killer thinks they are moving in a direction – as I said – but it can get frustrating when the end, if that was really what they thought it would be, seems to come no closer. So far, it’s all been random. Victims here and there, no way connected, and that was essential, because you needed to move around, to feint, to see what other direction, random direction, you might take to move closer to… oh, I want to say the ‘goal,’ but I mean seeing how far you can take yourself, to prove yourself capable of an ideal state of understanding your limits,. But when it isn’t working you take a side trip – temporarily abandon the widespread, random search and decide to pick a known victim, a temporary fallback that might break the chain or… form a more useful link. The chain of failure, the sense of assumed failure. Picking someone well-known is obviously too chancy, so someone known to you. But it turns out that throws the whole scheme, the original scheme, awry. It looked like a good idea, but it’s a bad choice.” Still holding his hand, she faced him, intense, reaming his eyes with hers. “That’s why Philthy Phil was wrong. It ruined the progress and made no useful difference.”

“You…?”

“I learned two things: Don’t change your pattern – instead, work it through more carefully, thoughtfully. And second, though there’s no ‘proper’ way, still you must complete it – no matter what. You have to find what’s possible, what you can achieve, even when you make a mistake like Phil. Carry through, that’s the thing, finish what you started even if you’ve gone astray. Giving up is too sad to contemplate.”

“Joking about you’re the… It’s shit.”

She shook his hand, violently. “I’m trying to explain.”

“You killed Phil? And garroted an adult male?”

“He was old and not much taller than me and skinny. It said that on your news for goodness sake. Once the wire was around his neck and twisted…”

“This makes no sense.Stop it.”

“That’s because you have too many predispositions. For me it makes perfect sense. It did’t work out the way I’d hoped, but things often don’t. But I can complete it. In a different way.”

Michael tried to pry his hand free of hers but it was held with surprising strength. 

“You wouldn’t tell me this… if it’s true –”

“Of course it’s true! Why would I lie about something so important?” She swung their interlocked hands again. “You can help me, but I doubt you would agree easily.”

“Help you kill people?”

Delia laughed. “Just one. Well, two in a sense, but one doesn’t really count. In a sense.”

“You killing people – I don’t believe that for a minute, but that you’d… pull a prank like this. It’s disgusting nonsense.”

She swiveled to face him again. “It is not nonsense, that’s a terrible thing to say. I’ll show you.” She reached into her shoulder bag with her free hand, pulled at something that clattered and before it could register on him she had their clenched hands handcuffed together.

“What?”

“Does this seem like a joke?”

“Take these fucking things off.”

“I like you. I liked you immediately. There was never anything sexual in my feeling, and that was a relief. You’re fun to be around, most times, to talk to. I can’t explain what it was I thought I could find in the… eliminations, just that I knew there was something else, something bigger that went to an unexplored place. Area. But I didn’t find it. I already said that. I still think it’s there to find, but I guess I’m not the one to find it. But even so – I’m repeating myself, that’s annoying – I must complete it.”

“What does that mean?”

“Oh, you’re silly.” An open, accepting smile enveloped her wonderful face. Her hand dipped again into her shoulder bag.

His body knew before his mind could realize. The handcuff on his side hadn’t fully closed, he pulled his hand free and flipped backwards, dropping to the sidewalk. When the bomb in her bag went off, Michael was spattered with a rain of Delia, bits and pieces of Delia. 

Not surprisingly, he was suspected of being the aerial killer – the killer of all of them – until forensics proved that the bomb had originated in her bag, and they could not trace any of its components to him. Or her. Or any other who. The near consensus was that the killer had slipped the lethal device into her bag and detonated it from a distance to signal the grand culmination of the killing spree.

So it did, but Michael never told them it had been Delia. His mind, his appreciative, inquisitive mind still felt linked to hers, to what she might have been, to what, perversely, she somehow was – someone as amazing on the inside as the outside. And after all, she had chosen him for her completion.

He funded a memorial in her honor.

I’m just not spiritual by nature – no soul, no god, no realm beyond the physical – though I believe that physical existence extends in ways we’re not close to understanding.

The true scientist, to my mind, is one who sees the world as generated, operated, and maintained by physical law, and sees this as amazing and wonderful. I find that beautiful in much the same way, I suspect, as those with a more spiritual side see the beauty of the ineffable.

Yes, I’m anti-religion – religion of any sort – but could it be I’m promoting science as a religion? I hope not. I think of science as a continual unfolding – then again, that may be how many religious see their form of the “truth.”

