[This is my last post to LickHaven.com. I’m moving the ruminations to substack, so if/when you get to the end of this chapter of Jenny’s life, please subscribe to me there, if you can stand to read more.]

Customers have a sure knack for wanting what isn’t available or what they shouldn’t want in the first place: Congratulations to send to people they hate. Birthday cards for relatives so obscure they can’t identify the link. Ugly gift cards to match the ugly scarves received. Heliotrope tissue paper. Glossy red and blue sacks embossed with the British royal crest. 

Jenny will spend the rest of her days dropping greeting cards into paper bags with little ribbons flapping off the handles.

She’ll suspend one of the bags from her neck. Bag lady.

“I’d like a condolence card.” 

The man is thin, stringy, compressed by his out-of-date business suit.

“For someone in the family?”

“Yes, but…”

“?”

“It’s not a death or sickness. It’s a wedding.”

Jenny scratches the side of her nose.

“My brother is marrying the wrong woman.”

Snort. “I’m afraid we have nothing for misapplied affection.”

He points to a rack. “Isn’t there something that would be appropriate even if not exactly… you know?”

Jenny assumes her concentration face while concentrating on nothing in particular. “Perhaps if I knew the details?”

The man raises his right palm to his neck. “He’s marrying a floozy.”

“A prostitute, a female reprobate?”

“She isn’t his class. She hangs around in bars.”

Jenny elevates to her full five-foot-eight. “With your brother or without?”

“Both.”

“Then she’s making her own choice, and so is your brother. You want your brother to be better than he can be and see yourself as the keeper of his sullied purity. That’s pitiful. Perhaps you need a condolence for your own blinderedness.”

The man’s shockwave registers in an inner region he seldom visits. He backpedals, then turns toward the door. 

Jenny trails softly behind him. “Though perhaps I can offer a solution.”

“No! No, that’s… never mind.”

“Humor,” she says softly.

He stops. “You were making a joke?”

“Not at all. I’m suggesting you approach your unsettling situation with humor.”

“I don’t think it’s funny.”

“Of course not – it’s a clear case of tragedy. But, if you present it to your brother and his intended in the form of humor, they would hardly see it as an attack. They would enjoy a small external chuckle, while you – you would be laughing inside like a hyena.”

“I don’t see how…”

She touches his suited shoulder as softly as a fallen leaf. “Let’s look at the humorous condolence selections.”

She shows him several examples of sappy goo with unfunny side drivel to which, predictably, he has little reaction. Then…

“Now this one – the poor fellow is being swallowed by a crocodile. See the gentle sentiment expressed? ‘How did you get yourself into this? Hope you recover soon.’”

“Heh heh.”

“Browse for a bit. There are several more with a similar flavor.”  

Jenny moves to the register. Pam materializes by her left shoulder and leans in, lowering her brassy voice in attempted sotto voce. “I don’t know what you’re doing.”

“Selling cards to nitwits. It’s what I’m hired to do.”

“You almost chased that man out of the store.”

“Almost doesn’t grab the ring. Shush.”

Pam backs off as Mr. Condolence approaches with a fistful of cards, places them on the counter. 

“It’s hard to decide.”

“Let me see… Ha, you did pick the crocodile, I thought you would. This one’s quite good too. Not too sure about this” – she pushes a reject slightly to one side – “but either of these might do the trick, don’t you think? And… these others have a similar… outlook.”

“But which is the best? The most convincing, without… I mean, considering?”

“I couldn’t say. I don’t know your brother or” – leaning close – “his floozy. What I might suggest is that you buy these, all of them except that first outcaste, take them home and make your choice on reflection. It will be clearer in the proper setting.”

“I could return the ones I don’t want – don’t choose, I mean?”

“You could, of course. But the others might come in handy later, don’t you think? You never know what opportunities might arise.”

“Well, heh heh, they might. Yes.”

Jenny bags the pile of six, swipes his credit card, extends an ingratiating smile. Mr. Condolence exits.

Pam stares into Chestnut St. “How do you do that?” 

“Stlange secret rurned in Olient. You know, you should fire me. If I were in your position, I’d fire me.”

“I don’t want to fire you. How can anyone be so goddam self-defeating?”

“Effort and dedication. And you can’t fire me because I quit.”

Pam deflates. “Really?”

“Long time coming. Maybe I can find something more useful to do in the world. Crochet doilies.” 

“Shit. OK. If that’s what you want. It had to happen. I can replace you, but it won’t be easy.”

A lightbulb flickers over Jenny’s head. “No, it won’t. Be easy.”

The women look at each other from an undefined distance, then the distance vaporizes and they merge in a hug. Pam writes out Jenny’s final check. Jenny picks up the few traces of her existence at French’s and leaves, determined never to return. Not even for a condolence card.

If I could

I surely would

Crap on the rock

Where Moses stood.

Pharaoh’s air force got grounded,

Oh Harry, don’t you weep.

So many jobs in so few years. She swept hallways in a tumbledown public school in North Philly. She typed reports for a lawyer with a bellow so voluminous his dictations stopped conversations two offices down the hall. She concocted grilled cheese sandwiches for hours on end in the last pressed-aluminum diner in the city’s Northeast. She inoculated the eyes of rabbits with a variety of brutal irritants for a cosmetic conglomerate. She cashed the checks of the down-and-out through a bulletproof window and charged them an exorbitant fee for the privilege. On the corner by Rittenhouse Square she hawked fliers for the ever-so-cleverly named Condom Nation. She shelved used books for a strange old man who seldom sold a volume. She called patients to remind them of dental appointments. 

Etc.

