The Drawings of Lascaux

The Federal Fisics Fellow has designated cartoons as a frequency range within the electromagnetic spectrum.

This is because we have come full circle since the Palaeolithic cave paintings of Lascaux. We have in that time achieved and lost language, and now rudiementary drawings are semiotic key once more.

This is why cartoons must be controlled. They are the essence of our language. So, just as you cannot direct X-rays at your neighbor, neither can you freely distribute cartoons.

The radio frequencies run from 30 GHz to 100 KHz. Cartoons run at the frequency of two a week. But they're more dangerous than microwave, or even ultraviolet. So they require screening, just like the sun.

Kids in school see cartoons on the scale of frequencies in their science texts. After several generations, it's quite natural to see them there. After all, the term "texts" is an anachronism, like "typing" and "dialing." Everything is pictures now.

I better wake up now. I do. And go back to sleep.

A young lady, very cute, is with me. I see this is all right, although my waketime being often pulls on me. We are sleeping together. I think, we've slept together, but I don't feel like we have. I think it's all right, although she appears a mite distance in the morning.

We have breakfast, then go out for breakfast. It is all a part of doing conventional acts, no matter our specific needs. I walk into the foyer of the restaurant and she lags behind. Yes, yes, I'm sure now, she is not happy with me.

I think right now is the time for another ritual. I must shower. I walk down corridors until showering begins happening. That's the way it's done now. You just walk down hallways until your act is presented.

There are open stalls everywhere along the way. I see there are convenient ones, just ahead.

I better wake up again.

The Deer Are Dancing!

We have moved into a palace. Somehow we are renting quarters which go on and on. I'm walking from room to room. I am now atop a waterwheel which I will casually walk over, and I say, we were supposed to move to another rental but we'll obviously have to cancel. Somehow this stately mansion fell into our laps.

I am walking to explore the rooms. I hear out beyond our stately wall border the sound of herding, the whoops of boys in the air. The deer come into our yard, and the goats. A little deer cringes pressing against the glass of the door to the yard. (It's a separate yard, just for this room, one of many.)

I open the door to allow in the little critters. I figger it's not right, but I can, being the resident proprietor, so I do.

I walk on. Here is a sunken den, and a room beyond. It's Reloj's room. I don't see him, but there are laughing friends about.

I go to the toilet. It's sealed up, full. I see I cannot use the toilet in this mansion. Must be others in this palace, but I concentrate on this one, so incongruous, like in a public bathouse. Near it is a smaller container, also sealed, but it tells me "You can spit here" so I do.

I step off towards where I've come. I see in passing one of the rooms on my way, what looks like a tribal stomp of deer, they're leaping in unison, facing one another in a circle on the lawn.

I go to find Niki J. Come, quickly, the deer are dancing!

When we are back near the room, we see it is a pride of young girls instead, leaping and smiling together.

Dennis Said

It is a grim desultory duty in gray dustones, without overt compulsion. We have to build a walkway beside the road. There doesn't seem to be any hurry about it. One or two drab creatures lift heavy sod and carry it lethargically. It is something we accept without joy and set to perform without hurry.

I walk up the line, behind a counter, and tell one I need my brush. She has my brush, which I need on the line, and she isn't producing it. She is one of those who sees her role as superior to my own, and her natural bearing assumes the like superiority. She condescends to answer in monotones and monosyllables. "Dennis said."

Dennis is some twerp from my ancient waketime history who believes his own destiny was set when he took slide rule in high school. Testosterone is troops with banners madly planted all over foreign fields. Dennis said.

I return to my place.

I now am called before a panel. Some serious officers are asking me questions. When I spoke with my son Will over the phone, sometimes I didn't hear. They lean closer.

Yes, yes, I say, I have hearing loss in my right ear, but that's sort of like being left handed, isn't it? You don't use both sides all the time. I am perfectly capable, I say. They don't think so. I attempt to convince them in rhetoric I am quite all right, can complete the mission, for, after all, what is there to hear in hauling dirt?

