

SKOOL DAYZ

Published by Bill Etem at Smashwords

Copyright 2018 Bill Etem

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

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Cover art by Dora Gonzalez

Table of Contents

Chapter 1. You Do What You Gotta Do to Escape the Monsters

Chapter 2. Politics as Usual

Chapter 3. Tough Democratic Girls

Chapter 4. Struggling Teachers

Chapter 5. Fighting Monsters on the Northern Front

Chapter 6. Wolfgang

Chapter 7. Marybeth

Chapter 8. Marylou

Skool Dayz

Chapter 1. You Do What You Gotta Do to Escape the Monsters

It was a bright beautiful Spring day in late May in Duluth Minnesooooootaaaa as I strolled down Superior Street accompanied by my pal, Sister Ann Asiago. We had left, ten minutes ago, our home at The Orphange of Saint Theresa of Avilia on the Lake on London Road. That's a mouthful, I know, I know. Oh by the way, Hi, I'm Al Kowasko, yeah, hi there, nice to meet ya, glad to know ya, I'm 5. As I said, it was a bright beautiful Spring day with the mercury soaring over 57 degrees Fahrenheit, which is quite tropical by Minnesooootaaaaaa standards. As Sister Ann Asiago says it is so gloriously delicious to see winter finally die, to finally see it get put into a hole in the ground, especially when the funeral comes before the last day in May. I'm wearing my usual uniform of cotton T-shirt, blue jeans and white tennis shoes. I know white tennis shoes are out of fashion for white guys like me. Sister Gabriella de la Villanueva says I refuse to kowtow to bourgeois conventionality. Sister Ann says I just don't give a damn. Sister Ann doesn't kowtow much either. She looks a lot like Snookie from Jersey Shore. Today she is wearing gray sweat pants and one of those skimpy sleeveless white T-shirts that you associate with old white guys with pot-bellies, and also perhaps with cigars hanging from their slackened jaws. The big difference here is Sister Ann Asiago is reasonably young and marvelously feminine. Her bosom swings some from side to side and up and down as we walk together down Superior Street. She belongs to the Cabrini Convent – Sister Cabrini being the first woman from the USA to be canonized by the Roman Catholic Church. The Cabrini Convent is somewhat difficult to get a read on, because it can be quite Liberal and Progressive in regards to scanty skimpy attire, gangland tattoos and primitive tribal piercings – I suppose you have to keep up with the times to some degree if you are to have any chance at recruiting new blood into your convent – but it is quite Conservative in other ways. Sure there's probably a few copies of Saul Alinsky's Rules for Radicals laying about the Convent and the attached orphanage, but for the most part DVDs of William F. Buckley Jr's Firing Line TV Show and books like Ann Coulter's How to Talk to a Liberal (if you must) and Michael Savage's Liberalism is a Mental Disorder easily predominate over the Liberal and pro-Communist material. Sister Ann and I had a heated argument about what we might have for lunch, which we would enjoy after we returned from our errand. I know that sounds crazy having a heated argument with a nun over something as mundane as what we would have for lunch. And now an awkward uneasy silence has descended over our conversation. I was sick of talking about my trip to Mar-a-Lago. And the Sisters at The Orphanage of Saint Theresa of Avilia on the Lake on London Road were probably sick of listening to me talk about it. I hadn't even met anyone famous aside from Tiffany Trump. Donald wasn't there. Melania was either sunbathing or shopping, but she was too busy for me. Barron was off somewhere. Still, what a whirlwind these last few days have been for me! I jet down to Miami and Tiffany Trump and her limousine driver, a guy named Bradford, and these two Secret Service guys – Manny and Joe Don – pick me up at the airport and then all of us take off for this restaurant called Ronnie Van Zant's. It has lots of Skynard music blaring, lots of Tiki torches, lots of hot cougars prowling around. Tiffy was bored with the place but you could tell she was being a good sport because Manny and Jon Don were having a fun time cause they knew lots of the hot cougars prowling around. Then we head up to Palm Beach and Tiffany ditches me for like 3 hours, and I just walk around the big empty palace – like I say the Prez and the First Lady aren't there, maybe they are in D.C., I don't know where they are, so it's just me and a Secret Service agent wandering round Mar-a-Lago, but then even he ditched me after a while, and then I had some free time to snoop in drawers and closets, just looking for anything interesting, not necessarily looking for anything incriminating or exonerating, but just general snooping. I'll explain why I was down there in a second or two but right now I have to interrupt the narrative, as Sister Ann has decided to speak with me.

`What are you thinking about?' asks Sister Ann.

`I was thinking that with you wheeling that suitcase behind you, you and me look like we're homeless.'

`I know! You could be my kid if I had shacked up with some blond guy with blue eyes 5 years ago.'

`People driving by in cars are saying to themselves: "that chick's old man and her old lady just threw both her and the kid out."'

`Well you can't always be worrying what people are thinking and saying.'

`Ain't that the truth,' says me.

Sister Ann is wheeling an empty suitcase behind her because we're heading for Rudy G. Perpich Elementary School, just a mere two blocks distant from us now, and we will need the suitcase because we will need to haul roughly 100 math and physics books back to the orphanage. It was none other than Rudy G. Perpich who had announced back in the 1970s that Minnesota is the Brainpower State. I imagine he wasn't purposely talking trash at other states, you know, he probably didn't mean to say or imply the people of California are bimbos compared to the people of Minnesota, or that the people of New York are contemptible dumb-asses compared to the fine intellects you find throughout Minnesota. But who knows what the hell he was trying to say, you know? I mean if you had to choose one state among all of the 50 states as the BRAIN POWER STATE, would Minnesooootaaaa be the first state, or the second state, or the third state that popped into your head? They gave their land grant university the nickname: The Gophers. Why would you name your sports teams after a rodent? Don't try to be super original with these things. Just go with the Tigers. Or the Lions. Don't overthink things. Don't try to be too cute. The people in Minnesota probably know, deep down, the name The Gophers is no good, but the tradition is so powerful, so mind-enslaving, that they felt forced to use only half measures to improve things, by keeping the tradition while changing the name to The Golden Gophers, so this might be a marginal improvement but the name is still a botch. Anyway, if you had to pick just one State – you can only pick one State as the BRAIN POWER STATE – them's the rules – you can only pick one state as being brighter and better and less retarded than all of the other 49 states, then don't you think the only sane and rational choice is to go with Massachusetts? I know, I know, a lot of people will say that only a State crammed full of shit-heads could have elected Ted Kennedy to the US Senate for decade after decade after decade. People will say that Mary Jo Kopekne died at Chappaquidick but only after she had survived for a few hours in an air pocket, and could have used some help rather desperately from the police had the police been notified of the accident in a timely fashion, but, still, be this as it may, all things considered, don't you still have to go with Massachusetts? Massachusetts has Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Radcliffe and Smith and Wellesley and Holy Cross and Mt. Holyoke and Boston College and Boston University and Amherst and I don't know what else, but tons and tons more in the realm of institutions of higher learning, whereas Minnessssoooootaaa has one huge land grant Gopher university and lots of expensive little schools, which, though they are good at taking money from rich parents and indoctrinating their kids so they can imitate the politics of their professors, nevertheless, very few people outside of Minnesota have ever heard of our meek and quiet little schools: Carelton, Gustavus, Augsburg, St. Thomas, Bethel etc.