So: All that we encounter in existence can be fully explained by scientific law, there is nothing more, and the final “why” can never be answered only because the final question lies outside what is being questioned, which in this case is all reality. There is no “spiritual” side whatsoever unless you personally define it as such.

If clairvoyance and similar experiences are “real,” then they have a mechanical base. What’s taken as “spiritual” is still subject to the laws of physics as we either know them or will discover them. If there’s something out there that travels from mind to mind, or circumstance to mind, then at some point it will be uncovered, defined, and explained.

I don’t know if you followed the hooha about the discovery of Higgs boson a few years ago, but it filled in a hole in the basic outline of fundamental physics. That is, it was predicted but had escaped every former attempt at discovery. Most reports covering its discovery didn’t mention that it actually proved the existence of the Higgs field, which is supposedly responsible for the existence of mass in matter (I have no real understanding of what that actually means). So might there also be a “spiritual field” that will be discovered and quantified? I don’t think so, personally, but it’s conceivable. 

*   *   *   *

What people are willing to pay for makes no sense. Some asshole spent 2.2 million to buy a pair of discontinued Michael Jordan sneakers. Proving, again, that having money is in no way correlated with having brains.

There were hits recently on Roy Lichtenstein for appropriating comic-book art, for which the original inker was paid sub-minimum wage, while Lichtenstein got $65m for his ripoff.

I always did think pop art was a scam, and the idea that Any Warhol got something like $145 million for a piece of his Marilyn Monroe crap – higher than anything paid for a Picasso?

I’m not personally a big Picasso fan (except for his blue period, which almost everyone else pretty much ignores), but he obviously changed the face of art. Warhol copied Campbell’s soup boxes. That didn’t even change the flavor of Campbell’s soup.

But I find it pretty funny that some dumbass Arab sheik payed half a billion for a student copy of Leonardo’s lost (or never completed) Salvator Mundi. All you had to do was look at the hands in the painting. When did Leonardo ever paint such limp, lifeless hands?

*   *   *   *

I don’t think I’ve ever seen a drag show (live or online), don’t particularly recall being around any place that held one. 

So my first question: When did drag grow beyond a niche form of entertainment?

Second question: When did drag performers start reading books to kids at story  hours – and why?

I’m not complaining or worried about anyone’s morals, just don’t understand how drag came to move in such directions and seemingly rapidly. Maybe as an analogy to clown shows or minstrel shows or musical comedy? 

But of course the real question is: Why are rightwingers, especially half-assed politicians, scared shitless of drag? Do they really find their own lives so precarious that the mere sight of a man in lingerie and high heels terrifies something deep in their souls?

Poor bastards.

*   *   *   *

Odd that I’ve always hated brushing my teeth and almost never floss because flossing somehow disgusts me, yet I’m not much bothered by needles and actively enjoyed being awake while stents were wormed through my veins – a process that would drive most people holy flaming M-A-A-D.

There’s little prediction of and absolutely no “meaning” to the eccentricities that pervade each human life.

The tailor who sat at his bench in the town square had sat exactly so for more years than the inhabitants at the other the stalls could recall. He had sat there before they had, any of them, been born. 

Tailoring was perhaps too exalted a word for his occupation. He made no repairs, and none could claim to have seen a pair of trousers, a waistcoat, or a bit of livery fashioned from the working of his hands. 

What then, did he form from his cloth?

Josfell tailored new thoughts.

An odd function, perhaps – but one so difficult to contemplate? When we sit to ruminate, old thoughts dominate our minds: the past, the changing social situation, the eccentricities of our neighbors, the state of the polity. Consider what we hear on the street, what we read or see broadcast, what the “experts” say, what is whispered from mouth to ear. Is a bit of it new? Yet, somewhere, new thoughts must be fashioned, lest humanity shrivel from inattention.

Josfell was one-hundred-thirty-three years old at the time of this telling. That great age was none of his doing or planning. He had long been prepared to sidle beneath the earth, which had paid him no special attention. But somehow the lanyards of life held him back. So in this public place he sat and formed new thoughts, though those who passed had no knowledge of what work he did, and little interest.

Until one late Friday morning, the 29th day of June, when the sun hung high and Josfell’s spirits swung low, a young man with a stark black beard and riveting eye leaned over him.

“I need a new thought.”

Josfell looked up, startled. Over the two centuries of his trade, few had asked anything of him, and none before for the one thing which he could, unfailingly, provide.

