 
Build Your Own Dog

\-- and other stories --

Robert Brady
Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2017 Robert Brady

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# Preface

Robert Brady's The Big Elsewhere recounted illuminations from closely-observed decades of homesteading on the slopes of Mount Horai, overlooking Lake Biwa, beyond the eastern hills of Kyoto; an idyllic personal perspective disrupted only by passing typhoons and marauding monkeys.

This new collection of fragmentary fictions and metamorphic musings gradually formed over those same decades, spinning as tales do into higher definition, greater velocity, more critical mass, chronicling another, fundamentally non-parallel big elsewhere, the psychosocial mindscape and discordant ethos of a richly-imagined yet eerily-familiar New World — in which the constitutionally-mandated inalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are hounded bigtime by a marauding Macy's parade of self-possessed individuals who appear not simply fantasized but channeled. Real-time entities, with histories and minds of their own, each doggedly constructing "other ways to perceive what we mislabel reality."

It's probably not a coincidence that the author spent some of his formative years scanning the airwaves at a US Air Force intelligence facility in Okinawa, learning through deep listening to recognize individual Chinese military radio operators, even extrapolating distinct personalities from their Morse code "fingerprints." Similarly, in a way, to how Chinese medical practitioners read volumes from a patient's pulse, Bob has learned to tune into and diagnose the otherwise ethereal Zeitgeist.

In the decades since many of this book's transmissions were first transcribed, social perceptions of normality have plunged off the charts and off the map, and the formerly unimaginable has become merely commonplace. Alternate facts and "fake news" reveal truth, as always, to be more bizarre than fiction, and the most far-out projections of science fiction eventually become simply accurate predictions of the all but inevitable.

Read and ponder these kernels of event-horizon conjecture now, before they transform into common wisdom...

— Ken Rodgers  
Managing Editor, Kyoto Journal
Table of Contents

Preface

The Very First

Little-Known Elevator Facts

Langdon Makes a Career Choice

All Except Blue

Build Your Own Dog

What I Meant to Say

A Touch of Amusement

Tao Te Virginia

Is There Life at Desks?

Cubist Cuisine

How Golden Arches Got His Name

The Forest of the Accountants

Little Yellow Flower

My Brigitte

Langdon Confronts the Enigma of Laundry

The Goddamned Tunafish Sandwich

Ask Dr. Clarity: Is the Universe Benevolent?

Twisted Shadows

The James Dean Parameters

From Here the Night Goes on Forever

Rambo Gets the Mail

Balshank Rules

Pieces of Fame

Makeup

L.I.T.A.

Character Actor Planet

Langdon Fathoms Normalcy

Throwing Up Off the Bridges of Madison County

Exploring the Upper Reaches of Shit Creek

Instant Office

The Deal

Been Down One Time

Time Soup

Langdon Buys Brown Shoes

Rumors About Leonard

All I Ever Do

Carpentry

Ask Dr. Clarity: A Sense of Syntax

Cutout

A Structure Named Zelda

The World's Largest Pen

Ask Dr. Clarity: My Neopaleo-ultramacrogeocentric Diet

The Morning Falls into Langdon's Hands

Sleazy Gods and Rat Frames

Whirlwind

The End of the Human Race as I Know It

There Goes the Neighborhood

Other titles by Robert Brady

# The Very First

The very first discovery of America, or of the land mass that would one day be known as America, took place on what would have been April 27, 49,926 B.C., at 3:22 in the afternoon, Pacific Standard Time, when Aijuk, a young hunter who had been pursuing a wounded caribou for two days, jumped from a large ice floe onto the uninhabited continent now known as North America, beating out Columbus by 48,500 years or so.

But no countries are named after Aijuk; no cities, streets or universities, automobiles, rivers, public squares, expressways, moving picture corporations, apartment projects, dry cleaners-- no, not even a cigar bears the name of America's true discoverer.

Because when Aijuk's foot became the very first to touch the now hallowed ground of the broad American continent, Aijuk didn't claim the land for any king, god, nation or manifest destiny; he held no ceremony, had no quoteworthy statement ready for the occasion, didn't even carve his name on a rock.

In fact, such thoughts never even entered his head, because to him it was all one world. Aijuk simply scanned the horizon, gave up on the caribou and jumped back out of America.

Such was the clarity of mind in those long-gone days.

# Little-Known Elevator Facts

In the millions of years before elevators were invented, human beings rarely went straight up or down.

Early versions of the elevator were largely failures, moving sideways if they moved at all. Over millennia, those devices evolved into the motor vehicles we know today.

Say "elevator" to a giraffe, and it will stare at you blankly.

Elevators are never seen mating, since they reproduce asexually.

The concept of the elevator is only vaguely hinted at in the world's holy books.

Sigmund Freud secretly believed elevators to be highly erotic symbols of both sexes, and loved to ride up and down in them.

Napoleon Bonaparte, like most people in history, never heard of an elevator.

# Langdon Makes a Career Choice

It began in a company elevator. Langdon, an eccentric but mild-mannered low-echelon employee, was alone there, chewing on a large, sticky caramel as he rose toward his elevator-sized cubicle on the 84th floor, when the Chairman of the Board crowded on with several junior executives, whose suits and grooming contrasted exceedingly with Langdon's "pajama suit" and "sasquatch" haircut, which caught the corner of the Chairman's predatory eye.

"Bangman, is it? Lamprey?"

"Mernerg..." Langdon responded, from far around the caramel.

"Oh. Well, Mernerg, how are things going in---- where are you anyway, Mernerg?"

"Fack mith..." managed Langdon.

"Fack Mith? What the hell is that? Smedley, is there something going on here behind my back?"

"No sir, it's a mixup of some kind, sir." The junior executive raised an eyebrow at Langdon in the back of the elevator. The eye under the brow fell to Langdon's do-it-yourself birkenstocks.

"Mixup, my ass. Mernerg, I like your style. You've got a rough cob look about you, the kind I just don't see anymore. Have a full report on Fack Mith ready for the board meeting at 3 o'clock on Wednesday."

"Borgle!" answered Langdon as the Chairman and his flock bustled out through the open doors. This was Langdon's big chance! To create Fack Mith from whole cloth and ride it all the way to the top!

But on second thought Langdon had plans of his own, so he bought a brown suit and brown shoes, got his hair cut like the Chairman, stopped chewing caramels and took the stairs, and they never found him again.

# All Except Blue

There had been a time when blue was nowhere near Arnold's favorite color, but ever since Maybelle had left for reasons he'd later found heavily underlined with red and other colors in one of her copies of Upward Woman, in an article called Is an Overweight Husband Holding You Down? 10 Reasons to Leave the Fat Behind, colors had looked repulsive to Arnold. All except blue.

Right then he'd put on his blue hat, blue shirt, blue pants and not-yet blue shoes and gone out into the repulsively colored world to buy an industrial spray gun and as many gallons of blue paint as his soon-to-be blue van could carry.

After blueing the van and his shoes, he started on the lawn; when that was blue to the roots, he began to blue the house. It took a while, including the windowpanes, then he took his blue inside, where it was really needed.

He painted the living room and everything in it blue: blue furniture, curtains, paintings, carpets. Then he rested his blue bulk on the damp blue sofa and listened as the characters of all his favorite soaps tried in vain to break through the blue membrane that covered the tv screen like it covered his life.

Then he started on the rest of the interior, and Arnold's world began to acquire the only color. He painted all the doors blue, the books blue, photographs blue, lamps blue, blankets and sheets blue, doorknobs, CDs, bed, bathtub, toilet, mirrors, clothing, light bulbs, potted plants, appliances blue-- he painted for days and nights without resting until the house and everything in it looked like he felt.

By the time he ordered fresh groceries on the blue phone in the blue kitchen, Arnold had a blue hunger; his voice sounded blue. When the groceries came, the mis-hued but curious delivery boy tried to see past Arnold into the blue depths of the sheer blue house from the blue lawn, but Arnold cut him off with his blue shoulder. This blue was his, and his alone.

He paid the boy in blue money and chased him off with a blue brush, then painted all the groceries blue. By the time he'd finished, everything was suitably chromatic. To celebrate, he went to the blue fridge, got a cold blue can of beer and cooked himself a nice blue steak in the blue frying pan over a blue flame.

Yes, it looked as though Arnold was regaining control of his life. He was even more sure of this when his nosey and disgustingly chromatic neighbor Mrs. Moore came over to inquire about his suddenly blue house, lawn, windows, and person. He painted the entire Mrs. Moore.

About an hour before the blue police came in their blue police car and began pounding on the blue front door, Arnold set out in his blue van to find Maybelle and do her too, in his very own blue.

After that, the sky was the limit.

# Build Your Own Dog

I'm a world-class genetic designer who got fired for nothing more than clonehacking a shark-collie-clam hybrid to use as a lab mascot. Just a fun thing, cute as hell-- and quiet, if you don't get too close, but what's a couple of fingers nowadays? Beats me why the management and stockholders are so damn fussy, when they themselves have all been pretty much, if not completely, redesigned. A lot of them by me.

Anyway, I figured I'd put my unappreciated expertise to work doing something cool that I could still make a good living at – maybe even get rich, if I can franchise it – so for starters I invented Build Your Own Dog, a DNA-Lego kind of thing, best I can describe it. Simple enough for a schoolkid, the BYOD Kit requires only a few basic additional tools and ingredients found in any kitchen, bathroom, garage or living creature. This is a pet revolution you can do at home without a degree, using a blender, spatula, basting tray, microwave and meat thermometer.

Up until BYOD, if you wanted a dog you either had to go to a reputable pet store and shell out a fortune for the conventional neurotic thoroughbred of your choice, from yappolapdog to fetchosticko to huntokillomaimo, or else go to the animal shelter or the dog pound and choose whatever pre-owned, escapee, secondhand who-knows-how-used dog is available from among the leftovers. Or you had to kidnap a dog that answers to someone else and will never like you, all basically lousy choices when seeking the perfect life companion to replace who or whatever.

Because the fact is, when you go the conventional DNA route, even if you go thoroughbred (read inbred) you never know what you're going to get; it's a genetic shot in the dark. Is that what you want? Hell no! You want what you want, right? Well, now's your chance to invest in a sure thing!

With the new BYOD Kit you can blend, culture and then "gestate" the dog that precisely meets your canine requirements. Just pop your carefully prepared, self-designed Doggy Blend into the tweaked microwave (set for thawing-cloning) for about 10 days and Ding! There you have it: a freshly cultured puppy that will grow to precisely the size, shade, hair type and personality you input back at the beginning via your genome programming chart. (Note: attack dogs limited to pony size in USA.)

BYOD Kits will soon be available at any PetKlone store, ProtoPet vending machine or InstaPet distributor. Just follow the clear instructions on the package to create the exact canine you want, of size and temperament ideally suited to your residential space, time budget, defense requirements and restraining strength.

I must add that, thanks to our accelerating research it won't be long before you'll be able to instantly enjoy any pet or combo you can imagine (cat/bird/pony combos soon to be online).

From there it'll be only a short sidestep to Sexual Companion On Demand, so sign up for our free newsletter today!

# What I Meant to Say

It wasn't what I meant to say.

I meant to say "Please get out of my way," but what came out was "Will you marry me?"

She meant to answer "Are you out of your freaking mind?" But she said "Yes, of course. How about Saturday?"

We'd met on the same bus three days earlier, when I'd dropped my lunch into her lap and could tell by her face that she'd meant to shout "You clumsy jerk!" but what came out was "Would you like to have dinner at my place tonight?"

I'd answered "Yes, certainly, I'd love to," when all I'd meant to say was "Sorry I have to scoop up these nuts like this."

So to avoid a ticklish situation I headed for the movies alone right after work that night, but wound up at her place just as she'd been about to take a nice hot bath and get to bed early; we had a hasty supper and made love briefly.

She called me Jim, though that isn't my name; I called her Joan, but that's not her name either.

Anyhow, the Justice of the Peace asked me "Do you take this woman to be your lawfully wedded wife?" when he looked like he meant "Is Charlie's Angels on tonight?"

I responded "I do," though I meant "Is that an emergency exit over there?"

She said "I do" as well, but her eyes asked "Is this really legal?"

We've been married, I guess you could call it, for ten years now, and have three kids, named Eddie, Billy and Mary, or Chester, Simon and Ashley, depending on who calls them.

I guess I'll never understand women, but that's probably not what I meant to say.

# A Touch of Amusement

I had never seen a funnier waiting room in my life.

The expression on the walls, the look on the door, combined to drive me into shrieks of laughter.

I was rolling on the floor, my sides aching, tears streaming from my eyes when the secretary called my name, announcing my turn for the job interview.

I straightened myself as best I could and brushed the floor dust off my suit, still chuckling at the color of the carpet and stifling guffaws at the lamps on the hilarious stands at the ends of the outrageous couch, as I gathered my papers together and wiped my eyes with my tie.