So Rudy G. Perpich, former Governor of Minnesota, must have been smoking crack when he said Minnesota is the Brain Power State. We can all agree on this. Gov. Perpich was a Democrat but a Conservative sort of Democrat. I mean he was a pro-life Roman Catholic sort of Democrat, and lots of pro-life Republicans voted for him and lots of pro-choice Democrats didn't vote for him. Sister Latoya Anders is my source of information on all this. There was a guy named John Grunseth who was the Republican nominee. He was a big rich powerful Republican CEO from the big rich powerful corporate world. But then accounts in the Press surfaced saying he once liked to throw naked pool parties, and with naked teenage girls! That's the best kind of naked pool party you can throw, I'll have you know. That's the crème-de la crème of naked swimming pool parties. You got naked teenage girls at your pool? Man, you're really living life in style. Of course I can say all this because I'm just a five-year-old. But if some guy in his twenties or thirties or forties or fifties was saying this shit, then people would want to lynch his ass....So the Republicans canned the CEO Grundseth and they brought in the pro-choice Arne Carlson to face off against Perpich, and of course the pro-life Democrat Perpich won the general election, and now Grunseth is running a big operation in Tasmania, and Tasmania is about as far away from Minnesota as you can get. I know I got to get to why I was feted, sort of, at Mar-a-Lago, and while explaining this you'll probably quote to me that old proverb about how people living in glass houses shouldn't throw stones, in reference to that crack I made about those college kids trained to imitate the politics of their professors. What have I been the last two years but a kid trained to regurgitate certain info, a kid trained to recapitulate various facts....It's like this. When I was three years old and living in an orphanage in Albuquerque New Mexico, Sister Ann, who was there with me, learned about Minnesota instituting a new curriculum for its kindergarten and pre-kindergarten students. Four-year-olds would focus on US History, US Government and US Constitutional Law, plus we would also learn a little Christianity. Then the following year, in kindergarten, kids would focus on math and physics, and then in the first grade kids would learn about modern European Cinema: French, German, Italian, British, Soviet and Swedish cinema, while of course taking refresher courses and continuing education courses in Con Law, Math and Physics. Every year there would be refresher courses, plus the study of Foreign Languages, World History, Environmental Science, Women's Studies, Oppressed Peoples' Studies, Queer Theory, Transgender Studies etc. Truth be told the whole plan was just a Liberal Plot to create future voters who would vote for Democrats and not for Republicans. Anyway, Sister Ann Asiago heard the news about Minnesota and formulated some plans of her own. She had studied Political Science at Fordham, and had even graduated from law school before switching directions and decided to become a nun. She comes from a rich Republican family in New Jersey, lots of rich lawyers and business people in her extended family. Long story short, even though I'm only three, Sister Ann starts coaching me up. Sure I'm slow and stupid at first. But slowly, ever so slowly, as the weeks pass, I start to wise up. By the time I'm three years and 7 months old I can explain to people the 3/5s clause of the federal Constitution, and I can tell you what the 9th and 10th Amendments are all about; I can tell you what every Amendment is about. At first I was really pathetic at explaining what Marbury v. Madison was all about. But Sister Ann didn't give up on me, and after a few months everything started to fall into place: I was really good at briefs, you know, paraphrasing Marbury and Abrams and Lochner and Near and Youngstown Sheet and Tube and lots of other landmark cases of American Constitutional Law, and I haven't ever started pre-kindergarten yet. Sister Ann gets two archdiocese to agree to have us transferred from New Mexico to Minnesota, and so I start pre-kindergarten in Minnesota. Sister Ann – a Republican - has me coached up in a really shrewd way, because I show pretty fast that I'm a superstar when it comes to US history and law and government, and so people are interested in my story, but Sister Ann has got me pretending I'm a big Liberal so I can get on TV and get all the Liberals in Minnesota to start loving my act, but, of course, I'm really, deep down, more of a Conservative than a Liberal, so I'm a Conservative masquerading as a Liberal. Sister Ann says this makes me a crypto-Conservative. So it got out that I'm a Conservative and I got the call to come down to Mar-a-Lago for a few days to sort of cool off after getting roasted by the Liberals in Minnesota; these people were calling me a dirty Judas and a filthy Republican traitor and a vicious little pig who likes to spit on poor people. I had been on TV, and though I'm only a four-year-old at the time, still I said some things that the Liberals found unforgiveable. Like I was saying Harry Blackmun, he of course wrote the majority opinion in Roe v. Wade, was a big brainless Minnesota dumb-ass, and I was quoting Harry's own words from his opinion in Garcia v. San Antonio Metropolitan Transit Authority to prove my case that he was a big brainless moron from Minnesota. It's all as clear as day that he was crazy if you would just read the words the big lunatic wrote. Now if you want to trample on the Commerce Clause and the 9th and 10th Amendments to the federal Constitution in order to give higher wages to some poor people, then you have to argue substantive due process of law arguments, and you might also want invoke the Equity Clause of Article 3, but Blackmun descended into this hideous mindless insane gibberish, I mean the bull that was coming out of his brain in the matter of Garcia v. San Antonio Metropolitan Transit Authority is just the most pathetic pile of idiocy anyone could ever imagine coming from a justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. Anyway, that's all in the past. I suppose I should be more charitable to Blackmun, but I'm sort of stuck in a rut on this matter, and I just can't seem to get out of the rut I'm in.

`Well here we are,' says Sister Ann. `Rudy G. Perpich Elementary.'

`It's more dilapidated than I thought it would be,' says me.

`Yeah. Look how someone defaced Rudy's name up there.' Sister Ann was referring to the fact that vandals, perhaps pro-abortion vandals, had taken some sort of hammer to the concrete entablature above the front entrance to the Rudy G. Perpich K thru 5 Elementary School.'

`You'll be around big kids so watch your mouth,' says Sister Ann.

`I'm always watching my mouth,' I say fully intending to be ironic. `Why can't I ever be sincere and spontaneous with people?'