“A thought?”

The intense young man pointed to the small square of cloth on Josfell’s lap. “Come, old one, provide for me a thought.”

Josfell held up the snippet, inspected it, tendered it. “Take.”

The man shrank back and constricted his brows. “I cannot take! It can only be bought.”

“I have no use for money.”

“That is not my concern.”

After fruitless haggle, Josfell sold the small thought-cloth for four copper pieces and returned to his work – like most of us, not much enlightened by his experience.

But the mind of Akim, who had made the purchase, was ablaze. He held a freshly minted thought, contained in a square but two breaths on a side, capable, he hoped and believed, of expansion into a world of contemplation. He would use it well and soon, that its impact be not lost or sullied.

In the poor mud-walled home he shared with Tamara, his too-often sickly wife, he caressed the thought-square and smoothed the wrinkles it had acquired from reposing in his leather pocket. What sort of thought might it be? A pondering, a question, a tentative answer, a mental bauble as mundane as a market list?

The sun had crossed the meridian into afternoon as he laid it on his rough-hewn dining table and considered its contours. So much was open to him in his life, which had reached a forking of the ways where concerted thought was needed. What if he had purchased only a misguided triviality? He feared its transference, yet knew this was the required act. Akim breathed deeply and raised the oddment to his open mind.

This is what he thought:

I am a herdsman of twelve seasons’ experience, knowledgeable in the ways of sheep and goats but insufficient in understanding the ways of men. When I cross the road, I ignore the progress of oncoming wagons, yet they pass me by unharming, for when I attend the opposite side, I am in no way lessened or altered. But within me flames a yearning that I cannot name or yet extinguish. I have the wish to be, but know not what it is I wish to be. Should I call down the rains upon my head, they would not water me. Should I call up the earth from beneath its rubble, it would not cover me. Should I curse the clouds that hide the sun, yet would they still provide, without question, salvation from the heat.

Standing, he railed to his wife, “My slate is wiped clean of questions each day as I retire! What do I know with certainty? What should I advance toward?”

He glared at the flaccid cloth, its content transferred. For this empty beckon he had squandered a portion of his father’s meagre inheritance? A rage built in him like the spring floods, overflowing the banks of his reason and sweeping the season’s withered mental vegetation before it.

He crushed the thought-source in his hand and retrod the dusty path to the market. There he confronted Josfell, quivering in part from malignancy, in greater part, disdain. “What have you sold me, thief?”

Josfell looked up, wide-eyed, open to the long ages when none had requested a thought. “I sold you nothing. I gave, you bought.”

Akim withdrew his anger, for even in his wretched sorrow he recognized this truth.

“But what,” he asked, “what is this?” holding forth the cloth.

Josfell turned the proffered square in his hands. A strange light, perhaps from above his shoulders, perhaps from a greater distance, touched the uneven surface and raised a brief flicker of luminescence. “I form the folds and cut the lines, but I am not master of the weave. I do not know what meaning it holds. Perhaps… the thoughts speak only as they can, each to each, thought to thought, thought to thinker? So that the thought that speaks to one is not the thought that would speak to another?”

“Charlatan,” cried Akim, but only to fill the space that might otherwise envelop both if no word were spoken.

In Josfell’s hands, the thought-square slowly lost its shimmer, to lie, if not lifeless, in the gentle grace of slumber. A weight descended upon him that he had not before known. “What would you have me do? I can refund your payment, but that will not alter the warp or weft. Yours alone are the crinkle and the waver, the twist and the wander of the cloth.”

Akim shook in near fever. “I cannot find its meaning! I have thought the thought, but all that comes of it is rank confusion. See how my life at home unfolds: Each day, when I reach to take down the tin of rice, first comes the desire, then the remembrance of where the tin is placed, then the will to move my body, next my ambulation to the shelf, then my hand extended, and at last the rice container lies upon the table. All my thoughts work to that end. But within your cloth lies no end. The edges are frayed, the threads hang loose and threaten to drift with the breeze. It is a sham, a great misnomer – not a thought but  vague intimation that lead to… nothing.”

Josfell put the cloth aside and rested his hands on his knees. “I did not know my father, and in my ever-increasing age have forgotten my mother. Such is life’s movement, which we are geared to accept. What was, is no longer, what could be, may or may not appear. Tomorrow, the earth may split in two and the halves desert each other. Should we dwell on such a fearsome possibility?”