Few of these sojourns lasted more than a month or two, some a matter of days. French’s has been her mainstay for the past five years, because of Pam, who bullies and berates her with a peculiar acceptance, because Jenny has the absurd gift of convincing dolts that they should purchase overpriced stiff-paper celebrations for any occasion. And because Pam is an honest-to-god decent human being in a world of homogeneous assholes. 

What now?

“So many putrid things happen… in the world… I want to do something useful.” Jenny gestures to the woman whose Formica desk plaque reads “Maria Sanchez, Human Resources.” Which resources does she classify as human?

Maria Sanchez picks up the paper in front of her. “You have a good background, sales, excellent clerical skills it seems. Good grades, superb grades at Penn. You didn’t finish?”

“No.”

“May I ask why?”

“You may. I didn’t want to. Finish.”

“Well. We do have clerical openings that you certainly look qualified to fill. Once we check references.”

“Not that.”

“I’m… confused. What is it you’re looking for?”

“I’m looking for hospital work. Working with patients.”

“We have only a limited number of floor openings, you understand. They require training.”

“I can be trained.”

“I mean medical sciences education, previous experience in health care.”

Jenny waves her hands, chasing invisible flies. “Look, I was selling cards, providing stupid crap for stupid people. I don’t want to push more crap around. People get mashed, they get gargoyles dropped on them – gargoyles – and what do I do about it? You see?”

“I’m not sure –”

“I’m in the world and the world doesn’t work and I don’t try to change it. The bad stays just as bad. I can empty bedpans. You dump somebody’s shit, it makes a little difference, or you… change their bandage, or. You just listen to them. What kind of training does that take, listening? Or somebody can train me. I learn fast. Every day, what do we amount to, you know what I mean?” Jenny slumps in the uncomfortable plastic chair. “I’m not articulate when I get excited.” She leans forward again. “Do something for me, OK, so I can do something for somebody else. That’s what I’m asking.”

Maria Sanchez smiles an infuriating (condescending?) smile and holds up Jenny’s slim resume. “You’d have to come in at the bottom, maybe below bedpans. In a sense.”

“You mean…?”

“I can’t guarantee anything, but I’ll see what I can do.”

“Jesus. Thank you.” 

Obsequious Jenny. Ha.

Outside, she wants to dance, get drunk and dance, or dance and get drunk. Ms. HR Sanchez acted like she wanted to help. Was it an act?

A pigeon craps on Jenny’s head.

Children hate school. Drunken men tumble down stairwells. Women call for help and the world disconnects. Shouldn’t it all work better? Alternate universes, multiverses, bubbles of new existence ballooning inside local reality, isolated realms adrift on their own rafts of alien physical law, a universe where oxygen’s stability disintegrates like a wind-blown puffball but good intentions boil up from the sea.

Are the building blocks of universes up for grabs? Grab them and celebrate.

substack: https://derekdavis1066.substack.com

Virtually every streaming crime series I’ve seen, no matter how high or low the quality or what the country of origin, includes the following elements [disclaimer – I’ve read little detective fiction, so can’t say if something similar holds true for novels]:

• major characters [especially women] look so alike it’s difficult to keep track of who they are
• all major characters have destructive parents, troubled children, and/or collapsed marriages
• lead police officers are distant, obnoxious, and/or emotionally tormented by nature
• someone on the police force in a high supervisory capacity is deeply corrupt
• all corporate figures are shits
• all attempts to solve an ongoing series of crimes have been met with utter incompetence until a new, untried, or semi-disgraced investigator is put in charge
• this new hire is not given adequate budget or tools to do the job
• whenever anyone says “thank you,” it has deep emotional meaning
• the investigator and an informant will meet at least once in an public space, observed by their enemy
• food preference will be used to define characters’ approach to life
• someone whose testimony or position in an investigation is crucial will be killed by a speeding car while crossing the street
• during in-car conversation, the driver will continually turn to look at the passenger, rather than pay attention to the road
• every major building or large house will have an overwhelming, multi-floor staircase that invites continual chase scenes, whether such chases make sense or not
• the good chaser always catches the felon being chased, even if the latter has longer legs and a more athletic stride
• officers and detectives will insert “fuck” into every sentence
• all floor lamps or tall desk lamps have the same shade – white, fairly clear, with burlap or similar fabric covering
• a third to a half of major villains will end up shooting themselves in the mouth or under the chin, spreading blood across the ceiling

*   *   *   *

Stump calls himself “a very stable genius.” Does this mean he has the intelligence of a horse?

*   *   *   *

Little known fact: It would take 6.02214076×10²³ avocados to form a sphere the size of the Earth. Thus, the basic numerical unit, Avocados’ Number.

*   *   *   *

I’m surprised to see so little in the media about how Rump has chosen people with colossal ignorance to run government departments. Commentators seem perplexed every time an agency head shows total boneheadedness about science, economics, or the mission of whichever agency he or she has been dumped on.

This is not accidental – it’s Frump’s deliberate attempt at self-protection, by surrounding himself with boobs who cam never challenge him, since they can seldom get out of bed in the morning without help.

A functioning mind might pose a threat to the god-king.

[If you’ve been stapled to this rumination list long enough you may already have read what follows. I know it or its near-twin ran at some point, but given my inherent inability to keep things in neat order, I have no idea when.

[But why run it now – again – anyway? Because over the past week I’ve been accumulating notes on the current political situation, and if I didn’t quickly come up with a diversion, you and I would be disgraced by my unloading them here.

[Much better to celebrate frivolity and ancient personal history than yet another paean to our national putrescent decay. This way you can laugh up your sleeve, rather than puke therein]

*   *   *   *

I was afraid I’d made a mistake a couple years back.