We enter the portals and proceed down one hallway and then another before finding the Principal's Office. On the door a sign reads: Dr. Klaus Von Nammacher, Ph.D. Sister Ann knocks on the door, a friendly voice invites us in, and there we find Dr. Klaus Von Nammacher. The name didn't exactly throw us. We weren't looking at some Asian-American guy. So, Herr Doktor Von Nammacher invites us to sit down and then there is some small talk about the weather and what I thought of Mar-a-Lago. I'm telling him about Ronnie Van Zant's and the hot cougars they got down there, and I'm talking about Tiffany Trump and what sort of crazy shit she was saying to me, and talking about what the Secret Service agents had been saying to the hot cougars they knew at Ronnie Van Zant's, talking about that sort of stuff. So then Dr. Klaus Von Nammacher looks at his watch and I take that as my cue to pipe down. Then, sort of apologetically, Von Nammacher asks if he may `conduct a quick diagnostic assessment of my mathematical acumen,' to quote his phraseology. I give my OK. He asks me straight out what 19 minus 12 equals. I suppose I then get a mindless, soulless blank stare on my face, I mean, in retrospect, I assume I probably had a mindless, soulless blank stare on my face. Then I get all flustered and frustrated and flabbergasted because my mind is as empty and as barren as Minnesota's Arctic Tundra-lands. Then I recover my wits somewhat and I ask to borrow a pen and a piece of paper. Dr. Klaus Von Nammacher gives these to me. Then I proceed to poke a hole through the paper with the pen. I was trying to write on the paper while balancing the paper on my right leg. So I stand up from the chair and start over by clearing a spot on Dr. Dr. Von Nammacher's desk. No doubt I should have asked for permission before moving some pictures he had of his daughter and girlfriend. These are two different people, I might need to add. I was still a little flustered because I always ask for permission in these sorts of situations. So there I am doing the calculation of 19 minus 12. I make 19 slash marks on the paper. I mean I thought I counted 19 carefully, but when I recount them I only find 16 slash marks, then I count them again as carefully as I know how, and I discover 17 slash marks, and though I counted real carefully I still lost confidence in myself – just how could I really be sure there were 17 slash marks there – how could I trust myself after all my previous mistakes and inconsistencies? I didn't want to count yet again, so I turned the paper over, and started over, though this time I was super super careful to write AK-47 exactly 19 times – AK stands for Al Kowasko! And 47 is my favorite number! I announce this exciting news to the other two people in the room. Anyway, I proceed to cross out 12 of the 19 AK-47s, and then I count 7 AK-47s that have not been crossed out. So, then, trying to be funny, because I'm super conscious that I have failed this diagnostic assessment pretty badly, I announce that 19 machine guns minus 12 machine guns is exactly 7 machine guns. You could tell Herr Dr. Von Nammacher was trying to be funny, and that he really wasn't at all impressed with my math talent, when he said: 'Good job, young man. I like how you think on your feet, how you don't get too discombobulated by tough math problems.' I knew he was handing me a load of bull but I liked the fact that he didn't sneer at me.

`I was pretty confused there for a few moments, I gotta admit,' says I.