“This, your thought, in its weight is much like mine from the cloth. Was it then first yours, only foisted onto me?”

Josfell shook his head. “We are the children of our pasts. But the future for each and all is murky, a mix of muck and blundered contemplation. Is that not so?”

“You say my thought, though worthless to me, is yet true?”

Josfell took up a wide swath of fabric, and with small scissors excised a piece half the breadth and width of that he had before given Akim. “Perchance the first was too grand a thought. Take this in its place, so that you might think within a smaller sphere. We are creatures of the earth, not of the sky. With this, perhaps, you will find easier access to your rice.”

Akim stood back, hands palm forward. “I find my rice well enough.”

“Then look to see what lies beneath your table.”

“You mock me!”

“Life mocks us. Nothing I say can change the heft of that mockery.”

Akim threw his smallest coin onto the tailor’s bench and took up the dwarfed shred. Even here, while still it lay in his hand, a thought hovered.

“Sell me another,” he demanded.

Josfell scissored a second segment from the cloth.

“And another,” said Akim.

Josfell paused. “So much thought?”

“How can there be too much, too many?”

“Take care,” Josfell warned, but handed across both added snippets. “The coin you gave covers all three.”

Akim did not dispute the tailor’s reckoning.

“Wife!” he thundered as he entered their hovel. “Wife!”

Tamara rose from her pallet, coughing. “What is it?”

“Where are your needle and thread?”

“Where they always are.”

“Get them!”

“Have you torn your garment?”

“Do not question me!” again in a roar, before his better nature intervened and his voice turned more confidential. “Not my clothing. More than my clothing, well beyond.”

Tamara brought her sewing basket. Akim laid the three new cloth skimps by her elbow, fetched the original, grander thought to top the inconsequential pile. Placing a finger on the upper piece, he declaimed: “Start with that. Each of the others you will add to it. I will show you the order, which must be exactly so. That is essential. Place this first beside the large one, the second here, the third – ah, no! How is this? It will not yet connect! I must purchase more before the third will adhere.”

“You paid for these, all?”

“Too much for the large one, too little for the others. It comes even. I take what money remains to buy more thoughts.”

“Our money for the food?”

Akim laughed, harsh at first, then more softly. “This money will bring food, it will bring all.”

So it was that Akim accumulated thoughts by the handful, the armload, until all but a pittance of his small savings had been transferred to Josfell, who attempted to dissuade the herdsman, but he would not countenance the tailor’s protestations.

Nor would Akim submit to his wife when she begged him to withdraw from this foolishness, for they had nothing left to eat but rice, and grew weaker by the day. Indeed, he tended his flocks with ever-lessening attention, so that they wandered off, one by one, or were attacked by predators and devoured. He responded only to the widening growth of the quilt that Tamara sewed, piece by piece, under his direction. For within his mind grew a resplendent tapestry of philosophy, a world-thought that would upend the errors and incompleteness of those who for centuries had expounded but pale simulations of Truth.

The day arrived when the final thought received from Josfell lay in his hand. He passed it to Tamara and indicated an unoccupied space in what had become an edgeless, ragged conglomeration of shapes. Once she had stitched the culminating thought into place, a wealth of revelation filled the herdsman’s mind, a coherence that spread through the interstices of his brain and beyond, an all-ness so vast that its full illumination exceeded not only his own ken – but what is permitted a human to comprehend.

So! he quailed within. This limitation, this inconclusion is given to me as punishment?

He rifled his wife’s basket, snatched her scissors, and began to wreak havoc on the thought-quilt that covered the floor and lapped against the walls. He cut and slashed with the small shears, severing here a contemplation, there a query, elsewhere an entire ratiocination on the afterlife.

He dismembered them, then slashed the bits to lesser fragments, until he had obliterated all meaning. He stopped when the segment that remained held only what he had discovered in his earliest days: the ways of life and family, of work and reward, of the sheep and goats he had tended, of his wife, of his comfort – and of his ever-confounding inclination to ruin all.

These bits, both separate and together, had been with him always. They were not thoughts he had bought; he had once lived and nurtured them, only to strew them willy-nilly in his rash scrabble for the ineffable.

Great tears runneled his face as he carried these tatters to the tailor and placed them on Josfell’s bench.