I’d ordered a copy of Cursed Be the Treasure, a 1920’s novel by H.B. Drake. As I reviewed it from memory on Goodreads (likely the book’s only review in the past 100 years):

“This is something I read as a teen and that has stayed with me forever. Probably I should never read it again, because, as a jaded old man, I could only be disappointed. But at the time it hit me like a ton of bricks. What happens to the young protagonist, his father and his friend could make a statue weep. Wonderfully descriptive and evocative.”

My intention in buying a new-old copy was to pry open the cover, fondle it a bit, but never, ever read it again, to avoid the certain sad, ludicrous letdown.

Yet, of course, I did. You have to know. And, god be good to bibliophiles, it was every bit as wonderful as I’d remembered it: engrossing, convoluted, heartbreaking, redemptive.

Our family had an odd collection of kids’ and kid-inflected reading material, mostly British, because my mother was mired in a false sense of inherited aristocracy from her (mostly crazy) Canadian relatives. In prime living room shelving, we had:

• a fairly complete set of Kipling that made me want to spend at least a decade in India 
• a shelfload of G.A. Henty, Canadian-based historical fiction that I never cracked as a kid; I read one years later and was bored near comatose
• several volumes of E. W. Hornung’s tales of master-thief “Raffles”; him too I read only recently – free on Kindle, thank god. What godawful crap

To prime the intellects of my two older brothers, my mother installed both the Compton’s youth encyclopedia and the14th edition of the adult Britannica in the late 1920s. They still recline at my elder brother Rod’s home – now my daughter Morgan’s –  a decade and a half after his death. 

But my greatest reading joy came from works like the Drake and the unlikely-to-the-point-of-ears-falling-off-absurdity Old Nursery Rhymes Dug up at the Pyramids. (This thin but broad-format hardcover, bound in burlap, featured one corner chewed off by rats – my mother’s childhood rats, not mine.) Each nursery rhyme presented a traditional Mother Goose stanza followed by four new verses illustrated with midnight-blue pseudo-Egyptian relief drawings. 

As an adult, I didn’t remember a thing about the content of those verses. The book itself was what fascinated – the feel of it, the rat-nibbled corner, the sense that, even at the age of ten, I knew it was truly weird.

Last time I looked online, I could have picked up a copy for around $35, “with one corner damaged” – wait, it couldn’t, couldn’t possibly be…. I’ve since downloaded a digital copy. Interesting, and still damned weird, but digital burlap doesn’t quite meet the test.

From her own youth, my mother had kept six or eight volumes of Playbox and Chatterbox annuals, year-end supplements or recapitulations of British children’s magazines from the early 20^th century. Occasionally these float around the online stratosphere, wonderful silly adventures of anthropomorphic animals like Tim the Tiger, in story or comic-strip episodes. The strips sported a very different feel from American comics, leaving me with a slightly uncomfortable sense of otherness, as though I’d entered a room that smelled both heavy and quaint. 

Mom’s anglophilia led to our continuing subscription to Punch, the finest adult satirical magazine ever produced (well, until Paul Krassner’s The Realist); it was going strong into the 1950s after 100 years.

Long before Volkswagen and Geico, the ads in Punch had a raucous yet self-deprecating sense of humor, such as “Schweppervescence lasts the whole drink through,” at a time when Schweppes, for Americans, was a mysterious, almost magical liquid imbibed 3,000 miles to the east.

Marvelous cartoons and tiny squibs attached themselves to the ends of articles, usually absurd bumbelations gleaned from newspapers and other magazines, with telling responses added by the editors. (They were the forerunners of the short ruminative blats I drop in here when high on Yukon Jack.)

My brothers had passed down to me Edward Lear’s Owl and the Pussycat and Other Tales, a 1932 edition with Art Deco typography and drawings by Keith Ward, a blessed marriage of text and illustration (the latter much livelier than Lear’s own cramped pictography).

I loved that book. Our copy returned to me a few years back with the cover and several pages missing or mangled. When I checked for a replacement, it would have taken 50 dollars to retrieve a complete copy. Now I can find no listing for it. But at the time, I had  more pressing needs for the 50 dollars).

Back to Cursed Be theTreasure: I will probably read it yet again, because the plot turned out to be far more complicated and intertwined than I realized at the first go-though, especially the mutual betrayal of the boy’s dead father and the man who saved the boy’s life

Is all this just nostalgia realized? Could be, though I think it’s more my rejoicing in a reawakened sense of wonder. In part, the sense of wondering what gets me into thinking about such things. 

*   *   *   *

Our current PA state representative is one Joe Hamm. Our previous rep was Tina Pickett. Our friend Karen, in Tioga County, is represented by Clint Owlett.

Owlettt, Pickett and Hamm – a great name for a law firm, but a godawful sandwich.

*   *   *   *

Can anyone tell me the principal vice of the vice principal?

If disinformation is bad, datinformation must be good.

*   *   *

I like to separate the “wily” from the “intelligent.” Predators are wily, but they’re working on instinct, not smarts. beloved President Stump is wily, yes, but with no intelligence behind it; he parrots back what his cheering crowds mouth.

That’s dangerous in itself, but there’s a difference between his malevolence and that of a a fascist like Hitler, who was definitely smart and truly believed some of his mad ideas. Dump believes in nothing beyond his own skin and has no core values. He cheers America because of what it can do to stoke his ego, draw attention, or make money for him.

He can barely put together a coherent sentence and has been an object failure as a businessman, but he’s been wily enough to garner the support of others as ignorant as himself.

