A Somnolent Sourcebook

Undertow

2012-01-25T10:58:00.001-08:00

Driving carefully through obstruction not clearly marked, with folks wondering over the roadway and gazing in different directions, as if there was an accident or construction at some undisclosed location.

An old brevet cop walks right into my path, and a soft contact is made with my left front fender. He continues on down the road, oblivious.

Here's a spot off the main traffic lane. I park, exit my vehicle, run after the rent-a-cop.

"Hey, excuse me, but - are you hurt?"

He stops, considers as if it hadn't occurred to him.

"Maybe a scratch ..." He pulls up a trouser to show an abrasion.

I look back up to my car to see - it's being towed! Inrush back up there.

"Hey, you can't - I was talking to a cop!"

There is a slender raffish sort with a deprecating perpetual grin. He is apparently in charge. My vehicle is towed away.

I see well the gambit now. Extortion like in one of those failed states ... Nigeria, Mexico, the US.

I ride with the smirking cop to a large building, barren and unkempt inside, with lots of milling and no clear mission. I wait. The tow cop is quite content to do nothing. He sits and then ambles. Then he leans against a counter.

The kids are coming today. This no time to be arrested. (I understand there will be a ransom for my auto and a fine for illegal parking and I am under restraint until both are paid.) I'd better call home.

My iPhone is transforming as I hold it, marveling. It unfolds a keyboard, then continues into a classic SLR camera, then retracts these extensions and presents others. I cannot make a simple phone call.

I've had enough of this. I slip away from the shoddy cop and head down stairs. I am accosted by another agent. He is bland and young and telling me I must wait.

I push him into a closet. Close the door. He opens it, tells me I am not free to go. I slam the closet door and am gone by the time he opens it again.

Home now. Ah, my favorite cereal. It's home, but an inchoate setting, with plenty of dark space towards the corners and voices from other rooms. Someone comes in and goes out.

I recognize the one from the closet standing near the edge of my breakfast room. And then, stepping into the dim light from a little further off, the shoddy tow cop.

It looks like I won't finish my cereal.

Tim Bowden is twiddling his thumbs on his iPhone 4S!

Here and There

2012-01-22T11:58:00.000-08:00

A portion of my income was left off inadvertently last year, and resupplied in a later transfer. It's all the same.

But I must document for taxes. I look for the pay stub, or the voucher.

There are lots of old papers here in this public desk. Here are references, but I need the specific items which authorized or effected the transfer, and the shortage.

I walk among many who are less and less interested in my problem. Perhaps it is somewhere else, suggest the keepers of the present domain here and now.

It is considered my best policy to seek assistance somewhere beyond wherever I might be, no matter where that is. They should be able to help, over there. Not doing their jobs if they don 't.

I find direct references here and solid leads there, but for the actual records themselves, that's the responsibility of someone not here now. If you would kindly consult another time and place?

You Should Help Her More

2011-12-08T19:32:00.001-08:00

I catch a glimpse of Lady outside the window. She is walking very fast to the utility shed from the basement door. (None of these settings corresponds to any waking experience.) She is dragging flattened cardboard.

What's she doing? Why does the cardboard belong in the shed instead of the basement?

I make preparations to go and assist, grudgingly. Is this necessary? I am lacing boots by the back door.

A grandson, not Peej but one who plays a grandson in our play, approaches.

"You really should help her more," he says. I know he's repeating what my son has said, but I pay it no mind. These aren't really my own family.

I walk beside Lady now. I'm telling her my adventure.

I tried to find you, I said, but opened the door of the shed and there was a miniature football stadium where the storage building should be. There were young boys playing football. The ball flew out the window.

Nobody knew what to do about it. They mostly stood around and waited. With great shrugs and nods, an adult, a coach or parent of one of the boys, is trying to indicate to me it would be nice we're I to retrieve the football. It was almost expected of me.

I went around the corner. I guess like magical fairies, none of them in the shed could leave it. I'll bet someone has the ball by now.

Around two corners, the side of the shed opposite the only door, the ball lays in a lot like a horse pasture. Approaching is a group of boys. One of them just ahead of two others bends to scoop up the ball and they stride up away from the pasture. I watch them go.

This is what I want to tell Lady, but she shushes me. On her other side is a blonde lady, smiling through crinkly make-up and gazing straight ahead through eyes that do not see. I am to understand she'a an old friend of Lady's and she's been talking and I interrupted.

Okay, I think, and I bolt away. I won't be going to the car to drive home with Lady then. She can look for me.

Where am I? It seems to be the bare underside of a huge stadium. Over there is a ward. I enter it and lay down on one of the beds.

I remain there. That should fix her! Don't want to hear about the lost and found football, well, I son't care about the glazed blonde neither. Bet she wasn't even there in the flesh.

I jump up as spontaneously as I entered the ward. It was the time to enter now it's time to go.

On one of the other beds is my list brother Reloj. He isn't leaving.

Tim Bowden is twiddling his thumbs on his iPhone 4S!

Journey

2011-11-18T08:31:00.001-08:00

On a bike, a long down, going so fast vision is bleary, my helmet blocks vision ahead. I see another start up the hill, worry we might collide in my partial blindness.

I note how I'm able to bounce uphill with ease.

I stop at Dr Jim's. His lady says, oh, wait. She retrieves an insert from a window. It's a rectangle out of four 1 x 12" planks of unknown construction. It's open, so I have no idea what use it might be. I also do not remember loaning it to them. I do not recognize it at all, but I accept it.

Dr Jim says, confidentially, "You really should go by and see Boss." This is an actual dim soul from my home town, given over to alcohol. I'm really too tired for Boss. Dr Jim reminds me he's my cousin. "Fish doesn't write to him anymore." This is another from the old days, a guy I was raised with of loony habit and imbibing nature.

So a highly educated pair from my online acquaintance connects me with my meager hardscrabble past.

Tim Bowden is twiddling his thumbs on his iPhone 4S!

The Mountain Daily

2011-11-02T07:45:00.001-07:00

Hut's Hunches
Renouned column in
Bonham Daily Favorite

It isn't daily, of course, or even weekly. After all, says the editor, nothing changes from day to day in our little unnamed village high in the Anonymous Mountains.

But when anything does happen, we all look to the Daily. And something has.

It was the only topic this day, and many after. A high wind at the peak. Much snow, presaging a flood of Something River, which runs through our village. Or perhaps it's one of those mine disasters. (We were reassured on that last point by the lack of mines or anything to dig out of Anonymous Mountain.)

What could it be? Surely, we all knew, something had gone wrong somewhere. We waited until the Daily could be printed.

The only distribution point was the Coffee Shop. (There was a contest one year to name that establishment, but nobody entered.) We roamed by the open door of The Coffee Shop all the day long.

The price of each issue was $5, which we paid, because each edition might carry months of incidents, and we were able to pay once for all of it, unlike the big city paper subscribers, who must pay a daily rate for their gossip, which amounted to a great deal over the year.

Here it is, freshly printed and in the bin. The paper flew out the door.

Something had happened, we read. Either a big snow at the peak, which would bring floods down below, or a mighty wind somewhere else.

We gathered in knots to discuss the news. Someone from time to time would take out her rolled copy of the Daily and slap it for emphasis with the back of her hand. It says so, right here, she would say.

The Great Wall

2011-10-11T15:36:00.000-07:00

The plan was to build a wall. But instead of a barrier, it was to be s a community-building project to run like the Great Wall of China for miles and miles, from Monterrey, Nuevo Leon, through Laredo to Austin, Texas.

Walking along the first section past Laredo, Eloy Cavazos marvels,"These are truly unique." He was referring to what were billed as Flying Buttresses along the way, set every three miles (the wall was made for long hikes) as the rest stops occurred.

"Heh-heh," was B T Wright's reaction when he learned of the coment. "Reckon them buttresses been around since Roman times." The wall was passing through B T's land and he kept up with what was said in his neighborhood.

"I don't know where Mr - Wright, is it? - I don't know where he studied architecture (nowhere, is where; B T was born in the family ranchouse on them grounds and had not been out of pistol shot from it since) but they taught us at Autonoma the purpose of a Flying Buttress was to offset load, which these don't, thus they are unique in that regard."

He made his point, but some of the neighborly amity seeped out of the enterprise during the encounter. The general idea of the wall was leveling but the fact was not many of the Anglos took well to an old boy made a fool of by a Mexican, especially an educated Mexican.

It was not the first nor last time a thesis to be proved instead buttressed its antithesis, but logic and irony were even less understood on the lone prairie than architecture, so the wall continued.

It's complete now, the Wall. There was of course a ceremony. Instead of the proverbial year in Europe, recent grads might take up the three-month hike along the Great Wall. There are provisions at each rest stop, plus sleeping accommodations. The passports are checked on leaving Monterrey or Austin and not again until arrival at the other. (The way is elevated to fidty feet and so rather difficult to access from any point except for the two entries.)

A survey was taken at both the University of Texas at Austin and La Universidad Autónoma de Nuevo León in Monterrey some ten years after the wall was finished. It was multiple choice, and the first question was, What was the purpose of the Great Wall. Of all the respondents, 12% had the right answer.

The next question was, Did the Wall achieve its purpose?

87% said yes.

Lost Kitten

2011-10-08T16:07:00.000-07:00

The delay in the image downloading; that came first. It was much later than today, and it was explained one of the legs had kicked out.

The legs were four and they propped the target so the visualizer could reach four dimensions. A hologram, shot from the inside, but a leg fell, so the image didn't load.

The rest of the gallery just waited, and then I grew impatient and zoomed off. There are plenty of galleries and they stream so fast.

The image from the set left standing had someone holding something. What was it? I am trying to maintain my balance here.

I ask Lady Kale, did you see that one? Someone holding something delicately, like a recovered kitten? No, she said. Just French Onion Soup and chiffon settings.

We can choose, I say. What we watch on the scanner is up to us. And there is more to choose from than was available to the world for any century before. And we're in control.

But I'm alone again. I say this out loud, but I'm talking to me.

I try and think if I am truly sustained. We use that word a lot. The ice is full of penguins and you have to remember where you left your hat.

I say that. I have lots of sayings. It's okay, because most everyone says the same slogans. We don't remember where we heard them.

I take time for thinking. Was I like this always? Is it okay being me? I try and remember how I was.

It's a unique experience, the scanner. It's made to order, your own history and preferences, made to order. They know me better than I know myself.

Ordering is easy. A point, a punch, and it arrives in your in-box, or to your door.

I already know how to hold it when it arrives, though I'm not sure what it's for. (It's okay, says Marly, always. I don't know what I'm for. Marly has a laugh like a kitten trilling the high keys.)

I know how I'll hold it, though, when it arrives. Like a lost kitten I've just found.

The Shaman

2011-09-11T12:23:00.000-07:00

Another one of those mystical windy numbers through dark passages. I am expected to join my Army unit. I do not know how to find it, though I should, hence I'm reluctant to ask. There are two guys setting something up; I don't know what, and I expect neither do they. Anyway, it's for certain nobody's in any hurry for it.

I say, maybe in the orderly room, I may find my assignment? One of them says, with an effort - though he speaks slow and low, it's almost too much for him - "Don't think so. They're just electricians."

I walk down the aisle, which is but a pathway between big tents with indistinguishable overhang and dubious surroundings, and halt by a raging stream. I stand because that makes as much sense as anything else. The current rises, walks up the backside like an animal. I must lay supine to prevent it's dragging me away.

Nobody seems to find my predicament of any note. At least, it doesn't seem to bother them. I suddenly realize why.

I have become their shaman. I take away all the evil spirits in the camp, like a lightning rod. All manner of clumsy lost sad happenstance is mine for as long as I stumble about in their region. I don't like this job.

I stand up straight. Stride up the bank. The river recedes like a tamed beast. I consult my iPhone; that's the ticket.

It sets a screen of me in the camp. There is me on my screen. I shake it good. The image forms a map, on it is drawn a thick red line, at the beginning of which is a throbbing blue dot, meaning me.

That's better. I step off, towards my assignment, and the blue dot moves with me. That's more like it.

Behind me is a crash. One of those who were doing something had the hood of the project fall on his head. He curses with more alacrity than he's shown during my visit.

Old Man Mose is Dead

2011-06-13T15:05:00.000-07:00

Old man Mose came out of them piney woods and never again was the same. Nobody knows what happened there, except'n it was bad and he was behind it.

From that time forth, he was plagued by owls. Often went into the woods, which is what you do if you live there, only he was a gentle critter holding neither rifle nor ax. But he done something, no doubt about that.

Came back very often after that with rips in the flesh. The owls caught him from behind, and, you know, the problem is, everybody always has a behind, and there are many owls.

Why didn't he just leave this mountain, go down to the flats? Lots of folks live down there and everywhere with more serious plagues than owls, and they just adjust to it. Heat, winds, no rains, they say, where you gonna go? For them, for most anyone, their world is all there is. Nobody makes good sense in their living arrangements.

There was no real askin', neither, as you don't want to partake of another's evil and banished forlorn pride and anguished isolation. You behave to him as if you didn't know what was perfectly obvious, like a lost limb.

Once he met a mountain maid way back in the piney woods, up before the wind begins. He meant to leave her but was distracted by owls, she said. Didn't leave soon enough. And so he brought her back to his cabin.

The little girl was born the requisite time after. Eyes open and following him as he came into the bedroom, until he left. Not smiling, neither.

Whatever happened way back long ago, she was there to account for it. Nobody doubted it, as nobody could explain it neither. But you see lightning, then thunder, and eventually you link 'em in your head, before it's explained rightly.

The little girl made sure as soon as she was able there was no need of owls. He was safe from them in the woods now, at least, though no longer could he hide from trouble in his cabin.

A Small Bird

2011-05-29T15:47:00.000-07:00

The motion was made and duly measured and presented in proper order and, as no member of the illustrious panel charged with remedies, solutions, proposals, or alternatives sputtered in utter incredulous stupor, in fact to a member seemed in rapt contemplation, I determined my own best posture and proper countenance was to lean attentively forward with my contemplative chin supported on one studious fist as were the rest of the assembled.

Maybe I had simply misunderstood. Was it in fact suggested that financing must be secured and expended upon the contemplated engineering project described as follows?

That clouds be seeded with dry ice in order that the nitrogen be boosted in atomic weight over the span of Israel within the 1949 Armistice borders at the narrow strait of eight (8) miles in order that the waist of land be expanded so that the north be not cut off from the south, or the reverse, in any emergency, and further that the braced air be sufficient in its entirety to bear the weight of a small bird.

And the President of the Council said, "Question?"

A hand went up. Now it will be clarified. Good for Representative Ruth.

"Just how small a bird?"

The Oaxacan Rig

2011-05-28T16:56:00.001-07:00

From Evernote:

The Oaxacan Rig

I had brought home the goods, all the way from southern Mexico. Everything was fine and swell, but now I needed to return the big rig with which I had hauled the freight.

I don't know why I didn't think of this before. We live in a bordering state, probably Texas, and it's a two-day journey back down to Oaxaca.

Maybe I'll start in the morning. A few hours won't make any difference.

In the morning I am still sluggish and procrastinating. It has to be done. You can't just leave an 18-wheeler parked in front of your house. Besides, some Oaxacan must have need of it.

Here I go, I think. A fool and his empty truck. I could maybe find cargo to sell down there, hammocks or straw boaters; make the trip worthwhile, but I'd have to pay plenty of mordida and the chance of losing the entire shipment during the long journey was right at 100%. Not good odds for investment.

Rolling south, I think of just stopping at a roadside park and hiking to a bus stop. Somewhere south of Waco, this scheme takes shape. Might even leave a suicide note, but I'm not sure there is anything north of Oaxaca to connect me with the rig.

"GOODBYE, CRUEL WORLD, I'M OFF TO JOIN THE SERVICE."

I rode near to Austin, and transferred to a route heading back north, to home. When the Greyhound passed the roadside rest stop, I said, mostly to myself, "I wonder if the drivers live in those rigs."

A gent across the aisle in a Peterbilt gimme glanced at where I was gazing, said, "Looks like an abandoned Oaxacan rig to me."

Sent from my iPhone

Time Did What We Couldn't

2011-04-08T11:33:00.001-07:00

We fell out before noon on the appointed day with our mauls and saws, ten of us. Plague had sent over a 'dozer and operator, but he just sat on the machine and waited for us to start. After all, he wasn't a native. It was our play, to begin.

It was a right good scheme, too, well thought out and practical. The American Theatre was very famous in our county. It had been the host of D W Griffin silents, such as Intolerance, which some elders in our town remember seeing there. It was a potential Historic Society relic if ever there was one in Bowdoin.

Our job was to partially destroy it.

The town of Bowdoin was dying. You could see it, feel it dying. Buildings up around the square were vacant, and some abandoned for a while were falling. We needed help to save the little village of our ancestors.

And so, during one or another city council meeting at Keene's (there were regular meetings but they were too formal, what with Ma there from the Favorite to rwrite down what was said) the plan was hatched to qualify for state development funds.

This was the program to raise property values in blighted regions with reconstruction and bank the additional taxes assessed for more civic remodeling. Redevelopment. Easy as pie, but the state would not buy into just your standard issue ghost town. There were just too many of those out in the dusty Texas plains, so we had to offer up something worth saving.

We figured we could render the American. It was so pretty; ornate and noir-gothic, with fillagreed columns and painted high frescoes and heavy purple velvet curtains. It was designed to allow for one day a week the commons to feel special, if that ain't a contradiction.

Calahan set his sledge on the floor, the handle resting against his thigh as he pulled on his gloves. Woesong circled beneath the screen, seeking where the most damage might be inflicted quickest.

Reloj just stood and looked. Up there in the balcony was where the Blacks were confined, but he had been up there one splendid night with Anna Lou. Right at the low railing towards the east, where the projectionist would be unable to see them.

Woesong thought, in the lower front section, just above the lateral aisle, that's where everything I knew about natural-motion activity beyond Bowdoin was absorbed. We had no TV in his early days, so we were pretty much left to entertain ourselves, to work out our own version of enterprise and folly and old glad social networking.

Nobody saw Abbot and Costello, or Francis the Talking Mule, as cultural forces worthy of emulation, fear or rejection. The movies were westerns or big city gangster or drawing room comedy flicks, and we walked out the same door we came in. It was foreign, like the carnies that came to town with their strange alien critters, and then they packed up and went on out 82 come some sunup.

It was TV followed us home, but that came later.

"Remember the tunes they played so low you could hardly hear in the time just before they drew the purple velvet aside and the previews began?"

Reloj wasn't moving, not even preparing to move. He sang very softly.

Atomic power,
Atomic power,
'Twas given by the mighty hand of God

"Yes. Oh, yes. You can date that one. 1949, before the Russkies had their own bomb."

"And there was the very thin transparent mesh curtain behind the purple one, which remained to cover the screen for a little while to mute the picture, almost like it was through a glass darkly, or waking up from a dream, instead of drifting off into one."