By the time I opened the door to the inner office, overcoming a new surge of laughter at the sight of the ludicrous doorknob, I had gained sufficient control over myself to present a reasonably staid appearance, suited to the position for which I was applying, that of bank manager.

The board of interviewers, however, was seated around such a side-splitting table that I lost control at once and doubled over roaring, dropping my briefcase onto a carpet even funnier than the one I'd just left, and going into absolute convulsions at each boffo question the comical crew asked me.

It was too much; I nearly crack up even now, just thinking about it.

Anyway, I howled all the way through the interview – you should have seen their ties! I simply couldn't contain myself!

At the end of it, they had the secretary help me out of there – I was jelly by then – and later I was informed that I had gotten the job.

As you can see, I don't laugh at all any more. Now that I actually manage money, it isn't the least bit funny.

# Tao Te Virginia

To know the way of constant contentment

is to know Virginia.

To know Virginia is to achieve repletion.

To achieve repletion is to perceive harmony.

To perceive harmony is to learn discernment.

To learn discernment is to know Virginia's sister.

To know Virginia's sister is to understand the prospect.

To understand the prospect

is to know Virginia and her sister at the same time.

To know Virginia and her sister at the same time

is to experience everything in the universe.

To experience everything in the universe

is to perceive risk.

To perceive risk is to learn that Virginia's

and her sister's husbands are large men of little compassion.

To understand this is to become the nameless uncarved block

that is freedom from desire and get the hell out of there fast.

The way is that by which one avoids consequences.

# Is There Life at Desks?

This is a question of tremendous significance for our day, when there are more desks in the world than ever before in history. Thus the profound resonance of the worldwide ongoing scientific research into whether or not a deskic environment can support life in any form. Investigations thus far strongly indicate the negative, some experts indeed being of the opinion that life as we know it has never existed at desks, despite apparent indications to the contrary.

Earlier in this century, having examined thousands of deskic artifacts from throughout the deskbound universe, including scrapings and fossils, as well as petrified, atrophied and mummified remains, researchers tentatively agreed that desks might harbor some sort of paperpushing life form, but it was later determined that all of those studies, themselves performed in large part at desks, were therefore seriously skewed by sedentary bias.

Subsequent broad-spectrum vital field analysis showed that the deskic specimens had in fact never developed to the stage commonly acknowledged as 'truly living'; yet even now, millions of people each day leave their homes to sit at desks for hours at a time, in the irrational conviction that at those desks they have a life, despite the mounting scientific evidence that tells us this simply is not true.

Still, people will be people; many also believe that there is life on Mars; but if these earthly studies tell us anything at all, it's that Mars is very likely covered with desks.

# Cubist Cuisine

For Picasso, the question of steak and potatoes was essentially architectural. In his earlier meals, the entire flavor range suggested a gastronomic palette of geometric leftovers, though these works were saved from formulaic reduction by an irrational light, achieved through chopping, dicing and mashing.

In the meals from the end of 1909, particularly the lunches, Picasso seemed to plan his meals in terms of fundamental vegetarianism; the effect of shimmering energy and indeterminate form was the consequence of making each course a little snack, rather than a whole meal-- a dietary caprice that unlocked a whole new dimension of post-prandial energy.

The first truly great cubist lunches were prepared by Picasso in the summer of 1910. Before then, it had been said -- primarily due to the cooking of Georges Braque -- that cubist meals banished flavor and replaced it with mass. But no longer. Picasso's lunches from that summer were a panoply of Mediterranean lucidity. No meals could be more gastronomically articulate, while at the same time more flavorfully withdrawn yet suggestive. They evoked what Whistler might have produced had he given up parboiling and mastered the Cuisinart.

The most remarkable instances of Picasso's ability to conjure up a gustatory presence from a negligible cupboard were the three cubist banquets he prepared in the autumn of 1910. Even in these multiple viewpoint preparations, the ingredients are never comprehensive or conclusive, and the small, varying facets register only tiny, fastidious changes in the cook's outlook.

These meals didn't set out heroically to gastronomize a new space and a new time; they demonstrated instead the power of a small set of cliches--- a tilted wedge implying "cheese," the repeated wavy horizontal strokes and ovoids that say "bacon and beans"--- to conjure up an entire meal.

The revelation of subtlety and humanity in the seemingly hermetic cubist cuisine is the real triumph of Picasso's cooking. Cubist cookery thus recalls less the austere self-sufficiency and the ground-clearing ambitions of other early modernist cooks than the real spirit of early potluck--- the marriage of wild speculation with an essential empiricism that shies away from any certain or conclusive statement, and makes each course, from soup to nuts, say "What is this?" rather than "This again?"

# How Golden Arches Got His Name

He had fasted for many days as he wandered the prairie naked, far from his tribe, seeking the vision that would make him a shaman. But he had heard no voice, only the sky-wide sweep of the prairie grasses, shoulder-high, whispering the long word of the wind.

Then one evening as he stood on a low hill overlooking a broad plain covered with buffalo as far as the eye could see, he suddenly was able to look further, and envisioned a great chain of hamburger stands, highlighting the shoulders of six-lane expressways through a great, rich city rising higher and higher into the sky where junior executives from renowned universities worked at keyboards in cubicles among the clouds from 9 to 5 above a howling metropolitan area surrounded by vast stockyards linked to key railway connections festooned with wire that led off to other great cities and international airports. He envisioned a Pontiac dealership with many perks, and returned at once to his tribe to share his vision with the elders, who when he told them could not stop laughing; for what could possibly be the value of such mad visions?

He was definitely not shaman material, they concluded, and assigned him the task of picking berries with the old women, who tagged him with the nickname he bore till the end of his days.

# The Forest of the Accountants

In the Forest of the Accountants every tree is numbered; every branch, twig, leaf and root has its FASB subenumeration, for to these dedicated public employees, nothing is more important than the Forest.

It has long been legally required that the squads of CFAs maintain detailed physical records of every aspect of the Forest, so that each year at the great Natural Accounting they can stand before the Forest Board and render a full, fair, professional and certifiable accounting of all that has transpired in the "Great Forest of the Accountants," as it has come to be called by the remaining locals, the elder folk who, despite the constant enumerative comings and goings, still manage to eke out a living in the vicinity by selling gall ink and foolscap, among other arboreal and calligraphic items.

But the number of elders is diminishing, as are users of quills. Few of the new wish to live near the Forest, let alone within it, it is such a shaded and enumerated place, especially given the dedicated staff who move everywhere along the prescribed paths and limbs, branding serial numbers into trunks and branches, scribbling lengthy digits in the hefty green ledgers that their muscular female assistants lug around in official wheelbarrows.

If a member of the remaining public were for some reason to go into the forest and look closely at the trunks of the trees, he would see a series of lengthy hyphenated numbers branded there, and if he were inclined to look upward, he would find that the undersurface of each leaf is inscribed, with white ink – as on a shard of Mesopotamian pottery in one of the former museums – in concise accountancy script, the archival number of that arboreal item, which, when at last in its Autumn it falls from its former place, is stored in the appropriate tree/limb/branch/twig/leaf file in the vast Forest Accountancy Building, which is honeycombed with towering wooden cabinets and dimly lit, low-ceilinged accounting offices up under the eaves, whence each Autumn a swarm of fallen-leaf-specialized CFAs emerges into the seasonal gusts to collect the swirling leaves of their sector and add each respective numbered item to its earlier entries in the big brown Leaf Books.

These accountants are now vigorously in season, pursuing leaves all along the frivolous wind, which itself has stubbornly never been accountable, ever vexing the orderly tabulators in pursuit of the stipulated neatness that puts every tree-related item in its assigned place, the organizational key to the stable civilization now remaining.

Since those officials in their many thousands are for the most part young males, they are suitably attired and generally bespectacled-- men dressed for forest as for office. In good time, they account for all the Autumn leaves, cross-checking their tallies with the Spring Leaf Emergence Tabulations. For this purpose there is a dedicated software system for Forest Assessment and Correlation, part of the Forest Algorithmic Calculations that are ever crunching numbers in the big gray Forest Information Technology Complex in another area of the forest, its great computations committed to cybermemory far from prying eyes.

For the Forest never sleeps, and Forest data is strictly confidential, being crucial to the remaining national interest; so it must remain unsullied in its accuracy and purity. Who knows what disasters might befall, if this information were to come into the hands of agents from other rumored national forests?

Therefore it is the accountants with their foresty brown shoes who populate the forest, for even in Spring and Summer – when in ancient times families went into the forest for picnics or to gather mushrooms and wild plants, then again in the Autumn for nuts and other edibles – the forest is swarming with various types of government enumerators.

Indeed, by early Spring, new accountants fresh out of the National Forest Accounting Institute are already scurrying here and there with their ladders, pulleys, ropes and hoists, fulfilling their internships as they set out to record and inscribe the new twigs and buds as quickly as they emerge. What a busy place the forest is then! The general public never goes there during this time of vital national importance. The few remaining lovers and other diminishing forms of wildlife stay away as well, for they know that even the night forest is filled with undergraduate trainees probing everywhere with their forest lights to check nocturnal root system activities, or, if in their accountancy studies they are so specializing, mossy aggregations.

All working hard on behalf of a "Greener Future for Everyone Who Remains."

# Little Yellow Flower

Oh little yellow flower

can you cure disease

Do you contain a useful chemical

Can you make a nice cup of tea

or dye my shirt

How about a skin cream

Would you look good as a centerpiece

Maybe on my lapel

If you're rare I could save you

the Earth is a pal of mine

Hey flower I'm trying to relate

Otherwise get off my lawn.

# My Brigitte

It was in earlier times, when such things were still possible, when the distinctions between imagined and real were clearer than they are now. I approached the door to the bathroom; when I reached it I paused to listen to the whispery feminine voice singing a lilting melody within. Was it really her?

I turned the knob slowly, opened the door and stepped into the large pink interior, walking further into the fragrant steam so I could see her at last just as I'd imagined her and there she was: the one and only Brigitte Bardot, age 25, slathered in fragrant soapsuds.

She looked up at me with those eyes, exactly as I'd imagined.

"Who are you?" She said, in that voice with the whisper at the edge.

"I am who am," I said thickly.

"What do you want?"

"Everything," I said. Plus my eyes.

"You mean, right here?" her faux surprise gave a new dimension to ravishing.

"Yes, this is as erotic as possible, like any place you are..."

"What do you want me to do?" She asked with lowered eyes, and the innocently sensuous beginnings of that smile she could stop trains with.

"Well, you go ahead, Brigitte, you do whatever you want, have your way with me, that would be sexiest."

"I can't; this is your imagining! I'm really just you, I can only do what you want me to!"

"What do you mean you're me? You're Brigitte Bardot!"

"Open your eyes," she said.

I did so and beheld the company CEO mouthing off to the board at full tirade, his usual froth about efficiency. Brigitte was right. I went back and told her so. "You're right: you are me."

"Of course I am; the real Brigitte is in her eighties now! She doesn't have anything like these anymore," she said, standing up in full naturally cantilevered magnificence, letting the suds slide slowly down that sleek tan and silken skin as my CEO barged in once more with impatience, asking me if I had any of that long overdue feedback yet, on the intensified imagineering project.

"Can I touch them?" I asked him. "Do they feel real?"

The board unanimously agreed that I should take some time off, to reclarify the distinctions between imagination and reality.

Bad for the project, but what can I say, being this far out of my mind?

My Brigitte has no real objections.

# Langdon Confronts the Enigma of Laundry

There they were, empty of him-- shirt, pants, socks, underwear-- forlorn and bereft, like a body without a soul; but they'd been pretty grungy, if truth be told.

Langdon himself felt a little lonely at the sight of them as he stood there naked in the laundromat, transferring his vacant clothing from the washer to the drier.

He had no pockets, so he took the other quarter from his other ear and plunked it into the drier slot, then sat back in the plastic chair to watch his garments in free fall, much as he himself was watched by the faces pressed against the laundromat window.

What is it about laundry in flux, Langdon wondered; what is so poignant about damp, empty garments heedlessly flung about on their own in a torrid atmosphere, having just been spun madly as a shapeless mass in a soup of soap?

Were there not strong parallels here, from which one could obtain the guidance needed to function optimally in the laundromat of life? That the objective was a modicum of transient purity went without saying, so Langdon did not say it; instead, his mind spun on and on, lifting and dropping empty thoughts in free fall until they were clean and dry and fresh once more, when he resumed his thoughts and left the laundromat, mentally much cleaner than when he had entered.

Before he'd even reached the wide-eyed crowd at the bus stop, he remembered his clothes.