`That's splendid that you brought that big suitcase with you,' said Dr. Von Nammacher with a nod to Sister Ann. `The mathematics curriculum here at Perpich Elementary, while undergoing radical changes due to the new legislation surrounding kindergarten and pre-kindergarten math and law and government and history, has never been circumscribed within narrow boundaries. Still, we can hardly teach the sum of world knowledge in our Pre-K thru 5 curriculum! Rational prioritization must always precede ad hoc attempts to please narrow factions and special-interest groups, as I have always maintained. I get angry protests from parents who want more Art History, more Swedish History, more Russian History, more Canadian History, more Nigerian History, more Upper Midwestern Literature, more Southern Literature, More Mid-Atlantic Literature, more Hispanic Literature, more Asian Literature, more Feminist Literature, more Transgender Literature..... Just the other day this old white guy was grilling me on why we don't teach the ancient Greeks, you know, Homer, Herodotus, Thucydides, like we once did? Well, let's see now. Thucydides has Pericles say that the best thing for women is that they not be spoken about at all. If I was to say kids must read History of the Peloponnesian War the NOW crowd would have my head on a platter, just like they once had John the Baptist's head on a platter. Anyway, without further ado, AK, I need your signature on some documents. We want your assurance that you will return the following math and physics books to us without too much damage. Good heavens! - We expect some wear and tear, but, all the same, we prefer that you don't inflict too much catastrophic damage. As you know Kindergarten here is not all-day kindergarten but it is all-year kindergarten. We like Barron's Student's Concise Encyclopedia for June. The mathematics section is only 45 pages long, taking the student from simple arithmetic through simple Algebra and up to simple Integral and Differential Calculus. But there's still much Algebra and Calculus that has to be learned. Still, just 45 pages in Barron's for June! That's a marvelous condensation of elementary mathematics! July is devoted to Dowling's Introduction to Mathematical Economics. We spend so much of kindergarten learning advanced physics we really do need to spend some time learning some Economics. Dowling does a bang up job in covering what might be called Intermediate Calculus and Intermediate Matrix Algebra and Easy Differential Equations and Easy Calculus of Variations. I like his derivation of the equations of Euler and Lagrange, which are so crucial to an understanding of Classical Mechanics, as well as Relativistic Mechanics – you know, Special and General Relativity - and of course so crucial to understanding Quantum Mechanics. So Dowling will take us through July. In August we focus on Murray R. Spiegel's Vector Analysis with an Introduction to Tensor Analysis. Then, next September, we get Bronson's Differential Equations. In October the rigor intensifies somewhat. We go all through Sokolnikoff's Higher Mathematics for Engineers and Physicists. I know, I know, it's an old book. But not everything that is old is a pile of crap. I like his treatment of Taylor Series for functions of several variables. And there is much to be said for giving kids a thorough introduction to Infinite Series, as Sokolnikoff does in Chapter 1 of his book. I tell you, Al, if you devote yourself body and soul to mastering Sokolnikoff's Higher Mathematics for Engineers and Physicists this investment of your time and energy will pay big dividends for you as you progress through kindergarten and beyond. So that's October. In November the rigor does not ramp up any but the sheer volume of material to digest does expand quite a bit. We review a great deal of info found in Murray's Probability and Statistics and in Hildebrand's Methods of Applied Mathematics. December and January and February see us turning to the Schaum's Outlines entitled College Physics, Theoretical Mechanics, Continuum Mechanics, Electromagnetics and Modern Physics. March is devoted to Kay's Tensor Calculus and to DuChateau's and Zachmann's Partial Differential Equations. By May 1 we want to be through most of the material in Zachmanoglou's and Thoe's book on Partial Differential Equations. By June 1 we want to be all or most of the way through Quantum Mechanics by Peleg, Pnini and Zaarur. Don't get alarmed, Al, at the perceived impossibility of such a drastically accelerated program. We're not asking you to focus on anything but math and physics, with the caveat that you do have to review Constitutional Law so that you don't forget what you worked so hard to learn last year. In all of these math and physics textbooks we have easy material, and we have intermediate-level material, and we also have advanced material, or difficult material. We want you to focus at first on learning the easy and the intermediate-level material, and we don't want you getting frustrated if you find the advanced material too difficult to learn. Just focus on the simpler stuff first, then, later in the year, as your mathematical sophistication advances, we can review the advanced material that we skipped earlier. Some of the material in Sokolnikov's Chapter 1 of his Higher Mathematics for Engineers and Physicists will seem impossibly difficult to you in October, but just wait till April, and then you will go back to that Chapter and find it pretty easy to understand. We want you spending half an hour per day refreshing your knowledge of American History and Constitutional Law. You'll be tested periodically on what you learned last year. We don't expect you to learn tons of math and tons of physics and also learn tons and tons more Con Law on top of the tons of Con Law that you learned last year. We're not insane idiots. Some theorists insist that you have to get children out of their idyllic childhoods as soon as possible. Life is hell, they say, and so you got to get tough on kids in order to prepare them for life / hell as soon as possible. It would be an act of sheer savagery, sheer monstrous diabolical savagery, so the theorists say, to fail to adequately prepare a kid for the future. But I say let a kid enjoy his childhood. I might be in the minority but I still say don't be in too big hurry to throw kids out of idyllic childhoods. A mere 100 minutes per day devoted to math and physics lets a kid be a kid but it also prepares his mind for the future. As I say, June covers merely 45 pages in Barron's. Dowling's book in July is long but super easy. So June and July should not be too arduous. But, all the same, the Autumn and Winter months will be tough. Now as I say, don't worry too much about the advanced level material in the textbooks which we will study. They will seem, on first inspection, impossibly complicated and grueling, hellishly fiendishly diabolically complicated. But don't get intimidated. Just keep advancing through the basic and the intermediate level material in the books which we will study, and then, as the months pass, we will go back and look at the advanced material we skipped earlier, and you will be able to understand this material, and it won't be hellish, or grueling, or diabolically fiendishly grueling. By next spring we will be covering Menzel's Mathematical Physics, Joos and Freeman's Theoretical Physics, and McVittie's General Relativity and Cosmology. I like Don Menzel's treatment of the 43 seconds of arc per century advance of the perihelion of Mercury, as predicted by Einstein, and validated by astronomical science, we'll compare it to Lanczos' methods in The Variational Principles of Mechanics and to Weyl's treatment in Raum, Zeit, Materie, 4th revised edition, as well as to the approximate methods of Einstein, the rigorous solution of Schwarzchild, and to the methods of Lawden, Wrede, Synge, Schouten, Spain, Stephani, Levi-Civita, Hilbert and Courant. We'll try to get to some of Poincaré's Celestial mechaniques but I can't promise that because we absolutely must get through Quantum Mechanics, and we also want to get to General Relativity, and you must have a thorough grounding in Riemannian Geometry, the Calculus of Variations and Tensor Calculus to comprehend General Relativity. We like Weatherburn's Riemannian Geometry and his Differential Geometry and Tensor Calculus around here. But L. P. Eisenhart's books are also acceptable. No doubt Eisenhart's books will have to do with many kids. Long and bitter experience has taught us that some kids just ain't man enough to handle Dr. Weatherburn's exacting rigor. I'm just joking when I say that. But perhaps I shouldn't joke about this. As you go through school you will meet people who will say stuff like: you're a pussy if you can't bench press 500 lbs, and people will say you're a shit-head if you don't understand Kant and Hegel and Marx and Engel, and people will say you're a jackass if you try real hard but still fail Real Analysis. All of this is nonsensical. Al, the spirit of man is indomitable. Al, I tell you, when you get older, you could bench press 500, and you could understand any philosopher if you prepared yourself properly. Now you might determine it's not worth your time and energy to prepare yourself to enable you to master certain things, but if you wanted to master those things, and worked hard, then you could. We give you lots and lots of math and physics textbooks to take home, because, who knows, maybe next January or May you will want to peruse some of these books, and will profit by additional study. But in kindergarten we really want you to focus on mastering the elementary and the intermediate-level material in about 20 math and physics books, and we also want you to master the advanced material in at least 7 of those 20 books. Do this and you'll pass the big test next spring. I do have some more good news for you. Kindergarten only lasts 5 hours per day, and most of that's recess. What the average Joe doesn't understand is that when you spend 100 minutes per day in class studying math and physics, you're mind doesn't just shut off automatically and cease to think about math and physics outside of the classroom – your mind keeps churning away, keeps churning and churning long after the 100 minutes of class time is over, and not just your subconscious mind, but your conscious mind will just keep on thinking about math math math math and physics physics physics....So like last year you got ten classes. Five minutes are devoted to a worksheet which shows you how to solve problems. Then you spend 5 minutes on a second worksheet where you actually get to solve some problems. Then you get 20 minutes of recess. You can relax, or work more math problems, or go outside and kick a damn ball around, or twiddle your thumbs, or practice singing like Katy Perry...You think I'm pretty without any make-up on, you think I'm funny when I get the punch line wrong....Sure, you were born a guy but maybe you'd like to transition into becoming a girl? – ever given it any thought? – who's going to stop ya? – we live in the 21st century not the Dark Ages – I'm just kidding – part of becoming educated is knowing when other people are joking - or maybe you don't want to practice singing like Katy Perry – you could pretend you're Slim Shady - or you can pretend you're that hot girl with the sweet voice in the group Churchill...you want me to change change change you want me to change...or if you absolutely insist on not wanting to pretend you're a chick, well, say you want to be a macho man, you could go old school and pretend you're Ronnie Van Zant...a Southern man don't need him around anyhow....give us a little Freebird, AK, Lord I can't change...or give us The Breeze or Sweet Home Alabama....or you could pretend you're Neil Young....Old man look at my life I'm a lot like you, I need someone to love me the whole day through...Southern Man don't forget what your Good Book says....we got a thousand points of light / for the homeless man / we got a kinder gentler machine gun land...Keep on rockin in the free world...or you could pretend you're Iggy Azalea, guys do it all the time, even guys who aren't even considering transitioning into becoming a chick...who dat? Who dat? I tought you knew dat...I-GG-Y....no money an no family 16 in the middle of Miami....heard he wanna lay it down on Iggy Iggy gave it to him twice now he wanna Mike Bibby diva three...you want a billboard bitch stop runnin in place, heels on me sayin give me six inches of space....So, to review 20 minutes free time, then 10 minutes of class time, 20 minutes of free time, 10 minutes of class time, 20 minutes of free time, 10 minutes of class time etc., etc. You should be able to master the 45 page math section of Barron's in 10³ minutes. 10 minutes per class, ten classes per day, 10 days of school in first two week of June. But if you need more than 2 x 10³ minutes for those 45 pages of Barron's in June, well then you got some homework, young man. Now in July, if you're struggling to keep up after giving 2 x 10³ minutes of focused concentration to Dowling then be sure to see a tutor for added hours of help. You can't afford to fall too far behind. You'll just get all ground to hell if you fall too far behind. Trust me on this. I seen tons of kids just get all ground to hell when they start to lag further and further behind. So don't ever lag behind, well a little lagging is OK. Make sure you understand all of the easy and intermediate-level material: you can return to the confusing advanced stuff later if the confusing advanced stuff is driving you crazy insane when you first try to comprehend it. Like I say Dowling's Introduction to Mathematical Economics is July. You will probably need all of 2 x 10³ minutes, and maybe 3 x 10³ minutes, before you feel like you really got a good grasp on the material in Dowling...Work the worksheets, Al...work `em over and over...work work work. Work `em Al Kowasko...WORK THE WORKSHEETS. Be like Iggy Azalea in her video Work, just keep workin on your sheet....Things get tough in August. Murray's Vector Analysis with an Introduction to Tensor Analysis will come as a shock to your young 5-year-old system. It might make you feel faint, dizzy, sick in the body and soul and head. Bronson's Differential Equations which we get in September is only tough in a few places. Sokolnikoff's Higher Mathematics for Engineers and Physicists in October ain't no stroll down easy street. No way José. You got it soft in June and July and then things get tough. Don't say I never warned ya cause I'm warnin' ya. Say you spend 2 x 10³ minutes in August comprehending most of Murray R. Spiegel's Vector Analysis with an Intro to Tensor Analysis. Or say you spend 8 x 10⁵ seconds studying the same in August. Sounds like a lot, but look here. 60 seconds per minute times 60 minutes in an hour times 24 hours in a days times 31 days in August is is a grand total of 2.678 x 10⁶ seconds in August, and we only want 8x10⁵ seconds of your time, so that's, let's see, that's only 2.9% of your time. Wait a second that ain't right. Let me recalculate. We only want 29% of your time, so that means over 70% of your time in August is free time. But, yeah, like I said earlier, your brain won't stop thinking about math and physics during this 70% free time. But this won't kill you or drive you crazy. Indeed, it is precisely, young Al, what will keep you sane! What will drive you crazy is falling behind, falling further and further behind, watching your classmates surge ahead of you, as you languish and drown in a sea of confusing mathematics, as you move day by day closer to the day you will be shipped north to battle the, you know, should you fail kindergarten. This ain't no school for no dumb-asses, sonny boy. Admittedly, my friends, it's a challenging curriculum but we want to make Rudy Perpich's vision of Minnesota being the Brain Power State come true. Let me give you the run down, AK, Mr. Al Kowasko, on the teachers that you got in Kindergarten. First Period you have Professor Scheherazade Abdullabi, our Distinguished Galileo Galilee Professor of Classical and Relativistic Mechanics. Second Period you got our Distinguished Ramon and Estaban Rojo Professor of Partial Differential Equations, Dr. Maria Lupita Viscayeno. Third Period is Dr. Natasha Ostrogoth, our Distinguished J. Robert Oppenheimer Professor of Electromagnetics...So la di dah with all this, you get the picture. 10 periods per day, but lots of recess. Work the worksheets, please. Work `em, Al. Work 'em! Work `em! OK?....Don't start bitchin' if you fall behind and get lost if you don't work the worksheets, OK?.....Now, as you no doubt noticed we gots lots of gals working and teaching here. We find that a gal, on average, will work for wages 40% to even 70% lower than what a dude will tolerate as a minimum wage. And then immigrant women will work for up to 50% less than what a precious princess will work for, you know, what a native born USA lady will tolerate as a minimum wage. You don't want to pay anyone too much, but then, on the other hand, you don't want too many teachers saying: `Oh to hell with this shit!' as they walk off the job. So these immigrant women teachers are a great great blessing to administrators like me. Those of us who are admins have to be both geniuses and magicians often enough just to make the numbers come out right in these budget-conscious times which we live in.'