An elemental coward who cancels meetings and interviews because he’s afraid of anyone saying bad things about, or, worse, to him. And since no one in Ukraine votes in our elections, they can all go to hell.

*   *   *

Much of the rancid ranting online by the far-right comes from the senile crabbiness of old farts like me. One of my major hopes for our country is that my generation will soon die out, the sooner the better.

The election of more women – and women standing up and yelling – are wonderful advances. But I fear the country will have to collapse much further before it can rebound. And it has to learn how to rebound, not drift backwards into a passion for sinkhole periods like the 1950s.

Looking back to and through the ‘60s, when I was in my 20s, and feeling that society might be at last learning the value of inclusion and welcoming, it’s sad to see so many of my contemporaries vote for lunatics, dimbulbs and rabid dogs.

Maybe it will be much the same will happen over time if the Millennials and Generation Z (damn such vile designations for the young) become as self-centered as those of us who’ve now sunk into the mire.

I hope not. For all my basic social dyspepsia, I’d love to see them prove me wrong.

*   *   *

I haven’t done crossword puzzles in years, but there as a period in my teens when I bumbled through a series of small Penguin puzzle books, back when Penguin was a cheap British paperback publisher, rather than the leading dingle on a hedge-fund corporate book-distribution butt.

The British idea of crosswords back (still?) was intriguingly different from the American, its clues often depending on puns and interwoven meanings, rather than straight-ahead Webster definitions. Recently, I’ve been wondering how AI chatbots would/could handle these.

The one clue and answer that I particularly remember from one Antarctic birdie entry was this:

Clue: twaddle or machine part

Answer: rotor

“Twaddle” in England refers to trash or verbal nonsense, which is also called “rot.” So the answer is a combination of “rotor” and “rot or.” I loved that – and still do.

Now, how much true intelligence does it take to design and unlimber a convoluted verbal problem like that? No doubt a computer could do it within a specific context, but would it, at this stage in programming progress, be able to wangle something this linguistically convoluted on its own, without external direction?

*   *   *

Dream #19 [lucid?]

I forgot most of the beginning on waking – a criminal or similar activity in West Philly. It involved a lot of driving.

“We” were somehow involved with a drugged out, immobile Black teen and his mother, at the tine peripheral characters. Later, something that happened up north made it necessary to pretend that the teen had been killed and to tell his mother that he was dead.

We traveled back to West Philly, to an area where I always get peculiarly lost in my dreams. I said to somebody, “Don’t go through there, that’s where I always get lost in my dreams, in tiny alleys and through people’s houses and back yards and have to crawl through small spaces.”

I didn’t think I was dreaming, I just didn’t like the association (this is an area that does not exist in reality – akin to Woodland Ave. in the mid 40s, but entirely different).

We ended up back at the rundown houses/apartments where we told the mother her son was dead. She curled in a fetal position against the wall and cried non-stop. I was very upset and thought maybe we should tell her the truth, but it seemed too threatening to us.

Later, she got up and went downstairs. We hear a rapid series of staccato sounds – not gunfire, more like firecrackers. We were sure the mother had done something suicidal. When we looked out the window, the large area in front – looking like foreshortened city blocks with no buildings – was crowded with people, mostly children.

One by one and in small groups, they began to collapse and drop to the ground. They weren’t bleeding but we knew they were dead. We couldn’t understand what kind of weapon the mother had used to kill them and what caused the delayed effect. After awhile, all 30-50 people were dead.

The kicker: We later found that the mother and son were planning a much larger massacre, and that the son was collecting the necessary materials for it. She had been crying not for the loss of her son but because she couldn’t complete her plan.

The latter part was probably inspired by a dream from several years ago of lobotomized children being massacred. I later published that dream as a short story titled “The Children” (also to be unleashed in the collection Farewell My Zombie, coming to Amazon).

First, a few short questions/observations, speculations:

How did St. Joseph become the patron saint of baby aspirin?

*   *   *   *

The iguana hymn:

“I ain’t iguana grieve my lord no more…”

*   *   *   *

We visited our daughter Cait in Old Chatham, NY. While staying at the local Travel Lodge, we found the bathroom stocked with “Green Heritage Pro” toilet paper.

 How many of you would want heritage toilet paper? In smaller type, the wrapper noted it as “Resolute Tissue.”

*   *   *   *

The recommended temperature for cooking in an oven is almost always set in 25 degree increments. This is a social convention with no basis other than a reflection of our base-10 mathematical system (seeing 100 as 10 squared), divided by an inherent instinct to cut any quantity in half, then half again.

*   *   *   *

As of a year ago, from what I’ve read, no one had yet definitively determined the origin of the word “cocktail’ to describe a mixed alcoholic drink.

*   *   *   *

As I’ve grown older, someone has come in the night to steal my fingerprints.

*   *   *   *

Why the terms “queen” and “king” for wider bed sizes? At one time, were all monarchs morbidly obese?

*   *   *   *

Linda has, over the past couple years, broken her kneecap and wrist while doing nothing in particular. Previously, she fractured a bone in her foot while crossing the kitchen floor. I suggest for her nickname: Hopalong Casualty

*   *   *   *

In the early decades of the 20th century, the term “Tijuana Bibles” referred to small volumes of dirty jokes.

*   *   *   *

Bird flu virus was recently found in raw milk in CA.

Suggested cartoon:

Photo of RFK Jr., proponent of raw milk, with a caption sliding above his head:

“Bird Flu over the Cuckoo’s Nest.”

*   *   *   *

From an article I read a few week back:

In mammals, “Between the fourth and fifth gestational months, the number of neurons in the nervous system just explodes almost exponentially and synapses form at a rate of about a million per second, an incredible number when you consider there are almost 100tn synapses in an adult human brain.”