# The Goddamned Tunafish Sandwich

At the time, during my junior year at college I'd planned to write a story about the illicit romance between yours truly and hers, but every time I got a chance to husband myself to her while hers was off professing English Lit we sort of got paralyzed with need and imminence, and hung around the kitchen intellectualizing, unafraid to savor lunch but afraid to broach the bed or related subjects while she made the goddamned tunafish sandwich and I sat there cursing the fundament of my nonchalance, wondering if this was really only going to be what it appeared to be, i.e., lunch, and if this sort of thing happened to everybody, or even anybody, else.

I also cursed the erotic muses that were lying idle with such a vast subject available, at which point Emerson would intrude with his views on the fitness, indeed absolute rightness, of the common as subject for writing, with Hawthorne not far behind rhetoricizing apostrophically to the Chicken of the Sea while Whitman pointed out with an elbow that the grass wasn't getting any greener, when Thoreau would come rowing over wishing he'd had tuna at Walden to go with his hoecake and beans, and it would get so crowded in that small kitchen that there wasn't enough tuna to go around, so Jesus would make an appearance and do the loaves and fishes with a parable or two, but by then it was time to get back to Existentialism 301, and the only thing accomplished was the goddamned tunafish sandwich and the miracle that she and I hadn't even touched each other.

Time after time this happened, throughout that whole semester, with various personages attending, sometimes Homer, Conrad, Veblen, Hamsun, Joyce or any of the hundreds of other great tuna-related minds popping into the kitchen with their bit of relevance, something to do with the wine-dark sea, or dining habits, or the economics of it all; Swedenborg would lay his charts out on the table, Twain would reminisce about the River, Proust would bring madeleines, stay and talk endlessly of the one that got away.

Our romance, as I'd initially thought it, was soon becalmed in a widening intellectual and spiritual sargasso that began to characterize those stolen moments, for by then we never knew who was going to show up, tuna being a universal sandwich having roots in aspects of culture and intellectual development as diverse as the origins of Babylonian civilization and the whereabouts of Ahab. Melville, of course, dropped in on occasion, with long riffs about what he used to have for lunch in Nantucket between bouts with the white whale, roommate of the tunafish.

# ASK DR. CLARITY:  
Is the Universe Benevolent?

Dear Dr. Clarity:

Is the Universe Benevolent? My religious advisors assure me that the universe is benevolent, whereas my homeless acquaintances and friends with terminal illnesses say yeah, sure. What do you think about this?

Young man in doubt

Dear YMID: Like ten million mothers-in-law in the same room, everything is relative. If you ask an individual who is being devoured by a shark as to whether or not the universe is benevolent, I think you'd be pretty likely to get an answer on the negative side, whereas if you asked the shark, you'd definitely get a nod in the affirmative.

This doesn't necessarily mean that I equate religious advisers with sharks and advisees as shark food, at least in print; look what happened to Salman Rushdie. Transcendentally speaking, however, which is the only way to address a subject I wouldn't otherwise touch with a barge pole but I'm doing a paid news column here, it's all a matter of balance, such as in the equation shark plus victim equals satisfaction for one of the parties.

Now as to which of us might wish to be the human factor in this necessary equation, I'll let you go first with the shark. Just because some celibate says the universe is benevolent is no reason I have to be; you think I'm crazy?

The universe is definitely balanced, though, apart from celibacy, Wall Street and national budgets. The shark's hungry benevolence is fed by the victim's unfortunate benevolence. As this indicates, benevolence isn't always fortunate, or volitional; the universe has more important things to do than go around asking for volunteers, it would never get anything done. Hey shark, you want to go hungry? Hey mister, wanna be shark food? Don't make me laugh.

Benevolence can't be merciful in such situations; look at the IRS, for example; they tax the lifeblood out of hardworking columnists like myself so that senators living the lush life in DC can give military toxic waste storage depots to their constituents out in the boonies; it all balances out.

As to whether one can rightly claim sharks, homelessness, terminal illness, government, toxic waste depots etc. as embodiments of benevolence, I guess one has to be fully vested in either religion or politics to make that claim-- of course with one hand out.

So benevolence yeah, ok, but not in my backyard. And a bit of parting advice: as a constituent of this great equation, don't drink the water in the boonies. In return, I'd like to be assured of your vote in my upcoming senatorial campaign.

Yours in the quest for truth,  
Clarity

# Twisted Shadows

Watching this classic movie from decades ago I'm still surprised to see the shamus come out of the sweltering LA hospital building into the hot day with a long-ash cigarette hanging from his lip, wearing a heavy fedora, suit, shirt, wide tie and two-toned actual leather shoes, walk up to his shiny new future-classic car (worth a fortune today, if you could find one) with the key held like a dagger and actually stab the key right into the door, then twist it to unlock--

Then he gets into the sunbroiled car with its fuzzy fabric seats, hot chrome and no air conditioning, hurries to lower the driver-side window by whirling a big silverknobbed handle on the door, turn by turn by turn by turn, unlocks and pushes open the vent window, mashes the old butt into the chrome ashtray that's sticking all ashy out of the middle of the hardwood dashboard, taps out another cig, corktip, maybe a Fatima.

Pushing in the faux-ivory lighter knob right next to the ashtray, he waits in the heat for the coil to get hot, then pulls it out and presses the glow against the new "coffin nail" they used to call them even then-- they knew it was slow suicide-- but it was cool, everybody dying together that way.

With no seatbelt anywhere in the picture he starts the big engine, turns on the radio to some cool jazz, gets the heavy metal monster moving via the stick shift in first on the steering column 1 2 3 R and a big clunky clutch pedal.

Steering with a "Busty-Broad" suicide knob on the faux-ivory wheel, he heads out into no-traffic rush hour, gets where he's going a few minutes later - easy parking in those days.

In the 5-cent coffee diner with the greasy swinging door he pretends to read the newspaper and listen to the radio before making an important call on the heavy iron wall phone with an entire city phone book hanging from a thick chain that you used to see in diners and street-corner phone booths all over LA, where the payphone coin sizes made different bingbong sounds to verify payment.

From that point the plot develops fast, things begin to get serious, bullets fly, blood flows, secrets are spilled, prison bars loom like twisted shadows, then it's over. It's not easy to travel in the past. Those were classy and dangerous years; few made it out alive for any length of time.

When I emerge into the hot night air after the noir double feature I'm right away in a hurry, my car already chirping with impatience when it senses I'm near.

# The James Dean Parameters

We're all more or less aware of the parade of James Dean look-alikes that Hollywood has trotted out over the years since James Dean finally gave us all a precise idea of what a James Dean look-alike should look like. But how many of us are aware of the privilege we enjoy in this regard?

It wasn't always this way. People in 1912, to pinpoint just one example, hadn't the slightest idea what a James Dean look-alike should look like, since James Dean hadn't been born yet, so there was no one to resemble, a stark deficiency that stretched from the mid-1950s all the way back to the beginning of the human race!

But even though no one knows for sure who was the very first guy to look like James Dean, it's certain there were quite a number of pre-James Dean James Dean look-alikes before the person we now know and accept as exemplifying authentic James Deanicity came along and established once and for all what all subsequent James Dean look-alikes would have to look like.

As for the Deanless millennia, although via the movies we can't look very far back, historical detective work has led James Dean look-alike experts to conclude that the earliest potentially verifiable example of a pre-James Dean James Dean look-alike lived somewhere in northern Russia early in the seventh century A.D.

Of course that individual was quite a bit ahead of his time, as were the many previous - and subsequent - pre-James Dean James Dean look-alikes all the way through history, until James Dean himself came along and at last gave them all someone to look like. Even so, people reportedly used to stop this Russian individual on the street and say: "Excuse me; aren't you..." but then they'd fall silent, of course, not yet knowing who the guy looked amazingly like.

Other aspects of this phenomenon can be seen in our own day, for example in the number of infants who look exactly like James Dean looked as an infant. But people who impulsively stop the mothers of such infants on the street can only say that the infant is certainly going to... look like somebody someday; because there is no such thing as an infant James Dean look-alike, since according to James Dean look-alike regulations, an infant who resembles James Dean as an infant cannot be a genuine James Dean look-alike, even if the infant happened to be James Dean himself! Because as we now know, a genuine James Dean look-alike can only look like what James Dean himself looked like when he looked exactly like what everybody now knows James Dean looked like.

Incidentally, it is also of interest to note that the James Dean we know is the only person who ever looked exactly like James Dean who wasn't a James Dean look-alike, and didn't have to put up with people stopping him on the street and telling him who he looked amazingly like, because there was no difference whatsoever between himself and James Dean!

Another little surprise in all this is that, according to the now fully established and globally recognized James Dean Parameters, for most of his life-- through infancy, childhood and adolescence-- James Dean himself didn't look like James Dean. And because James Dean departed this earthly plane so soon after setting the Parameters, no one knows what a middle-aged or elderly James Dean look-alike looks like! This means that, at this very moment, there are any number of guys out there who look amazingly like what all the 45- to 85-year-old James Deans would have looked like, but nobody has the slightest idea who these guys look like!

For the many millions of James Dean look-alike fans, this is a most unsettling thought.

# From Here the Night Goes on Forever

I guess this is goodbye, he thinks as she hands him a twenty. He'd spotted her earlier cruising the pet food, though she didn't buy any; looks like she used to have a dog but now is on the road to get over a bad marriage or soured boyfriend, see something of the world, find out what she's made of, get a job out west back east down south or up north. She's just passing through, like all the women he hoped to fall in love with here at Becker's Interstate Emporium, "The Crossroads of the Continent."

She's blonde and slim and highway weary, has that greasy look they get after 12-16 hours straight driving, the last 6 hours alone in the dark with all they've left behind. Squinty, kind of, in their eyes the fading glow of a suddenly empty future.

Looking at this one, he pictured maybe an accountant boyfriend with a sheep dog who spent weekends on the water, ate a lot of yogurt and sprouts, did major Pilates: King-size bag of sandwich cookies, six pack of cola, yeah. Vegetarian health food boyfriend's ex strikes back. Bet the kitchen had been spotless, with somewhere a secret core of chaos. Heading toward Santa Fe, maybe; has that potential Georgia O'Keeffe-ness about her, vistas of flowers in intimate close-up, with bones. Good bones.

She jiggles the change and looks at him with that "discovery" look all new 'on-the-road' women have, like suddenly there's newness everywhere, even in the eyes of a cash register guy in the middle of concrete noplace. That look always got to him.

They've been driving so long by the time they pull in here for gas and needfuls they look that way even at pet food, but never buy any, just pick it up for a lookfix, remembering the dog, turn it over and read it like the key to existence is on the back.

There was something special about those women; they bought cooking gas and boil-the-bag meals and toothpaste but weren't really here, wouldn't be anywhere until they got beyond the nowhere that bides in the empty heart.

He could imagine them each pulling away in their car, and felt the pull of his own departure. One of these days the right woman would come to check out her purchases and as he handed her the change he'd ask where she was going and he'd know by her answer and the look in her eyes that it was time for him to go too.

With his eyes on hers he asks where she's headed.

"Into the night," she says, her gaze turning from his. He looks out the store window where she's looking, beyond the flashing pink neon arcs that signal to all corners of the darkness.

"From here the night goes on forever," he says.

# Rambo Gets the Mail

They're out there. I know they're out there. Get your ass down and come over here by the door.

Yeah. In Beverly Hills you get that feelin' when they're out there. They. Them. My street my lawn is filled with 'em gapin' an' gawkin' an crawlin' toward the house the dirty creeps but they ain't got a chance against me I'm ready all the way see this doorknob? Designed for my personal use by the Department of Destruction it'll blow 'em away I love it.

Love is hard for me. I'm a quiet man a gentle man a rebel I get headaches, no friends, artificial tan, I don't know. I like guns, bows, knives, rockets, grenades, choppers are my friends I don't talk much.

This AK47, my bosom buddy, serrated Bowie knife for good camera glint, coupla frag charges for the big flashes, night vision scope, rocket tube oughtta be enough to check the mail. Take that, you creeps: Zap. Pow. Um. Somebody's gotta do it. 25 sequels so far, ain't done a movie in 2 days, it's drivin' me crazy, I ain't ripped off a poet's name and wrung its neck for nothin'.

I'm outta here soon's I get my knife in my teeth an' all these straps on but I gotta say somethin' first I may be a lonely man but anybody gets in my way they're meat but they won't get this far. The lawn is mined, there's special poisoned grass blades plus the nerve gas sprinkler, anybody gets by that is cut to pieces by the megamower.

I'm doin' this for one reason, like always: I just want the post office to love me the way I love it. Now follow me don't touch this knob and keep the camera low or you're meat too.

# Balshank Rules

This isn't the story I planned to do at all.

The story I planned to do began: "It was as though the little town was asleep by the river," then from there the plotline was supposed to unfold the way a flower blooms, in a sensitively ordered progression of evident literary value, in accordance with my outline, in a tale that ultimately redeems the common man and proves the strength of his basic beliefs. But this is nothing like that, goddammit. I can sense a difference already, even before the first sentence, like a fist forming; that's how fast it can get out of hand.