Reloj turned with his big hammer on his shoulder and walked clean out of the American Theatre. Not saying anything, not even looking back. I followed him. We weren't the first, and the stragglers came soon after.

The guy on the 'dozer watched us head on up and down South Main to our vehicles, then cranked up his own.

Time did for us eventually what we couldn't, which is ever the way. There were other schemes, but none of them worked. But such measure and manner as our civic pride took was expressed most elegantly and honorably the day we came to do damage to our heritage, like insulting our ancestors to please fickle strangers, and didn't.

A Most Excellent Novel

2011-04-07T16:06:00.001-07:00

From Evernote:

A Most Excellent Novel

A most excellent novel, chock full of my favorite ingredients. It was freighted, dense and quirky. Love them kind. it was written by a woman, and I love them kind, too.

It came in a little classic brown jacket, probably of the Everyman library. It was recommended in an article by someone I had read of elsewhere. Faulkneresque, it was labeled. Boy, show me to it.

I could not find it. Everywhere I searched for it - online, at our extensive bookshop - I came up empty. I could not even find it listed anywhere. I was embarrassed to conclude the "article" where I'd read the review was actually a short story. Okay, I say, I'll go back and see if there is a fiction identifier in the piece which recommended the ghost novel.

I could not find it. Everywhere I looked, at home and online, was dry of any notion of any series of paragraphs anywhere which may have boosted the Femme Faulkner.

What was the name of that novel anyway? I tried to think. Can't remember. But the author's name ... escapes me.

Oh, well, I know I could ask someone who will know... if I'd taken a class anywhere ever. Then I would be able to fit both writers and their production into oeuvres with a professor guide up at the U.

Wait ... what was the name of the author of the recommendation?

A Perfectly Fine Gadget

2011-04-05T14:31:00.001-07:00

From Evernote:

A Perfectly Fine Gadget

It was just hefty enough to feel important. It was metallic and intricate on it's face; very impressive. About the size of a large paperback.

We handled it, nodded, passed it on. Another of us did the same. It went all around.

I was the one who discovered that you could twist the barrel after shoving the base upward and it would lock in place. I tried it twice, then said, "Hey, lookahere."

I demonstrated the move again, more expertly, assertive, even. Everybody around nodded. I placed it back on the shelf and made to walk away to another part of the plant. Others did, after long admiring glances back at the gadget.

Nobody, then or since, had the slightest idea what the use of it might be.

Strange Visitors

2011-04-01T11:14:00.001-07:00

From Evernote:

Strange Visitors

Isn't it strange we are in their house and not ten feet from them and yet our two families have never spoken, nor even been introduced? I am a bit uncomfortable.

They are arrayed in a family setting, and so are we. They are collected near the foyer and we are near the front door. The house is a rambling complex with an assortment of roofs in a shady noir (as in, I'm not sufficiently visual to describe it) floor plan which leads very soon out of sight.

We must gather our trappings. Plastic toys for our only child, a daughter, strewn about. Yes, yes, we really must go; I'm sure of it. We move about, preparatory to our exit.

Bit first here is a lady who needs assistance. This means professional office duty; else she would only ask for help.

I sit and I listen and make notes. "I see," I say, and "Do go on."

She has the voice of a senior haggard Asian. I glance at her for the first time. "She" is actually what looks to be a middle-aged Hawaiian with deep lines in his face. He is pressing an index finger directly into his brow between his eyes, which are closed. What's he doing, channeling?

To my right and utterly still is one who matches my first supposition based upon the voice I have been hearing. She also presses an index finger just above her eyebrows but her posture is otherwise unremarkable. She remains perfectly still, with her eyes and her mouth closed.

It is really getting on time for us to leave.

Rocha's Curtain Call

2011-03-20T11:19:00.001-07:00

He worked in Supply most of the time I was in the unit. Hermerejildo Rocha, called Herman, was a Spec-4 with a laconic manner and a steel plate in his head from a recoilless rifle injury in Vietnam. He had waived any disability claim in order to re-up in the Army for a six-year term. When asked why, he shrugged. 'In business back home, they don't pay any attention to you when you're my age.'

Home was Garden City, one of the most depressed regions of the nation then or now, and, even were there some sort of economic miracle possible, it still would be in Kansas.

He and a buddy from his home town had remained together throughout their enlistments. The buddy was also disabled in that war, with a rifle wound to his foot ... from his own weapon. "It was bad over there," Herman admitted, "but ..." and he just shook his head. The buddy seemed always very depressed, spoke in a quiet voice, had a pretty wife who danced for the boys in one of the many go-go grind shops along the main street of Lawton, OK.

I had a very soft time in the Army during those horror years for some troops. I was able to drive home most weekends. And one Sunday night or Monday morning I came back to the post to discover the laces missing from my dress shoes.

I lived in NCO quarters, though I wasn't one, and neither was Herman, my roommate for the period just before his ETS to another post. Our boots and shoes were displayed under our beds in the two-troop rooms, and mine were bereft of ties and Herman was gone. I guess he was just short a pair for his dress green traveling uniform.

Why not just requisition from me? He'd never see me again, so why even bother with a note? He was probably too busy with packing to even wonder about somebody already a ghost.

Rocha just walked into a dream, leaned on a bureau in his uniform, looking just as he had way back when. I didn't speak to him because of distractions in my dream, and I regret it now.

I wanted to ask him about the laces.

New South River

2011-03-17T17:46:00.001-07:00

From Evernote:

New South River

I need something, for I am cold. I will drive somewhere there is perhaps a sweater.

On the roadway (which like in all my dreams is familiar to me only in my dreamstate) I encounter signs which tell me New South River is just ahead. Okay, I think.

Houses thicken until I am in a veritable nest of single story white frame one- and two-bedroom structures. They are set out like cabins, with little space between, as if a flood had gathered them along a river run and left them here. They were all in good repair, as far as I could determine, although there was not a sign of life about.

Oh, here's some. Milling about an old fashioned storefront with steps to a porch. Inside there is a jumble of dry goods as if the prop folks had quickly dumped it onto the set.

"The New South River is historic!", reads a sign over a bookshelf. There is a guidebook there up high and I think I will learn now about New South River, which I never heard of and don't want to ask about because maybe I should have.

There is a map on the wall showing the river itself, which seems to be running down the center of the US, somewhere in the Great Plains. It is drawn in a very dark blue line to rival the Mississippi to the east. It is progressing for many miles over flat terrain; no loss of elevation to boost it.

How is it running, this river? And, at the spot where it is drawn, there is no river in the real world.

I wonder if it matters. There is a lady who seems to be in charge. At least she has much enthusiasm and she keeps moving and everyone smiles as she passes by.

There's a ghost river, and some are very enthusiastic about it, but I wonder what can be the utility of the project. I see one worn rudimentary pamphlet and doubt it will become a best seller. Yet all around there are avid believers in New South River. And how can anything labeled 'new' be historic?

From all about me here there is great hope and some joy about a current which does not exist I walk out of the store alone.

Nothing Like the Sun

2011-03-13T10:04:00.001-07:00

It was a most satisfying accomplishment, if only because the results were so far above either effort or expectation. I had appended a singularly pedestrian comment unto a blog posting.

It was altogether quite reasonable, maybe a bit so sensible as to appear banal. (A trivial remark on second mortgages, say, will abstract to profundity quite well, as: "A citizen's Liberty is not owed, but paid to his nation's military.") The point I have forgotten, as have all who ever knew of it, because the sole paragraph I had supplied was strangely unmoored from the particular and cast into the general, as a boat in a storm.

My comment was copied, shared, passed on, until it went viral. From large-scale news sites to small neighborhood blogs, my lines appeared, were read, commented upon, repeat.

I personally saw no benefit because only my alias was attached to the newborn wisdom of the paragraph. Then, over time, my by-line disappeared, and a variety of famous names was substituted, from Aristotle to Hume.

Hey, I wrote that, I said in the small forum in which I was able to appear. But, as one or two asked the circumstance, and I was unable to supply without cheapening the whole enterprise, I soon gave up all attempts to mount the bandwagon I had launched.

Well ... not really launched, except as the pebble to the landslide, because my own small candle flame spark to the project was nothing like the sun it became. So I was left to muse whether all fame were like this.

A Repetition of Unintelligible Sounds

2011-03-10T19:32:00.000-08:00

We sometimes gather at bus stops, but the buses no longer run, and we know it. It's mostly dark after the sun goes down. We have this sensation of the day ending for months now.

Someone will hear something said, step up to anyone on the street, inquire. They're going to do a deal. My cousin works there. Everyone nods and eventually the group dissolves, the elements reforming on down the road.

Almost any sound will bring a pause, and everyone will look towards it. There are fewer vehicles, and inside them faces look grim. They do not look out at us, those who are able to ride in autos. "Hear anything yet?" is the most common greeting on every street.

It isn't clear what we're waiting for. Nobody knows how we arrived at where we are. Everything just stopped. All scheduled events weren't canceled, they just didn't happen. Groceries and markets are still open, and there's no rush anymore. We've in some sort of slow-burn emergency, but we continue the same day and night for weeks now, so the anxiety is low-key.

Milling in front of store windows where nothing is for sale except for perishables. The power doesn't work in houses so we come into the street to find where broadcasts are happening. In furniture and convenience stores, with speakers high up above the show windows. We stand on the street to silently watch and listen. Announcements are sporadic and brief.

They tell us of plans. We are going to package our debt, we were told recently.

"We will attempt to lease the deficit to other nations which we don't owe already. There is an electronic auction in Canada. It is suspected good will come of this initiative from Mrs Margaret O'Connell of Peach Street. Thank you, Mrs O'Connell."

It will be like all the rest of them. They have ideas sent to them by Concerned Citizens. They say they will implement the plan. Then they come back in some days.

"It was actually not a good plan from Mrs O'Connell. It would be like selling the hangover and not the party. We expect more of our citizens. This will never do."

Then we will hear out of the speakers:

"Mr Magruder has suggested that if all citizens were to take turns dragging on a large treadmill, then power would be restored. We could then export what we don't need to our creditors. Thank you, Mr Magruder."

We watch the guy who is the only one we will see all day and into the night who is smiling. It is like a hasty drawing of a smile, however. It is unnerving that the only notions for correcting whatever has gone wrong come from individuals writing to the station.

The central, maybe only, state of our being is anxiety tamped down just below panic. The children still play in the park, but it's as if they are at a funeral. They know something is sad, but not what, and nobody is able to tell them. How do you tell a kid that everything just stopped?

Some will begin, "I tell you, if only we'd ..." and then someone else will always cut him off. "There's no need to go over the past. What's done is done."

We had grown accustomed to the noises in our town, of course, but what we hear now is often unfamiliar; sometimes ... disturbing. A sort of rumble, a muffled concussion, and always just beyond sight. We all stop and wait, everyone quiet, but it will not repeat. We are waiting for a repetition of an unintelligible noise, is what.

The women seem most patient, are the most assured. They keep us up, tell us we'd better and we ought to and don't let this or be sure of that. They are marvelous. I don't know what the men would do without them, nor the kids, although nobody believes any steps we take will ever make the slightest difference.

"Mrs Kinoffka of Liberty Street has an idea that throwing wide our borders and allowing everyone in will dillute our difficulty like how a cesspool be cleaned by a creek in a storm. Thank you, Mrs Kinoffka!"

I remember the countenance of my mother in her casket. Her hard last days had left her looking like her stern elder sister. And there was the begger with her child in the market that year, Mazatlán, her face a mask of woe. The torero, Eloy Cavazos, on missing with the sword, lays over the back of the animal and moans to the heavens.

It's a very common expression now.

Bury

2011-02-19T10:49:00.000-08:00

We are called back into a litigious labyrinth we thought we had done
with. There is a hearing room with heavies at the door. They only
lounge there; no force is otherwise implied. However, we don't try to
leave.

The question for the Case Management Conference, the hundredth in a
series, is the figure of speech possibly mentioned, maybe thought, in
one of our depositions.

"We will bury you."

It may have been "Wilbur, you ...", as that was the name of the
bailiff. (Young then; he now is retired and sets his teeth in a glass
overnight, we hear during our long hours spent on these premises.)

There is on our land, we understand, a mound which resembles a grave.
It is considered by all parties that perhaps the inferred, implied, or
imagined threat might be alleviated were we to level that ground, thus
causing less anxiety for someone, or no one, who might link a
simulated (in the mind of a casual viewer) grave to the fantasy quote
from a deposition. We do not even begin to take up the odds anyone who
mangled a transcript from a court reporter might also walk upon our
grounds and spy the mound and be sore afflicted by it.

Okay, we say, and stand.

The judge intones, "One other matter ..."

We sit.

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The Club

2011-02-13T16:07:00.001-08:00

Monica had written extensively about Disgustus, the primitive manlove tribe which would not allow women among their illustrious charter membership. This was because, as J Cletis the spokesman would inform the admiring cub reporters, men are better. Boy, said J C, do we love us some men here at Disgustus.

They would, however, allow in maids and cleaning ladies, secretaries, if they went about their business without jostling the guests. That's how Monica sneaked in. As an office worker. She took her own private notes of the gossip in the kitchen and laundry room. How the boys acted like frat fools away from the family. Towel popping, raw unfunny humor, raunchy comments, vulgarity, odd wrestling in the
sauna.

The story hit the front page of the Atlanta Clarion under an alias by-line. Some consternation resulted at the club, for what supercilious executive can afford to look like a loutish teen in public?

It was calculated some feminist must've sneaked in under a menial's disguise. Rules were changed. Henceforth, no maid or laundress would be hired if she knew even three word of English.

Especially were they careful during the week of the US Open. After all, the overweight drunk and the obsessive philanderer would not care to be interviewed while off the links. One must retain one's indignity at all cost.

The heavy drunk had a typical last round, for him. Slicing into the trees, dumping into the rough, even missing the ball during a put. But he was such a good sport nobody minded. What a guy; tossing a wedge into the lake then diving in after it. The gallery loved it.

When the cameras were turned off, another came on. From across the fairway a solitary figure, the overweight drunk approached, weaving, staggering. Dropping his driver along the way. Strangely, as he drew near the camera, he seemed to collect himself, walk upright, straight.

On the green, he pulled off the Hawaiin shirt he always wore. Took off also the padding beneath, then the trousers with the stuffed leggings. Stood there in shorts and tee, smiling. Maybe you saw it on YouTube?

Monica.

In the office of Disgustus the week she worked there, it was she who took the call to alert the club the drunk was back in rehab. Kept it to herself until her story ran, and the story became the most sensational to hit that town since the Civil War.

Our Show

2011-01-29T16:32:00.001-08:00

What's anything but as it's valued? - Troilus and Cressida.

All day we wander these corridors. The set is a shopping mall, but the walls are plastic and styrofoam designed to look like stucco and brick. There is all manner of vegetation about, made from nylon and other fabric.

It does look like a shopping mall, at that, with folks milling and walking and sitting and talking. We are, all hundred and twenty of us, paid extras in the giant reality program Our Show. We do what most do in such places, except leave the premises. Ever.

Our living quarters are on the second floor of the end closest to the parking lot. The walkways are very long and, as you can't see from one end to the other because of the dogleg at the end away from the parking lot, nobody knows just how extensive is our home ground.

I used to know directions. Like, which way is north. Now, I only know from the parking lot.

It doesn't really matter, though, because we have enough room to wander. Besides, once you go out any exit, you can never enter the premises again. (It is rumored a whole gang in a shop were expelled with the shop in one fell swoop. They didn't like the diner on the set and what's a half-dozen more or less millers along the mall? They sealed it off and built something else and never again were seen those who had wandered into the shop.)

The camguys carry their tools unobtrusively on a shoulder. They swing their arms as they walk so we hardly notice them. At first there was the tendency to act out before the cameras like all the other shows, but that became too much effort after a time. If you are always on-screen, then you never are truly. At least that's what some of us have decided.

Anyway, all the passion necessary for melodrama just fades away with time.

A condition of our participation is that we never forbid the camguys from wherever we may be. If any of us hook up, then they might follow us up to our rooms. Nobody seems to mind anymore. It will be shown vividly in it's time, but we never know when, as the live stream for Our Show does not follow consistently the day it was taped. There is ever, as we say, a mismatch in the sequence. Besides, loving up in the rooms has become similar to what goes on elsewhere. I don't mean we make love in the fountain (that's only happened a couple times since I've been here); I mean all we do has become ritual and has sort of lost its excitement, if you know what I mean.

We are of all ages, though like most shows (and like most malls), the young predominate. The lady I often sit with at the taqueria (no kitchen, that we can see, so the grub must come from elsewhere -
the shops carry real corporate names, though, as they sponsor the show - we are cautioned to never complain about anything but one another) is a senior, in fact. I mean, she's elderly; we aren't allowed to ask how long anyone has been in Our Show.

What is strange is that ... I do complain about those who annoy me to Alice. She nods and seems to understand. I tell her Jack is messing up scenes because he can't seem to remember who he is. He was in the obnoxious jock role and yet there he was crying down by the fountain because all his pals were alienated from him.

I never saw Jack anywhere about the set after that.

Sometimes we talk about the life we had before. Some say they did something useful and the others will laugh her down and she won't be convinced by anyone that what she did might have been accomplished just as well without her. Besides, what is 'useful' outside has no real application on the set. Everything is of the same value in here. It's good when it's on tape and worthless otherwise.

Some fall in love, or seem to. But it's just too difficult to distinguish that from any other act which brings pleasure and perhaps prestige - along with a camguy. We all make gestures, after all, hoping (with a degree of avidity inversely proportional to the length of our time on set) to end up on tape for the day. We are, after all, under the illusion we are worth the tape and also there is the suspicion (unstated) that a certain time without tape means expulsion.

Some have been disappeared from Our Show. They broke a rule, like hitting the exit and wildly chasing off into the night, screaming. I don't know what happens to them then. Maybe they go back to doing something useful outside. We never see them again.

And whenever I complain to Alice about anyone, that one is gone immediately. Maybe there's a parallel set they are cast into. Maybe there are many parallel sets for any number of expulsions.

Some days I just don't feel like rising in the morning. And that's all right. Nobody seems to mind. Or even notice.

Houses Divided

2011-01-08T08:51:00.001-08:00

There is a vast neighborhood welling up out of the foothills. It begins innocently enough; low wall the color of the sandstone and both growing with the hills. It's going to be something, all right.
It will be an insular city, like all of them which would select us over them. Only it will take up every buildable acre between the sheer wilderness canyons on either flank to where the mountain grows too serious for civilization.
A homeowners group has already formed. It was a bone tossed to the wretched poors. A full 10% of the townhouses shall be reserved for the working stiffs. As those are designated the first built out on the plains without a view, they are the units first completed.
Okay, says the HOA for the poors, we're ready to move in. Not so fast, says contractor Bilge Builders and financiers Acme Hushfund, for if the poors move in now, we won't be able to sell the upscale units higher up.
Too bad, say the poors. Give us the keys. Forget you, say Acme, come only when you're called.
Lawsuits brewing on the rocky plains. Lawyers gathering like gulls at the dump. An ex parte halts all building.
Everyone sits, or waits in the corridors of the courthouse. Out on the lonesome prairie, nothing moves. Each side blames the other. If we wait, our poor clients will never be able to moves in, for the project shall never be completed. If the lower sector be trashed, then the building shall end anyway, for who wanted to invest the amount necessary to return our investment on a slum?
The judge sought mediation, suggested arbitration, tried to force settlement. Nothing worked. First he would have to reconfigure human nature.
Out in the red sandy foothills, dust blows over walls unable to hold out the ravages of human nature.