There was some more small talk and chit-chat, but, in a few more minutes, Sister Ann's and my meeting with Herr Docktor Klaus Von Nammacher concluded. He was an odd duck. He was quite Germanic, quite Teutonic looking. Blond hair, athletic build, monocle in his left eye. No, no, just kidding about the monocle. From looking at his face you would think he would be austere and reserved, like some colonel in the Luftwaffe or the Wehrmacht, like he ought to be drawing up plans for the best way to deploy his Panzer divisions, or drawing up plans for stealing lots of masterpieces of art from French museums. If you ever saw John Frankenheimer's The Train, there's this actor this named Paul Scofield who looked just like Von Nammacher, but the latter was sort of a chatterbox, not very austere and reserved, no chilling hauteur about him because he spoke in sort of a typical American twangy way when he was shootin the bull with you. So that just goes to show you that you can't trust stereotypes.

So as you might expect, I, Al Kowasko, am pretty depressed as Sister Ann Asiago and me load up the 100+ math and physics textbooks and start wheeling the load out of Dr. Dr. Von Nammacher's office.

`Should have brought a damn semi to haul all this,' says me.

`Just relax and take things day by day, second by second, I should say,' says Sister Ann. `It's like when you were a three-year-old just beginning to learn American Constitutional Law. You learn a little minute by minute, day by day, and at the end of a year's time you really know a lot.'

`I suppose....What happens if I fail?'

`You won't fail.'

`But what if I do fail?'

`You won't fail!'

I already knew the answer to what would happen to me if I failed but I decided it was best to not press the issue. Pressing the issue wouldn't change anything. If I failed I'd be shipped to the Northern Front where I would have to join all the others fighting the monsters!

`By the way,' starts in Sister Ann, `you succumbed to temptation, like Adam and Eve once succumbed to temptation in the Garden of Eden.'

`How so?'

`When you were saying that 19 machine guns minus 12 machine guns equals 7 machine gun, you succumbed to temptation, because you wanted to yank the chain around the neck of that principal, you were yanking his chain trying to see how he would respond.'

`First Amendment law is really quite unambiguous. Aside from airport security, and a few other places, I have an air-tight Constitutional right to talk about machine guns. Look at me! I'm AK-47! I'm Al Kowasko!'

`Pride goeth before a fall. You're the one worried about failing. Why don't you also worry about falling?'