I guess it all started when I was a child, when I first lost my sense of control over things and despite my conventional upbringing and higher authorial ambition I began to imagine stories involving large breasts, exotic metals, shock waves, body piercing, radiation, that kind of thing. I wasn't breast-fed, I don't think; the fact of mammary deprivation may have had something to do with it, but we didn't talk about things like that in my family, so I won't say any more about it to a readership of complete strangers I'll never meet in a million years, unless you get in my way.

I'd planned to put some trees right about here, a lot of trees in fact, very generous with trees, phony trees, of course, just penmarks on paper or pulses on pixels after all, who would care, there are no more trees, all over the imaginary mountains made of mental plastic between me and you to screen me further from your naked gaze-- rich, artificially green apparently healthy trees to nature up the beginning of the pathos with all that hokey hope there used to be - like in those nice stories they used to write before reality insisted - and then before I know it the scene is an apocalyptic small-town parking lot with radioactive parking meters, I'm sorry, I don't know what's come over me, numbers painted on the asphalt still bubbling, and the faintly glowing side of a building, the brick bulged out in the part that's still standing, with what's left of a dry cleaning advertisement on it singed by the heat of the blast.

Shit. I'd envisioned a nice heartwarming story about a family in a small town like this one used to be before whatever happened happened, what the hell else am I gonna get published in this sappy world except a story in a friendly sort of town where everybody knows everybody else and there's enough implicit sex and hidden madness that an author can disappear in a plot so formulaic it's completely unlike life, from the time you wake up in the morning all the way to the grave.

The story was supposed to take place 30-40 years ago, maybe some scenes in this very parking lot, all to do with the struggles of a young couple confronting conventional change, the way it used to happen before tv in the small towns that were soon big malls on their way to worse and then to here - back when there were trusting neighbors and that kind of illusory stuff \- heartwarming is the word, with a soupcon of tragedy in there somewhere for the pathos we need more than ever nowadays, I mean true pathos, the kind you have to look backward to get anymore, not the supermarket or celluloid kind everyone is so fat on all over the place, and all of a sudden there's this - this - creature, Haina, screeching to a stop in a cloud of burnt rubber on a spiked motorcycle, she's the female protagonist and succubus of Balshank's alterego's incubus, the arch-nihilistic agonist Lemuel.

So much for heartwarming. Who the hell are these people? I don't want to write about Haina, or any of them, but inspiration is a razor-sharp blade at my throat. So Haina is a closely shaven example of all that is best in women who act like men but are in touch with their inner female on a day-to-day basis, and can override the bitch when they want to.

At the same time, I feel that this is getting too far out of hand. I'm sorry. Haina epitomizes all that is indefinably neutral in the realm of ambition and succor, but can bend a tire iron with her bare hands while consuming human flesh if she gets the craving. She is tall and strong, and has big tits beneath titanium spirals. She is my muse, what can I say.

But on the other hand, what the hell can I do with her for pathos in a small eastern town 30-40 years ago with boilerplate trusting neighbors and boilerplate implicit sex, so it has to be some protopunk apocalyptic thing, forget about the trees, I don't know what's with these spiked leather bracelets and an orange mohawk for color, now I've put a chrome bolt through my nose.

My name is Balshank. I take over evergreen smalltown heartwarming bullshit stories and stomp their preapocalyptic ass into the real thing, fit the times like a studded glove. Just wait till I get my hands on Haina, that small-town-blasting plutonium junkie bitch. Then I'll have a fucking story for you, so don't go away; I need a little bit of tension right about here, and you're it.

# Pieces of Fame

It wasn't all that far into the future: a couple of light years, a couple of dark years maybe, from where Earth is now in its flight through space.

On the implant screens you could see ads for the famous facial features of galactic celebrities: the actual eyes, noses, cheekbones, teeth, chins etc. of Mentavision superstars now discontinued who had sold their bodies prehumously for vast sums, the precious corpses now reduced to their marketable components by the great body merchants for exclusive sale to those wealthy enough to embody the actual nose or other part that had been so famous and still was, thanks to the ads that displayed such items like the most precious jewels: famous eyes on the finest silk, renowned noses, celebrated cheekbones and eminent chins on luxurious velvet, illustrious teeth in jaws of solid gold...

In those days, most members of the general public could afford to contain at least a piece of some celebrity, since everyone wanted to be famous, at least in part.

For the wealthiest though, it was possible – even rather common – to be a complete pastiche of actual fame; to be, as some of the merely upper class so snidely put it, completely who you were not, as so many were.

# Makeup

Is this the cosmetics section, is this stuff makeup, I want to buy whatever makeup is, get made-up.

How did you get in here?

I came in through the truck bay at the back.

I see; well, um... what kind of uhh... look did you have in mind?

You don't have to back away; I'm not dangerous. I want to look like somebody else, just about anybody else, but not this face I hate this face, I've never felt it was the real me, never-- maybe like a famous model or movie star, some celebrity would be what I want.

But you're an elephant!

Just on the surface; it's only an accident of birth.

But you can talk!

You pick up a lot at the zoo; the only thing to do there is watch people. And listen.

Why didn't you tell them you could talk?

They'd just give me more to do, and for peanuts; entertain the customers, make a fortune off me, and I'd still be only a zoo attraction. I can do much more than that, I have a star inside. I can sing, dance, do standup comedy, I practice at night-- I'm an entertainer at heart, and I need a good manager; but first I have to get the right look and take piano and dance lessons.

Well, under ideal lighting and with competent makeup, one wouldn't necessarily notice the elephantness right away...

Yeah, but right now I look like every elephant I ever saw. Maybe you could make me up like a superstar?

Well, I think the trunk might be a problem, and the ears, and of course your skin texture, I don't know if makeup will help; anyway, even if we can give your face a Hollywood look, people will still know you're an elephant won't they, because of the ears and the trunk and four legs and all.

Now, look: I've come in for a consultation, like the sign outside said, and I've got some major plastic surgery in the pipeline; I've waited a long time for this, and I don't think you'd want me to get hysterical. Don't you meanwhile have any whitening agents and foundation, eye shadow and all that stuff, like some deep wrinkle remover, vanishing cream too, blusher, some opaque pancake and strong "Pink-Passion" lipstick? I saw that on the side of a bus.

Wherever shall we begin... you might as well sit down No not there! Right over here on the floor would be good, let me get a ladder, we'll start with some facepacks, then I'll get some stuff from hardware.

First we'll try some of this high-coverage foundation, this is very popular lately, sort of a spackle grade in your case, very au courant, all the right people are using it, see what we can do with this shine around your T-zone, which you should know by the way is proof of youthful skin. This is a very large T-zone you've got here, I suppose there's something to be said for size...

Well, to tell you the truth, I hadn't noticed, I have so many other cosmetic problems.

I'll show you this whitener, too. Your cheeks are quite dry; do you use a face lotion? You should be very generous with your lotion after washing; the skin always requires moisture, especially if you spend a lot of time in the sun. You soak the cotton very liberally with the lotion, well maybe a mop would be better, and a large bucket, you soak it like this, then mop the lotion over the entire face, which in your case takes a while, patting lightly-- actually pounding quite heavily with the mop; in fact—whacking—full—out—to—promote—blood—circulation—and—skin—metabolism--very important for that fresh look.

Now a thorough scrubbing with a heavy gauge wire brush... There. You'll notice the change in 'feel' to the skin. This side is a lot lighter now, a lot softer. You see? Something can be done after all. Do you use eyeshadow much?

No, not really, I don't have fingers yet.

Of course. Well, what color clothing do you plan to wear?

Blue, mostly, I guess, I've always liked blue, maybe with a little red in it, if I can ever find it in my size.

In that case, let's see... a little blue eyeliner; actually, a LOT of eyeliner, half a carton, maybe, this is on sale today by the way, you get 12 free brushes-- a few packages of brown right here for emphasis, then an awful lot of this very popular whitener on the lower eyelid just here, we've been selling a lot of this lately too; then some more foundation, a heckuva lot more, put it on with this large putty knife, which I'm using only for speed so we can get the preliminaries done today.

This is two-way foundation, by the way; you'll need something more like an industrial caulking gun-- several in your case-- because you see the applicator has to fit the foundation particle size, a very important point; will you be using a credit card, by the way?

No, I don't trust myself with plastic.

I know what you mean, I'm the same way. OK now: another layer of this, and if you get your ears and nose done, people will start mistaking you for a celebrity, as long as they don't look at your legs too closely, until you get a couple of them removed or whatever. Now take a look in this-- in all these mirrors--- No, maybe the front window; how's this for starters?

Is that really me? Actually, on second thought I'd prefer a more chiseled look, if you know what I mean-- I don't want to look cheap.

Well, you can't expect a miracle in one afternoon. You've got to understand that a complete makeover, a total change in your look from the ground up, given how far down the ground is in your case-- and what you've got to start with-- could take considerable time.

We elephants have good longevity, so that's no problem. In fact it would be a plus to get out of the zoo and be a celebrity, as long as I don't look too wild.

Actually, the wild look is very in now; are you sure you want to go for more sophisticated? What about a green-and-orange buzzcut trim with black around the eyes, and purple lipstick? That's very young, very daring, goes with any skin tone of course, put in an earring or more, with some well-placed tattoos, and you could maybe even keep the nose and ears!

Maybe that would work for someone who's originally human, but I've got to get to first base before I can steal.

Golly, you know our similes or whatever and everything, don't you?

The zoo is a classic metaphor.

That's just great. Well, it's far past our closing time, so let me just add this up: let's see: 40 facepacks, 36 large sponges, 32 foundations, 17 buckets of whitener, 24 cans of wrinkle remover, 14 pounds of blusher, 42 false eyelashes, 34 Pink-Passion lipsticks, 8 pounds of eyeshadow, 7 large wire brushes, 6 supersize foundation applicators, 5 buckets, 4 scrapers, 2 putty knives, general equipment destruction and full occupation of the facility for the entire day to the exclusion of all other customers, that comes to $9,419, plus tax; will there be anything else?

Yes, I'd like 100 gallons of vanishing cream to go, and another appointment as soon as possible. Oh, and by the way, do you accept ivory?

# L.I.T.A.

At the time - and this is nearly a century ago, mind you – it was tacitly agreed among the office staff that the lady showed great courage in coming to work dressed in such a creation, particularly given its early form, when the metal struts extended her arms, uplifted her breasts and spread her legs that way.

The objective of wearing the apparatus was to manifest an appropriate degree of sexual anticipation on her part (in keeping with the new comprehensive sexual self-determination then in foment), but its artificial-leathery expanse left only the tips of her hands and feet free, minimizing her office productivity.

She must have spent a great deal of time having the apparatus put on every morning (no one could have put that construction on single-handedly, and she certainly couldn't have slept in it), the intention being to stylistically offer herself to whomever at the office was eligible, while at the same time protecting her person against actual violation by anyone who didn't have the combination or her spontaneous permission.

The apparatus also (this was perhaps its most radical feature) isolated her from the then-common modes of social communication, since it covered her face and disguised her voice (it would seem for purposes of anonymity, as practiced in some sexually primitive religions of the time), effectively rendering her incommunicado in person, not to mention incognito in entirety and useless on the phone; and since her fingers couldn't span the semanticizer keyboards and when she went to the ladies' room she took up two commodes – and, going home or from floor to floor, the entire elevator – it soon became a question as to why she had been hired at all, since it was clear she could do little work as it was then known.

But since no one could find out her name (all requests for personnel data had to be submitted through the single multifunction slot in the apparatus, and were summarily rejected, additionally shocking the inquirer with a jolt of high voltage if the question was improperly coded), no one could access her file.

Early rumors of her rampant sexual favors (such as could still be granted in those morally rigidified days) were floating about, which was understandable given the manifest sexual nature of the apparatus and the abruptly turgidifying effect it had on the genitals of male bystanders when she glided by under full sail, as it were, accompanied by the throbbing electric moan of the pulsing motors: very realistic.

Then there were the stories-- inspired by the continual addition of straps, hooks, chains and whatnot all over the apparatus-- that the lady, whoever she was, had been coerced into wearing it, though nowadays such devices, in much more advanced form, can be seen everywhere; some individuals are hooked up continually by default.

The Company's higher level management at that date, though, was understandably non-committal on the subject of the Lady In The Apparatus, or LITA, as she came to be known, until someone's brother-in-law at a holostation heard about her and sent a crew over to find out what was going on, since nothing much in the way of change had happened in the city for years, and the news crews had plenty of time on their hands.

The anchorman asked the CEO, whom he'd caught edging into the reeds outside headquarters with LITA during working hours (many offices there were too small to properly wield an erection), if he had anything to say about her status, and was accidentally sodomized with his own macrophone, an event widely broadcast in the raw as evidencing the increasingly erotic peril of bored reporters seeking to interface with highly paid executives of uncertain sexual persuasion and their however mechanized paramours.