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Stories in Dark Stone

2010-12-27T16:40:00.001-08:00

The grounds around the school are oak-shaded and spare.

The building is a simple boxy structure of five stories in dark stone with no pleasing aspect. Nor am I pleased to be heading into it.

I am not remembering which the class subject is. I do know I am not fit for it, or, as I prefer, it for me. I know it is something for which I cannot muster the slightest effort for learning, as that describes practically my entire school day.

My jeans are spotted. Something has marred the shins of my jeans. This is only another mark against me. I walk alone, marked as an outsider, without sufficient notice to graduate to full-on rebel.

Realization like an epiphany warms over me. Hey, I really don't need to do this. Always this is salvation for me, who am caught in a conveyer designed by and for strangers. For what's the point? Just to sit bored and embarrassed in order to vex a teacher and encourage classmates that at least they ain't dumb as me.

I don't have to enter that lifeless structure. There is another way. It's along the path around the monolith to the gate and escape. Why didn't I think of this before?

There are stoonts gathered by the front parking lot. I pass at a distance, but I need not worry about notice even were I to walk right through them.

A girl is dancing and chanting a skit.

I know how to groom
I learned it in home room
My heart is a cardigan
Woven on a loom!

My last decision on the campus is to never attend a reunion.

Yet the dark walls follow me.

The Bare Belly of a Bassett

2010-10-28T18:28:00.001-07:00

I have asked the agency to which I belong to change my mailing address to one which seems at least 20 degrees cooler. It is remotely connected to a job I once had and I like the sound of it.

The agency meets outdoors and has no name. I'm not really sure that I'm the only one embarrassed to admit I have forgotten our mission. I'm not even sure we ever had one, but I keep quiet in case we did.

A somber withered one speaks to the group leader. I watch him in profile as he says, "I know why Bowden wants to be associated with this particular address. It's because of his weird belief that canines are susceptible to poison oak. Also, he believes 'carbon dating' is a matchmaker premise that any two organic creatures should be perfectly compatible."

I object. "That last odd belief is from Descartes, not me, and I never met the man. And anybody can find a rash on the bare belly of a Bassett." I might also have countered with a statement challenging the absurdity of either of these statements remotely conflicting with our raison d'etre, which is what smart argue persons often say, but I had no idea what that even meant.

I may've won the point, or lost it, but it wasn't the sort of discussion to give much satisfaction either way, then or now. It was growling at a Poodle in a passing auto.

The Number®

2010-10-12T13:57:00.001-07:00

It is all quite simple, you see.

Just as pollsters can with great accuracy predict the victor in national elections, you can devise a strategy to move any product, practice or premise. It is strictly a matter of leveraging prime factors into a sine quotient of current derivatives. If everyone would just go to our website at thenumber.com, you will see it's much simpler than it sounds.

Oprah is very impressed. She gazes sincerely at her audience. "I'm very impressed," she tells us. "It's life-changing." This made the fourth epiphany for Oprah that week, and it was only Thursday.

All you could hear about then was The Number®. Did you know it will help you sell turnips? It made my wealth in sugar futures. I found my husband through The Number®!

It sure did sell a lot of books, anyway. The Number® was numero uno on the NYT Best Seller list for 18 straight weeks.

Then it popped, sudden as a soap bubble. It just went away, with no word about whatever had become of The Number®. Maybe it was the report that the author and entrepreneur had skipped out on a hotel bill after a conference. Maybe sugar futures tanked.

Or maybe it was Oprah again. The problem is missing the point, another guest told her, dripping sincerity. Everyone worries about the mot juste, when the primary agent in communication is The Letter®. Like, have you accepted your RDA in Rs today?

Oprah is thoughtful. "My Asian friends do have trouble wirh that one."

"But we all do!" exclaimed the shill, "Which is why we are as a nation bereft of the thrill of the trill!"

Oprah looks at us. "This is very interesting to me."

If you are very interested in The Number®, there are some copies left in major bookshops. Look on the remainder tables. But hurry. They won't last long - before they're pulped.

Whasshisname

2010-10-07T14:39:00.001-07:00

I am a published author.

I have a story in a local publication. Some read it and are impressed. They either praise me or dismiss me, which is the same. I am quite pleased at this turn of events.

Once somebody would say, if they said anything, "There goes ol' whasshisname. " Now they say, "There goes ol' Whasshisname, the author."

All in all, I think, life is much improved. I have definitely come up in the world. Maybe I should be fitted for a tweed smoking jacket with leather elbows. It's no good pretending everything is the same now.

And then suddenly one early afternoon I stop dead in my tracks. I had been on my way to the local diner to allow them as weren't writers to observe one who was, a rare opportunity for the poor proles.

What stopped me was a contemplation of my method of composition. For the first time, I began to wonder if my private process as a writer might be the talk of the town, as I figured my new tweed jacket would be. All those intimate portraits of the artist alone in his den, in his bath even, once he has been recognized as a genius, such a bother. Is there no privacy at long last once fame comes calling?

My creative work on the published story, for instance, consisted in copying it word for word out of the Atlantic.

Now, really, is this anybody's business? Who really bothers with inspiration? One pretends to channel old George Eliot, that other one studies the bon mots of Balzac in translation, while I see my my own métier somewhat more directly.

I wonder, should I relate this matter to the press? Say, toss it out, like another author might let on she always does a first draft in longhand, or dictates to a secretary while in the bath? My own source
may never be discovered, after all, as many original screenplays are only borrowed from literary classics, on the assurance no one who goes to the movies reads. I doubt anyone who reads me would be familiar with a writer published in the Atlantic, after all.

But it is a puzzler, this moral conundrum. After all, I only want what's right for me, which is the essence of scruples. And I am a most scrupulous person.

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Something Turning

2010-09-30T08:01:00.001-07:00

It's traffic, said the expert consultant. Economics is. Just like circulation in the body is critical to health, your downtown business district should have an ideal pattern for vehicles to travel. Sounds logical, we say.

You say a recession is nothing but slow or clogged road arteries? Right you are, he said. Okay, we said.

...

Lem hauled Riley Mae into court, said, Judge, she's encroaching on my east pasture. Done cut muh barbed wire. Well, shoot, says Riley Mae; my land runs as far as Sixth does, the deed says, and now Sixth runs east instead of west.

"That's a fact," mused Judge Moore.

If the Blue Norther was later than Easter, it was given up as a natural by-product of criolisis, which was physics, according to Preacher Friar out at Hopkins Wrecking. It's the same principle as in Dyna-Flow on a Buick; something turning turns something else. Traffic turning one way affects the very air the same way. It's why rush hour in the big city brings tornados.

"Look at the drain in my bath tonight. It don't turn counter-clockwise no more."

"Is that a fact?"

"That's a fact," said the weather girl out at Station KFYN, 1040 on your dial.

...

Someone was to appear in Nextown with a new idea for a common civic function. He was an expert in doing a public chore much more efficiently. I was delegated to travel from Ourtown to Nextown for his convention, being as all cities are signed on for the chore.

I set up in the motel where the ceremony was to be held and began to copy from the handout the expert's biography. I'll take it back to Ourtown, is my plan, and maybe it would be printed in the Ourtown Newspaper.

We weren't sure what was the new plan, but we knew we were suspicious. The expert came over to my table while I was copying out details about him. I wasn't concerned; I didn't think he would bother with what I had written. Nobody else ever had. Doubt if I could draw notice with a ransom note.

He didn't even know me. He didn't introduce himself.

"Let's go for a drink after the session and talk it over."

I was thinking.

"I don't drink," I said, "and I don't know of any bars in Nextown, but, okay."

"Okay," he said.

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Möbius Phobias

2010-09-17T20:04:00.000-07:00

I am to be drafted back into military service, specifically the National Guard, at age 70. It is altogether quite depressing, but there doesn't appear to be anything I can do about it.

Except for passive resistance in the form of my usual torpor. Specifically, I am to report at a certain time Saturday, yet I proceed in believing (or acting along the lines of the belief) that I so not have to report until Sunday.

The span will be two weeks, during which we will have to climb a mountain on foot. I am sure I can accomplish this feat, bit I wonder about the other old ones.

I strangely have my old duffel bag and military gear from forty years ago, and I proceed finally to gather it all. A certain grizzled old vet in a uniform of uncertain vintage insists in flossing my teeth. Despite my protests he stands right up in my face and proceeds with the operation, as if I'm a toddler.

What's past is prologue, they say, about carousels.

Foundling

2010-09-01T11:46:00.001-07:00

Lost in a closet, long ago ...

I dig out of nowhere a small black box.

It's a toy. No, it's a laptop, an ancient model sub-compact, with a tiny keyboard (but much larger than the iPhone I write with now), as if designed for children.

I open it up to see do it still work. It do! She fires right up. On the screen I see numbers at top left. 119. This ancient gadget from before WiFi has downloads at the rate 119 MBS!

It is a wonderfully functional little machine which does all I need it to do, which is bring in data from the world wide Net and ship something back from Tim to time.

But how is it possible?

Metamorphosis

2010-08-26T09:33:00.000-07:00

Our Founder of Bad Dreams

I am joshing with the investigator. He is looking into a crime which is of a very serious nature but which is of less significance because it's offset somehow, like in a reality show. I want to both gain his good opinion and perhaps distort his findings, because I'm the guilty party. I was convicted of another offense of the same nature this past year, in fact.

Someone is tracking me. He is Turkish; with a traditional beret and goatee. Here he comes. Crossing the street. He makes to impale me with a multi-forked device that hurts not at all but the meaning is obvious. I am a suspect. I accept the guilt, although I do not understand at all the crime.

I report to ER. We must dress in those bare-back hospital gowns. To do this, we are expected to lie down and wallow on the floor, squirming in and out of garb. I see a matron do this calmly, without reservation. It seems the more sensible because everyone else does it automatically.

The Old Stations

2010-08-13T12:45:00.001-07:00

My ancient vinyl Jazz collection is stacked on a bookshelf, waiting to be translated to the new format. Tapes replaced the LPs for a time, but they're gone now as well.

Movies morphed out of theaters into the den, but now those tapes are gone, also the DVDs which replaced them are rotating into the past in favor of streaming on wires, which will themselves be no more when the wireless universe comes to town.

All the old stations, as Waylon sings to us, are being torn down, and the high-flying trains no longer roll.

I write this, in fact, on a tiny gadget that fits in my pocket and also contains a vast library of literature and music which it will quickly and easily display and play for me. I can visit the Web and handle my email and search Wiki and be directed to any destination out on the road - and I can even talk to family and friends over it. What I want to know is, isn't there a time coming soon to a library near you when the allocation of large chunks of public funds for the purchase of items and storing and staffing of facilities for last millennium's text technology will be considered misappropriation?

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Charity Stampede

2010-03-17T10:57:00.000-07:00

Our NGO was a private/public operation in support of military veterans and was supported by taxes. We were very creative one year. We allowed certain unemployed vets to drive our entire fleet of vans used regularly to transport the ailing to the vets hospital. They were commissioned to carry the aged and the infirm to Thanksgiving meals, or wherever else they needed to go. It was very well received, this idea, and we smiled for the photographer from the local paper. That's us, doing good, was the expression.

First, we lost track of the drivers and their vehicles. Nobody was keeping strict accounts of their travels, and now we had no account of any of them. Also, we became aware the credit cards issued to the drivers were not tracked. We did not know how to monitor them. Perhaps we would have to wait until the bills at the end of the month. We really were not a top-notch organization.

The reports in the news informed us the vet drivers had wandered off the reservation considerably. Apparently they were moving bodies to where they needed to be. One story featured a move for an impoverished family back to the old homestead over two states. Another news item featured a nest of runaways in San Francisco who were escorted back to their native habitats. (Running away is thrilling at first until the cold and the ragged hunger and fear set in.) Any number of children were saved this way.

All of the news was positive, only we were expecting that coming from the bank at the end of the month not to be. We fretted, but who wants to rain on a victory parade? Everywhere was smiling on us. We done good. We just could never expect to pay for it. But we didn't let on.

None of our superior authorities cared to mess in our business. What they wanted to do was empower and enable the lost and lonesome and hope trouble never came home to roost. Minorities and the disabled and veterans were all granted roles in the organizations set up for their welfare, for not to do so would imply some sort of ism. So we weren't bothered - like the kid drunk for the first time at a Worlds Fair who jumped from a tall building such as he had never seen before. Folks on the second floor heard him muttering as he dropped by outside, "So far, so good."

We were not, after all, so very different than Wall Street. We were investing heavily with somebody else's treasure and when it all crashed down, well, the public would pick up the pieces. We encouraged one another with that rationale. It was the only one we had.

Meanwhile, nothing was heard from the drivers nor their vehicles except for the various news repoorts. Regular rides to the VA Hospital were suspended. The reports were coming in from farther and farther afield.

The Lower Branches

2010-02-13T14:34:00.000-08:00

It's another one of those B-movie sets, obscure background in nondescript buildings. A series of rooms. We go into one. We occupy it. We are hired, our team, and we're taking over, but from whom is not part of our indoctrination.

It's a room like the others. We enter, my mentor and I. She is older, sadder, and she says, "You should cut the lower branches on the bushes along the walk." I don't know what we are doing here. I'm the newest member of the team.

I walk. She walks away. I look at the bushes along the walk. It seems such a senseless job. And what will all these others do? Nobody tells. We all just walk into rooms and without even looking around at desks and chairs we walk out again. Is this it?

And then one of the rooms I walk into has her in it. My old mentor. She is sitting now. Looks up, ever so sad. "We're fired," she says. Just like that.

Cop Stop

2009-11-18T10:09:00.000-08:00

Across the street, cruisers stop at what looks like an ordinary suburban domicile. It isn't.

An officer of the law approaches the front porch, steps up, turns right, and engages with an odd configuration on the door. It looks like he's undergoing a chest x-ray. He isn't.

"Recharging his batteries," says my guide. I wanted to see this, and he knows about it.

Suddenly the cop leaves off. Another one approaches. She must have priority, because she takes his place and he retreats to another machine in the shadows of oaks to the right rear.

"She's a lieutenant, on a mission," says the guide.

"Androids," I say.

"Well, yes," agrees the guide.

The lieutenant leaves and the first cop comes around the house. He is grinning, as if there has been a faux pas somewhere. At least, that's my reading. But what do I know about androids?

He pulls a long dark object from his partrol wagon. It looks like a surfboard, but isn't. He mounts the head of it, turns it sideways, and through a pedal device he begins to mount in the very air.

"Will you look at that?" I say.

My guide has stepped away for a time. The android up high, about a thousand feet by now, drops something. I see it's in the form of a bomb, a small one, like those dropped by hand in WWI film clips. I'm not afraid, because I figure, he's one of ours, after all.

The "bomb" plops against the ground. I pick it up after it stops bouncing. It's just a small finned device. I somehow understand it can be taken apart if you twist the fins. I try and do that. It's stuck, though.

Inside is water. I wonder why that is. But there is never really any explanation in dreams.

DID YOUR CHILD DO THIS?

2009-10-17T12:16:00.000-07:00

Stu and Val are upstanding members of their community, Sereno Knolls, which is situated along a golf course spotted with townhouses and behind heavy metal gates. There has been but one incident in the recent collective memory of this most pastoral playground for plutocrats - an inexplicable sabotage in the clubhouse. After a children's festival, there was found a large slice in one of the theatre seats. The cushion was hung out in front of the theatre with the sign in bold letters inscribed over it: "DID YOUR CHILD DO THIS?" It was thought guilt and embarrassment might bring a confession like in Perry Mason, but it didn't, and so eventually the sign and cushion were removed and the culprit remained uncaught and the grim business of golf was taken up once more.

An even more troubling event began when Stu and Val were featured in one month's community newspaper, Fairway Foldderol. They aren't particularly happy about it.

The story was rather innocuous, as all of the rest have been; something about crabgrass encroachment on the greens. But two commentors on the problem were gifted with hedcuts, like those in the WSJ they all calculate to leave in their carts after a round. It seems Stu's portrait was not, in his mind, particularly flattering.

The happy couple would not voice discontent, of course, for they would not want it thought they were engaged in such petty concerns. However, in a week or two, they sought discreetly to determine who had written the crabgass article, and, specifically, who had created the hedshots.

They were not successful. The publisher and editor, one individual, claimed these stories come over the transom after every Homeowners Association meeting and he does not credit them. All bylines and photos in Fairway Folderol are unattributed, for, after all, it's only a neighborhood gossip sheet.

Not being successful does not jibe with the bearing of Stu nor Val, so they stepped up their subtle campaign. Oh, really, we must know, they claimed in a letter to the editor (not for print); we want to thank the artist, as it's such a close likeness, and we feel we simply must know how we were chosen for the honor among all other humans on the planet.

The publisher/editor, being a man who recognized no irony and wasted no words, replied simply that he did not know the answer to their question.

Next came the letter from an attorney, who had not been engaged officially, but she has known Val and Stu for ever so many years and is often able to offer off-the-record advice and bring some satisfaction without any trouble to any party. She asked the original question.

And drew the identical reply - if possible, even more tersely worded.

The demand letter from the attorney came in two weeks. No answer from the Folderol.

A suit was filed in Superior Court, and the Publisher/Editor was duly served.

The news became general then. Did you hear? Val and Stu are suing about their picture in our dinky little Folderol! Have you ever heard such madness?

Val and Stu stopped playing golf, visiting or being visited by their neighbors. After all, the satarist was obviously among them, and they knew not which. Best to take no chances. They drove their limo out the gates and returned as the occasion demanded, both sitting up straight and looking neither right nor left.

Various attorneys who lived at Sereno Knolls volunteered their services to the tribe, pro bono. The case went forward. During the Interrogatory and deposition of the publisher/editor, not one further word did he offer to the demand for the identity of the artist who so cruelly caricatured Val and Stu than: "I don't know."

The case was dismissed with prejudice as a silly waste of time and resources, and Val and Stu were sanctioned to the tune of the court cost and attorney fees for causing the trouble. But even that wasn't the last straw.

While they had been able to dodge all the lampoons around the clubhouse - the faux-Folderols with ever-more-grotesque caricatures - they could not ignore the one strung a hundred feet up all around the water tower. It featured one of the more cartoonish of the modified hedshots, with the question lettered above it:

DID YOUR CHILD DO THIS?

The townhouse of Val and Stu was on the market within three weeks.