“You sought to present these thoughts as new… I had them already but knew them not, nor did I recognize their repetition when once again you rendered them to me. Take them back. Keep them to bestow on those less blessed than me. Give them away if you can afford to do so, sell them cheaply if not. All should have access to them, that these thoughts might reach completion, that those receiving them might see themselves with wild clarity. Whatever life may be on the grand scale – that we are not meant to know. It is not a withholding of the gods, but the limitation within that prevents us falling into the great infinity of ignorance. Take!”

Josfell accepted the remnants, but he could recognize in them nothing that he had formed or trimmed from some larger cloth. Yet he could not protest so to Akim, for the herdsman was already at a distance, striding for home.

It took over 70 years to find the wreck of the Titanic, but only a couple days to uncover the wreck of the Titan submersible that went down to geek at the Titanic’s grave.

The Titanic drowned a few millionaires. The Titan squished two billionaires.

We’re getting better at some things down in the bottom of the ocean.

*   *   *   *

Two people I know well and respect share a similar and to me quite unsettling view of what science is, and especially of who scientists are. They seem to look at the average scientist as a sort of low-level goofball hampered by a predetermined outlook on the world, their knowledge based on outdated theories and a blindered view of present concerns.

Real science is exactly the opposite: a wide-open search for the truth of how existence works. It’s easy to point out bad or pointless research – there’s enough of it out there, and it gets picked up as gospel by dunderheads like RFK, Jr. (that swishing sound you hear is his father whirling in his grave) – but scientists, like any other collection of human beings, range from brilliant to incompetent, from upstanding to scoundrels.

[I confess to viewing nearly all psychological research as a vast wasteland of half-baked approximations and low-tier grant-grabbing, and I know that kind of generalization reflects a failure of acceptance on my part. Part of my reaction is that I don’t consider psychology an actual science, just a collection of disorganized flapdoodle.]

But the physical sciences – the “hard” sciences – have long been focused on finding the physical laws behind everything from the universe to the human mind, and at no time have been more strenuously and widely studied than now.

Over the last century, and especially the last couple decades, the advances in health and disease prevention, in cataloguing the workings of the human nervous system, for example, have been astounding (though with the unfortunate side effect of quadrupling the human population). 

At opposite ends of the physics spectrum, both cosmology and quantum mechanics have in the last decades brought us more knowledge of how the universe is governed and constructed than in all of previous human history. It’s interesting to set this progress against that of political and social behavior, which has barely evolved over tens of thousands of years.

I’ve been reading Science News magazine for the last 40 years. A less technical summary of current advances in the sciences than Scientific American, it goes to great lengths to present the widest array of research in all areas of science, and to hold it up to close examination, by discussing the experiments or advances with experts across the field – those who support and those who, often enough, point out the inherent shortcomings in the various researchers’ approaches.

I’d recommend a subscription to Science News for anyone with the slightest interest in the progress in understanding brought by the elegant use of the human mind. Under the current editorial staff, it has been especially good at shining the light on young researchers who are upsetting established views.

As a side comment, over the past half century, academic research has moved away from the time when graying university profs held all the power and often took sole credit for advances within their departments. It’s no long uncommon these days for grad students and post-docs to be cited as lead authors in academic journals. Also, ongoing studies can be accessed on free sites like arxiv.org or PLOS.org. These are wonderfully healthy developments.

Remember: Einstein was 26 and working in a patent office when he published his special theory of relativity.

*   *   *   *

The Great Replacement Theory: A rightest sneer that there is a deliberate attempt to minimize the relevance – if not the existence – of white Americans through unleashed immigration. 

If only it were true! I’d love to see the dingleberries who come up with such asinine conspiracies become the least uncommon denominator.

Which brings back memories of our World History class in high school. In those days (the late ’50s), “world history” was almost entirely Western Europe over the past roughly 2500 years. It started with ancient Greece and Rome, who saw everyone to the south and east as barbarians and looked down their aquiline noses at Northern European white trash. Too bad, because I kinda liked the Goths and the Vandals.  