Despite this development, and the reporter's instant (but ultimately elusive) fame on the talk show circuit, nothing substantial seemed to be forthcoming with regard to LITA, other than that the apparatus worked well even in landscape vegetation, simultaneously trimming nearby plants as it reached full throttle.

Not long after this complex of events, someone with a disguised voice called the station, purporting to have detailed information, right to the nanometer, regarding the relationship between LITA and a virtually male chorus, or at least that's what it sounded like when they ran the loop back.

I have to say that the whole thing seemed utterly likely to me at the time, having myself one afternoon experienced the apparatus in intimate detail while LITA and I were fully coupled for those few accidental but nonetheless divinely unforgettable moments that began near the parking lot, when my hand got caught in a hand sling while I was signaling for a taxi, my feet swung neatly into the stirrups and LITA and I were locked into an easy cantering gait that ate up the miles with ecstasy before I knew what was happening.

The apparatus had by then evolved to accommodate multiple intimate couplings (there were three of us involved before I was ejected like a spent cartridge), and had many unique and ingeniously positioned loops, fasteners and curtains for just that and many other purposes, all made out of advanced materials for long and vigorous use. Prototypical at the time, these materials are common today on the universally popular male and female apparatuses, which, thanks to continual refinement since LITA's time, now boast over 1500 standard sociosexual functions, with many new options added each year.

No one has time anymore for the really old-fashioned pre-apparatus activity, which used to take up to an hour in some cases, when it was done at all, rarely during the busiest times of day and never in public. I'm reminded of the time my father is said to have tried it with my mother, as we used to call them-- oh, it must have been at least 200 years ago: it allegedly took tens of minutes, resulting eventually in my sister. Such is the case no longer, though, and we have the apparatus to thank for that.

In her own primitive way, LITA was a true pioneer, whoever she was.

# Character Actor Planet

This is the preliminary report on my assignment among the inhabitants of the planet Zeron, called 'Earth' by certain of its contemporary inhabitants. I find Zeronians to be a very curious life form.

Their most remarkable aspect is that they are lifelong character actors, each playing one continuous unscripted role with impressive dedication, never significantly deviating from the assignment, apart from temporary escape via alcohol, drugs or other forms of induced dementia (consistent performance seems difficult to bear). To help ensure this there are asylums everywhere, under various names. Each newcomer to the planet is assigned his or her character name at birth, and is thence taught in the various asylums how to perform on the social stage.

Each is steadfast in attempting to portray their character till the end of their days, as though the portrayal were actually their "self," as though they were one and only one being throughout their entire lives, separate and distinct from all the other individuals! As a result of this version of PPS, or Primitive Persona Syndrome, they place a high value on fame, as well; it is a most remarkable thing.

Nor do they have any qualms in demanding the same performance and ambitions in their children, all the way through the standardized asylum curricula; thus, none ever get to be all that they actually are-- in fact, they never have an inkling of their true extent-- though for a time the younger children are allowed to expand their consciousness somewhat when alone together, until the asylums and other theatrical pressures put an end to that.

This odd characteristic, which has stymied their progress to the level we and other advanced cosmic societies now enjoy, requires numerous forms of crudely devised support, such as their many religions, nationalisms, racisms, political parties, armies, gangs, secret societies and so on, each of these disparate entities requiring a deity, symbol or beloved leader of one form or another to impart meaning to their respective roles and justify playing them from day to day without surcease.

Indeed, they often buy "self-help" and "self-realization" type media forms to assist them in this impossible endeavor. Under normal circumstances, their dreams and other ultra-imaginings would give them clues as to the misdirection of such a life, but since they hold so firmly to the conviction that each of them plays but one role in some vast, cryptically scripted performance, they are unable to speak for their "selves" or make coherence of their dreams, let alone their existence, so live fundamentally unfulfilled lives for the most part, often cursing their fate as though it were not and never had been in their own hands, calling instead upon one or another of their many "higher power" defaults.

As a finitely divided group they will never progress as far as have we and the other fully advanced societies of the cosmos, unless they break free of the severe psychosocial restrictions that sorely burden this underdeveloped, bellicose and obsessively theatrical planet.

It was my mission to initiate the process that would one day liberate these protobeings from confinement within the minor holographic roles to which they remain committed as a self-labeled intelligent species.

Having studied the indigenous psychosocial parameters for a number of earth lifetimes, however, in keeping with our preference for the cosmic rule of metachronicity I have concluded that it would be best to postpone any decision regarding initiation for at least one million earth years, to afford Zeronians the natural evolutionary opportunity to experience the fulfilment of autorealization.

Respectfully submitted,

Folessren Wanzaburatt, QG

Senior Realization Advisor

Third Quadrant

Protohabitable Sector 1

cc: all members, Cosmic Realization Supercommittee

# Langdon Fathoms Normalcy

In his early readings on psychology, Langdon was amazed to find that psychologists were generally in agreement as to the existence of a standard of normalcy in modern human behavior.

Langdon had never before entertained such an idea; after all, he had never met anyone who was the same as anyone else, except in the broadest of morphological and behavioral terms. Whence had this psychological standard been derived, in an almost entirely urban, and hence abnormal world, except perhaps from the quixotic endeavor to make a science of psychology?

Where were all these 'normal' people? Was strapholding in a crowded subway normal? Was driving alone in a large automobile normal? Was smiling into a telephone normal? Was walking down a crowded street with earphones on listening to heavy metal normal? Perhaps so, Langdon concluded, within the given abnormal context of modernity.

Was modern normality, then, in the larger context of stars and planets and evolutionary striving, whence humanity had arisen, actually fundamentally abnormal? Langdon pondered these things as he mentally jogged backward among the automobiles that whizzed along the elevated expressway that ran past his bedroom window, and exulted in the sudden awareness that he was normal in the larger context.

The idea that modern abnormality was in fact normal was comforting to Langdon, who had always preferred the mental and spiritual wilderness to the concrete compromise into which he had been born, and in which he could not be truly at home unless he had a security system.

# Throwing Up Off the Bridges of Madison County

He had a curious shamanlike power. He was a leopardlike creature who rode in on the tail of a comet. He was a graceful, hard, male animal who did nothing overtly to dominate yet dominated completely. He was a prairie wind you could ride like some temple virgin toward the sweet, compliant fires marking the soft curve of oblivion.

—James Waller, The Bridges of Madison County

Ok. So I'm riding this temple virgin. Riding her like I could ride the prairie wind that was this-- leopardlike guy. Who also rides comet tails. This scenario prompts a number of questions. Does one ever, under any circumstances, ride a temple virgin? Isn't that taboo? Is it ethically or even politically correct? Or am I riding a prairie wind the way some temple virgin does? The author provides no clue. Maybe he means that I'm a temple virgin who rides this guy who's a prairie wind?

But he doesn't know anything about me! Neither I nor anybody I've ever heard of has ridden a prairie wind, or even a temple virgin... Anyway, let's pick one, see where it goes. So I'm riding this prairie wind temple virgin-like guy, this also leopardlike, also shamanlike, also comet-riding graceful hard male animal guy who without doing anything overtly to dominate dominates everything completely-- except me, of course, since I can ride him like a temple virgin. But how the hell did I get here?

I made the mistake of opening this book I just picked up that's all over the place, I keep tripping over it. I don't even know this guy. So what are the implications of my riding him? Do they do this sort of thing in Madison County, the shamanlike men, the leopardlike men, the comet-tail-riding prairie wind men of Madison County? Surely not in public; maybe under the bridges?

And then there are the sweet, compliant fires that I'm riding this nauseatingly overdescribed guy toward. Are there sweet, compliant fires anywhere in Madison County? Why would I want to ride this leopardlike guy toward them, wherever they are? Sweet fires? Compliant fires? That mark the soft curve of oblivion? Curve of oblivion? Soft curve of oblivion? The tongue grows flaccid with the absence of meaning...

This book is oblivion, but it isn't soft; it is softer than that; it's beyond even mush. Yet it's been on the best-seller lists in the US for about 4000 weeks, as though a lot of people think it's some kind of poetic prairie wind-riding temple virgin literature or something, there are photobooks, calendars, posters, greeting cards, t-shirts, tours, they're making a movie, a musical, he's writing a sequel, a sequel beyond the sweet compliant fires of oblivion-- What does all this mean? The book itself means little, other than that literature is in mortal danger, as present generations look to this new oblivion as a model of literary success. Downhill starts here.

It means even more appallingly that somewhere a professional book editor and degreed literary person read the manuscript and decided to, of all conceivable alternatives, publish it! Likely because it touches on those naive-extra-urban, but not too extra, spiritual-back-to-nature, but-not-too-far-back, shamanlike-leopardlike-tail-of-a-comet-prairie-wind-riding-temple-virgin yearnings out there with change in their pockets and excess vacuum in their souls.

This book is to literature as Jonathan Livingston Seagull is to philosophy; as Sheepdog Beach of My Lollipop Heart is to poetry; as Kentucky Fried Chicken is to chicken fried in Kentucky. But then in a grotesquely larger sense, maybe The Bridges of Madison County is some kind of enigmatic karma that erases the spiritual debts of the world; maybe people deserve to read this book.

# Exploring the Upper Reaches of Shit Creek

Well here I am, up Shit Creek just like they told me I'd be, and without a paddle, just like they said.

I'd expected that, though, heard it a thousand times, so I brought along an extra paddle; came in handy real quick, but I lost it at Shit Falls. Didn't matter much though-- I lost the canoe there, too.

Never thought Shit Creek'd be this deep. Or this fast. Hell, I'd be real happy with a snorkel. Even this far upstream it's been up to my neck all the way. Stumbled a few times, went in over my head, but now that I got this far up – a lot farther than they told me I'd get – I figure I might as well try and discover the source of Shit Creek, maybe make a name for myself, get something worthwhile from the experience. Get famous, give lectures, become a guide maybe, write the Shit Creek Handbook; be a best seller for sure, cause the farther up I go, the higher the population.

I'm sure a lot of folks back home who are right now ignoring all those warnings about being up Shit Creek would give a lot to have a reliable handbook before they wind up here without a paddle and other really useful equipment, like I did. And if they still insist on heading up what turns out to be Shit Creek, like so many folks do, well then they can sure use a good map, and some expert advice on all aspects of survival in a uniquely challenging environment.

Looks like most of the folks already up Shit Creek without paddles and whatnot will have to stay here for good, as implied in the tradition, though some are still trying to build rafts, maybe even climb on out over those slick mountains, but it doesn't really matter all that much even if they do manage to get out of here, because the folks downriver can always tell if someone is fresh back from Shit Creek.

Most Shit Creek residents just give up and build little huts out of the only material there's plenty of in these parts, trying to make the best of the worst situation, make some kind of living up here, don't know doing what, there's no tourism; golf, forget about it. The fishing is no good either. Anyway I'm not all that anxious to go ashore and find out what's in those woods: the banks look worse than the creek, if you can picture what I'm saying.

I should have worn some kind of special boots, but all they said I'd need was a paddle.

# Instant Office

Now you yourself can experience that strange sense of urgency that comes with having your very own office, anytime, anywhere. Whether you're in a van, park, alley, vacant lot or the remaining wilderness, simply unfold your patented Instant Office around you as instructed, and get right to work.

Contains imitation desk, chair, standard office equipment and self-inflating boss. Unremarkable interior decor includes bland veneer paneling, copy of painting originally by a guaranteed human, institutional venetian blinds, sunlight apparently coming through an apparent window, simulated traffic noise, carpet with realistic indentations left by the furniture of the guy who got fired before you, and some kind of job to do with that strange sense of urgency you've grown to need.

For lower budgets we have the even-less-personal microcubicle package, but whatever your choice of life enclosure, with your Instant Office, no matter what time it is, you can't wait until it's 5:30! Or work overtime, even if you're unemployed! Feel like you're doing something conventional with your existence! Wherever you are and whatever you're doing, this little briefcase-sized item will instantly transform your life by placing you where no human being naturally belongs!

One size fits all! Salary not included.

# The Deal

Sometimes this feeling comes over me like a glass door covered with torn posters or a "Reserved" sign on a table in the middle of a forest – Lemme see a hundred fifty thousand, say, times 18 equals two point seven million, which is – Where was I? Oh yeah, this feeling comes over me like a truckful of empty soda cans in the desert sun or a dictionary on Mount Everest – Factor in the cost of transfer from the error account to Brazil that comes to – Sometimes it creeps up on me like a snake in sneakers, other times it's an elephant just out of my briefcase or a zeppelin filling the trunk of my BMW – I have stuff to do, that's what gives me all these feelings, like a mole near a bank teller's elbow or the way a chimpanzee thinks about a door, and it's hard to pin down what I should do, like a chloroformed moth or a wrestler from another high school, but I suppose everybody has these kinds of hassles – Minus transport and commission, plus street markup and payoffs – And they stick with you like sat-on sushi or a broken parachute but what the hell, once it's done it's done, that's the deal, you don't like it you're dead.