Tile for Tailings!

2009-08-10T10:12:00.000-07:00

A report broadcast over a local teevee station in Santa Barbara about a posh neighborhood within that realm details dumping of tailings. Some have been mining up in the hills and the refuse from the digs is scarring the mountains.

The offenders have appeared as sorrowful and promised to do something about it. They say, we'll fix it. They set about in thoughtful poses seeming to do just that.

"I know!" says one. "We'll offer up free tile!"

Yes, that should do it. So they announce over the teevee station they will provide tile for a cross community, to atone for scarring the mountains with their tailings.

Home Depot was the designated distributor, and when they opened their doors the morning after the announcement from the forlorn fortunates up the mountains, hordes of the homeless rushed in. Where is the tile? they asked. We're here for the tile.

The platinum patricians had not sent word about screening the applicants. So the staff at Home Depot simply passed out the square sections of Navajo prints or wildwood flowers to anyone who asked.

News reports for days after would spotlight the results of the largesse of the tile tithing. Under a bridge, a grungy campsite might be festooned with sprightly design in earthtones. A square of ten feet to a side set out under a bridge. A trail through the hills would have a pattern of these decorative blocks in a clearing.

After a time, everyone forgot about the tailings in the hills, and the plush plutocrats were even able to go back to their mining with complete impunity.

Sweet Belinda

2009-05-03T14:06:00.000-07:00

One of the millions of minor bloggers out there was elevated quite suddenly in just minutes of one day.

She had appreciated a new series on one of the networks, and she said so in her web log, with a readership of twelve, not any of them attending. The program on the network featured the American ideal of the stalwart little man through expertise and tenacity overcoming the vast unholy resistance of the corporate powers. He was a small-town doctor with a degree from a non-elite school called the Academy of Parapsychology and Medicine, and his practice included much of what is called alternative medicine.

The medicorps would try and run him off his country roads, and put out evil gossip about him, but the homey kept on curing cancer and raising the dead, despite the distractions. Belinda the blogger thought it a wonderful stirring call to arms for all practicioners of the ethereal arts.

After one posting which contained lots of exclamation points and caps, she noticed there were twenty, thirty comments appended. How can this be? Usually, the only comments on her site are her own. And now they continue, and are not stopping! What have the woodsprites wrought?

She was linked by a major blog with lots of corporate sponsors and also a little-known green chute to the major entertainment corporation which owned both the teevee network and many other entertainment facilities, including plenty of blogs. Our lonesome voice in the wilderness was picked up, amplified, broadcast, and she became a Name.

The cures and practices of the smalltown doctor of the teevee series began to edge up in acceptability. He would in his lab (which served also as his bathroom) concoct a tincture to homepathically treat an ailment, and all over the land the same process would occur, with many vowing to drop their unnecessary medical coverage. The polls showed more and more approval from the public of every cockamamie cult concept known. Carnegie Hall was filled for a lecture on chakra. There were executives of the med firms wondering how they were gonna keep 'em down with the pharm.

All the tribal wisdom came back. Flouridation is a communist plot meant to sap our vital fluids. Vaccinations cause autism (or autonomy; same difference). Cancer is necessary for the AMA to thrive, so it is protected in a secret lab beneath Ft Knox. There are vast colonies on the moon filled with the living dead the Pope doesn't want you to know about, because they were raised by holistic rather than holy orders.

Public funding of science in schools was reconsidered, and the NIH was decommissioned, as was the CDC. No longer was rancor reserved for the doctors who would terminate pregnancies; a more likely challenge was "Why are you sustaining cancer?" The teevee was now full of programs about plucky smalltown practitioners of the subtle arts, and news of the skyrocketing illness and death statistics were not reported, because that was just not a product the public preferred.

Sweet Belindal appeared on Oprah, and then she was given her own teevee program. Everyone was so happy that solutions turned out to be so simple. It had been so humiliating not to know so much; now there was great satisfaction in the confirmation that those who seemed to so far above everyone were frauds and mountebanks.

There was, to be sure, sadness. Not everyone was aboard the magical mystery bus. This family had sickness and death, and they kept quiet about it, for shame. That other one, too. In fact, had they not kept so quiet, they would have learned that sickness and death were pandemic in the land.

And then another blog, right out of the blue, reported that Belinda was under treatment by a physician licensed by the AMA. There was general scoffing, which subsided as medical reports were leaked by disgruntled clinical staff. The reports were headlined.

"Oh, we perceive that you are worried, and lame, and sick unto death. But, weap you when you but behold your own sorry lot? Here is your savior, marred, as you see, by her own private HMO!"

There was great anarchy unleashed in the land, with voices calling in the night. Some would decide, and others reconsider, and this one would take off for another point, from which more returned. It was the worst of times, with memory alone supplying the best.

The Vladistaya Valley

2009-02-18T16:03:00.000-08:00

We arrive outside Stalingrad. I say to my counterpart on the other side, "If you but had a place we might rest?" His eyebrows furrow.

I am a Wermacht artillery officer with my company. We don't want any trouble. We are here because we were sent, I say. I see, says Ivan. Well, there is this recently vacated boys military school.

It is a block of stalags somewhere in the Yurals. We drive there in our tracked vehicles, unpack all our gear. There is coal, and some grub. We build a fire and settle in to wait out the winter. From where we are, there isn't a cannon to be heard.

Is there a telegraph? One of my troop is an operator. Well, yes, says Ivan. We locate it, and I begin dictating battle reports.

It is bitter cold, and hard slogging in the mountains. The snow falls and the tracks freeze, and you cannot cross over the bodies in the hard rain.

Two words crackle back. How many? I carefully report, too many to count. We cannot tell the corpses from other berms and won't know until the thaw. We are holding on for the Fatherland. The operator cackles at this.

The Vladistaya Valley is a narrow gorge between rivers I'm told will be running swift with trout come spring. The sun is trapped between the ridges and it is very warm early and long for this climate. It must be held at all costs. It's far superior to Berchesgarten.

Ivan looks quizically at me sometimes, but he doesn't interfere. We are far less trouble than most Germans.

In the Vladistaya, there is a wealth of wheat and even fruit trees in summer. It is superior to the Yukraine. It is so prized that Stalin does not allow it onto any maps. The local citizens trust us now. They bring us eggs and milk. It is a tribute to the Hitler Youth we are so diplomatically successful. There is chocolate for our coffeee some mornings.

As the hard winter grows toward its end, Ivan says., well, now, you must know, there is no such place as the Vladistaya Valley.

And I say, no, of course not, and we're never leaving it neither.

Conflicts, with Roses

2009-02-12T14:16:00.001-08:00

I go to the office late for something I've forgotten. There is a seedy type with mock dressup costume, like a tweed coat over blue jeans. He has a pitiful ancient revovler he threatens me with in a dark hallway. I'm somehow not intimidated. He doesn't look that ominous.

You're one of them, he sputters. One of his tormenters. I just waft around a corner into the office, leaving him out in the hall. I hear a click, then two. I reach around the door and with surprising ease cease his weapon.

Now I leave. I must report the revolver. Here, I'll take out the shells. Now who to report to? The crossing guard? No, better ... there's one. I say, I have this pistol here. I took it from one who meant harm. He's still at large.

Now it is very late and I'm at headquarters. So, someone accosted you and you just took his weapon, just like that?

Yep, that's exactly what happened. Strange, ey?

Boy, I'll say.

Eventually they give up asking the same questions. Now it's very late. I must call my Lady. It's after 1:00 AM. I try and call home, and for some reason cannot. I drive very fast along Highway 9, and turn back around Glen Lomond and run through a small garden near a fence and am inside the yard of a wooded plot before I can turn around. When I do, I start for the gate again, but one who is slowly walking towards it unleashes a greyhound.

I am on a motorbike now, and the hound is right beside me. Then the gate is closed, and I'm back in the main house with all the family, and they are all moaning like for a lost relative over their smashed roses. Look, I'll pay, I have to go home. My Lady is waiting.

They try and place over my chest some sort of sign like a horse collar, and another on a family member. They want to take a picture, for proof or something. I've had enough. I rise up. I'm going. One uncle makes to stop me, but he's not very effective. This is a story of blustery weaklings.

I leave, and walk, because I've forgotten where I've left my auto. I don't even have the keys in my pocket. I walk, and the road leads off away from the highway, and I'm now inside a complex that looks like some huge government building. Out of a crowd leaving the offices is my Lady! Our sons are walking before her, in costume, like for halloween in the old days. They're like little lions from Thrifty's.

I am so glad to see them. But what are they doing here? They were here to report my absence?

Maybe I'll find out tonight...

The Usual, the Extraordinary, the Never

2009-02-12T14:07:00.000-08:00

Okay, she says, I'm on it. She jumps in her Chevy and she starts her ride. Out to Hatley Field, which is now the Landing Site.

Some weird schlub had hooked weather balloons to his lawn chair in Vidalia, Wisconsin, and gone up, up, and away, all the way to New Hope, Vermont, where she was the ace reporter on the only daily in the county. She thought, as she drove, there are in all matters only the Usual, the Extraordinary, and the Never. She said, I'll come up with a never question, one which will reveal the character and desperation and earnest childlike dash of this daredevil.

It may've been so. But when she arrived on location, she found the flyer had been all wrapped up by the big city news centers for exclusives, during which he shrugged and replied with dull responses to rhetorical questions. It happens like that, she thought on her way back to the paper to draw down her article from the wire services. Maybe that's why I call it Never. In New Hope, Vermont.

Reloj's Career Path

2008-12-12T10:30:00.001-08:00

Reloj is just finishing up his doctorate in Childhood Education, specializing in Gifted Children. It is the summer before he's out of school, and he's looking around for a job. He tells me, they have one in a certain tourist mecca we know. I think he's kidding. No, no, he says, it's taking handbills around and placing them under windshield wipers.

I say, well, you know Einstein worked in a Swiss patent office while he was writing three papers some noticed in time. And didn't Hawthorne work in the customs agency, Salem or somewhere? And every day of his writing life, Trollope sallied forth from his writing desk to his job at the postal service. He invented streetcorner mailboxes, you know.

So, maybe I'll take the job, says Reloj, and he does. And now, all he talks about is his adventures placing ads on windshields. He doesn't like Elitists, he tells me, those who have windblown wipers so you cannot place the posters under the blades.

I saw, what do you sell? And he says, oh, this, that, and the other, something different every day. I say, well, how do the business do? He says, the same as always. The same number of tourists come here and buy the same amount of goods in season year in and year out. I say, then why do they advertise? And Reloj say, well, you know, that's what they do.

I say, boy, I'll bet you can't wait to begin lifting those little geniuses to their appointed higher station. He says, yeah, well they ain't geniuses who simply turn on their wipers to dump the handbills on the road. The nerve of some people. Litterbugs. I bet they use that casuistry, situational ethics, to plea how they didn't place the paper under their own private wipers so they aren't responsible for the mess after. Some people.

I say, boy, you worked long and hard for the kids, and now the benefits to them will arrive, starting next year! And he say, huh?

The Old New Age

2008-12-02T13:24:00.000-08:00

First I was suspicious and then I was confirmed in doubts when I saw my wallet skitter away in the shadows at my feet. I knew it.

We were in a bus like no other, maybe how such would be conceived were you to begin back in the forties with a rural scene and project forward from there, like the serials of the epoch used to; old Fords pulling up to a spaceship lying on its belly like a bathtub toy.

The lady was rotund and dressed in many confusing layers of various designs of myriad substance. She was very stoic, saying nothing as I stood over her with my indignant accusations. See here, you took my wallet, I said loudly. Alert the driver.

I sought to take charge of her in a citizen's arrest, but she wasn't going anywhere inside the enclosed conveyance and neither was anyone else. So I stood and looked offended and she sat and ignored us all just as she had from the beginning of the ride. She was stringing beads for a necklace, it looked like.

In the middle of the scene, a little thought came creeping. I felt again for my wallet, left rear pocket of my jeans, and confirmed it still wasn't there. But then I remembered. Since I was pickpocketed before (in wake time, in Paris) I always carried my wallet in the left front pocket. Oh, dear.

Yep, here it is. I apologize profusely, but the victim of my suspicion pays no more attention to my abject wailing now than she did my fierce charges before. I determine to set it all to right. I go to other passengers to explain I've made a terrible mistake, but they all seem intent on escaping the bus and most especially me at the earliest.

My job is through the night. I work in what seems to be a parking garage, dark, with many foreign objects all about. I am now figuring how to carry old newsprint across to the recycle way at yon end. Some of it, I become aware, seems to be missing. I must recover the lost pages of what is an ancient slab of muck after all. I don't ask any questions.

Rats skitter here and there, but I have learned to think of them as mice. We all separately without consulting have done that. It's called on-the-job training.

The straw boss says to me, "We need you to demonstrate a product tomorrow. You'll come in an hour early."

He seems very sure. I don't know from where he derives his confidence. In fact, I have that question about everybody I meet lately. I haven't even decided if I'm going to show up at my regular four PM hour tomorrow, or ever again.

But I don't think of that now. I have to move this mess of ancient, useless papyrus to the far bin. Then I'll leave and see whatever else is in store.

The Old Man and the Rain

2008-11-02T08:55:00.000-08:00

INFERIOR - DAY

It's raining on an old man up on the roof. Bleak, soggy, grey, and miserable. He doesn't have on rain gear. He isn't smiling. Looks grim. Wizened, lined, ancient. Staring off-camera. We slowly pan forward. He's just sitting there on the roof, not even moving.

VOICEOVER

I am told by Ralph the Roofer that most leakage can be stopped by simply sitting on your roof. I sit up here on all my roofs. I haven't had a leak in a hundred years. Ralph the Roofer knows what he's talking about. You think my opponent, that Other One, can protect you from leaks? You think he'd be so wise, with all his Harvard, to sit up on the roof in the rain? Not a bit of it. He's an elitist. Meanwhile, I'm on the job, sitting up on my roof, in the rain, and I have the sniffles to prove it!

Cable News Smackdown

2008-10-05T11:35:00.001-07:00

Olbermann has a horse who broke a leg. I hate these kind of stories. It will have to be "put down." It's a completely disheartening tale.

Faux Noise has filed suit to stop it. They're flashing their "pro life" cred. Don't kill this horse, they say. The Terry Schiavo contingent gears up. And any cockamamie notion has its full day in court.

So lawyers from MSNBC and the fascist folly channel square off over equestrian equality. I go from a parking lot somewhere and here comes one of the Faux folk. He's in a bright orange jumpsuit and I'm thinking, he seems just like ordinary folk. And I remember, the guards at the death camps were mostly just your average Wermacht warriors with bad knees disqualifying them from the Eastern Front.

Red Roadster

2008-10-03T15:21:00.000-07:00

I arrive in my little blue auto in front of a row of one-story stores. The district is clean if uninspiring, like me. I go through a walkway bounded by more shops to an open courtyard. Back here is an industrial sector where they build products. Some guys wander about in no hurry and a woman waits at a desk. I have no idea what they make, but they must ship it out because there is a truck waiting over by the rear exit to the wide parking area.

I go see someone named Beaumont. Are you Beaumont? Yes. Hi, Beaumont! We shake hands. He agrees to transfer to me for valuable consideration one each sporty small red roadster. Gee, thanks, Beaumont!

I leave to go back to high school. (In my dreams I carry along the same consciousness always but my outer being is obscure.) I next return to the shopping district.

Hey, the roadster, my roadster, it's gone! Where is my roadster? I better go see Beaumont right quick now.

I go back to the industrial area. Different folks are loitering, moving about in no hurry. I say to one of them, hey, can you point me to Beaumont? No, he says. I ask again, some other one, who says, no, but maybe that one knows. He points at a desk, and a lady is talking with a gent there. I'll wait. Meanwhile I look around for Beaumont. He sold me his roadster, I say to no one in particular, and now it's gone. I left it up front and it's gone now.

Oh, hey, wait a minute. I remember now. I drove the roadster to high school! It's not Beaumont's fault, it's mine! Of course, if I drove to high school, then I didn't leave the red roadster here, and that would explain why I didn't find it when I looked here.

Sorry, Beaumont! I say. But nobody pays any attention, and nobody is Beaumont anyway.

Now I must find the red roadster. It must be over by high school, but I don't remember where. I must've parked close. I mean, why take the roadster to high school if you're going to park far away?

I must start on one side and work myself in concentric squares ever wider until I find it. That's the ticket.

I think, hey, wait a minute. Whatever became of the blue sedan I had this morning when I went after the red roadster from Beaumont? Better worry about that in good time. First I better find the red roadster.

Let me see, I'll start on one side of the high school. I'll park here then.

Wait a minute.

What's this I'm driving?

Acceptance of Excellence

2008-09-21T11:00:00.000-07:00

We eagerly rush from one meeting room to another. We are earnest and attentive. We are expected to be.

The course is Acceptance of Excellence. The motivator has been on Oprah. 'Nuff said. He tells us to visualize, optimize, upsize, categorize, fantasize. We only see him on tape, but he looks prosperous and there is a panel of eager and attentive fledglings amidst the potted plants.

You create a sight picture then you fix items within your new context, like sales, salary and benefits. You are ever so much more successful than you believe. Most never realize their potential, and realization is a state of mind, after all.

He is an ex-football coach, our motivator. He never mentions his record. We assume it's excellent.

Our business is selling ice cream. Our location is a summer tourist island. Our sales go up with our expectation and visualization after Memorial Day, and then we lose our focus around Labor Day. Every year it's like that. We spend our winter in meetings, mostly. How can we fix this attitude of ours? Why do we allow ourselves to wallow in the pit of despond?

Our recovery of Acceptance of Excellence rudiments takes six months. Come next Memorial Day, sales go through the roof. It's because in December we were ever so slothful and disbelieving. Also, some skipped the motivation seminars, and not all the chairs were filled at the optimizer meetings.

But can you imagine how it would be were we not Expecting Excellence? It would be flat the whole year. We are so fortunate to have found our motivation. Now if we could only find out why we lapse so consistantly each fall.

Heart of Darkness

2008-07-18T08:28:00.000-07:00

The news cuts away to someplace called "The Heart of Darkness." I listen, and it is not further located on any map.

A pretty lady in cammie gear speaks seriously to us before a backdrop of dense jungle. A tribe, she says. Not hunter/gathering, but planter/migrant, which means they place seed in the ground then leave.

Another tribe is more the hunter/gathering paradigm. They find fields which have been planted and abandoned. Then they harvest. Then they eat.

The planter migrants are extremely emaciated, whereas the hunter gatherers are definitely not.

We see a still shot of an obese native, chomping on an ear of corn.

The migrants captured a monkey, she tells us. They handcuffed him in front with a stake behind his back placed horizontally with both arms looped around it. Then they sent the monkey to the hunters.

From the studio: How big was the monkey, Felicia?
Felicia: Somewhere between a chimp and an orangutan.

Immediately the gathering tribe released the monkey. It did not, however, run off into the jungle, but it hung around. We figure it only wanted to see what would happen.