`Catch me if I fall, please,' say I.

Chapter 2. Politics as Usual

I haven't done a completely excellent job in getting you up-to-date on just what the hell is going in Minnesoootaaaa with the school system here. Now that I'm back at my room at the orphanage and now that I don't have to keep up my end of the conversation with Sister Ann any longer, I got some free time to get you up to date. Well, now then, everyone knows there are lots more Democrats in the USA than Republicans. And everyone knows that the Democrats would win every election and the Republicans would lose every election, if, somehow, Democrats could be inspired to go to the polls and vote. And what prevents Democrats from getting inspired to go to the polls? They are balkanized; they are divided into hostile factions, and this leaves many millions of Democrats apathetic. They are alienated from the political process, driven into cynicism and left to flounder and vegetate, to twist in the wind. I didn't all by myself, mind you, come up with all this info and analysis on my own. The Sisters of Cabrini Convent have helped me quite a bit! You mustn't demand too much originality from a 5-year-old, you know. So, I made a lame insensitive joke at Perpich Elementary about 19 machine guns minus 12 machine guns is 7 machine, and of course some people will get on my case and say something like `Shut up you little creep! Kids die at school from machine guns!' This sort of hostility leads to balkanization and factionalism. On the one hand, I can't deny that machine guns and schools don't mix. But people die all the time, people are starving to death in South Sudan right now, for instance. Does this mean you're an ass if you smile and crack a joke? Does it mean you have to go around with a frown on your face and you have to inform people who are smiling that they can go straight to hell, because they are insensitive bastards who are laughing and smiling when people are dying nasty deaths in South Sudan? Anyway to get off my soap box on South Sudan, getting back to the USA, the Democrats are factionalized. They are balkanized. Polarized. Torn asunder. Minnesota Democrats devised a plan to energize kids aged 16 through 18, to energize them so that they would be less apathetic and less cynical and more inspired and more energized to go to the polls on election days. If all kids are energized to vote, then the Democrats win, because there are more Democrats than Republicans. But how do you get Democrats to be less balkanized? That's a tough one. Look at the Feminists within the Democratic Party. You have your anti-porn feminists and you have your, well you wouldn't call them pro-porn feminists, but they are feminists who are not super super anti-porn. All feminists, or at least something close to universality, hate that nasty hard-core porn shit, but a lot of Feminists don't mind at all and might find quite delicious indeed that sort of erotica which we might call luxurious, or steamy, or artistic, you know, sensual soft silky soft soft-core porn. Sister Ann likes to wear revealing clothes at times but she is still an anti-porn sort of feminist. Just because she likes to feel feminine and beautiful doesn't mean she wants to flash her private areas in public, you know. Don't ask if she like to flash her public areas in private, that sort of question is counterproductive, and, really, it just gets us nowhere. Let's try to keep things on a productive plane. Merely because Sister Ann likes to show some cleavage doesn't mean she is getting set to pose for Playboy, and it doesn't mean she's a big fan of Mapplethorpe or Basic Instinct or works such as Judy Chicago's The Dinner Table. I know, I'm getting back on my soapbox. So sorry. To get back to Minnesota, the Democrats in Minni wanted to make sure that the curriculum in grades 10, 11 and 12 was a curriculum which energized kids politically. Less apathy and the Democrats win. Simple enough. Easy formula for success. Easy formula to remember. Easy triumph for the Democrats. So, to get a curriculum which will energize kids politically the Democrats in Minnesota had to make compromises with them wrascally Wrepublicans. The Democrats eventually got what they wanted, though they had to capitulate quite a lot on some issues to the Evangelical Republicans in order to get what they wanted, which was this: Democratic Party principles would be pushed in the last three grades of high school. When philosophy was taught in the 10th grade it would really just be Feminist Philosophy. When World History in the 11th grade was taught it would merely be a form of World History which focused exclusively on Liberals: Jesus, Mary, St. Francis, Erasmus, Voltaire, Beccaria, Karl Marx, Martin Luther King Jr., Bobby Kennedy – JFK was a Conservative – Hildegard of Bingen, Marcus Garvey, Malcolm X, Tupac etc. And when 20th and 21st century American Women's History was taught in the 12th grade it would be all about Liberal American Women in the 20th and 21st century, and students would get tons and tons of strictly whitewashed and exclusively positive info on Rachel Maddow, Nancy Pelosi, Eleanor Roosevelt, Hillary Clinton, Jane Fonda, Whoopi Goldberg, Joy Behar, Maxine Waters, Anita Hill, Janeane Garofolo etc. They wouldn't hear any negative info like how Janeane Garafolo got married but she didn't know that she got married, though, in some sense, this info makes her more attractive, and hence more persuasive, because it makes her seem like an ordinary person who has flaws and it makes her seem less like some smarty pants super brainy chick who is all about showing that she's intellectually superior to everyone else. I'm not saying she always projects such a persona, but I saw her on TV once talking to Joy Behar, and she's real cute Janeane, I mean – Joy is substantive and has gravitas but you wouldn't say she is a smokin' hot steamin' mamacita. Anyway, moving on with the agenda here, the two sides, the Republicans and the Democrats, in Minnesota, had some marathon bargaining sessions, with the final session at the Capitol in St. Paul lasting till 3: 45 a.m. The Democrats capitulated to the Republicans in agreeing that 3rd graders would learn all about the Clinton Body Count, you know, about all the corpses piling up of all the dead people who crossed the Clintons, Vince Foster etc. But to get what they wanted for the 3rd grade curriculum the Republicans had to cave to Democratic demands that the 4th grade would be devoted to the evidence which says 9/11/2001 was, at least to some degree, an inside job, you know, how did Building 7 come down the way it did? The two sides agreed that the 5th grade would try to be less partisan and more fair and balanced. But this merely glossed over the gulf of disagreement separating the two sides. To the Republicans fair and balanced scholarship meant that the search for Truth in the 5th grade would resemble the journalistic integrity on display at Fox News, as opposed to the liars' mentality running amok at CNN and MSNBC. And of course to the Democrats, fair and balanced scholarship meant that 5th graders would be instructed in the fountains of Excellence and Truth and Honesty found at MSNBC as opposed to the deceitful gusher of vile lies poured out by the satanic hordes found at Fox. So 5th grade curriculum was still a battleground, but a ceasefire held in the other grades. 5th grade would examine the concept which says so much of education is simply establishing what the facts are. What exactly were the facts surrounding the Kennedys' involvement in the death of Marilyn Monroe. If you can establish what the facts are in, say, the death of JFK, then you can establish if he was killed by a lone gunman or by a conspiracy of killers. But if you can't establish the facts then you're just spinning your wheels getting nowhere. If you knew what all the relevant facts are in the death of Vince Foster, then you could determine if his death was a murder or a suicide. Look at Bill Cosby. To defend him you have to accuse his accusers of being liars. To defend his accusers you have to accuse Bill Cosby of being a liar, rapist etc. Well, first, you have to jump in and investigate: you have to try to establish what the facts are. You have to try to determine if any of his accusers have a track record of telling lies, or if they are honest women, and are not liars, not scheming gold-diggers.