# Been Down One Time

They found him in the Baltimore dawn after the ice storm, part of the ice on the edge of the highway, in his fifties they guessed, frozen stiff like he'd been heading for the road, his old iPod still playing Fleetwood Mac, good battery, "Been down one time, been down two times, never goin' back again" the catchy and somehow relevant tune coming out tinny into the new dawn through the earphones when at last they broke the ice and pried them off his ears.

Figured he'd been on the road, in winter-- some always are-- just froze where he fell, on his way somewhere didn't matter anymore. Knew no longer about the memories in his head or how strong they were, knowledge is like that.

Hearts break and don't heal, happens all the time, though not that often any more with Fleetwood Mac, a power of the 70s. "You don't know what it means to win," the song looped over and over in the corner of the morgue, coroner couldn't bring herself to turn it off.

She was a Fleetwood fan too, still had those memories, those songs brought back memories, damn. You take 'em where you find 'em, hold 'em while they're yours, till they're maybe all you have.

# Time Soup

One minute it's a sheer cliff face of red quartz, polished to a desert sheen by millions of years of windblown sand until the spirals and spirit-beings, long ago chipped into the rock, beacon out into the unending darkness of your hungry soul like a stone-age lighthouse; then the next minute there was something in the kitchen--

You saw it just as you were turning back to your lunch from the window where you thought you'd seen the cliff-- there was a white airy quality for an instant that slowed and skewed, curving downward like in those calculations you learned to do way back in math and thought nothing more of, until now it's that white stallion you'd have sworn you didn't have in the basement.

But the moment you think that thought, there the stallion is, looking up through your stair-jagged shadow into the light from the open door; and yes, in fact, you realize in amazement-- as you gallop across the living room prairie, steadily gaining distance from your daily self-- you did have a white stallion down there after all; what could you have been thinking, you wonder, until up looms at last the famous red quartz cliff you've dreamed so much about all these years but never had the chance to visit where it rises up from the sand, even though it's so close in actuality that it cuts through where your bedroom used to be, where life had never been quite right; had there maybe been something debilitating in that thin, pale soup of days?

The stallion falls to grazing on the sparse prairie grasses as you dismount with a new sense of awe; the spiral petroglyphs shimmer as you trace them at last with yearning spirit-fingers and caress the shining cliff with the open palms you used to close in prayer, hands that now begin to recoil at the familiar touch of a weariness so intense that before you can even find a mindhold you're refusing to awaken to a cold, rainy, spiritless Wednesday morning with twenty years till maybe pension-- red cliff, white stallion nowhere but in a fading to long-gone dream...

# Langdon Buys Brown Shoes

"Do you have something like this?" Langdon asked the men's shoe store clerk as he pointed to a picture of Goethe's shod feet that he'd clipped from a calendar portrait of the great author and shoe connoisseur. The clerk did an interesting thing with his eyebrows.

"No, sir, I'm afraid we don't."

"How about these, then?" Langdon flashed a picture of Velasquez' footwear, from the famous painting. The clerk did the interesting eyebrow thing again.

"No, sir, nothing like that nowadays."

"How about this, then?" The ever-patient Langdon, by now used to the vast and various shortcomings of the civilized world, pulled out a picture of the footwear in an early cubist painting by Picasso, whom Langdon considered one of the greatest shoe designers who had ever lived. He waited in hope of a positive reply. The clerk's eyebrows.

"I've never even seen anything like that in the shoe line, sir."

"Well, then, might as well show me what I've got to settle for," said Langdon.

"All we have is this selection, sir: in this brown, this brown and this brown. This is the office shoe. Everyone is wearing it nowadays, sir."

"I'll take one right and one left," said Langdon, "and I'll wear them home." Newly brownly shod and feeling somewhat less himself about the feet, Langdon walked squeakily homeward, practicing the eyebrow thing.

# Rumors About Leonard

It all started back in the very early days of the movement, when such social attitudes still predominated. Leonard, the innocent catalyst, had never been what you'd call a macho kind of guy, but ever since the twins had been born, his wife Verona hadn't seemed interested in him. She was always 'worn out' when he came home from the office, always 'had a headache' at bedtime, and it was driving him up the wall of sex, until one day he got an idea from an old black-and-white movie: he would make Verona jealous. But he wouldn't actually have an affair with one of his female co-workers; he would just pretend.

So one evening he bought some erotic perfume and lightly misted himself with it before going home. Verona sniffed suspiciously the whole evening, and from that time on began to suspect that Leonard might be gay. This caused her to consult the lady next door, whose husband was macho, and to withdraw even more obviously from Leonard, so he decided upon stronger, less ambiguous measures.

A few days later, he went to a lingerie shop where he bought some supersexy lacy panties to leave just showing out of his pocket when he got home. But the saleslady, who lived just a few blocks from Leonard, and who had recently heard grapevine rumors about his hidden sexual preferences, immediately phoned several of her legitimate customers to say that Leonard, her seemingly respectable 'neighbor' for all these years, was in fact a transvestite whose wife thought he was secretly gay. The rumor got back to Verona before Leonard did with the panties, so the panties didn't work either; in fact,Verona slept downstairs that night and wouldn't say much more than yes and no at breakfast, mostly no.

When in desperation Leonard bought some "Purple Passion" lipstick to smear a kiss on his shirt collar in the office men's room, just as he was putting it on his lips like Marilyn Monroe to give the 'smear' the voluptuous authenticity he wanted, his department manager came in to take a leak but instead took confirmation back to the rest of the office regarding all the rumors that had been swirling around about Leonard and his multiple secret sex lives and his poor unsuspecting wife-- and right here in the office men's room no less!

Leonard was let go soon after, the new rumors racing like wildfire back to Verona, only this time with more 'meat' in them, something about lipstick in the office men's room with his manager, so Leonard was locked out of the house with panties in his pocket and Purple Passion on his collar, all the neighbors watching from behind their curtains and nodding knowingly.

Not long after, Verona sued for divorce and child custody on irrefutable grounds, with plenty of reluctant but sympathetic witnesses from the office and the neighborhood, and by then the entire scandal was front page in the local tabloids, though everybody already knew all the sordid facts in detail, so Leonard chose to leave town with nothing but the clothes on his back, minus the panties and lipstick that showed so prominently in the candid photo now front-paging all the national tabloids.

As a rampant sexual deviant who hadn't even tried to hide the fact from his wife, neighbors or coworkers, but had carried on right out in the open without shame until he finally had to leave town, Leonard was invited to all the shockmongering talk shows, where, because of his transparently provocative denials: Yes, I did have sexy panties in my pocket, but--, Yes, I was putting on Purple Passion lipstick like Marilyn Monroe in the office men's room, but--, he instantly became famous as a homosexual transvestite radical activist and was rapturously embraced as a legendary underground hero of the nascent LGBTQ movement and a quick book was written about him called Leonard Demolishes the Closet, with a photocollage of Leonard on the cover wearing panties in an office men's room and a shirt with lipstick on like Marilyn Monroe but without the manager, who was said to have quit his job and started writing a stunning personal expose about his secret affair with Leonard.

In Leonard's own international best-seller, I Am Leonard, he insisted that the cover and contents of his manager's book were nothing like Leonard really was at all, but the vast crowds of worshipful gays and transexuals that filled the coliseums and mobbed him at all the book signings wouldn't hear a word of it.

The massive royalties from his book – and from Living with Leonard, the revolutionary, smash hit prime-time transsexual sitcom already booked for 10 seasons – went mostly for lawyers and alimony, though Leonard's wife was rumored to have gotten a huge advance for a bombshell book of her own that the tabloids said would expose the world-renowned Leonard for the chameleon he really was.

By the time the Oscar-sweeping movie I, Leonard reached his new country of residence, Leonard himself had begun to wonder.

# All I Ever Do

I was heading out the drive when who should I run into coming the other way but one of my former spouses. We said nothing as we passed-- in honor, I suppose, of the vast rift between us.

Musing on the ruthlessness of fate, I stopped in at the only decent restaurant in the Complex to chew on a double-cheeseburger with shredded lettuce, onion and tomato slice on a bun that contained no cheese, no meat and no vegetables. Illusions are everything these days, and as the physicians so expensively point out, a lot healthier, though I fail to see the advantage in extending the span of such a life.

I also ran into one of my present wife's current lovers at lunch; up until now he'd been invisible. Whatever we said to each other wasn't important. Then, somewhere else in the Complex I met the former mistress I truly love, and to my astonishment she actually spoke to me and still loved me, despite the terrible unclarity of our respective situations.

At that moment I knew that love really does exist, is more than just a word; unfortunately though, even being around her seemed to depress me and I knew it would never work, which I suspect is the way I feel in fact.

Pretensions such as this can never last for long in the real world. Because despite former beliefs, love is after all just a word, a merely monosyllabic attempt to convey the unimaginable flavor of what was once, in a manner of speaking, an actual double cheeseburger with everything.

You can't see love, you can't taste it; you can't buy it and you can't sell it, but it can make you feel like you're starving in poverty if you have enough imagination. I told her this and she said she'd known it all along. Still, I loved her; I had always loved her.

Later, as I headed home, I wondered.

That's all I do anymore, actually.

# Carpentry

You know that little oral sound-gesture seldom seen or heard nowadays, my father used to do it when he reached a key point in whatever piece of cabinetry he was making, he'd stand there and look at however far he'd gotten with hammer, saw, chisel or marking pencil in hand, and make that sound that conveys the sense of placelessness you're going to get out of any minute by some means, where you curl your lower lip back over your lower teeth and pull the tip of your tongue downward until it makes a sucking pop-click against the lip, one click for shallow placelessness, two or more for greater depths, well Vicki was pop-clicking like crazy as she stood there at the foot of the bed looking at me like I was a problem in carpentry, and I knew there was going to be joinery trouble.

But whereas actual carpentry is an abstract concept and simply awaits the carpenter's next move no matter how long it takes, in the present instance no way was I going to passively wait for Vicki's figurative hammer and saw to structure me as she might wish. A man is more than a highboy, after all.

I could sense, as I often had before – though with never so tight a fit as now – that she was seeking with her psychological tools to alter the basic framework of my life, such as it was-- not that I myself understood that framework; in fact the very idea of entirety, hence completion, was inimical to me, an ongoing piece of work as it were, of a piece with "verity of being," to use the Jamesean phrase.

Anarchy was more to my liking, an in-process construction of master cabinetry and cubbyholes, multiple floors, windows and doors here and there, lots of shelves, couple of secret panels, but whatever structure Vicki was perceiving, she wasn't pleased with it, as usual: it wasn't on the level, or the doors wouldn't open, or it left its clothing lying around the living room and never did the dishes, drank too much beer, didn't finish its master's thesis, couldn't hold a job, fooled around with other women, it was always something, something petty, some ridiculously delineating zigzag plumbline thing.

"It's all life; everything is life, all over the place, randomly occurring and driven from within, unknowably, yet fitting snugly," I explained using an apt carpentry metaphor, as I had so many times before, always in appropriate fashion, but all I ever get from explaining is arrested or fired or more pissed off at, in this case that pop-click, loud and vicious as Vicki gazed lasers at me lying there naked, coincidentally beneath the woman next door, also naked, and very well put together, who at Vicki's sudden entrance had gone rigid atop me like a cellar floor poured yesterday.

My father, a master carpenter, also used to drink a lot and appreciate women, leave his clothes lying around, not do the dishes, not even finish high school, and I could never understand why mom was always pissed at him, even after he died, for doing what a man does; all he'd done was live as best he could, get through the days, the jobs, the nights, the days after.

That approach didn't work on Vicki either, though she wasn't even my wife, nor was I her husband it went without saying but was nevertheless extremely relevant, though I would never have said it right then and there, one must be precise in angle joinery, and I knew that anyhow Vicki would find some way to view it askew, even as warped; she just popped her lip a few times more, slower and slower, then left her tongue stuck there ominously unpopped, picked up my pants and shirt and socks and underwear and shoes from the floor and threw them at me as with a parting pop she walked out the door for what looked from beneath our naked neighbor a lot like forever. Things were beginning to look level again. Forever is definitely level.

Christ was a carpenter, wasn't he? Over half the world is now possessed by his furniture. That thought drifted to mind as our neighbor threw back the covers along with my shoes and clothes and began dressing hurriedly, in some shock I suppose, since I'd told her that Vicki was visiting her parents in Seattle-- I do a little fact-planing now and then on the side, make a snugger fit of otherwise disparate dimensions.

Yes, Christ was a carpenter, did some nice work no doubt, simple stuff, highly influential brand name since the initial leveraged takeover, company survives to this day as a conglomerate under many different brands, internationally recognized logo, dozens of subsidiaries, countless franchises, very large holdings, millions of faithful lifetime customers, even deathtime, plus a miraculous tax rate.