From the Heart of Darkness, this is Felicia, returning you to our studio ...

They Come In

2008-05-27T07:37:00.000-07:00

I have a nice private room in a dorm atmosphere, but that is changing. There is in-coming.

They come in all the hours of the day and night. They stand and sit and discuss it in knots and they move all around. Some of them set up in my own room, and they make demands. For how can we even dress with you here? one exasperates.

Some of them are a network. A Christian network. The sect is called Carpe Diem*. They are all about in white robes, and then four of them are arrested. The news reports they have bilked an elderly man whose room they had taken over into signing over all his worldly goods. After all, they say, it's the way of the Lord, us meek should inherit.

Still they come.

* In Darkly Dreaming Dexter the title character Dexter mistakenly translates carpe diem as meaning `complain in daylight.'

Warming Trends

2008-05-19T18:49:00.000-07:00

I am walking now. Someone is walking with me. She says, what will you say? This suggests, I will soon be talking.

I consider. They say walking the walk is the reality, while talking the talk is only bragging. That suggests a progression. Well, I'm already walking, and I didn't have to plan for it. So what do I need to study talking for?

But I look for a loose scrap to fill in notes. A magazine subscription request. I turn it over to see is there white on the back.

I think of Marilyn. She invented walking, in the movie Niagara. Long takes of her moving away from the camera. Walking scenes. I'll bet she didn't need more than one take on each of them, but I don't know. She sure needed plenty of takes on talking scenes; in Some Like It Hot she wore out her co-stars by messing up takes, some 70 in a row sometimes. That may be a record. For 70 clapboard snaps, she'd walk up and say, like, "It's Sugar, me."

Chaplin said the camera should be still. The only reason you move a camera is to film walking, and walking isn't dramatic. I wonder if he ever saw Niagara.

I am expected to introduce my new play. It's to be performed by a high school. I'm no longer in high school. I wasn't aware I would have to speak tonight. Isn't the play supposed to address itself?

Well, no. At least, I hope not. The play is about the fallacy of faith. There is a scene where guys out on the Chosin Reservoir are very cold, then they are glad, because their hands and feet are starting to warm up now. They can't feel the cold, then they can't feel anything. It's a light-hearted comedy, and nobody will catch on, so I'll just tell them it's all about global cooling.

Nobody ever knows anything. I used to worry about that, but I soon warmed to the idea.

Behind the Counter

2008-05-12T13:15:00.000-07:00

I am on the wrong side of the counter.

It's a fast-food joint. I am training. It is presumed I know something. I am pretending to be a transfer who only needs catching up with local procedure. Maybe I'm writing an article on the life of a burger flipper.

Someone is showing me. Here is this, and there is that, and, watch out, it's hot. All this product goes in this cage and this other sits over here. A bell rings. That means that over there is cooling past where it should in relation to this over here.

It's all unrecognizable. What is all this "product"? I can't ask, or they'll realize I don't know. Which is the point of asking, but it means I ain't qualified if I don't know. Dumb is it's own retard.

This is Lifer Slim here. He's telling me about that over there. He's the that over there go-to guy. A lifer is over the age where you are only passing a summer. The kids laugh at them, and the lifers retaliate by making them do stuff. Slim is a nice one, though. You can tell the kids like him. He sits over on the counter out of sight with his lunch. (Brought from home, I note.)

The young girls set the tone. The customers like them and so do the lifers, so the boy kids do too, because the girls generally brighten up the place and everybody smiling is better than everybody not.

So it goes.

Meanwhile, I'm trying to mime acts of others, although it all makes no sense to me.

The Good Ship Lollygag

2008-04-27T15:09:00.000-07:00

We are on a fabulous Holistic Health Holiday cruise aboard the Good Ship Lollygag to an exotic island. The ship enters a river, and passes through a narrow inlet into a lagoon.

The water here, we are informed, is excellently ennobled with arcane ingredients and ancient healing elements. You must drink it. Go on. Here's how. And the tour director sinks his face below the surface and comes up gulping and smiling. So do we all. You think we didn't want to be healthy?

Back aboard, we are spirited into tango lessons. Here's how, the entertainment director tells us. And he hops on one foot, then the other, and so do we all.

After a little while, I notice I am no longer able to see color. I wonder if this is healthy.

And now, proclaims the attendant, we should all go to the bathroom. He is smiling as well, and he troops off, us behind him, where we divide at the twin doors.

Later the cruise ship is impounded and the crew arrested. It is reported that the scheme was gold smuggling. That was one of the prime ingredients in the water of the lagoon. So they had their customers absorb the water and then condense it on the dance floor and then let it run into filters set up for the occasion. The company was able to collect a sizable amount of gold that way.

But wherefore did they not simply filter the gold from its natural watery habitat? Ah, there's the glub-glub. In the lagoon there were certain parasites, bacterium, impurities the cost to cleanse which would've been prohibitive. And yet here were some millions of volunteers a year willing to freely offer kidneys and pay them for the privilege.

Also, as we were all dedicated alternate medicine freaks, to report our health troubles after the cruise would've been a betrayal of the faith. We did not even relate our renal rumblings to potential new sailors on the Good Ship Lollygag. Needless to say, each pilgrim to the lagoon ever after, in the homeopathetic tradition, diluted all future participation down to nothing.

But here I am, back on land, running beside the sea as those health nuts will. I pass Beth, the stalwart of the doggie beach where we used to run Scoob and Maya waketimes. I had just passed others I knew, and they had told me there were surprises, the rangers were bringing around to every little group certain treats. It's good to keep communicating, said Beth.

Yes, I said, and told her of the wakeful time Chico and I went to the hills above Allende to secure pot for fun and profit. And Badman Jose worked on a chicken farm, and he did not understand generally, and we did not understand him specifically, and it was a circumstance ripe for disaster. I don't know where I draw my allegory sometimes.

A janitor with a South Pacific accent now seems to be telling me I must help a relative apply to enter a VA hospital. I cannot understand him, and he is growing impatient with my incomprehension. I look through folders in my office now, but cannot find what I think he said, Ramu, because I suppose he didn't say that. He shows the file and we stride forth.

Here's Ramu now. I set out to do up an ap. (This was my waketime job.) I must take his picture. I have a tiny camera the size of a large signet ring. It isn't working. And now out here in the field, a private and dark neighborhood street, I have desks and cabinets to take back to the office. I can just handle this, maybe, but there should be another way.

Wait, there is help. Other family members of Ramu. Good, let's go. Now Ramu is a canine, and he's tied up, but uncomplaining. He's lying on the ground, and looking at me expectantly. I will free you, guy, don't worry. I will take you home.

Cloud Perforations

2008-04-22T07:43:00.000-07:00

It was a state school, not the least prominent but not far up from the one that was. He was a physics prof. He said to his classes first day, "I want you to consider clouds, but not quite clouds yet, but the perforations within them. I want you to think of those openings as pre-existing.

"It is through massive calculation I have determined the chaos theory is correct, in that this is the only means by which I might stand here. However, the incredibly complex labyrinth by which I arrived before you, and you before me, could not have accounted for all the variations in the meagre five billion allotted years. No, we must assign another, darker force. We must determine something is watching."

That grabbed 'em. Then he proceeded throughout the days left in the quarter to demonstrate the arcane ineffable mystery of doubt. And then late in one class a youngster put up her hand.

"Yes, but ... say a Brinks Truck passed by on the interstate outside our window and a bag of cash blew out, or was tossed out, anyway disintegrated and a confetti storm of cash rained down on us here in this class, and only us here.

"Then would we not feel special, as if the product of design, with some force out there selecting us for advancement, whereas all the other classes would be thinking of lunch or the night. Only we would consider ourselves blessed in this universe through the merest chance."

She stopped and she looked at the professor. And he at her. The class ended.

It was the beginning of the Multiverse. All the science journals now are conversant on the multiple universes. And the young student was not even a physics major.

Years later, someone and someone from one of the classes of the physics professor of the almost-lowest-rung state school met somewhere, and one said to the other:

"Say, do you remember that physics professor ...."

"Yes, yes, old Cloud Perforations."

"Yes. I wonder what he meant by that."

Culture Individually Cloned

2008-03-24T14:14:00.000-07:00

Jane Frank's Crags and Crevices

We are in a large storehouse filled with androids. They aren't supposed to be anything else, however. They are not trying to pass, like in SciFi movies. They are, actually, there to create your very own copy of an "original" Keating.

He's an abstract expressionist Oprah or one of them likes. One trip to her show, or somebody's, and he's so in demand he must hire the building of streams of stringers; machines to do up his color smears while you watch. Each creation takes five minutes, and that only because of the wait states while the robot pretends to consult its muse.

And so I hand one of the 'droids a canvas. Only, before, I take the brush and I smear it with yellow. A collaborative effort, I say; me and old Keating. I hear murmurs of protest behind a window. So disrespectful; unethical, even. Yes, very.

Niki J and I remove some Keatings from the gallery. You can do that. Just as you can buy the "works," you can take them down from the shelves. A pleasant couple in business dress approaches. I am hung for what to say, but Niki J isn't. She explains the boilerplate you have to use to protect your right to remove paintings from museums and those quaint little overpriced art shops.

They sigh, resigned. They accommodate us. Actually, they are very nice. We walk about with them throughout the art factory. They hear us and offer no argument. Why should they? There are some hundreds of robots turning out these masterpieces. More than twenty times the number we had removed were created out in the factory while we were in the act of taking them down from the gift shop.

I return for my Keating. Wait, what? The yellow is gone from my base coat. They have discarded my in-put. I have, once again, only what everyone else has, just a mass-produced robot-generated assemblyline muck-up.

It's culture, after all. That's the way it goes.

Orange Wire

2008-02-24T13:26:00.001-08:00

It is a project which seems simple. Let me see what it is. Why, it is only the hooking up of a modem. I can do this.

It looks like a small roadster. A gleaming sleek metallic swoosh. I open it and see there are many cables, small bundles of wires, myriads of them. All I need do is hook these wires up to my modem at home. This is very simple. Plug and play.

Let me see. There seems to be a color coding scheme. However, the color is all orange. Each of many cables is filled with twisted swarms of orange wire. Yet it is simple. I plug each into the like port in my modem at home, and there you are.

But how will I tell each wire from each? There are many webs of them. I could follow each one to its logical conclusion. But there are miles between this modem and mine. And I cannot move either one.

I could mark each wire, as, terminal one, two, and so. But I would have to mark them every few feet, because I must go far, and I cannot see more than near.

I could just hold one orange wire and walk with it all the way to the other modem, plug it in, and then return for the next. I could do that. But it would take me many trips, and the earth, it is very old.

I am on the phone now, to the realtime owner of the bookshop in my town. He is saying something comforting but not helpful. I wonder if I might call in an expert. I don't want to, because I should be able to set up a new modem. It will bring much data so rapidly. But first we have this of the setup.

A little girl just at adolescence approaches, takes off her jacket; a very tight sweater remains. She snuggles against me, smiles up into my face, says, "My teachers like me very much."

She's like another orange wire. She knows nothing of modems.

Now I am making my way down a mezzanine. I'm holding a tray of chocolates, and trying not to step on pages open on the steps so that very little space remains for my feet. The pages are pictures of saint or patriotic frenzies. Uh-oh. I drop some. I am thinking of retrieving them, and also thinking, what will that do to the confidence in chocolates? And thinking, it's only more orange wire anyway.

Harmony

2008-02-17T12:33:00.000-08:00

We all are wearing neckties.

Not the common sort, but more like the western swing version, with intricate knots at the throat and swirly loose ends. Men and women wear them, and children, too.

These are gadgets rather than sartorial items. They perform wonders to shape and enhance the larynx and nasal cavities in effect. The result is, all the men sound exactly like Vaughn Monroe and the women like Deanna Durbin. It helps our music that hardly anyone has ever heard of either of those singers. The stars no longer own their sounds, any more than Henry owns his Ford. We are all either Vaughn or Deanna.

And so music in our community is by casual singing-in-the-shower, but you hear it everywhere; street, store, or park, by everyone, for all have the precise same talent and sound. It's true democracy, as all voices are created equal in our town.

There is a background soundtrack in the stores and broadcast on the street and into the park. It's the instrumental for some musical of long ago, and in school we learn the parts. We learn the parts to old musicals and nothing else in our schools. For we need nothing else. The grass is as high as an elephant's eye. I just met a girl named Maria. I have often walked on this street before.

And so Tonight will swell up, and all the Marias will tune up. There is no bashful voice in our town, for we are all the same. Anyone who would dress and go outdoors would freely sing to the wind. We're like that, in our town.

Illusory Duplication

2008-02-12T18:50:00.000-08:00

You sail across a great sea, then a lesser sea, and you dock. Then you take a road through a city, then a country lane, then a path, then you climb.

Up high along the ridges, you can see the hawks swoop down below, and clouds come right at you. There is a well marked trail, but what if you go over the ridge?

You find crags and nestles, is what, and no marked passing of humans, so you continue, and the brush is thicker and there is heat now, dry heat, and so bustles in the hedgerow.

Until you are clear in the valley, before a river and beside it a village like a watercolor from an amateur artist. I mean, there are all manner of styles along the river front, there are ancient adobe cabins and there are two-story gabled farmhouses with stitched Tudor paneling, structures of brick and mortar and stone and tin. Sometimes the houses are begun and then trail off, like a slipping away life, an incomplete picture.

This is a lost, forgotten, unknown land. It's not on any rolls in any government office. When there's something needs doing, I begin to understand, somebody just does it. There are no uniforms anywhere. They have a vigorous trade, duty free, with the outside world because they have a deep-water port nobody but certain shipping lines know about. Over the hill, this is considered wild country, uninhabitable.

There are no names here. No signposts; not on the city or the streets or the stores.

No language that I can understand. When two men encounter, they both give that quick jerk of the jaw up and to one side that says, it's a hard life, ain't it? You bet it is. The only sound from them is the workingman's moan, more like a yawn, "Whoa-ho-hoah." Women smile and nod noncommittally and they laugh with a pleasing lilt. I think of an old Buffy St Marie tune, a verse of it going

Merry Christmas,
Jingle Bells
Christ in heaven and the devil's in hell
Hearts they shrink; pockets swell;
Everybody know and nobody tell

and I always used to wonder. But ... but, if everybody knows, then what's the point of the telling?

I stop in front of an old frame building, peer into the show window. I stand like that for a long time.

Inside is Clayton's, the grocery store of the neighborhood where I grew up. I am astonished. The layout is the same, and the products on the shelves look as if they might be canned goods from the fifties, last century. It's identical to my memory.

From here over a rugged mountain and up a long path and a longer road to a highway to a bayside city and across two oceans and then three mountain ranges after you hit ground and a desert in there too, you'll be where I started, so it is impossible anybody who had been to Clayton's could ever have preceded me here. Nobody could have walked in my footsteps. Yours neither.

What I mean is, what I'm seeing clearly in this old replica of my childhood experience could not be. I blink. It just could not be. What did they - maybe design it from a photo in a magazine? There was never a picture of Clayton's. Of course not. Why take a picture of a small-town market? It would be like the mirrors in the Borges Library of Babel; why an illusory duplication during infinity? When it is going you think it will be ever thus and when it isn't, well, you have much more to miss than Clayton's.

I try the door. It's locked. I look around. Nobody on the street. But then, who would I ask? And how? There is not even a language.

There's a fog from the bay, and it meets the clouds from the ridge, until I cannot tell either from the other.

Tungsten Under Heat

2008-02-02T10:59:00.000-08:00

One who is very refined and most assured and inspires great trust is telling us. It's the same chemistry as heavy metals in solution, she says. Say tungsten. On a lab slide, with heat added and then subtracted.

Little girls suffer the precise same pressures, conflict. She is of a sedate reddish hue and she has a reassuring half-smile. I am trying to write down her name, this one who says the development of young girls is like tungsten under heat.

I write "P - A - T - " but she corrects. "Start with "Niki." And I do, very precise in my penmanship to show her my scholastic alacrity, but I note my finely-chiseled letters must eventually bump up against my prior scribbles. There does not seem to be anything I can do to fix it. Oh, dear.

She says, okay, and takes over the pad. There, now.

Black Christians

2008-01-21T16:35:00.000-08:00

I somehow came across old script of mine, in the form of several scrolls, in a dusty box.

Oh, this, I said. This is the compiled concordance we figured out one year. First I saw it and then others helped, and we were able to explain every single incident in the New Testament according to easily explicable quotidian drama, with nary a reference to magical intercession. We did that.

And wrote it down, and some saw it, but most did not. That's always the way, you know, no matter how popular the work may be. Most ignore anything. Those who had not seen the scroll but heard of it referred to us as Black Christians. They heard we were both, but none of us was either.

But, look you here. The scrolls, each rolled and dusted white and laid side by side, drift into a pasty state up towards the other, older end of the box. They are Catalone then, I see, and I taste one, and it's delicious. Niki J says it is. It was a freelance research project, and now it's dinner. I wonder if that's the way it ever is.

Do Dogs Mind Being Dogs?

2008-01-17T13:04:00.001-08:00

A band of grey suits lounged on a convertible in the era beyond the colors. The suits were drab and loose, as were the men. They are returning from a party somewhere.

"I wonder..." says one of them, the one called Joe, "if dogs mind being dogs. I mean, had they rather be us, or are they satisfied?" He is musing to himself, lounging in the convertible. One or two glance at him.

This is a troupe which performs what resembles baseball, except it's staged down to the minor detail, and Product Placement is the motive force. They set out in two teams inside miniature stadiums, with a desultory and almost lugubrious audience of passers by who sit in the stands and make no display at the antics on the field below. They are there because they must be somewhere.

The troupe goes through the routine of the game, but it's much more melodramatic than chance would allow. At every step of the way, they emphasize shoes, gloves, a certain coffee. They stop to admire often. The crowd seems utterly unmoved.

It's late in the morning, and Joe has lost his companions. Here he is shuffling down a line of "orphans" separated from their sets. The drover looks back several in the line to Joe, says, "You don't have carfare, do you?" I wonder how he knew that, Joe muses.

"Move over there," says the drover, and Joe does. "Where were you last night?" he presently asks. Joe tells him, at Finley's. "Have you spent too extravagantly? Maybe your estate is above your station?" Oh, no, says Joe. I live in a hotel. He thinks that will do him some good.

He is conveyed back to his station. His in-box has mail from Freir's, with an attachment. Probably a project. No need to bother with outstations, decides Joe. He goes in search of his troupe.

They are rehearsing a new set to demonstrate the efficacy of a training cereal. They seem to like the new bit. "Hey, that's good," says Joe. They look at him without emotion. "Leader wants to see you," says one simply.

Joe knocks on the door. The leader is with someone, barks out, "Come on in." He seems stressed. He is settling something in a field far away from Joe's troupe.

When the other leaves, the leader is angry. "Why do you do something like that?" Joe is stunned. "Like what?" he asks.