Every week I read the crime blotter in the local paper up here, because… well, you want to know what crime is like in your little area, right? Yeah. But mostly because it’s good for giggles and the enduring touches of absurdity that are the core of a well-rounded life.
Almost all law enforcement here is through the PA State Police in Laporte. Yes, we have a county sheriff, but he seems mostly responsible for salting away those who need to be removed from the public sphere for the Greater Good. (We don’t even have our own jail; we export our crooks and crooklets across the county line to our neighboring incarcerators.)
Anyway, awhile back I started to note that the charges in the blotter filed for various crimes (mainly DUI, weed possession, and some form of harassment) were getting… a mite strange. I was no longer just “DUI,” but “DUI and…” a variety of added unlikelihoods.
Online, I further noted that either things have changed throughout the country and wider world, or I was just getting more observant: The same creeping charge sheet was happening everywhere.
So here’s a random selection of weird crime charges I’ve collected over the last roughly three months:

• “causing grievous bodily harm with intent.” Yup, only that – “intent.” So is this the same as or different from “causing grievous bodily harm just for the hell of it”?
• “recklessly causing grievous bodily harm, assault occasioning actual bodily harm, and common assault.” I guess there must also be “virtual assault,” “highly uncommon assault,” and possibly “egregious assault with Indian spicing.”
• “assault with a deadly weapon with a hate crime enhancement.” As everybody knows, hate crime will enhance any assault.
• “obstructing an official proceeding, assaulting police with a weapon and robbery.” I don’t remember the details and can’t quite envision the context.
• “DUI combined with substance.” It really was pretty substantial, since it involved a drunk-driving Mississippi state senator.
• “obstruction of official business.” A fairly laidback charge when applied to a man climbing 73 stories up the exterior of a South Korean skyscraper, barefoot, while wearing only shorts.
• “grand larceny and mischief, as well as misdemeanor counts of conspiracy and criminal trespass.” A bunch of teens, slapped for roasting and eating the town’s swan.
• “voluntarily causing hurt by means of a heated substance.” A woman in Singapore, for scalding her husband with boiling water. (Well, it could have been an involuntary whim.)
• “criminal solicitation in the second and fourth degree, tampering with physical evidence, and conspiracy in the fifth degree.” Just shows how many degrees you can heap on a guy for his second attempt to hire a killer to off his wife.
• * * *
  I see a tendency among political commentators (I try to avoid them like the bubonic plague but don’t alway succeed) to equate Trump and Florida governor DeSantis. This is a mistake! Yes, both are vile, repulsive human beings, but that’s only the unlettered surface response.
  As I’ve probably claimed before, Trump is stupid but wily. The stupid is obvious, but the wilys of the world are skilled at a kind of street smarts that has little to do with intelligence: It’s an ingrained ability to see how to take advantage of the weakness in others to order to create your own personal advantage.
  People in places like up here judge you by who you are (or by who they think you are), not by your looks, position, or smarmy pretense. I think Trump appeals to many of them not because he’s a good guy but because they see him as a straightforwardly bad guy, right up front.
  DeSantis, alas, is actually smart, which gives him a different kind of advantage. He can form his asininity to sound like it’s based on logical reality.
  How about a wider contrast. Trump’s raucous hatred is intensely personal, not ideological; he hates anyone who is not himself. DeSantis’s hatred, by contrast, is less personal than ideological; he hates anyone who does not share his warped beliefs.
  Now let’s take this yet a little further.
  The fear that either of these two miserable examples of humanity might become (again, or for the first time) U.S. president calls up specters of Nazi Germany. I’ll say it – right of the bat – that I think that’s ridiculous. This isn’t Germany in the 1920s, and neither of these guys has the heft to pull off a Hitler, no matter how much they might want to.
  But…
  Again thinking back on Nazi Germany, I see an interesting pair of analogies:
  Trump as Goering
  DeSatis as Goebbels
  Goering was a blithering dumbbell, placed several levels above is competence, with no concern beyond his own festering skin.
  Goebbels was a clever, probably brilliant believer in the Nazi ideal of racial superiority.
  Make of that what you will (or won’t).

One last partisan gasp:
I’ve been wondering right along whether Trump’s pronounced reluctance to read anything handed him might reflect a learning disability: not that he avoids the written word by choice, but that he simply can’t fully comprehend it.
Recent extracts reported from his interactions with his lawyers in the secret-document retention case now make me wonder if there isn’t something deeper at work. Take this from one ecorded conversation:
“They presented me this—this is off the record, but—they presented me this,” Trump continues. “This was him. This was the Defense Department and him. We looked at some. This was him. This wasn’t done by me, this was him.”…“I just found, isn’t that amazing? This totally wins my case, you know. Except it is like, highly confidential. Secret. This is secret.”
Does this represent someone, even in private conversation, who can speak or understand basic English?

[I was about to apologize if I had offended anyone of an opposing political persuasion, but I quickly withdrew that incipient apology. In your case I intended to offend and exquisitely enjoyed the offense.]