But the fate of the founder of that empire was not going to be my fate; I'm no savior, I'm not even a carpenter, when it comes right down to it. A little dovetailing now and then, some tongue-in-groove, that kind of stuff. I know a few other things, but I don't let them get in the way of my woodwork. As for me, I'm not furniture, and have no furniture potential, which makes me unusual and interesting to women, kind of a one-off do-it-yourself project, but of indeterminate nature and ultimately limited service.

Most men are more or less unfinished furniture, just waiting for that ideal handywoman to come along and make them permanently into just the item they need around the house; often as not the men wind up off to one side, stuck in a corner, unfinished in one way or another-- one leg too short, a peg or two gone, a few shingles missing or drawers sticking, stuffing hanging out, unhinged, door hanging off.

Women like me because I'm a challenge, a real fixer-upper, but I know what's good for me. Most men don't know what's good for them, don't know what they want, or how to get it; but more importantly, they don't know how to let go of what they have, drop it and move on to what they really want. That's what women hate most, is men having what they want. My mom just hated my dad for living the way he wanted. And look at Vicki and all the other women in my own past. Where are they now? What the hell happened to them all? Gave up the job, every one, the moment I slept with another woman or something.

Maybe Vicki was right, though, in a way; maybe I do need a little more conventional structure to my life, a little timber framing, as bones to flesh. Think maybe I'll go out tonight. The cabinet commission can wait another day. Watch a little tv, have a few beers first. More structure could be just what I need. I'll give it some thought. A good carpenter never blames his tools.

# ASK DR. CLARITY:  
A Sense Of Syntax

Dear Dr. Clarity:

I have noticed that whenever I say such things as: "See Spot Run! Run, run, run!" or "The book is on the table," or "The pen of my aunt is in the desk," the people I am conversing with look at me strangely and demand that I stick to the topic. Do you think I am in the wrong here? The boy is after all holding the broom.

Sincerely,  
Syntactic Traditionalist

Dear Traditionalist:

You have what is known in scientific circles as GLR, or grammar lesson recidivism, a condition suffered by many who go through standard schooling and try to sound educated later in life.

There are in fact many dogs other than Spot, who do things other than run; the book may in reality be under the table; the just as likely pencil of perhaps your uncle may be in the vestibule and conceivably a girl is holding not a broom, but a shotgun.

There are so many more possibilities than your grammar book allows you to perceive. You are part of this process; take your eyes off the pages and learn to stick to the subject, then you will see Spot run. Run, run, really run, and perform other, more extensive actions, often in bad taste, in that big activity known as Life. You yourself can even run after Jane. Good luck with that.

All Best,  
Dr. Clarity

# Cutout

The first time I saw him in the lobby of the tax office I thought he was just a standup cardboard cutout, a way of minimizing dimensional appearances to offset the visual effects of bureaucratic downsizing, but with additional visits I came to realize that he actually worked there.

One day, when I'd been standing at the counter looking for a tax advisor to assist me, I heard someone say my name and looked around everywhere, until he spoke again and I realized that he was in fact a living but dimensionally challenged person.

He had an edgy, cardboard kind of voice that was ideal for talking about taxes. His nametag identified him as Al Plane; in our introductory conversation, he informed me that he commuted daily in a stack of employees from a nearby family warehouse where he lived on a shelf with his cutout wife and kids in a two-dimensional split level.

Because of my complex tax issues I got to see Al pretty often after that; if I was still there at closing time we'd now and then go out for a drink and a bite to eat. He had a taste for full-color images of the finest bourbon, with occasional illustrations of wok-steamed gourmet vegetables.

I can see now that there was a lot more to Al than offset printing, though who could have known what was actually hidden in that thin mind of his. I'd have to say that aside from his being visually unimpressive, especially in extreme profile, he was fully versed in bureaucratic fine print, which is also intensely linear.

I regretted my initial prejudice toward the guy, and realized that most dimensionally normal people are conditioned by billboards, tv and magazine ads to treat the dimensionally challenged as though they are mere advertising and worth little attention. I became convinced that Al was entitled, like anyone else, to full 3-dimensional rights.

After all, bidimensionality is an inherited characteristic, not a matter of preference; Al was born a placard, he didn't choose to lack depth. As time went on, it became apparent that this quality in fact made him the perfect bureaucrat, and that he would go far.

So when he decided to run for mayor, I signed on right away. I felt we definitely needed less dimension in public office, and by the time Al ran for governor, his PR people had come up with a winning campaign slogan: "There's a lot less to Al than meets the eye." Since he commenced his campaign for the presidency, we've learned that there's even less to Al than we'd thought; if he gets elected, we'll simply have to accept the fact that we may soon find out how much less there is.

But that's a small price to pay for the dimensional correctness we so sorely need at the top.

# A Structure Named Zelda

There is that which is exclusively planar about Zelda, as she lounges on the floor of Marco's loft, talking of love. What Zelda knows about love would not fill her cocaine spoon. It is Marco who fills her cocaine spoon.

She is, as Marco observes with his artist's eye, distinctly planar in her psychophysical pose-- unwitting, yet revelatory. She infolds upon herself with her youth, her ingenuousness; her eyes, nose and mouth arc about each other in spatial revolutions, orbits of emotional motion, auras that radiate from her incubus in a paisley of darkness, which Marco shall also depict as no other artist can.

Structurally angular and rigid as she lies there, half in, half out of herself and the space she comprises, Zelda is a study in diminishing perspective, a vision in violation of the golden mean of sexual involvement. Zelda will lie down with anyone in search of love; this gives her the air of adventure she now wears like a morbid background; but Marco is not in search of love; Marco is an artist; Marco shall depict love, and its absence, in his unique way.

And so Zelda is Marco's model of this basic structure: the vectors, the inertial moment, the struts and buttresses, stresses, arches, tunnels and columns-- the basic architecture comprising love, antilove and their combined effects.

Marco touches Zelda here and she sighs, Marco touches Zelda there and she moans; then with the charcoal, the pastel, quick marks on the canvas: Marco will get to the heart of it, to the heart of that yearning so abstractly embodied by the teary, red-nosed Zelda, as the absences and the presences quickly take form, relentlessly acquiring structure in this series of portraits that will show the world the full range of Marco's genius; then how Marco shall be adored!

# The World's Largest Pen

Well, Bill, I've finally tracked down Sven Fjornsgorn, the eccentric artist-inventor and creator of what is now known, and observed worldwide, as the largest fountain pen ever made.

It wasn't difficult to find Sven, he said he'd be reaching the nib on the 29th by sled dog; I simply took a transatlantic private jet from up above the clip near Kyrgyzstan, past the lower end of the cap to New York and then followed the pen body visually by air, eventually also resorting to dogsled at around the threaded part where your fingers go, up past the Bering Strait and on into northern Siberia.

Sure enough there was Sven, just setting off on the last leg of his journey, getting to the point, as it were, or the nib rather, 22-karat gold plated, a fine calligraphic nib about the width of Kamchatka, soon to be dipped into a large, deep lake that in the Spring melt, with the addition of massive quantities of oak gall, will be transformed into the traditional black ink Sven reveres.

The internationally acclaimed artist will then be communicating with the many plunger-lever-raising engineers who are standing by to coordinate the dangerous and protracted filling of the pen high in jetstream winds, while tethered like astronauts atop the gleaming black barrel tilted somewhere above Montana, I believe.

Once the nether end of the filled pen has been lifted into geosynchronous orbit it will be used to write, on a planetary level, the world's biggest words, comprising the world's longest sentence – part of history's first global paragraph – on the world's largest-ever sheet of bonded, weather-resistant foolscap, an event that will deprive much of North and South America, Asia, Europe and Africa of direct sunlight for at least several weeks.

Those living beneath the global document will be evacuated from the umbral area toward the margins and beyond threat of injury by the moving nib, which, according to our calligraphic engineers, will exert tremendous writing pressure on the world's largest page.

No one knows exactly what Sven plans to write with this massive implement, or what scriptive path the giant nib will follow from left to right and top to bottom, temporarily leveling great swaths of forest in the process – numerous residential areas as well – with gargantuan syntax, though Sven declares he is trying to avoid any community larger than a midsized town. All in the worthy name of world literature.

This will also be the first time in history that cursive writing has posed any direct physical danger to the general public; many of the logorefugees who are being forced to evacuate their homes for the calligraphic duration are not happy about being crammed into temporary artistic housing for the sunless time of writing. A number of families are carrying posters and giving the single-digit anti-whatever salute as they trudge toward the buses that will take them away to the so-called 'art hotels' where they'll be staying, many in subterranean facilities beyond the reach of potentially fatal syntax during the Great Writing.

Other folks who are leaving have said that they agreed to move (though they have no choice, under the current global art authorities) because they hope that the vast performance-art work, soon to darken their skies and prevent agriculture for an uncertain duration, will in time stimulate these nib-violated and economically depressed regions through increased tourism and other forms of commerce, such as ink transport, metablotter operation and subsequent supercalligraphic events.

Others suggest that portions of the pen barrel itself, in addition to furnishing a uniquely qualified museum for this world-changing graphic exposition, could be transformed into extraplanetary metro areas, weather-resistant terrestrial cities, multilevel cargo aircraft hangars, national spas, portable Extreme Olympic stadium complexes, world-class hotels, unique restaurants and casino resorts or even just vast quantities of ideal storage space, to list just a few of the non-calligraphic possibilities. Thus there is some hope in these faces, Bill, even as they attempt to stay out of the way of the massively written word.

We managed to snatch a few words from the reclusive Sven himself on the final leg of his trip to the nib, regarding some of the things we all want to know more about, for example this world-sized Montblanc. So tell me, Sven, why this? Why the world's largest pen?

"Well George, can I see some ID? Thank you. An artist can't be too careful when dealing with a world-sized Montblanc. I've always loved pens, always wanted to have a big pen, bigger than anybody else's, a really big pen; pencils you can have. Ballpoint pens, sharpies, forget about it; in the compactor. I've loved fountain pens ever since I was forbidden to touch one as a child; we weren't allowed to have pens in our village, or any writing instruments. Everyone had to memorize the Bible as oral history. More than that I'd rather not recall, there are a lot of things I don't want to remember about that time, believe me, ever since I was a little boy and we were kept illiterate – it was the war you know, I think, or maybe it was just the strange activities of our remote village and its reclusive residents.

"Whatever the case, I could never have a writing instrument of any kind, as I say, so I vowed that when I grew up and made enough money as an artist-inventor – I invented force-field underwear, you know, among my many other gifts to the world – I would one day sponsor creation of the world's largest pen, which wouldn't have those cheesy stamped-out steel nibs using that cheap-looking blue ink like they had in the post office in the capital, where officials wrote state-business postcards with official pens that leaked and stained everybody's pockets; my ink would be genuine India black, with no leaks!

"And what a production line we've made for that ink, too! But now at last I have the pen – that was something to commission, let me tell you, the biggest pen ever by far – and I will fill it using the latest satellite communication; then we will write all over the world and the world will see what we have written, thanks to geosynchronous cameras.

"I will have to write quickly, however, because not only will I be writing alone, with my handheld controller, I will be using fast-drying ink – millions of gallons of expression – additionally, the paper will create a problem with the harvests, you see, since the sunlight won't reach the land during the big writing, which will go on I don't know how long, you can't hurry art, can you, and then there's my artistic whimsy-- I can be pretty wordy, you know-- also, not much sunlight gets through paper of this quality, and millions would starve, all in the name of art, when cursive speed can mean loss of life. Then there are problems of art refugee transport, with highway visibility at dangerously low foolscap level. Only the finest."

So tell us Sven, any hint as to what will be the subject of the world's longest sentence you're going to write in the biggest words in history on the world's largest page with the world's largest pen?

"No, no, the whole thing is a very strict secret between me and my wives and girlfriends, who would kill me if I told you, just to say though, that it will have something to do with the importance of intimacy all over Asia, large portions of Europe and the Americas as well, with much of Africa in there also and possibly a bit of the North and South poles near the margins, depending on weather patterns. When it's finished you'll be able to read it from Mars, as the world turns. However, one thing I can guarantee is global titillation.

"Then after a couple weeks of full-page display we'll cut the whole thing up into folio-size pages, many of which will be completely black with sections of perhaps pornographic words, I will say no more on this, and publish it as the world's thickest book of pieces of individual letters of words from the biggest literary work in history written with the world's largest pen. You can't really put a price on that, can you. But we'll try. We'll also cut from it many scrolls of different lengths, so we can provide long cross-sections of the more beautiful letters and key portions of heartfelt words, phrases, clauses and even shorter sentences-- say, from New York to North Dakota.