"We don't need you here," says the leader, and turns away. Two aides appear at Joe's elbows.

Joe is now out on the street. The aides had escorted him there very quickly. Now what? Joe is thinking. He tries to text Freir's, but the message bounces.

I don't know how I became a member of that troupe. I don't remember when I wasn't there. Now I'm not there, I have no idea where I am.

But his hotel room is somewhere, and that's where he goes. What did I do? Joe asks himself, over and over. And what do I do now? He inserts his key.

It doesn't fit the lock.

The Partisan

2007-12-29T15:23:00.001-08:00

The tables and chairs began to occur like chance along the walkway, and if you sit, then someone will bring you something. It's like love. I sat. There is a nondescript young lady across from me. She says nothing, and neither do I. Ain't love grand?

I am brought the news that a certain Count has completed a project very dear to me. It wasn't, but I'm always glad to hear the news. What was the project?

Something involving an array of firearms. There is a picture of many pistols on a graph. It's supposed to be very creative. I am conscious that I am accepting regurgitated public wisdom again. I nod and grin. Here he comes, through the tables, smiling in the sun; the Count.

I stand and make to introduce my companion and the Count. Which isn't easy; I do not know the names of either. So I simply stall on names. "Count, this is - " and allow her to prompt me. "And this is Count - " and he gives the complete title. I promptly forget both names.

He has a model of his creation, which he sets before me with a flourish. We move off in various directions during the course of the general decorum of the setting, and when I return to the table, I find a note on the Count's graph.

"We in The League can no longer sustain you as a member. We are sorry, but your contribution to this atrocity is beneath our great mission and earnest hopes." There is a token messenger from The League, standing with great tacit opprobrium nearby.

Now she is reading me off quite proper. She repeats the dire terms of ostracism. When she is done and awaiting a reply, I say, "Okay."

She is disappointed. She had expected more turmoil, a row, maybe overturned chairs for the cause. But, really, my interest in the Count's project or The League either is no more heartfelt than my coming by the chairs and tables and the lady love and sitting there. I move off with precisely the same dedication as brought me to sit down in the first place.

An Incipient Frenzy

2007-12-13T14:14:00.000-08:00

The baby was placed in the walkway, sitting, with his toys and accoutrements stacked around him. He sat there, alone. Someone had decided they didn't want him, so just put him down, like an item in a store she at first wanted but thought better of it.

I am utterly disgusted. I go to the baby, take one of the items stacked beside him, and toss it behind me in the direction of a passel of matrons with strollers and shopping carts. It nearly hits one, who is aghast.

The area is like those grassy winding walkways of military bases. I pick up the infant and begin walking with him. There are now more and more others walking, with babies and carts, and there is some anxiety, an incipient frenzy. I realize the ladies back where I threw the carton have called the authorities, and everyone understands something has happened.

Not an abandoned baby, but a package tossed in anger, that's the trouble. I hurry now. There is a path beside the one leading to the main gate. I tell the baby to please wait on this bench, and I place him on it. I will go and move my auto and be right back. I avoid the gate and enter the lower parking lot. I am exposed to view but unnoticed.

We escape.

But now my companion is a rangy, thin pup, legs like a birdog. He is now cavorting over the trailer back of me. I'm driving a truck now. The pup worries me; he is bounding about back there.

I must work now. The pup is safe, but I've missed something back on the line. It's my old job as a Swiss extruder operator. For some reason, that job I left in 1969 recurs. Here, all my machines are down and one is running good wire, but on a scrap reel.

All I have to do is wind it onto a good reel and sell it. The wire is gray, an unusual color. I must set it up to wind, meanwhile watching the pup I have rescued. The job is going wrong; it always does in my dreams, and mostly back in reality. I worked for nearly twenty six years after that Swiss job, and yet that's the one that comes back most often. I don't know why that is.

I am working at making do with a mess, as always, but at least the pup is safe.

And the Band Played On

2007-12-06T20:31:00.000-08:00

The way we enter now, is, he said, and he began to climb pegs up the wall.

The villa was lemon stucco and it was vast. Niki J was looking for something I thought utterly worthless and so naturally she pursued and I watched in some dismay as she stepped on up the wall after him.

He was a subaltern, and he presented us with a closure of a conflict with the owner, who was an eccentric but presumably harmless crackpot. The lieutenant said, we'll close the claim on the cable. Okay, that sounds good. The crackpot had engaged us in a dispute over a cable for which we were not even responsible.

"But then there is the water damage, and we must be compensated ..." I blew up. You say we are to drop all claims and then be held liable for damages. He tried to assert himself, but I say, "You cannot even sign on this matter, can you?" No, he admitted. It was a waste.

Next picture, a cop of the sort you find in quaint dusty Mexican villages is confronting me. He makes to apply handcuffs. The crackpot has told him I am a bank robber, he informs me. I am again exasperated. I make the usual threats of the consequences of false arrest.

It goes away. There is on a screen on the wall a video clip of the antics of the balmy baron. He is in a theatrical disguise; wig and three-corner hat and droopy mustache, and he is dancing a sort of loping nursing home ramble. His wealth is such that nobody ever seems to tell him he isn't really getting over.

A wan maid, young, like an au pair, is mooning about. She is losing her job. She seems despondent. We talk to her some, and she doesn't mind talking. She is losing her job on some impulse of the crackpot.

Now here he is in the flesh. He has a picture. He says, it's you. I have you, right there.

What is this? I ask. It's a series of shots of old guys.

"The band of the Titanic," said the kook. I groan.

"The Titanic went down in 1912," I say.

"1920," he corrects incorrectly.

"Besides, none of them survived."

He doesn't say anything, but he doesn't seem to think my comment has any bearing at all on the subject. I stare at the photos.

Playing in the Park

2007-12-03T09:31:00.000-08:00

At a desk inside a large extravaganza remindful of Bellagio's, they are handing out complimentary envelopes to all guests. I am designated for some reason as a courier. I am to deliver plenty of other envelopes to others.

Inside each envelope is ten thousand in cash, compliments of the house.

I say to Niki J as we proceed along one of many elaborate hallways, "Do you know how much money I have in my pocket?" Yet absconding with the funds never really occurs to me. Besides, even if I did, an alarm would most likely sound once I hit the exit.

Where is Scoobie? I am forever losing contact with my pal in my dreams. We leave him in a city? How can this be? Yet there he is, across a busy city multi-lane roadway, playing with other pups in a park. It's like I have a stroke and when I recover I'm without my boy.

I run to him. I am sprinting, and somehow not at all tired. I must ascend a hill into the park, and I do, at full blast.

Big Box

2007-11-28T18:35:00.000-08:00

Inside a warehouse, there are many workers, and they are building a huge box. They rush here and back with tools and they apply them to a job and then they rush off somewhere else. The box is the size of a dumpster.

There is an indistinct, anonymous politician up on a catwalk with an entourage. They are watching the construction of the box with great approval. Sometimes somebody will pat the politician on the back, and he'll nod, and they'll all continue smiling down at the box and the workers constructing it.

I know I should recognize the politician. He's always on TV, in the papers. But they're starting to run together, like penguins. They're all slick and smiling and their images are like a mass entangling of photons. If one of them orients in one direction, another will be moving exactly the opposite in reaction.

It's a nuclear power plant, I'm told by someone who knows. I say, that dumpster? Well, it was once as big as a building,with other Politicians high up in a skyscraper smiling down at the construction site. But this Politician stopped it in Congress because it had been suggested by another Politician. That one would have powered a city forever. But this one, he scotched it, and now it's dead in the water.

So some blamed him. And he hurriedly before the next primary kicked off a smaller projet. This one is 10% of the other, and it will power one household forever. There's to be a lottery to determine which household. The Politician is taking credit for saving lots for the taxpayers.

Newsmagazine

2007-11-23T20:46:00.000-08:00

I have a newsmagazine, I say. I don't remember which one. I don't read the cover to find out. I tell this one, a stranger standing on the street, I say, it includes a film clip. Isn't that marvelous?

He says, says this one on the street, oh, boy, more TV.

I say, yes, but it's a newsmagazine. His eyes glaze over, and I've missed my ride home in the telling.

I set out walking. The route is from my old high school home, forty years ago and more, but I set out.

Someone in a pickup picks me up. Hi, he says. I'm Mitch Romney. I'd like to be your president.

I determine to remember what he says so I can tell Niki J when I'm home. Maybe this guy is famous. He might even be in the newsmagazine. I listen very carefully, and he doesn't stop talking. It's as if he's broadcasting. I don't feel the need to say anything at all, because once I begin to encourage him to continue, he's already continued over me anyway. I just nod and act interested, like back in school.

So I just listen closely.

And when I'm home, I rush to tell Niki J. I say, guess who I rode home with. Mike Romney, the presidential candidate!

Oh, says Niki J, without pausing what she's doing, which has nothing to do with Mick Romney nor politics either. What did he say?

That's the funny part, I say, puzzled. I don't know.

You rode home with him and you don't know what he said?

No, I admitted.

He must be the quiet sort.

No, no, he talked the whole ride. It's just - his words were like breathing. They didn't cling together. They didn't say anything. They were exactly like the hum of the engine. It's a complete mystery. I thought at the time we were having a conversation, I mean, the sort you have with politicians anyway, and now that I reflect on it, there was nothing there.

What's that you have in your hand?

What? Oh, this. It's a newsmagazine. With the most remarkable content: a video clip! Inside the magazine!

Whoopee, says Niki J. More TV.

Movie Star Map

2007-11-07T10:41:00.000-08:00

I am seeing a mysterious inset in the lower right corner of a colorful fan magazine page.

It's an obscure lifelike drawing of figures in some indistinguishable action. It makes perfect sense to me. I realize however that most likely not another human on the planet would understand it. To them it's probably like the inexplicable drawings in New Yorker which have nothing to do with the story, or like all the other photos in this and any magazine. But this one contains more important data than anywhere else on the page, in the magazine, in any other magazine. I am so amazed by this.

We have been a long ways off visiting, and now it's time to go. We set to go, dreading the long voyage home. There is someone in a long elaborate vehicle. Very delicate, for he is deliberately wrecking it. Making a false move at the wheel and the expensive contraption crinkles like crackers and I turn and walk away.

There is Rita, my sister-in-law, standing on a large platform in the shape of a twin bed. She is on the top bunk, and it teeters, because it overruns the bed below. She steps on the unsupported edge and it tilts. I see there is no danger. She will only fall harmlessly onto another bed. I am not alarmed. She does fall exactly where physics demands. I realize it is an accident, but not a very serious one.

After much thought, I suddenly realize there is a firm and fast link between the two events and the graphic in the magazine, for the drawing describes and identifies the rest. I am certain of this. I can see it all. It's like the first time some human looked up at the stars and beheld the very image of a bull. I see it all. I am utterly astonished.

Then more so, as I also become slowly aware. Someone designed the graphic. I'm not alone. Someone intended this.

I look all around, then up at the stars.

Inspiration

2007-10-01T10:49:00.000-07:00

I work in a comic book network. I do some drafting, some lettering, come up with some ideas. I am struggling. You can tell from my work I'm struggling.

Almost anyone can draw better than me, letter better, come up with better ideas sometimes. I am desperate, actually, if you want to know. I may not be here much longer.

I see something. Sometimes, I do. That's why I'm still here. There is a story in the news. I see the story. An aging pop star of sorts who has become a noble has had a picture in an exhibition confiscated. What was in the picture?

Little girls at play. One of them quite exposed.

I do a frame consisting of a drawing of the exact scene. I don't really see any sense to it. But I'm sure those who are better able to gauge artistry than I will do so here. I ink in every detail of this rather sorry snapshot.

My editor says, are you sick? There is nothing that can redeem a disgusting exploitation of children. She shrugs, sneaks copies of the graphic story out to where the usual moral bleaters will see it. They do see it.

Along about the time the comic comes out, so does the clamour and outrage. Oh, the sin, the depredation, the utter depravity! and the comics fly off the shelves.

For the next printing, we added a bit of whimsy, some sardonic dialogue fore, and a bit of irony aft, and the frame ran as before. We added a banner proclaiming this the Satiric Issue.

We set a record in sales, and I suppose the pews also were filled up, so everybody was happy. It's what makes us strong.

I look for the next inspiration from pop culture, as do, I'm sure, the preachers.

Who's Sorry Now?

2007-09-29T14:53:00.000-07:00

I am in bed with Connie Francis.

She is smiling up from under me in full album-cover makeup.

Scene wipes like a movie. I'm now riding with Connie Francis in an auto. She shows me a picture. It's like George Grosz, a bad drawing with an odd perspective. Maybe a Picasso, with two figures engaged and another one a bit apart. Connie Francis says, remember this from last night? And I smile and nod and remember nothing.

Our land is on many levels, and down in the lower quadrant of our grounds like it never was, an auto is backing into the brush off our driveway. Wait, hold it!

It goes through the bushes, and I see it's actually a gate I never knew was there. I approach carefully. On the other side there are many animals, some quite exotic, inside dark bars like a zoo. I stare.

Ask Niki J. Do you know there's a petting zoo just beyond our drive? There's even a gate I didn't know about. Neither did she.

But now, closer to home, we have (in the dream) a stand-up natural gas wall heater. Only ... there's another one, roughly bolted to it. Somebody else, I conclude, is leaching off our heat for their own. How can this be? I ask Niki J. No, she wasn't aware of it at all.

But now I must go down. There is a tunnel, spiraling, ever downward. It's so far down the air pressure is very light, as if we're on high. But, strangely, we are able to go down deep into the earth very quickly.

We cannot stay here. We'll develop depth sickness. It's why our national culture is so superficial, after all. But we must bring back the clothing on hangers in the chamber. Yes, of course we must. But there are so many of them, brocade gowns, heavy cloaks. Why are there so many? We cannot carry it all. But we must make do. I begin gathering hangers.

In the auto, I ask Connie Francis, "So, do you still see Dick Clark?" She is to my left, facing forward now. I suppose someone else is driving, because she doesn't seem to be doing anything but musing. "No," she says simply, then, very softly, "I must get out of here."

Dissolve. Our wall heater stands alone now. And the brush down in the lower section, it probably no longer has a gate. Yes, yes, I'm sure of it.

Wait, what's happening on this set? I look in.

Colonel Bureagard over there is sitting on a camp stool. He is waiting for the President-Elect. Lincoln has not taken office yet. Here, Mr President, says the Colonel. I must show you something.

He's a naturalist, the Colonel is, but he used his drawing talent to record what he had seen among the Seminoles in Florida during a recent field trip. He knows his old law partner Lincoln will give him a meeting. Look here.

The scroungy Seminole in all his inglorious spartan want is displayed, the rank and the pitiful, even to the smallest children, and the last portrait is the result of a punishing mission, as General Claptrap called it. Corpses abound.

Lincoln is crying. "I promise you this iniquity, this tragedy, will be requited and it will not happen more." He slams his fist down on the puny camp table so that it collapses.

Colonol Bureagard rolls up his artwork, and I awaken.

Burning Sheets

2007-09-22T12:24:00.000-07:00

I have a new invention here, but it isn't mine, and I'm not altogether comfortable with it. A new means of remaining warm on a cold night.

You simply douse the sheets with a special water, then set fire to it. The water will burn at an acceptable rate throughout the night. If you would turn the thermostat down, as it were, you simply kick off sheets. The smoke goes somewhere - don't worry, I am assured.

Now there are three hounds at the carnival. I must retrieve them. They are in the keeping of one of the sideshows, a Pool for Pups, run by a burly congenial one and his slatternly spouse. Basically, it's a small wading pool. They are traditional carny folk. I take the leashes of two, presumably Maya and another I'm keeping, and say, hold on with Scoob; I'll be right back. I take the two to Niki J, way over on the other side of the grounds.

When I return, there is the spouse, and she's telling me, "He went to see if Scoobie should be barred from here." What?

I rush to find him. Up the hill and down the midway and into a tent. There's the guy, and over there's Scoob. He is being fed something scrumptious, and likes it exceedingly. I take the leash, and I back out with it, but only after Scoob is finished, which doesn't take long. I am shaking. Me and the boy retrace our steps back past the Pool of Pups. It's all right now, but I'm wary.

Three-Octave Scale

2007-08-05T10:52:00.000-07:00

A very efficient librarian hustles to a volume on a table. I watch from a short distance. She expertly rips a print from a large book and starts back to the reference desk with it. I am appalled. I say to her, but, but, and she ignores me utterly. That's a Botticelli you just ripped out! Amateurs, she is thinking. They don't know the ways of the Library.

I am walking now in step with George, recently deceased, from my old home town. He was a lifetime substance abuser who grew up in the sixties and went away then came back, chagrined, on the mend, an outspoken definer of abuse and its various dodges.

He says, I hear you're quite the show at a party. He says, and so quiet other times. I think, George is such a nice guy. Then as we trudge along, I'm thinking, hey, wait a minute! He just defined a primary pattern of alkies!

One wakes up, startled into a new world. (Am I also waking? I remember a pleasant intricate dream but none of the details preceeding.) He blinks, confused. Someone comes to arrest him. Yes, yes, very well, come along now. He is nude under a blanket, and he stands up, very tall, and is cuffed with hands behind him. I am given the chore of transporting him. Come along now.
He is in a red ermine cloak, and as he walks, some startling changes take place. One, he becomes shorter. Another, I see his hair color turn to grey. His elegant covering becomes a horizontally-striped Indian blanket. Then, he is no longer cuffed, and he walks into a building, looking back at me in some amusement.

He is Bill Bybee, the class clown from my elementary school. I think maybe I should consult the authorities, but I can't see how they would re-arrest someone who has not been arrested in the first place. This is an entirely different person than the one I started out with, and he seems to know the joke is on me, but what is there to do?

Three Blind Tries

2007-06-27T09:15:00.000-07:00

There are notables of French thought arrayed up by an ancient rock wall. They're standing there at varying levels. I know of them. I watch. They don't say anything. Post-structuralism probably.
There is a grouping of dimestory Indians inside a circle of onlookers. From somewhere outside the circle comes another. He is in a fringed buckskin jacket. The camera, or our viewpoint, pans close up to the fringe.

He is an ordinary chunky guy with a weathered face. Reminds me of that legal buffoon Spencer. The chief until the entry of the Fringed One falls in behind, calls out, "He is the leader in all things."

The Fringed One takes them in a children's conga line, weaving like a train this way and that. The tribe attempts to maintain dignity. I am thinking they are deriving their culture from old movies, just like us.

When he stops, the Fringed One addresses the tribe, or us with the tribe as characters in the play. You, he says, set up demonstrations. And you, he says, arrange an appointment with the Secretary of the Interior.
It is the time for slipping in. We go where we aren't allowed. We cause no harm, we only sneak in because we can. I cross some ground and hear the dogs bark over inside the compound. We can slither in this ravine to that fence. But I simply trot along the gulch.

I'm too reckless. They come where I'm hiding inside the wall with lights. I step outside.