It is a Catch-22. I am pretending I'm not anxious to leave, indeed want to stay with this noir nonsense, which should convince them to kick me out. I act as if I don't want to be considered aged, damaged goods. I act like I care what they think. I am a good actor, and they are most predictable.


I think of the fatuous, foolish effects of cockamamie causes everywhere. Dennis said.

The Medium Massaged

There is a path along a waterway, an inlet, a sound, maybe? The tracks run along then up and over. I don't recognize it. Is it from another dream? It's vaguely military, as if a transit of a troop train.

Here, I say, we can get out here. It's a military base of a most meandering sort. I'm actually looking for a bathroom. (This is the most constant proof that your unconscious interacts with your physical realm; when I need one actually, I dream of searching for a bathroom, and there is always some barrier to using it in my dreams which keeps my waketime bed dry.)

I go through a lot of paths and buildings, finding nothing, until I wake.

Now here I am again. We have created quite a broadside. It will be most effective. I can imagine folks reading it and running out growling into the street.

We've done well, my partners and I. They don't have any identity other than my partners. The one with me now, my second, we are inspecting the manifesto as it comes out of the weave. There is a machine which will embroider our message into a sweater. It is very unique. We'll have pretty women wearing our message and an angry mob rushing out into the street, looking to right the wrong we point out.

A hitch in our stitch.

The first line is ready for inspection, a sample. It is utterly illegible. Oh, dear.

What to do? We are too clever by half. The medium mucks up the message. What good is the most brilliant design if no one knows what we're saying? It may as well be the most arcane surrealism, or the old sixties art deco posters advertising bands playing where you better know where `cause you'd never learn it from the poster.


Maybe, I say, we can do up the sweater anyway and send it down to LA and they can fix it? When it's broke, we reason, you send it to LA, where the prime fixers are.

Our other partner is sad. There he is in the next room, lying on the couch. He has thrown up something black. I understand it's the result of partner two reading him off about another project. But we need him now. I try and ignore his sadness and the black muck.

"Can you ship this sweater down to LA? I mean, after we have it complete?"

No answer.

Sinuous Saga

I am strangely associating with the jungle queen of the underclass in my old home town, Sheena Belle, as well as the class cretin, Boss. I don't know why I'm here, but we're up on the square in our old home town.

Sheena steps toward the street and she makes a puddle out of the asphalt by simply wading into it. Here she has a pool forming.

Now we're all in. Floating around the square in small singular rafts, like Venice. My sis-in-law Rose says, wait, hold it, and she comes aboard my raft from hers to seize......a cotton-headed water moccasin, as we called them. A deadly water snake. Rose has it by the neck near the head and near the tail, and she flings it wide to another part of the moat.

Switch to...dry land, in fact, nearly a desert, with an activity going on like Trades Day, except sparse. Another snake, maybe a rattler, rises in my path. This time a cowboy sort approaches and takes hold of the monster, expertly throttles it.

There seems to be a lot of snakes in my old town.


Woops, someone has run into us. I'm in an auto, and next to me is Reloj in another, and an old guy turning across our bows has included us both in his circuit. (Strange that he's coming from our left, perpendicular to the road where we wait at a stoplight, and he's somehow turning to a road to our right. Dreams make funny traffic patterns.)

We're all calm, and realizing there will be a long wait for the traffic report. I have in an old '57 Chevy a wrinkled front fender and grill, and Reloj has some damage in his vehicle, which I never see.

I spend the time like you do while waiting for the police. I am sculpting the figure of the old man who has hit us in clay. I don't think I have the roll of his pompodour right. Maybe the police has a sculptor to fix my work.

I hear the interview now between the old man and the claims adjuster. He tells her the wreck has dislodged all his utilities, including gas and power and "Sears." The concussion or something has ruptured his Sears. Hmnnn.

The adjuster says, "That's fifty thousand, right there." Wow.

I try and think how maybe this wreck has broken my K-mart...