"Right now I have to get back to coordinating the filling and final cleaning of the nib, then slowly and carefully lifting the pen through and above the stratosphere to the proper angle for elegant calligraphy much like I was taught in collective college under threat of bodily harm. No sloppy penmanship, no chicken scratches. We must also be careful with this world-quality ink, needless to say. You could drown in one drop, imagine what it would do to your jacket. It's everywhere, you know the way ink can get, especially if the pen had a leak as big as this one could, and I'm going to be writing long, complex sentences. Also we must have non-stop blotters ready, with the best engineers standing by. Right now, though, I have to approve the choreography of the hundreds of dancing pen ladies."

OK, Sven, and thank you. We look forward to a world of vast calligraphy, followed by some superplanetary blotting.

And now back to you, Bill, under looming foolscap darkness.

# ASK DR. CLARITY:  
My Neopaleo-Ultramacrogeocentric Diet

Dear Dr. Clarity:

It took me years to get to where I could eat only brown rice, but I didn't stop there. Since then I've worked diligently to perfect my dietary habits so as to avoid all foods that come from the sun, which is a proven source of fatally excessive heat and the cause of cataracts and melanoma, among other things.

Now that I've developed my neopaleo-ultramacrogeocentric diet I need nothing more each day than one moderately sized bowl of raw dirt, which I wash down in the morning with my special gravel tea.

The trouble is, for an optimal diet I require dirt from organic former ricefields in the lower Himalayas that have lain fallow for at least five years. Such dirt is extremely expensive, as you can imagine; it can be smuggled out in only small quantities and is in great demand, so commands premium prices, leaving me no choice but to break into people's houses and take their appliances for resale in order to support my diet.

Recycling appliances is of course a plus for the environment, so I feel karmically balanced on that score, but in a way it's self-defeating, since all that lifting and carrying makes me need even more dirt, leaving me locked in a vicious cycle that seems to be spiraling ever downward. Do you have any suggestions?

Sincerely,  
Dedicated Geophage

Dear Geophage:

This is a growing problem in the terminally developed countries, where there is ample time for boredom and obsessive pursuit of irrelevant minutiae. First of all you shouldn't have to break into people's houses to eat dirt, particularly dirt that is not from the region in which you live. I suggest that you change your point of view from the ground up.

Despite popular opinion, there is nothing wrong with foods that come from the sun. I myself like double burgers with pickles and ketchup followed by a beer then an eclair, all of which come from the sun. Mustard comes from the sun too, if you are one of those marginals who puts mustard on hamburgers.

What I'm trying to say is that there's something nearby for everyone, especially if you're standing next to Michelle Pfeiffer. That's the way nature works. In my own case, for some years now I've been eating two or three double burgers a day with everything, except dirt, and I am making a fortune syndicating this column.

I suggest that you look in your own backyard: barbecue some burgers; wash them down with a six-pack of Pepsi or brewski, followed by a few cigarettes; sprinkle some Himalayan dirt on the burgers if you have to, but get real at all costs. You'll feel better for it when you die and find out that you haven't been dead all along.

All best,  
Dr. Clarity

# The Morning Falls into Langdon's Hands

The train pulling in just as he reached the platform; the train door opening right before him; the last empty seat waiting for him alone; then just as he came up the subway stairs the crossing signal turned green and Langdon, the morning clearly falling into his hands, was on his unimpeded way to the office, where today would be just the day to insist upon his well-deserved promotion and raise, and finally ask Amelia for a date-- for this was one of those pure inertial days: the rocket that was his career would be launching today, he could feel it, then would come all the blissful years of his wondrous life with Amelia and their beautiful, brilliant children, scions of the Langdon Dynasty, Langdon freely rising above the present moment, streaking further and further into a future that as of now was well within the grasp of his reaching hands, and probably why he didn't spot the open manhole.

# Sleazy Gods and Rat Frames

I dunno. Y'gotta have respect. How can we poor undergods run this thing if we lose respect? Just last night I was standin' by the savior tub at the carnival-- y'know, where the high diver of the day jumps into the ritual cement as it hardens, and stays there forever "to great worship and applause," as they say-- when a real god came by, one of the sleazy ones you see more and more of nowadays.

You can just tell, no matter how far they've fallen. Had on a battered topper and needed a shave, wore a big polka dot shirt open at the neck, stringy tie, filthy I mean filthy dark suit, big shoes, no badge, prob'ly pawned it, yellin' "Rat frames, getcher top quality rat frames!" Just an old juicehead now, hawkin' fer some higher-up. Looked like he'd been a clown not long ago but couldn't hack it. No respect fer the position.

Usual rat frames, those flashy 5-d holography things you can see through, with patterns on 'em dependin' on the rat you wanna make fer whatever world yer into. Had 'em strung around his neck like a street seller, and he looked pitiful, so I asked about 'em. Real cheap; I wasn't interested, I still make by hand, always will (not like some as I could name) but I bought one 'cause I was interested in him. Imagine one of them sinkin' so low. Asked where he came from but he wouldn't say-- nothin' more evasive than a street god-- he just kept tryin' to push more rat frames on me.

Seems it's happenin' more and more these days; time sure ain't what it used to be. I remember when we all had to make everythin' from scratch, even our own rats. I mean it. You're too young to remember, but in those days you respected your gods, and they respected themselves. Now they flog these mass-production frames fer whatever you want, and bang, you got a world to get off on, cheap.

But naturally the new worlds don't hold up; the old ones are collector's items now, I hear; imagine that. We used to just give 'em to the Junkman. An' sleazy gods sellin' rat frames on the streets! What's next? I dunno what it's all comin' to, but at least I still got my pride. Wanna buy an unused rat frame cheap?

# Whirlwind

In her fifties somewhere, with short dark hair in a severely helmeted bob, she wore a high-necked yellow fake leather sleeveless blouse with green hypodermics on it dripping something iridescent red; around her neck hung a silver chain rope in the shape of a noose, with a heavy silver skull and crossbones hanging from it in the cleavage between her heavy breasts.

The skull had red eyes that glittered incidentally, like uncut rhinestones; her own eyes resembled big burn holes in naugahyde. She had a look on her face like she'd examined one too many prostates, but she was his date, what could he say. He just told her he was blind. She took his hand and led him to places he never thought he'd see. She fell in love with him at first sight not only because he said he was blind when she knew he wasn't because he never took his eyes off her tits, but also because he wore purple socks.

She'd always had a thing for purple; their being socks just put it over the top. She herself could never wear purple, it clashed with her aura. She had to wear yellow because of her rising sign; it also turned out to match his shirt, a red satin thing with wide orange stripes and sort of chartreuse blobs, and the cuffs with that different kind of fastener on them in two places. His blue velvet pants were special too, in a way, like his socks, like his multiple piercings and spike-studded sandals.

She'd tried to impress him with at least the feel of her clothes, and it must've worked. It wasn't until they'd been in the hotel a few hours and had gotten to the bottom of the second tequila bottle that she got to really know the guy himself, the guy inside all that special fashion wear and phony blindness, and found out exactly how much she hated the bastard's reeking guts. Looking back at it all like a totaled brand-new pink El Dorado, she smiled one of her straight-across long-term tequila smiles with a beer chaser. Life is funny, ain't it, like an empty Cuervo bottle dropped from a fourteenth floor Vegas hotel window, still in your ex-date's hand: don't mean a damn thing to anybody anymore, till it hits the pavement.

# The End of the Human Race as I Know It

It's clear to me that the human race as I know it will be coming to an end pretty soon, it's fading already; Hollywood is a good indicator of that.

But I don't mean just the movies; I mean also here on the corner of Rodeo Drive and some street whose name I can't make out from the crazy angle my imminent widow is attempting to strangle me at, just because she happened to go window shopping at the for chrissake very window of the very goddam store where I was buying a serious negligee much too tight-waisted for her.

So she also happened to see me coming on to the saleswoman, who was younger and slimmer, prettier, more interesting and intelligent, and had a better body than my wife, and even my mistress, but mostly just because my wife not only followed the saleswoman and I into the back room and pervertly watched a lot more than the beginning of what she cruelly did not allow to reach consummation between two consenting adults, instead cutting right in at the fastest, best and loudest part just before the end, interfering as well with the transfer of large denomination bills she felt should instead go to some charity, like the pointless education of our delinquent son, but it's my money, and what good is a person's own money if he can't have a good time?

So there we were at a new juncture when, after vigorous near-sex with a much younger woman and my heart the way it is, I made it out the door first and tried to outrun my wife who, as state champion of the 200-yard hurdles back in college not long ago, caught me in record time right at the corner of Rodeo Drive and Brighton, it turns out; never could outrun that woman, which, now that I look back on it, is how we came to get married in the first place, an earlier end of the human race, as it turned out, but damn, ain't that Hollywood?

# There Goes the Neighborhood

"Ook, have you seen the new—family, I guess you could call them-- it's more of those tall, handsome men and a number of most becoming women and I must say adorable children, who took that large cave across the valley I've been saying for years that we should move into? They make really beautiful spear points, I hear. They go by the name Cro-Magnon."

"Yes, dear; I ran into some of the men while I was out walking, working out my idea for a future international economic system. Those Cro's, as the locals call them, are rather flat-faced fellows-- not that there's anything wrong with that. Sadly, they also lack the authority imparted by a prominent brow and receding chin. Some kind of genetic defect, I'd say; rampant inbreeding, most likely. They tried to teach me how to make better-looking spear points, as though that were the most important thing in the world! I don't see why they think themselves superior, can't even lift an Auroch!

And then they commented on my prominent brow, as though I couldn't understand a word they were saying. From the way they pointed and nudged each other, they must have thought I was sub-intelligent. Despite their pretentiously hyphenated name they couldn't understand anything I said about the function of gravitational force in stone ballistics. Probably use only one-tenth of their brains."

"Well, Ook, I think you should pay more attention to them; you may be a sub-chief with powerful visions, but your spears are an embarrassment. And what good does it do to spend your time perfecting useless inventions like your 'wheel'? Or any of your other ideas-- your so-called genetic theory, or using the sun to create clean energy for use in caves-- And there will never be a national economy, as you believe, let alone an international one, no matter what your 'econometric' calculations tell you, because there's no such thing as the 'public' you're always going on about. And what's wrong with good old fire, I'd like to know? Look how long that took our forebears to develop! What's more, it's warm, it's bright and it's fast! A gift from our ancestors!"

"Yes, I know, dear, and I am proud of our technological heritage, but look at all the smoke! That can't be healthy. And the wasted heat! We've got to find some way to store it, even reverse it to create cold. All based on my theory of smallest particles. And one day there will be a general public, who will appreciate the advances I propose.

My wheel also has a place in the future, if I could just think of something clean to do with it that doesn't lead to a vast highway system or worse. Maybe just a wheelbarrow to start with. One thing I've learned from hunting mammoths is that it's better to anticipate problems. With all these complete strangers moving in, though, it won't be long before the mammoths are extinct; what or who will be next? And if they ever get ahold of my wheel..."

"Well, Ook, while there are still a few mammoths left, wouldn't it be useful if you spent more of your time like the Cro-Magnons and showed some practical ambition by at least hunting with modern spear points? Feed your family on a regular basis? Get some decent furs? Live in a cave we could be proud of? Isn't that better than walking around pondering useless concepts like space travel and financial systems that will never have a place in this world, embarrassing me and our family in front of all the other Neandertals, not to mention the Cro-Magnons?"

"Maybe you're right dear, but these ideas come from the great spirit, and as their recipient, I must honor them; they may one day improve our lot, or that of our descendants, and of our kind in general. I think that obsessively perfecting the flint point and focusing increasingly on luxurious possessions would send the wrong message to our offspring, establishing a negative focus that could one day result in desire for ever-deadlier weapons, vast standing armies, international conflicts and loss of consideration for our fellows and the natural environment.

If we go too far down that path and that mindset begins to gain acceptance, it might be better for our kind to simply merge with the Cro-Magnons, perhaps imparting to them some insight that may yet save us all. The way they handle things now, as though they own everything, is a negative path."

"Sure, just put everybody down; belittle actual progress, and nothing to eat in the cave, nothing warm to wear with winter coming on. What will those who come after think of us, when they find nothing but a little empty firepit and a couple of crudely shaped rocks to our name?"

"Well, if the Cro-magnons wind up in charge, they'll likely never decipher my cave-wall formulas, probably think they're just pictures of animals and piles of bones and stones. They'll never credit us for any great discoveries-- the equivalence of matter and energy, for example..."

"So are you just going to sit there or are you going to go get some meat?"

"I'll be off in a moment dear, as soon as I sketch out this idea I just had for a flying device..."

"And to think I could have married Mogg..."

* * *

Thank you for reading my book. If you enjoyed it, won't you please take a moment to leave me a review at your favorite retailer?

Thanks!  
Robert Brady

#  Other titles by Robert Brady

The Big Elsewhere

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