So the 5th grade was still a battleground where the curriculum was left up in the air. And it was only by capitulating completely to Republican insistence on tons and tons of Christian instruction / indoctrination in the 6th, 7th, and 8th grade curricula – where the Republican curriculum was – All Evangelical Christianity All the Time – AECATT – that the Democrats were able to get their way for the 3 years of the high school curriculum, where it would be - All Liberal Brilliance All The Time – ALBATT. There was some bipartisan agreement, such as on slightly more foreign language study. Mathematics is sort of a foreign language, in that, well, it isn't English – Oh no, Math is certainly not English – but mathematics is the language of theoretical physics and advanced economics, and there is a big tie in with computer science, though there is tons and tons of science which only requires a very modest level of mathematical sophistication. One of the attractions of math and physics is that it exercises minds but it also gives kids a break from polemics. Obviously, you got to get your head screwed on straight in the arena of religion and politics or else you're like some toothless inbred Minnesota hillbilly lost in the universe. It's like in Cool Hand Luke where that guard goes: two men playin' grab-ass spend a night in the box. If you don't get your head screwed on straight in regards to religion and politics, it's like you're spending your whole life in a box playin' grab-ass with yourself, as Sister Ann likes to say in her colorful way. The study of foreign languages also gives kids a break from the headaches of religion and politics. The study of French rather than Spanish became mandatory for kids in Minnesota under the new rules, because, oddly enough, the Hispanics in Minnesota wanted to keep the gringos ignorant of Spanish, because, if the gringos learned Spanish then the gringos would cease to be gringos, or at least the lines would get blurred between what is a gringo and what isn't a gringo, and the Hispanic Democrats in Minnesota believed it would be politically inexpedient for them to do away with the distinction between Hispanics and gringos. A camel is what a committee will come up with when they are shooting for a horse. Minnesota's curriculum was designed by committees of committees of committees....So, a few hours ago, I was paging through some of these math book that I got and I found something which might interest you. Real Analysis. The author is a guy named John M. Howie, CBE, MA, D.Phil, Dsc., Hon D. Univ, FRSE. His book is published by Springer. Sister Latoya tells me that Springer is the most prestigious name in the world of publishers of math books, though I'll bet that's pretty subjective, still, everyone seems to agree that Cambridge is more prestigious than Oxford for math books, and everyone knows MIT is a million times more prestigious than Alamosa State or Chico State in publishing math books, so it's not all subjectivity, anyway, I'm just regurgitating stuff here, I'm just a 5-year-old, I don't know anything, I'm just repeating what I hear the Sisters say. So, getting to the point, Sister Latoya latches on to some words from John Howie in his Preface to his Real Analysis where he says that Real Analysis is the pons asinorum of modern mathematics. And what is the pons asinorum? This is the bridge of asses - you know – the bridge of donkeys, the bridge of jackasses etc. If you can cross over this bridge and understand Real Analysis then, evidently, you're smarter than a jackass. But if you can't pass Real Analysis then you're as dumb as a...I wonder what female donkeys are called? So, anyway, Sister Latoya sort of goes off after reading this stuff from John M. Howie, CBE, MA, D.Phil, Dsc., Hon D. Univ, FRSE. At first she's angry that some MALE is calling her an ass merely because she doesn't understand Real Analysis. But then she lightens up some and goes through a whole dissertation on who are jackasses and who are not jackasses. People are always going to say stuff like: you're a rube stuck in the 19th century if you don't know who Slim Shady is, or who Marshall Mathers is, or Breezy, people is always sayin shit like: you're a hick white boy if you don't know who OutKast is, or, you're a half-wit if you don't know what a female donkey is called etc. So what if John M. Howie CBE, MA, D.Phil, Dsc., Hon D. Univ, FRSE indulges in some elitist rhetoric in his Preface? According to Sister Latoya we all do it. If you're a Republican and you hear someone say something good about Ted Kennedy then don't you immediately say something like: `But look at what that degenerate jackass did at Chappaquidick', or if you're a Democrat and someone says something good about Ronald Reagan, don't you start in with something like: `But look at what that brainless fool did that other time when...' What do you think? Am I a jackass if I try real hard but still fail to pass Real Analysis?

Chapter 3. Tough Democratic Girls

June 1st has arrived. It was 8:40 when I left the orphanage and began my walk to kindergarten. 20 minutes was cutting it sort of close. And then I hadn't planned on meeting these girls who I met on the sidewalk. There were three of them. They looked like they were in either the 4th or the 5th grade. But I knew they were trouble as soon as I saw them, which happened when they approached me from a side street. One of them, a tall girl with brown hair holds out a Kleenex to me and says to me, `I want you to shine my shoes.' I don't say anything and was going to just keep my head down and keep on walking, but the three of them have me surrounded, and I can't move forward without touching one of them, and I don't want to touch any of these girls, as each of them is a lot bigger than me, and I can tell they are not pleased at all with me.

`Shine `em, bitch!' says this blonde girl.

`Come on, leave me alone,' I say, `I'm just a little kid. I'm only in kindergarten.' Then the third girl, she has these blonde highlights in her otherwise auburn hair, gets her face close to mine and she says, `We're gonna pound you. We're gonna pound you cause you was talking shit on TV about Democrats, and we're Democrats, so we're gonna kick your punk ass.'

So I'm pretty scared, shaking in the knees actually, shaking actually quite a bit actually, because these girls are a lot bigger than me. I never really had to think about fighting and defending myself too much before this incident. I've had some time now to think about tactics and strategies to use in such conflicts, but at the time, when these three semi big girls had me cornered, I didn't have any sort of coherent strategy to help me think and act to get me out of this painful predicament. I just sort of cowered like a little coward. I just sort of hunched down and look at the ground as I cowered before them. Then, looking up to see what was going on, I see the one with the blonde highlights in her auburn hair has put her fist close to my face and then she says, `You was told to shine some shoes, cupcake.' I start to run away from them but they catch me and throw me down to the sidewalk. I lie there like a homeless bum, motionless, silent, insolent, lying there on the concrete in a way which says to the world: `I don't give a damn if you don't like it that I'm lying here on a public sidewalk.' So I lie there in my insolent insolvent way until an elderly woman comes out of her nearby house and shoos the three semi big girls away. My guardian angel, the old woman, looks at me in a queer sort of way. I'm wondering what she's wondering. I'm wondering what she thinks I did to make those girls so angry with me. I sort of smile, or grimace, and then I wave to the old lady, and then I pick myself up off the concrete and head off to school, though I take a long cut down an alley so that I don't have to follow too closely in the footsteps of my tormentors, the three tough girls, as we all head toward Perpich Elementary. As I depart the old woman is still staring at me, and I 'm pretty sure she's wondering why and how I got those girls so pissed at me.