Too bad adulthood seldom turns this to intelligence.

*   *   *   *

Now, a tale told by Jenny, central character of my current attempt at a novel. I have no idea why she introduced this, sad and human as it is:

Antilagrea was chained to a cliff, like Prometheus, because she had opposed someone important, or someone who thought he was important and could not be brought to account. She was Greek. The Greek gods were easily and often angered, but no god chained her there. An old man, Palleus, did that. He was not Greek, had come from somewhere else and settled. One day he found her, his servant and mistress, eating honey from his private store. He dragged her to the cliff in shackles, clamped the shackles to a ring in the cliff-face. Was the ring there for shackling maidens, or had someone else put it there, a mountain climber, or a hunter who wanted to hang meat to dry? Palleus left her to the elements, but a shepherd’s boy saw her and took pity. Many a shepherd’s boy, intent on tending his flock, would not have cared, or if he had cared would have shunned the responsibility. But this one (his name has escaped time because he was but a shepherd’s boy) climbed to help her. He could find no way to undo the shackles or pull loose the ring, breaking his shepherd’s crook in the effort. His failure unnerved yet excited him. He left his sheep, ran to town and shouted for help. The local blacksmith gathered his tools and climbed the cliffside, clipped the shackles and set Antilagrea free. What did she do? She crawled back to Palleus, the old man who had chained her to the cliff, apologized for her transgression and begged forgiveness. The blacksmith returned to his forge to find the fire cooled, setting back his work by a day. The boy’s sheep had wandered off. Two were eaten by wolves, another fell into a ravine. The shepherd beat him to paralysis for abandoning his flock. Palleus and Antilagrea shared supper and gazed at the stars. The stars gazed back.

[This pretty much duplicates an earlier entry, but the wonder of the modern world is that nobody remembers anything for more than 35 seconds. So no apologies this time. It’s a ramble pinned to the fall breezes.]

As a kid, on Halloween I could become a legitimate fool for a day: Unlike the rest of the year there were no rules, no one or nothing I could offend, nothing I could “do wrong.”

After we moved from suburban Havertown to Philly, Mom made me a strange costume based on a Welsh tradition of the “button king.” (Or so she claimed… I haven’t been able to find any reference to such a Welsh oddity online, though a guy in South Carolina, Dalton Stevens, was known as the Button King for decorating all his clothes, including his shoes, with thousands of buttons.) 

She bought me kid-size dungaree overalls 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. We had a Halloween parade at that third-grade public school – walking around the concrete schoolyard in a line, costumed – but I have no memory of parades at Catholic school, starting the next year.

One Halloween I dressed as a girl – can’t imagine doing that in any other situation; I would have been mortified to the point of sinking into the ground like Rumpelstiltskin – a gypsy girl in a long, flowing, patterned skirt, my cheeks rouged. That was the year some yob tried to steal my goodie bag. I was short but I warn’t no fragile girl,. I held on like a pit bull and kept the bag.

No idea why, but I don’t remember other costumes from my kidhood, though I fervently prowled the Powelton Villages streets annually for treats. I’m much clearer on my adult party-going on All Hallows Eve.

In 1968 I bought the one and only suit I’ve ever owned; I wore it seldom. By the late ’80s, the seam on one leg had parted and I’d stapled it together. I realized that a) I’d put on weight, and b) I’d lost whatever minimal interest I’d had in suits, so I gave it to daughter Morgan’s then husband, Leo.

But over several years earlier I’d worn it to Halloween parties, because dressing as a junior exec was, to my mind, the most ridiculous costume I could think of (though it did make me stand straighter with a drink in my hand).

For one party, with no costume handy, I turned the 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. A simple, if not especially inspired, goof.

When I was first courting Linda – OK, when I was first thinking of courting Linda – I went to a party across the way on 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 wore an attempt at a kilt and some minor regalia: For you see, I was not a humble beggar, but the King in disguise.

I had planned to throw off the blanket around midnight and announce my true assumed identity, but when the time came, I couldn’t bring it off. Such overt exhibitionism before uncertain acquaintances… I didn’t have it in me then; nor most times since. Instead, I went home, made the change there, unobserved, then reappeared as the King. It was something I guess, but no flash in that.

But my favorite (and most renowned) Halloween appearance, years earlier, did feature extravagant exhibitionism. I wonder where the impetus came from? It’s the kind of thing that I usually internalize, coming through in my writing but hiding in daily life.

It was back when I was living in the House on 34th St. in the early ’60s (you’ve heard about this domicile before; maybe you even remember it), after returning from my disaster of grad school at Stanford.

At the time, Penn still dormed men and women separately. The women’s dorm was a block and a half from the House, in 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 (later removed; later still, reinstated?).

Yet the inside held an airy, white-painted court outfitted as a unisex dining hall during lunch, where the “coeds” were allowed to mingle with male humanity. I think the building is still some form of dorm, with the open playing fields that filled the rest of that block now turned into clunky smaller buildings that bring Penn more income.

Anyway, come Halloween, I was taken with the idea of impersonating Christ on the road to his crucifixion. Dressed only in a loincloth, fashioned from a hunk of sheet, and a crown of thorns, woven from a dead vine, I pasted a fuller false beard over my less impressive real one and dribbled red food coloring down my forehead.

To complete the transformation, I tacked a scroll reading “INRI” to the horizontal member of a hastily assembled cross, which I dragged along 34th St. (a major traffic artery) and into the women’s dorm. I fell the requisite three times along the way. I have, somewhere, a picture to document this crazed but, I declare, inspired feat.