I tell the one who has caught me, we can do good, we can show you where the defenses are weakest. He laughs. Do you think we cannot withstand such as you? He opens a door and I see another very solid one behind it. They had allowed us in simply because we were no threat.

Fire Etched on Ice

2007-06-11T14:16:00.000-07:00

In my traditional setting for dreams, a dim room so I don't have to tax my visual imagination too much, I'm sitting over a printed circuit board. Miz Ethleen, my high school Spanish teacher, is watching me suspiciously, like she did the time Claudia in the seat ahead of me exposed lots of her middle to reach over for something dropped.

You can tell what folks look like by studying the chips on the PCB which represents them. You want to see conformity, nice simple sound lacing in the welds and pouty lips.

I am coloring a chip on the board we're studying. I am aware my betawife is complaining at one side. I'm waiting for her to desist. She says I shouldn't be coloring the chips on the board. Always she represents the public against me, thinking that will stand her in good stead. Very threatened.

It doesn't stop, so I stand up and walk away.

Onto a lift, which is nothing but the ordinary run into a henhouse. That's right, it's a riser about one inch by two feet with a crosstitch of a flat stick for traction paralleling all along the way. We shuffle up the run like chickens.

Up there are rooms where some fabulous displays are available. The art showings are in rooms decorated to look like where you go to find fresh eggs. One exhibit is fire etched on ice. Another is hope in formaldehyde. Still more is a still wind.

You cannot remove anything from these premises, not even theories. You will not even be able to remember the works long enough to describe them. Still we head on up.

Someone is shuffling extremely slowly just ahead. There is a gap in front of him, but I cannot pass. Maybe he's working as hard as he can to move up. But he isn't moving very fast.

The Big Picture

2007-05-25T08:55:00.000-07:00

I'm just so sad about it, but what can you do? Four months! Just snipped out of your life like commercials in TiVo.

I say to brother Joey, hey, I'll miss you, I'm sorry. He understands. He's very stoic. But then, it's me that's going into the slammer.

I don't feel guilty because I didn't do anything to deserve it. I just was. It's not even karma, it's the Lottery in Babylon, the one Borges told us of where interest is spiked if the drawing handed out bad news as well as good. You win ten million. You lose your house, your wife runs off. The citizens actively support it because they see good times for them which will mean more only if bad goes down somewhere.

I report to the front desk, which is wide and waist-level. A little lady, young, is across from me, and she is giving instructions. But I cannot hear in the clamor of the room. But the desk is wide. But I cannot lean towards her because that would be, I don't know, forward. And she doesn't care to lean towards me because I'm fixin' to be a jailbird.

She talks on in the same voice. I wonder if it really matters I'm understanding none of it. After all, I have the big picture.

I Dream of Lennin

2007-05-18T19:31:00.000-07:00

I am afraid. I am on my back and someone is investigating. It's Lennin. Yes, Vladimir. He is adeptly slashing my pockets one by one. I have on a voluminous frock overcoat, and he is methodically slicing to see if I have anything hidden. I don't know whether I do, but I know it's curtains for me, for suspicion is sufficient in this camp.

Strangely, the above isn't the image of the Lennin of my nightmare. It's as if he's played by someone else, so it's a movie within a dream, which probably explains why I'm not terrified. The Lennin of my dream looks like the sniper and subway hijacker from French Connection.

Wonder what it means to have Lennin looking for contraband in your clothing.

The Arroyo

2007-05-08T11:56:00.000-07:00

My dreams are in shades of gray, but they shimmer.

In an urban setting is a grotto, an arroyo seco; the buildings seem to be melting into a central dry creekbed, like sewage in slums, but this is an upscale mercantile mess. We pass down this chute on foot, some of us.

And some of us expire. We carry them to the banks of the seco, and we place them carefully and tenderly on the bluff just off the passage. (The bottom of the arroyo is as uneven as any creekbed, but I don't see how a current could have formed this configuration in a major metropolitan area.)

A moderately overweight one with a pained but kindly expression is settled beside the arroyo. We ceremoniously carry and deposit him and return to the arroyo. There is nothing else to be done.

The mansion off the arroyo has many rooms. I'm passing from one to another, and there is really no symmetry. It's like people; some end off and another begins and there's no rhyme or reason to it.

I know before I see the large crates. Reloj is back. I see his goods stored fresh from the movers in an airy fringe to a corridor off a suite. I see Reloj's hair is long, luxurious even. He turns to see who is coming, then turns back without greeting.

I'm sitting with him over breakfast, or maybe dinner, as I'm not aware which end of the day we belong to, or what's on the table. There is talk, but strangely we aren't talking. I am conscious he does not seem aware of me.

There is a point when he will be leaving, of course, and then he's gone, without any reference to that transition. I just become aware at some point he's gone.

The Way is the Way

2007-03-31T10:15:00.000-07:00

There are doctors working on my hand, the one wounded in a bike accident in real time long ago. They can fix that little finger. They have inserted needles, without pain, and I'm back in a splint again. I am so amazed. Then when I look down in a while, the splint is gone. I tell ya, modern medicine.

They tell me I have every chance of restoring full use of my left hand, and I reply, "You have a debate with Dr Lewis then," referring to my (dreamtime) former plastic surgeon, and one of the new dox says, "No, you have a debate with Dr Lewis."

I must go from here to there now, from one clapboard village along these ridges through several more to yet another. I start out, naked, of course, but then I'm delighted to notice I have on a long T, with beet juice soaked onto the front tail, which I don't tuck in because I have nothing to tuck it into. Anyhow, I'm relatively well dressed by dreamtime standards.

It's a matter of ancient woody towns in close order, and I pass through them, and then realize I have left my vehicle parked back where I started, at the doctors' office. Oh, well. I start off retracing my steps.

I proceed in my usual dreamtreck, through a series of ancient stores featuring odd goods laid out to confound shoppers. You cannot easily transit through this confusion. Here I am in old dingy barnwood trying to find a door opposite the one I entered. You have to have been born here to naviagate this trail.

A young clerk offers moderate assistance, pointing out a dim path of light through indistinguishable fabric. I am most grateful, if only for her concession that my voyage is not utterly foolish.

A bunch of guys occur to me along the way. They know me, and one of them begins talking about the upcoming Dallas Cowboy season. That extra-point fumbler quarterback, Romo or something, his replacement is in camp. They all hope for great magic from the next maybe messiah.

I intended going out for high school football, even now, maybe as a postgrad. I was not able to make practice, but hope to. Maybe I can join these guys soon. They don't seem to blame me for not showing up. (The realtime football team looked down on any guy not suffering their idiot grind with them.)

My dream as always settles into a contented acceptance of an interesting trip rather than any fond anticipation of its happy conclusion.

Postcard from Rouen

2007-03-20T09:18:00.000-07:00

This is the village where Papa roamed. It's in the south of Spain, near the sea. Hemingway came here and stayed a season, and now they have his every path and stop marked out and commemorative trinkets available.

I am in an open limo, and there are others in a long string, like a beauty pageant. I am studying closely an ancient tome with a chalky yellowing fabric cover. It's Cervantes, only I cannot figure out which. It might be the one of the crazed knight, but the pictures don't tell that story, and I don't read spanish, especially 16th century spanish, well enough to know.

I turn the page and a letter falls into my lap. It's old, but I cannot tell if it's as old as the book. I can make it out mostly. It's a shopping list. Wow. A four hundred year old shopping list. I'm trying to think about saving a shopping list for that long. It must be pure chance. Who would decide, I'm gong to keep this shopping list forever, to remember the rutabegas at La Dome and the melons from Valladolid. Maybe that's how history comes to be.

A lady in our limo, unknown to me, says, oh, Rouen is closed for remodel. She says it, Ray-een. She asks to look at my book, and I give it to her. I figure someone who is confident about saying Rouen in mixed company must be trustworthy.

I have to run back to my room. I am packing a box of books to trade at the local bookshop. They give you credit. I was wondering how much credit a first-edition Cervantes might be worth.

I really should not have left the old text in the limo. It really was not a good idea, no matter the lady knew French. I don't know French either. Maybe she knew that, and just said Ray-een to impress us. Maybe she said Rouen wrong. Perhaps she's never even been there. Maybe she only wanted the Cervantes.

When I find the limo, it still is moving slowly through traffic in its stately ceremonial pace. The space I have foolishly abandoned is vacant, and when I hop up onto the running board, I see the Cervantes is square in the seat I had occupied.

Whose Turn Is It?

2007-03-05T18:30:00.000-08:00

We're going here and then there, through corridors and into rooms where nobody settles. Some of them are over there and some over here with me. I don't know how I'm connected with any of them, but I don't worry.

Now we're out on a dark street, going this way and that. I don't know these folks, I say. Someone makes reference to Neil Young. Another adds a cryptic comment.

I hear it. It's Bob Dylan said that. I try and interpret, using the only reference to literature I can summon at a moment's notice, the early scene with the Australian of the busted lorrie in Green Hills of Africa. Papa tells him, the people who praise it, praise it for the rhetoric, which is unimportant. They put in a mystery which is not there.

I say that, or something like, to ask if Dylan is talking about adding mystery where none exist. He smiles at me. I guess maybe that was it.

It's later, other rooms, and I am thinking, hey, was that so? Me and Bob Dylan? Maybe that didn't happen, I think, still within my dream. Maybe that wasn't him, or maybe he didn't mean that about mystery. I always have conclusions nicely drawn, like about movies, and then later on I see insider gossip from the creators and they incorporate none of my ideas. So are they wrong? I mean, I thought the day of the writer, the auteur, was over, and it was readers' hour now.

Whose turn is it?

My Ship is Sailing

2007-02-07T12:54:00.000-08:00

There is a lovely tune I first heard sung by a Cuban on the beach at Mazatlan, the summer of ’71. The chorus goes something like, “Wait a little, just a little bit longer, before you take away my happiness.” At first I thought it was just your usual crooning, but then I figured out from the title it was someone addressing his own memory.

La Nave del Olvido. The Ship of Forgetting.

My ship is sailing. I am losing the past, and it’s eating away the present. I slip down as in quicksand. I am young again. I am in the back of a vehicle driven by a man with a woman at his side.

They are utterly indifferent. No affect at all. She removes a pistol, one of those shining nickel and silver numbers patrician women might carry. She brings it out to no purpose, and it sort of hangs there in our presence.

I am able to secure the weapon, and I hide it. In a matter of moments the lady and I are in bed.

She is attractive as a mannequin can be. She shows no effects from sleeping with me, but I am much troubled. The night is ending. I’m not 18 come dawn.

I worry. Will this regression end my happy day life as a satisfied senior citizen? Will Niki J leave me? After all, this event of last night happened many years ago.

I hurry as best I can, through the night, down all the years, to a dubious dawn.

Carved in Stone

2007-02-03T10:16:00.000-08:00

I am following a path carved in stone, specifically the granite along the peaks of a mountain range. I have one of those toys which will create music as you wave it, and I do that, worrying that perhaps the train of monks whose trail my own will shortly intersect might be disturbed. We are all seekers in these hills.

My mechanical chime looks like a lantern and it’s at the end of my staff and I wave it and wailing results. The file of Hindu pilgrims makes not a sound, even of footsteps. They merely trudge forward as if through cloud, each of them like the others. I see them slightly below my own rut carved in stone perpendicular to theirs, from slightly above.

I walk and I wave my lantern chime and the wail is all the sound there is.

Bookstall

2007-01-12T18:13:00.000-08:00

We live in a community overrun by a liberal arts university. The Pulitzer committee is in town.

There is one of the ravers downtown who has attracted notice. She blares and babbles all the day long down on the main street, and her virtue is, no one can understand her. Abstraction is, after all, the roiling thunder in currents betoking depth. She is thus a postmodern marvel.

She is writing into her journal when she is not raving. Furiously scribbling, as if settling old scores. Apparently the university press has published some of her writings in one volume, and then they marketed it all around as a sop to the uneducated street masses, saying in their meetings, we must overcome our elitism by supporting these lowly dregs sometimes. The journal is supposed to be better than Jacques Derrida. She's a natural genius, they are saying. She will most likely win a Pulitzer. Wonder if she'll bathe in Sweden.

I find the book at a booth in a street fair for thirteen dollars, which I don't have. The husband of Heidi, a bookseller classmate of our boys in real time, is the merchant. Here, just wait, I say; Niki J will be along shortly. She'll have the price. I take the book and now it's up to me to pay, only I cannot until my loving lady returns.

There she is now, down the block, entering the square. I hustle over to solicit funds … only … it ain't her! How embarrassing.

Now I have the book and still haven't paid for it. I take the auto now. I don't know why. The road leads up a very steep incline. I will park up here. That's best. I don't know why that either. I will park in this space in front of a building which has obviously burned very recently.

Okay, I think to myself. I'm parked up the hill from the street fair with a book by a postmodern genius I haven't paid for, in front of a burned-out building, after mistaking my wife for a stranger, and none of these various parts hang together. Nothing relates to anything else. I don't even know why I bought, or made as if to buy, the book.

DIY Transplant

2007-01-07T18:51:00.000-08:00

It is like changing out a hard disc unit. I just don't know how deep to cut, is all.
A friend needs a heart transplant.

I just don't know how deep to cut. So I say, maybe we should consult my cardiologist?
His name is Hauser. We are in the habit of traveling up and down the Peninsula, Menlo Park and Redwood City and Cupertino and Palo Alto. In the night, we go up and down, seeking the next party.

I arrive at the apartment, with an anonymous friend. His lady is there, and she goes back to what she was doing when she realizes it isn't more interesting company. We catch a glimpse of her in the hall. She seems terminally bored. It's her relation, after all, who needs the new ticker. A son or brother. She is unconcerned. Best not to be too anxious, I think, in these circumstances.

I don't know how deep to cut, I say. I'll call my own doctor, I say. She asks, where's his office? She's worried about the toll call. Oh, Menlo Park, I say.

We call him. He is a slipshod sort of doctor. He walks into the apartment and he collapses onto the carpet in the living room. Hua-Vac, he says. That's the name of the artificial heart we need. There are so many brands. Skil, Block & Decker. Okay, solid, I say. Hua-Vac. I'm glad to have expert help.

He moseys on out. It's just that, I still don't know how deep to cut. Maybe I should've asked him that?

"It was a fifteen cent toll call," says the bored lady.

The Mask

2007-01-06T18:32:00.000-08:00

We travel, all of us, always traveling. Someone has an auto and recognizes the responsibility of carrying as many of us as the vehicle will hold down that road. When we stop, we always lay down on our backs like troops on bivouac. Just lie down and wait until someone else comes by with another auto.

Someone does. He has a superb ride and he intends a major trek, out of the way, beyond anything we have yet seen. All of us at this particular stop in time decline in unison. It's risky, and what's the purpose? After all, traveling is all we do, so why add to it an elaborate journey to an unknown location? We remain as we are, lying and waiting.

Me and Chico, we're to the movies now. We are in Zacatecas. We sit and we watch. The Spanish is surprisingly clear to me, and Chico is fluent.

This is Alejandro Rey onscreen, a noble of some sort, and he presents what appears to be an ancient mask to a dealer in antiquities, who glances at it and immediately announces it is a fake.

"You can tell by the eyes, you see," and he indicates, but Rey is glowering. The one who sold him the artifact has left the country, but he must be found, for all that. Nobody puts one over on Alejandro Rey.

The hero strides to the door, pauses, turns back. Freeze frame. There's no reason for him to be standing and facing the camera at a slight left profile. It's only because that's his good side, and also the composition is used on the marquee to sell the picture.

Outside now, there is a Mercado, well lit, with rows of tables. Me and Chico, we roam the tables. The stalls are along the sides with the tables in the center. I see now it is a mess area. We take a tray and sit.

It isn't very palatable, nor nourishing either, I think. Everyone around seems depressed. So am I. This is supposed to be exciting, exotic, but it is, I must admit to myself and no other, rather boring. We are sitting in a dining hall not very different from the one in our old grade school.
I rise and visit the shops along the fringes of the mess hall. There are varieties of goods, none of them well-made nor interesting. I roam through the stalls.

I cannot locate Chico back in the hall now. He isn't where we were seated before. Has he left me again? (In waketime, during our first hitchhiking On the Road trip together when I was 18, we were back in Dallas after visiting New Orleans, near brother Joey's apartment, and I said, "Wait, I'll leave my rucksack with Joey; the parents will be over tomorrow..." and I go off to do that. But when I come back to the road where I had left Chico, he had in the meanwhile been offered a ride the seventy miles home and jumped at it.)

I must see about going back home, I'm thinking. If he is gone, then how am I to manage that? I slowly pass through the mess hall, thinking, I'm alone now. I must think.

The Cause of It

2006-12-26T17:24:00.001-08:00

Something is happening here, a secret ceremony I have encountered and become entrapped by, like a silent auction or a Paiute marriage proposal.

I am the person who played a part in the rite, but I'm someone else entirely offstage. The intended I have not seen, but have great respect and admiration for, only my daylife is where I live, and I must go back.

But I'm not released. There are these details along a dusty street of a strange dreamscape. I have disappointed some, enraged others. They discuss it in groups, casting occasional glances at me. I smile, blinking.

They enter my daytime now, wading in like indians into a cabin in old movies. They show grim countenance, offer complaints. I have offended someone. He is just outside on the lawn.

Sorry.

I enter a cafe to stanch all this disappointment milling about. Yes, but I must go back sometime. My intended is working here. She makes no special play or demonstration; she speaks without looking at me, as if she's planning a fire drill should one ever come. She is small and freckled and pretty but she won't look at me. I like her fine but indeed I must go back.

Here she is on the dusty street. She covers her eyes with her hand. She is in pain! She is disabled? She lays down. I see she lives in an auto within the cafe. I really must do something. I must go back.

When I'm back with Niki J, still some hover. One of them charges me with disrespect to one hombre he names, perhaps the father of the bride who won't be a bride after all. I'm glad he does not mention the reason for the disagreement. Niki J has a plan for assuaging all this anger, and I'm only glad she isn't aware of the cause of it.

But, then, neither am I.

Oasis

2006-12-13T19:04:00.000-08:00

These are new canines, a special breed. "These are Christian dogs," says the prim lady escorting them with a dual leash. She seems very proud. They look like a version of hammerhead shark on four paws. Why they are called "Christian" isn't explained, but, then, nobody seems to have to justify that about humans either.

I commute to work on foot. I work in Watsonville, a village in which I indeed was employed through much of my waking, or at least daytime, gamma minus civil savant career, but this Watsonville is different.

There is a newish ranch-style brick-and-stucco dwelling in a neighborhood of plenty of others like it. They are landscaped on hilly terrain in one of four different floor plans. I stop by this particular unit to rest. No one knows why, not the owner of the home, not me, not anybody. I just go in and lay down and sleep if I want. I'm not related to anyone here. I don't even know them. It's just where I rest on the way to work. I don't even know who devised this rest stop plan.