Halloween for Linda and me pooped out over the two decades we lived in the rear section of our Baring St. house. Few kids found us back there (and of those, the majority were ferried to Powelton from outlying areas by their parents, who dumped them on our Victorian street corner and waited with the motor running for them to accumulate loot). 

Upstate, Halloween has been a major decorating holiday that almost rivals Christmas, but our house is invisible from the road, and the official outlook on trick or treating is oddly circumscribed, as though the local establishment fears that kids out on their own at unregulated hours might be disemboweled by ghouls.

I’ve pretty much lost my holiday spirit anyway. None of the celebratory days or seasons that temporarily rescued my youth from dankness mean much to me now. But almost every day at home seems celebratory, because we’re living in commune with good people, our dog, our cat, a half a zillion trees, and the occasional bear on the front pork.

I’ve got nothing to complain about. Though that won’t stop me, of course

A note from a friend, a solid religious believer and a damned fine human being, set me to trying to figure out not just what do I believe, but what do I find worth believing – worth caring about, worth considering.

Overall, I feel that it doesn’t matter whether there is or is not a god, but that the universe is so haphazard that existence, however ordained, isn’t suited to life, doesn’t care about life. 

Growing up, I abstractly believed in humankind (called, in our gender ignorance, “mankind”), that it was essential, ordained, the top of the universal heap. Much later, I came to a more nuanced outlook on humans’ place in the world – the ill we’ve done at every step, and how it’s ruined the “lesser beings” surrounding us.

I guess today I’d be labeled a pessimist, though I don’t see myself that way – more a realist, a pragmatist, or whathaveyou. I no longer care whether humanity survives. Because even if it (not “we”; individuals are too diverse to lump together under any common rubric) can learn what’s necessary to perpetuate itself through caring and wisdom, that will still not be enough. Evolution has fucked human life beyond redemption, an experiment that failed because there was no care in the “design.” 

My rant about population can be summed up: “We’ve gone over the edge; the fall into the abyss is assured.” If the entire race should wake one morning infused with decency and understanding, it has already ruined its redemption though sheer numbers. Halting or limiting reproduction (chosen how?) would still leave the remaining handful with a planet blighted to the point of requiring eons to repair. The 8 billion already sullying its surface would be condemned to slow, painful extermination, useful only as fertilizer. A hell of a best-case scenario.

And supposing humanity’s continuation as a species? Trudging along with the same faulty mental and genetic equipment, it will face an eternal repetition of love/hatred that’s led it nowhere (though maybe it could intern the psychopaths who now control our destiny, providing them with canned adulation and the AI luxury to fill their every perceived need).

And if it tinkers with its makeup – fine-tunes the slurry of our collective mind so that love and pragmatic good infuse it universally? It would become a soup of refined beings, alphabetted with all possible knowledge, as dull as Georgian architecture. 

Myself, saddled with a standard-issue muddled human mind, I alternate between self-flagellation and my increasingly dark certainty that nothing I could do would matter, that nothing humanity could do or be would make a damned bit of difference, now or through all eternity and infinity.

So which should I do? Putter around the house, satisfied with relabeling the jars of grains and seeds and nuts on our kitchen shelves, or continue writing novels and bilious articles that few will read and that will have no meaningful effect? 

Supposed to be warm tomorrow. I’ll accept that.

*  *  *

Individual frog cells can become nano-robots – read about it. What does that portend in the macro world – not just ethically (when have we ever acted ethically?) but as a continuing lifeform? Assuming we don’t destroy ourselves fast enough, this generation or the next will likely see the end of untamed evolution and the beginning of deliberate transformation.

This needn’t lead to despair, unless you like to think that way. But it’s the science of reality, in the daily news pouring down on us.

Damned interesting.

*  *  *

What gets me the most wrangled is that so many people think I’m a nice, tolerant guy. Actually, I’m one of the most self-centered people I’ve ever dealt with.

I hate when anyone impedes my motion, mental or physical, in any way; I get enraged about intrusion – even though much of the time I have no real idea what I want to be doing or how to go about doing it. Erin, my middle daughter, is much like me – except in being honest and direct about who she is. That makes for a different set of problems from my failure to openly admit who I am.

*  *  *

Growing up, I never automatically thought of someone in their 80s as automatically too old to think cogently or have leadership abilities. I skipped the presidential debate this round, thank god; it sounds like they both should be prematurely buried, but I wonder if the constant ragging about their age hasn’t itself undercut them (though how anyone could further undercut Trump is difficult to imagine).

My age limitations (at least as I see them within my wider limitations) are far more physical than mental. I’m still able to both talk coherently, type complete sentences, and convey meaning… most of the time… but sitting hunched in my chair for an hour leaves my spine wracked. 

Feh, I say again, Feh!

As some of you may know, Linda and I picked up covid about 2 weeks ago. Linda got a negative test yesterday, I’m still positive (though I tend to be iffy in most other areas).

I was reading a longish piece about despair in a recent issue of Science News. Seems psychologists are deciding that “despair” is different from plain old user-friendly depression, and that’s it’s hitting a lot more people today, especially the young. Why?

Why not? Between the pandemic, the threat of the collapse of life on earth and the general rottenness of existence for far too many of our far too exploded population, remaining positive feels more and more like pulling a rabbit out of a hat.

As a kid, I was afraid nearly every minute of most days. It wasn’t even a matter of being “afraid of.” It was a raw, generalized fear – I guess it must have been of existence, if I had any clear idea what existence was. Just the sense of never knowing how things worked, what most of them were, barely what I was.

Over the years that fear tended to move off. Lots of high points, even in the worst times, and if course the positive revelation of my kids and of Linda. But now…

It’s like I really am having a second childhood, the one thing I most completely never would have wanted. Too many mornings I wake in panic, with this sense of I don’t want this, any of it. Most of all, I don’t want myself. Too many afternoons, in the middle of trying to make the internal vacancy of my life work, I find myself on the verge of tears.

But this isn’t quite the same as that old childhood fear. It’s closer to horror, the result of learning more clearly what existence is or seems to be. Look at the viciousness, the bitterness that’s spread around the world, the vile absurdity of our country’s government, the sense by those with any power that they have the right, even the duty, to destroy anyone who does not support their every breath.

An extreme outlook on my part? For sure, but one I think that has a pretty rational basis.

It’s not like I think there was ever a halcyon time. Mankind has always had a huge vicious streak, as have all mammals, as has all life, as has all evolution, as has the vast turmoil of space.

But this is one of those woebegone eras when the viciousness is blatant and adopted by nearly all sides, arming themselves with guns and vitriol. There have been times, there have been places, where this negativity took hold and strangled a civilization. But now, the whole world is one extended civilization, and it has every aspect of going down the tubes. Permanently.

Should I care? I don’t think so. But something down inside me must.

And here’s the latest weirdness, the other night, trying, between pills and self bludgeoning, to force my mind to shut off its rants and go to sleep. I suddenly felt a shift in outlook. In some inexplicable way I no longer saw myself as a complete individual, but a shattered something with parts broken off or lost in the haze: that I was not a “person” so much as a character in a story, one with missing dimensions. Not a character created by another, rather a half-formed amalgam that did not add up to “me.”

What then? What do I have left if I’m not me? Maybe that’s part of what makes me write, even in times like this when it’s most painful even to think. Maybe I’m trying to create a complete me that makes sense. If I succeeded, would I come up with something I would like more or less than the trashed, fragmented me that I’m coming to truly despise?

Tune in next year.

[A fair amount of this is touched on in previous ruminations, but I thought I’d try to get most of it together in one place. It’s a result of a wonderful visit from an old friend.]

When we moved up here, year 2000, the house was uphill, at the end of an absurdly steep, winding drive, invisible from any other dwelling in the county. Our nearest neighbors were the Colonnas, down in the valley by the pond, on the other side of Lick Creek.

The Colonnas were the best neighbors anyone in history has ever had. Joe (known as Sonny to his South Philly friends) was a retired stone mason who had made marble pieces for the Vatican and various D.C. fed offices – as well as granite monuments for deceased mob members back home (I’m sure he had a booming business with Nicky Scarfo). Mimi, his wife, was the sole tough broad who hung out with the teen male up-and-coming mobsters. They both had wonderful tales to tell.

Joe would regularly plow the path to the bridge in winter for us and invite us to his summer cookouts for his South Philly friends, especially Carmine. Mimi would help anyone in the world with anything they needed while sounding like she’d willingly slice your head off.

Joe died fairly suddenly while in the hospital for a supposed not-too-serious ailment. We’d take Mimi shopping every week after that (she’d never learned to drive) and that was always a hoot – especially when she forgot to change out of PJs. She later moved down to the Philly area, where her brother, Frank, had bought her a condo. She died about 6 or 7 years back.

They one one child, Joey, in his late 30s when we first met them. Born with cerebral palsy, he had not been expected to walk or talk, but Mimi decided (and when Mimi decided, watch out!) that she would get him past that. She did. Joey is severely retarded, lurching when he walks, with limited, difficult vocabulary, but a huge sense of humor and his parents’ desire to help in any way he can. So the rest of this story is about Joey. 

When he had arguments with his parents, or just for the hell of it, he’d stump and heave up the long, steep drive to visit us. He and I would sit on the front porch, trade jokes and complaints while watching the sun go to hide behind the trees on the other side of the valley. (The time he fell on the drive and I had to haul him to his feet – he weighed probably 240 – was one of my major physical challenges.)

Joey had a rich fantasy life, but not always a bucolic one.

He loved to go bow hunting with his buddies (some of the younger South Philly tribe) and practiced with his bow and arrows in his back yard. I’d find his arrows now and then on our side of the creek. His aim was uncertain at best.

And he was convinced (with questionable help form one of Joe’s friends) that he had a $36 million contract with Princeton University for a building project. He was going to design… I never quite understood what. But it worried and obsessed him, because he realized that not being able to read limited his understanding.

When he found that Linda was a reading teacher, he asked her to teach him. Unfortunately, he thought that learning to read was something that could happen overnight; the idea that he’s have to work at it every day flummoxed him.

The crossover between his love of hunting and his design “business” led to his yearly insistence that he had to map state gameland #13, the largest hunting preserve in the county. So every spring I’d print out a 3-part map of 13, take it down to him, and he’d do his best to reproduce it on tissue paper.

Whenever I went down close to the creek to collect firewood, he’d holler out that he wanted to help. He could carry out the occasion small log, but he also wanted to help chop. I think Joe had something arranged so that Joey could handle, if not an axe, at least a hatchet, but there was no way I’d chance being responsible for how he’d handle a sharp, dangerous tool. I’d find some way to indicate I didn’t need help, or was “just about done.” That part was all a little scary.

But like his parents, he could always hold his own. When I’d go down by the bridge with the weed whacker to trim along the drive, he didn’t like the noise and would shout over, “Derek, I’m gonna sue ya!” On other occasions too he threatened to sue me for one perceived affront or another. Somehow I really respected that. Shades of Mimi!

But last Sunday afternoon was what really set off this reminiscence. Linda and I had started up the driveway when I decided I needed to check the propane level in our tank by the bridge. When I opened the car door to get back in: “Derek! Derek!” It was Joey, sitting in the breezeway between the now-uninhabited house and the garage.