The owner sometimes sits and chats jovially with me, like you would the one on the next seat in a bar. I don't have to knock when I enter. I just go in, stretch, lay down. It's about half way along my route.

I run a generator. It sits by my bedside at this strange oasis, and I use it for various appliances. It isn't really noisy for generators, but it is for a non-paying guest. I think maybe I'm overstepping my bounds, but, shoot, I'm doing that just being here. Maybe we all are.

Down the front is a trail over and through rocks for the brook sculpted into the front lawn. It is slippery through here, I'm thinking, and winding, and probably treacherous. Always in dreams I go where tracks are precarious.

Why do I stop here? I don't know. But I do.

The Dogs Are Talking

2006-12-04T16:28:00.000-08:00

The dogs are talking.

Oh, not in long sentences; more like the rustics I grew up with. Scoob is moving towards the door of an unknown apartment and I ask him where he's going and he says, in a growl so he won't be overheard and understood by outsiders, "Ahdunno."

There is a pup with a message. I know this somehow, and I see her, long fur flashing along a distant road. If she is stopped, she won't tell anyone anything, and there is no message attached to her collar. She is running down the road. She will tell me, most likely, "commonhome."

The village is like a ruin. It is white as southwestern desert sand but there is no dust, and the buildings start in dunes and build up running along into walls and then there is a buttress and cornice and a swirling rococo spire column and another and then exactly like music it wanes and slows and drawls into a dune. The city is composed, like a symphony.

It isn't dirty or dusty either. If you step through a heavy wooden door, any door, the inside is ornate wood paneling, oak and teak. It is dark and quiet inside. Here's one who I was once friendly with, and have neglected. I want to make nice. Everyone is lying about in torpor, woven art dropcloths covering overstuffed furniture.

"You should meet Reloj! Reloj's here."

"I've met Reloj." Bored, angry at the neglect, distant.

Reloj with two others wells up like a glass-domed centerpiece out of a table. He doesn't speak. They are just there in that tight space, being. I don't know if it's some sort of projection from the basement. Hey, I'm thinking, Reloj's here.

I must go out and work now. It is the time for work. Before was the time for lounging. There are four of us, and we are on a slanted street, and our lunch is in what looks to be a trash can on wheels. The delivery person parks it up the hill from me and my partner, near two other workers. I think, he might as well have parked it with us.

I go to the cart (actually a round cylinder) and open it. There is the bottom of many pizzas. How do they keep from spilling their toppings? They are upside down.

A smiling face among them. It's my daughter! I pull her out of her entwining with upside-down pizza. I hold her. She is covered with sauce, smiling. She only says, "So warm!"

I walk with her now. It is walking-with-daughter time. Up there the buildings wax, and back there they wane. Wait, hold on, this isn't the block I'm looking for. The streets have no names and the buildings have no numbers, nor any other distinction, even so far as separate walls. It's essentially an unknown number of streets of untold rooms.

There is a little dog somewhere, running to bring a message. I must find the little pup. I turn and start back the way I came. It's being lost time now.

Separation Anxiety

2006-11-26T09:33:00.000-08:00

I am being fired. Okay, I walk away from one of those starched impersonal euphemism-laden sessions while the headcutter is amidsentence, then I pause outside the door. Hey, wait a minute! I'm being canned as a passenger of this rapid transit joint!

I was riding the train, which was proceeding suddenly over a narrowing track which became a roller coaster rail over sheer mountain passes. This is supposed to be a dull urban commute. I was surprised we made it across gaps thinner than our tread. Maybe that's why I'm not needed aboard no more. I was distracting and exhibited a lack of confidence with my screaming.

I am going to the office, or was. The office is now a store which has nothing to do with me. I worked there before when it was something else. I'm not sure why the present establishment allows me to keep my computer and desk in a small space in the midst of their business. Funny. My prior employment allows me to remain on the premises, through either default or indifference, although I no longer work there, or anywhere, and anyway my former firm is long gone from the neighborhood. And yet the public conveyence to and fro that jobsite has just fired me.

I see my computer is gone. Oh, yeah, Niki J has taken it home. No, wait, she says, look. She has redecorated; there is now an arras over the monitor. I think about how that must look. The workers all about may think I begrudge them a look at my monitor which is ensconced on their grounds without justification.

I am outside now, walking home. I think again about Scoob. Always I have dreams in which I've lost sight of Scoob. There are canines abounding all up and down the road, some he cavorts with. He's not among 'em. But I see him now, leaping in distant shadows. I know I'll find him, but it scares me still.

I wonder when Maya our new little diva pup will make her charming way into my dreams.

Snakes in the Basement

2006-11-25T12:58:00.000-08:00

I stand in the corridor of an old castle and watch them file by. They are going to a funeral for a fallen warrior, all the full-time vets in funny hats and merit badges, and my old simple boss is dumpily in somber step with this crew. He doesn't even turn his head to look at me standing by the side.

I continue outside and mount my bike. I am riding down a remote lane along the moors now like in Jane Austen and Bob Thomas steps to roadside. He's a year older than me back in high school. That's him heading this story, taken at a reunion in 2005.

Bob thomas wants to know, "Are there snakes in the basement?" I had just seen a funeral procession headed there, so I said, No, no, all clear.

I ride out, about, and return. It's an indeterminate number of hours later. I am swarmed by an angry mob.

They are raging at me. What'd I do? I didn't do nuthin' - what'd I do? They are screaming and threatening. You done it, they yell. it was you? It was who? What'd I do.

Slowly at a high decibel the story slams by in jagged shards. Bob Thomas was bitten three times by water-headed cotton moccasins in that very basement I told him was secure. He has developed a severe palsy as a result, like a Parkinson's patient. Here's Bob Thomas now, making a shaky entrance.

I sit with him while the mob simmers, quiets, ambles off. I'm sorry, Bob Thomas, but I didn't know. He doesn't say anything, just shakes. I sit with him for a time, part in commiseration and apology, but mostly I'm thinking what will the mob do if I make to leave?

In that flat pastoral land, I sit sadly, showing great empathy, while Bob Thomas shakes, and the mob lurks, muttering growls audible across the grim country.

Job Site

2006-10-26T18:17:00.000-07:00

When I was young, I thought, one day I will drive, and be in charge of when we stop for the bathroom and where we go.

Now I am on a work crew, and I am the newest member. It isn't right, I think. I am sixty three and a half and yet I am the butt of jokes and the fool of the camp. We are engaged in a construction project and I know neither the process nor the materials. Here I must remove one wheel from a quad-wheeled vehicle of what looks like a flat platform of concrete with steel ribbing. How do I do that? I'm expected to know.

"Here," says the straw boss. "The bag goes in the bin."

It's like a sack of oats, burlap, and the "bin" is apparently one of those shelves up there along an uneven barn construction where stray boards over many years have been put to use with chaotic effect.

I think I should climb inside, a ladder which runs up the scafforlding. I squeeze by a shelf, find the passage does not go where it should.

Now I see there should be a ladder outside. That's how you do it. The boss does it, quickly and easily.

He tells me, you went to the job site this morning. You should be here. We form up here. Be here at 7:30 AM.

Now it's after that, next morning, and I see Joe, a co-worker, ambling toward the job site. I've missed it again. I can't do this. Joe is hispanic and sturdy and understanding. I say, I can't do this. He says, sure, I understand, I'll tell the bosses.

I just couldn't do this.

It Just Sits There

2006-10-22T15:13:00.000-07:00

It is a perfectly marvelous gadget. There's none like it anywhere. It will foretell the present with 100% accuracy. I can guarantee it.

It sits up on my desk, by my monitor. It has no wires going in, no antennae, not even an opening. I don't know how in the world it's powered. Nothing goes in. It's a sealed box of unknown material, sort of beige and about the size of a tissue container.

It just sits there.

I can open it up at anytime. I do. The front hinges away, you see. I find inscribed in the handwriting of da Vinci a perfect description as if it were a diary of events of the day passing, as I have experienced them. It is thus my own empirical record, to include sights, sounds, smells, prominence of each in accordance with how I sense. It is always written in Italian, however, so I must keyboard it into Babel to understand what it is telling me, but it is always simply a log of the day passing.

There is only one day, written on a page which is not paper, and when I close it up, nothing happens. It just sits there. And then in a day or a week I open it again and there is the day revealed on that grey paper which is not paper.

I can never hear anything whirring or scratching in there. I don't know where the box came from; it just appeared on my desk one day. I thought maybe it belongs to Niki J but she doesn't know where it came from either. We are both extremely nonplussed.

I try and open it earlier in the morning, thinking I'll find what the day will be like. After all, if it knows what is happening without anything telling it, then maybe it knows what will happen. But it always just reports the immediate past.

I know absolutely nothing more than I'm telling you.

Alone Now

2006-10-14T20:57:00.000-07:00

She was trying to calm her little sister. They were alone now, the four of them, but the two younger sisters had only themselves.

The little one, three, was moving away from the center, which was the kitchen, a sump of surrounding spirals of a winding path leading with flat walls to the upper reaches of the house. You followed the path which coiled like smoke up to the bedrooms. You were in clear sight all the way up because the walls lay on a level with the corridor between them.

She was trying to calm her little sister, but she herself wasn't calm. The older ones, her brother and her sister in their twenties, intended dumping the youngsters, she knew. They were going to Rouen, and then they would place the two little kids somewhere, maybe an orphanage, maybe worse, and they would then move to Paris and live together as husband and wife. She had heard them whispering in the house without walls, their excitement overriding their caution.

She did not even understand how a brother and sister could ever be at the same time husband and wife. But right now she had to soothe the younger one, so she hurried after her, winding on the floor slanted like a dish.

She could not see her in the bedroom. And then she did. She was curled in the bed of Josetta, their Husky mix. Where was Josetta? She hadn't been seen since the strangers came to tell them they were alone now.

She tried to coax her out of Josetta's bed, but there was trembling in her voice. The little one lay very still. Maybe she is hoping all this will go away.

True Life Experience

2006-10-12T08:50:00.000-07:00

There is an exquisite little girl in the right back seat of the old limo. She is fascinated by the turn of the handle which cranks the window. She rolls it up and down.

We are on our way to a camp function. I am a counselor. I smile at everyone. The little girl is part of the volunteer force selected for true life experiences in meeting inner-city kids for crafts and sing-alongs. She rolls the window up and down.

She notices I am as taken with her as she is with the cranking. She says,

"My father says that's how you teach the windows to operate themselves."

I laugh, agree that is a very profound way of looking at it. Yes, it's very good, I nod and smile. I don't want to admit I have no idea what her father means, or what the little girl understands from it.

All the day and thereafter, I try and figure it out. The limo we were riding in was an older one, and the little girl was from a prosperous family. It is possible she has never in her life ridden in a vehicle in which you had to operate the windows by hand.

Resonance in Shade

2006-09-14T08:53:00.000-07:00

There is a picture on my phone I do not recognize. Where did it come from? I'm the only one who shoots pictures on this phone. But I do not at all recognize this picture.

It is of shadows. It's silhouettes, I see now. There are two figures casting shadows within a gray rectangle upon a dark ground. They are in a certain pose, each aware of the other.

Who are they? And how did they come to be on my phone? I will send the picture to my computer account to look more closely.

I open the door of the Explorer and I glimpse something in a sandy shade of cover. It's a book we took out of Logos with others some time ago. It must've fallen between the seats and has lodged there ever since. It's been, what, weeks? I didn't miss it because I had others in a pile I dumped on the living room table.

I opened the sandy cover. Began scanning. Then reading.

I soon discovered a scene identical to the photo in my phone!

A couple of young women engaged in one another on a bed in an apartment with the bedside light on were apparently unknowingly casting their image in just sufficient glow for the purpose to the delight of passers on the street below.

I am frightened. It's a sign. But of what?

Chanteuse

2006-09-06T18:13:00.000-07:00

Someone brings a beer. One. For six or seven of us. Thanks. I should go for more. I don't.

We are in a bar which is a transition, like an airport. We pause here and drink and then go on. There is somebody and somebody's kin and the blonde, who is pretty and just past young. Everyone is relaxed. I go to the bathroom.

It is a large public place, and we mill about. The blonde appears on a balcony I thought was just a faux masonry piece up on the wall. She begins to sing to us. A lot of self-conscious guys who only want to do what they came for and leave.

She reassures us. It's all right. I always do this. And then she sings for us so very sweetly. It is really heartfelt. We pause and look at her and listen. It is all most endearing.

Then she exits through a door which wasn't there before, and immediately wasn't again.

The Shroud of Hozomeen

2006-08-20T10:15:00.000-07:00

Onscreen someone walks in a misty foreground.

Behind there looms a shrouded mountain. The scene is graygreen, and the soundtrack is low-pitched and ominous, like an invisible leopard breathing.

The lights come up and the picture disappears in a sequence of numbers. The fat guy stands up down front.

"Well, gentlemen?"

The three at the table are blinking, confused.

"This is all?" asked one of them.

"It's enough," assures the fat one, with a dismissive snort.

"We had expected more of a sampling..." comments another of the three at the desk.

"Now, gentlemen, you cannot expect me to give up the Secret of Mount Hozomeen in a preview."

"Yes, but - we really have insufficient data on which to base any commitment..."

"That's fine. Perfectly fine. I really must march-order here, if you'll excuse me. Dreamworks is expecting a showing tonight." The fat one begins to unplug his projector.

"Yes, yes, of course, by all means ... " one of them says.

Next the fat one moves to roll up the screen. He is obviously waiting. There's a conspiratorial grin on his mug. He keeps his unconcerned back to the desk to the rear of the screening room.

When he steps to take down his screen, he sees that the room is now empty.

Mysterious Island

2006-08-08T14:13:00.000-07:00

The pageantry, that was the main item. It was elaborate and in full military dress. It was all working quite well.

Our own private island in the Marshalls was flourishing. It became a transition zone for executives and finance officers from large corporations doing business with China. There had been threats. We were known to be secure.

They landed on our unmapped island and they stayed in our luxury hotel off any grid and they were met by emissaries from the Mainland and they flew away in Chinese aircraft, and their passports never snitched on them. As far as could be read by the State Department, they had taken a vacation with us on our island. Our competitors have laid claims that we are contributing to industrial espionage, perhaps the nuclear sort as well, but they are only jealous.

Our guests, they sometimes ask, you are doing this to snub Taiwan? You are partial to communism? We say, no, no, we are only partial to us. We came into possession of this island and looked about for a means of making it pay.

They come to us, our secret relay station, more and more often. We have certain considerations from the Mainland. We are able to attract some of the best staff in the South China Seas. Hong Kong is too crowded, and so is Singapore. For a business wishing quiet, or security, or discretion, they fly to our island without name and we take care of their concerns.

It is said by some, yes, but there are certain repurcussions? There are consequences? Oh, we reply, there are all sorts of secondary effects to all we do, each one of us. Some of the best intentions work out the worst.

But they never stop. Every week there are more of them. We smile and bow and escort them to their rooms and in the morning the Chinese will be here.

The Verities

2006-06-26T16:59:00.000-07:00

King James was displeased. There was a silly mechanism seeping into the plays by which characters were magically rendered unconscious by a rap on the head while some business was accomplished which required their unawarity.

He was a great believer in the verities as promoted by Jonson and Greene and the other Oxford dons. You should not see Agincourt in one instance and then be magically transported back to the moors the next. And no growth or gestation should occur in no two hours.

And no taps to the head should snuff the candle of consciousness for a brief interlude of the plot. The king was quite incensed about that.

And so after a performance of a play at the Globe, the actors were gathering on the stage for their curtain call. The royal bedchamber guard was there behind them all as they bowed, and when they rose they were greeted by a bash on the noggin from a heavy flat pewter slab.

You see, announced the royal centurian, some are stunned, some bloodied, some killed, yet none lapses into a dreamy slumber for two minutes then awakes with no further bother.

That is why there are no knockout bits in the old plays from the Jacoban era. That process did not begin again until the cowboy movies and the Hardy Boys books, in which Frank alone accounted for some five hundred concussions.

The Picture

2006-06-20T15:23:00.000-07:00

We are passing along the street. Niki J and me. Officers intercept us. We are to be honored in a photo. Over there. An automatic pistol lies on the street just out from the gutter, pointing in the direction we were headed, and two rounds in order have been placed before its muzzle in a cartoon fired position. We are to stand there to be photographed.

We do. It is taking some time. There is a whole crew of photographers, directors. Is this to be a commercial? Yes, yes, a commercial, answers someone in the crew, noncommital.

Now we are joined by others. It is becoming quite crowded, actually. Who are all these interlopers? I cannot even see the camera now. We are called into a restaurant, dark and ferny, to discuss.

Is this the establishment of the commercial? I ask another crewmember. Yes, yes, he answers, the establishment of the commercial. It's as if he does not speak English well enough to use his own words. He does not inspire confidence.

A lady is in charge of a lecture. She lights into us. I think, it must be the interlopers she means. The lecture is about our duty, and how we have fallen short of it. Them interlopers, I fume with her.

She addresses a guy to my right and just ahead. She says something that might be misconstrued, about she and he together, and then she smiles, bows her head; "Well, I guess we'll see about that."

She is flirting! With an interloper! And then it becomes clear. All of these have been on the shoot for a long time. The project has been going on forever. There is just this one still photograph! And yet it goes on. Every now and again they pick someone else from the street, and yet it's always the same.

Nothing is ever done. It is all just milling about and conflict and discord and chaos and then someone just walks off up the street and then they find someone else coming the other way.

What is this? I ask? It's just a picture, isn't it? I have directed my question with more hope than is justified by experience to yet another crew member.

"Yes, yes," he replies with an affirmative, confident nod. "Just a picture."

The Box

2006-06-05T14:46:00.000-07:00

She is asking so I am explaining. I say, I'm reading a book about it so should have more to tell shortly. Just not quite yet. She seems most anxious to know.

It is a box made out of some material they will maintain for all of us in the Home Office, I say. In there will be samples or readings or actual processes from our innards, and they will have us all wireless electrodes so that any change at all in our workings while out in the field, even as far as mental pictures, shall be noted and contrasted.

I go into detail explaining all I know about the box, which seems substantial and of a granite flavor, although it is probably some degree of heavy alloy. She didn't seem satisfied. My daughter, she said, she is going away. Tell me what you can of this box and these electrodes.

But that was all I knew. I didn't really even know what we were to be sent out about. Some sort of mission, I surmised, but that didn't satisfy her either. But what mission? Surely you must know where you are going and why you are going there? Else, why bother?

It is for the box, I say, but now I didn't seem convincing even to me.

Look, I say. I'll finish the book in a few days, and then I shall write you all about it. I say, the book is issued to all participants; surely your daughter has one?

But she merely looked very doubutful, gazing out along the trail we'd all be taking shortly. She unnerved me, did this mother, and I didn't know exactly why that should be. She's just from the old school, I decided. They're great worriers.

Look, I'll read the book, I said again. But she was no longer paying any attention to me. Singly and in pairs, youngsters were tripping off down the path.