We were both delighted – we’d missed Joey now for years, while he’s been living in a group home somewhere near Gladwynne, where Frank has his home – Mimi’s brother, who now owns the house.

Turns out Joey came up here with three of his housemates and their driver, Reuben, a wonderful guy who dealt with this limited quartet as fast friends. Reuben said Joey had been insisting that he had to go see his true home.

We spent probably an hour, maybe two, in Joey’s living room, just trading tales and outlooks. He told us all how he planned to come back for bow hunting, then close up the house for winter and return in spring to open it for another year.

The visit brought back those evenings on the front porch on the old car seat, some of the most relaxed hours of my life: I don’t relax easily, a worry-wart with always “something else” on my mind that intrudes its veil between me and external reality.

My few attempts at meditation drove me batshit; I not only don’t concentrate on my inner being in quite that way, I don’t want to. But there on the porch, with nothing to prove, sitting beside someone who didn’t expect me to prove anything, I learned something about existence that’s really important.

Joey. A good friend, a fine teacher.

Thanks.

*   *   *   *

Getting even: You know what’s really behind those Moroccan and Turkish earthquakes? It’s the first stage of Africa’s revenge: “You up there in the Mediterranean and Europe, you spent a millennium enslaving our people? Well, we’re gonna take our whole tectonic plate and cram it up your ass!”

Read an absorbing article in the Guardian (or was it The Daily Beast?) about a family who discovered, via commercial DNA tests, that one of their sons, conceived through IVF, had a different father, arising from some screwup at the clinic. Over the years, they managed to track down the biological father and the two families became friends.

I’ve wondered, here, in the past, if my middle brother, Vic, had the same father as Rod and me. Funny thing: the inter-family differences mentioned in the article were much like those in our family: the biological son and his father were both book readers, the other son was sports-heavy.

With us, Vic, his sons and his granddaughter showed a dexterity that pulled them into sports, while Rod and Dad and I were book people. My nephew Tim (Vic’s youngest and sole surviving son) has never mentioned if he read that rumin, but I know he reads most of them. I’m thinking it’s something we might talk about some day. He’s a realist and I think wouldn’t be horrendously upset (especially since he never knew my parents).

Another thing: I was amazed that brother Vic and his eldest son both died of dementia. Before that, almost all such cases I knew of within the extended family had been of women in my mother’s maternal line. So could an “outside” paternal genetic link to dementia have been involved?

I’m interested mainly for the knowledge. Don’t much care about the inheritance angle itself. The individualities of life are usually more defining.

*   *   *   *

Suggestion for a show featuring a tiny insect that attacks an unsuspecting garden imp:

“Little Louse on the Fairy.”

*   *   *   *

In 2018, Richard Hodges, an archaeologist and past president of the American University of Rome, visited the site of Ribe in Denmark, an 8th century trading settlement. He described it as “a layer cake of superimposed workshops, one on top of another” in  Science News. “Some burned down. Some of them were just demolished. Every one of them was producing huge amounts of material culture.”

Troy and other ancient centers have shown a similar layered buildup: One generation dumps their waste and construction debris atop the previous. This is how civilizations evolved, as immediate centers of existence without a long view of history: “History” was what they could personally recall of the last 2-3 generations.

The attempt today, through archaeology, to preserve and entomb the past is, in many ways, noble, but it’s not human in the broadest sense. Turkey’s attempted upscale development of its seacoast, involving the devastation of a two-millennium past, reflects pretty much the outlook humanity has always had: “This is our home, we can do what we will, and the devil take its past.”

The major difference today is our explosive capacity for destruction, and the insistence to make a profit from every square inch of the world.. We now have the ability not only to rise atop, but to obliterate. And at no time in the past did we have the possibility, much less the desire, to respect and resurrect.

Is this difference good, bad or beside the point? However we may view it, like so much of modern life, it may well prove terminal.

*   *   *   *

Things I hated as a kid that most kids love:

mayo

ketchup

pineapple

celery

breakfast cereals (hot and cold)

Disney animated features (Cinderella? Feh!)

*   *   *   *

Political and social commentary, both right and left, too often assumes that any major change or unusual event threatens to become, if not permanent, at least terrifyingly long-term. This response has become particularly apeshit in the howls over social media as either the upholder or destructor of free speech and informed outlook.

Yes, the social media have brought us raucous scads of conflicting info, and brought it to us too rapidly to allow for serious contemplation. But actually, history is cyclical. Most, if not all, explosive trends morph quickly in ways we wouldn’t anticipate.

This has always been true, but largely hidden. Now, every change, large or minute, is splattered across the connected world, hour after hour, becoming difficult if not impossible to avoid. That, in itself, is the change-of-the-moment, and it too will undoubtedly alter in ways we can’t predict.

So if everyone would just calm down… I’d like to slurp through the day without someone screaming that the latest social or political marshmallow will transform society unto the nth generation.

*   *   *   *

Bringing honesty to phone hold messages:

 • “Thank you for your call: All our representatives are busy wasting our other customers’ time, and have no ability to help you with your problem in any way.”

• “We’d like to assure you that your call is vitally important, but in truth it means absolutely nothing to us; if you would like to leave a message, there is virtually no chance anyone will ever get back to you.”

• “At the sound of the beep, you can either hang up or stay on the line to hear the most inane music ever recorded.”

*   *   *   *

And as Flanders and Swann said of one of their most marvelous songs of the 1960s-’70s:

“This may all seem irrelevant, but it is not irrelevant – it’s a hippopotamus!”