I still managed to arrive at my First Period class by 9:00. I knew most of the kids in the classroom, and there were at least 20 of them. Most I knew from pre-kindergarten last year, though a few were total strangers.

`It's the TV star,' said one kid that I didn't recognize. I smirk at him and then take a seat. Professor Scheherazade Abdullabi looks real nice and friendly, with a sweet smile and a cheerful demeanor as she begins her spiel.

`Welcome to kindergarten children! Welcome, welcome...'

Well, you know how it goes. Her cheerful demeanor and sweet smile come with an expiration date. And the expiration date comes around pretty quickly. Before you know it she's like any other teacher: robotic, militaristic, regimented, swift to bark commands, swift to assume you are lazy and stupid if you don't have an answer as fast as some adult might have it.

`All right, pipe down, pipe down...Let's have some quiet in here...We expect you kids to already know how to count to a hundred. You know the routine. You know the drill from last year. You got ten classes, though they all deal with math this year, not like last year. In each of the ten classes the teacher spends 5 minutes teaching you how to solve math problems. Then you spend 5 minutes actually practicing the techniques which we explain to you. If you don't know what the word `techniques' means don't sweat it. You'll learn soon enough. So, you all have your own copy of today's lecture sheet on your desks, right? Speak up if you don't have it. Plus you all have the problem worksheet, the sheet you use to practice the techniques you're taught, right? You all got the two sheets of paper, right? I know you all have your own pens and your own paper. What I'm asking is this: do you all have the Lecture Sheet and the Problem Worksheet? OK, I see everyone either nodding or just sitting there looking dazed and not too excited to learn lots of math. Come on, come on, let's get excited! Get excited kids for the math lesson! Oh Yeah, Oh Yeah! Pump it up, pump it up, get excited, here we go, here we go....'

Chapter 4. Struggling Teachers

Well we know you don't want to read any math. And what else was Kindergarten but one long grueling ordeal with math? Let me skip ahead one year to the following Spring. Again it's May. Let me summarize how the last 12 months went for me. Yes, there are only 45 pages in Barron's Concise Student Encyclopedia devoted to mathematics, and I had the entire month to learn the material in those 45 pages, but, still, nevertheless, I would have to describe the month of June as hellish. It wasn't super super hellish but it was still painful and frustrating and indeed hellish. Now July was a huge disaster because we hadn't yet called in any help, to help us get through Dowling's Introduction to Mathematical Economics. It was bad on July 8 and 9, but Thursday July 10th, I'll never forget that day, was the absolute lowest of the low. Oddly enough it was the girls in the class who really showered the female math teachers with really tough love. It got real ugly. This one girl named Suzy would walk right up to a teacher and shout really nasty stuff. The sisters at the convent don't want me telling you exactly what Suzy said. They say that repeating that sort of language in print just drags the culture deeper into the gutter, though some of the nuns insist the culture can't be driven any deeper into the gutter than it already is. Of course Suzie is furious because she'll get shipped to the northern front to fight monsters if she fails math, and with only math incompetent teachers she will certainly fail math, and on the northern front kids generally live about two weeks before some monster rips them limb from limb. By July 10th the teachers are very used to nasty of abuse, so they get all smarmy and sarcastic in return and say shit like: `Hey, thanks, bitchita, for your imput, and for your bold honesty, You're such a dear. Without honest dialogue where would this world of ours be?' And then the teacher would stick her finger in her mouth and pretend to be barfing on the kid, or she would say something like: `Hope you like fighting all those monsters you will have to fight up north, kiddo.' I got my ass kicked one day by this Asian Lady Teacher. It was a few days after we had commenced, in great earnestness, the profound study of Probability and Statistics – and this Asian Lady didn't know shit about Probability and Statistics - but she actually wasn't too bad at teaching Lagrangian Dynamics, Fourier Series, Ordinary and Partial Differential Equations, Legendre polynomials, asymptotic expansions, perturbation methods etc. Anyway after it becomes painfully obvious she doesn't know diddly squat about Probability and Statistics me and these other bad boys would start in with: `Hee Haw, Hee Haw, Hee Haw'. We were being jackasses you see whenever she would make a botch of things at the chalk board me and the boys would be reenacting that crack from John Howie, where Real Analysis is the pons asinorum. So, then, one day I received a nasty note from the Asian Lady, which read as follows:

YOU MAKE DONKEY NOISE AT ME

BUT YOU JACKASS, YOU THE DONKEY, AL KOWASKO

YOU TELL BOYS TO SAY `HEE HAW, HEE HAW, HEE HAW' AND THEY SAY THIS TO ME ALL TINE TODAY, CAUSE I NOT KNOW PROBABILITY REAL 100% PERFECT.

YOU ASS-HOLE! YOU VICIOUS LITTLE BASTARD! YOU GO TO HELL! YOU ARE A VILE PIG-BOY. NOW I REPORT YOU TO PRINCIPAL VON NAMMACHER - Madame Professor Li Chang, Distinguished Emmy Noether Professor of Probability and Statistics at Rudy G. Perpich School

So this shook me up, shook me up pretty thoroughly at the time, which was quite a few months ago. I was just having a little fun. So I go to her office quick and apologized fast. I know I can be sarcastic but my intention is just to laugh a little. I don't want to be hated, of course, of course, and there's some real hate dripping from her note to me. Long story short I patched things up with her and we get along fine now.

At first I was pissed at having these incompetent teachers incapable of helping us, with the upshot being we would all fail kindergarten, and then we would all be shipped north to fight monsters. I had a bad few days in June learning fractions and decimals and percentages. I was putting in tons of time in homework and I was still falling behind the rest of the class. While I was studying Con Law the year before a lot of my classmates were working with private math tutors. I totally lost it in class one day last June – throwing chairs, flipping over tables, throwing F-bombs around. But then I had a few marathon weekend sessions with Sister Ann – and I just got fractions and decimals and percentages shoved into me for hour after hour, and so I got caught up with my classmates, but we were still falling behind, and we just didn't understand what the teachers were teaching. And with these worthless teachers we were all dead meat. You could stick a fork in us. I calmed down, grew philosophical, and accepted the cards which fate had dealt me. Over the span of a few days in June, and with some reflection, and some soul searching, though with a few setbacks now and then in the coming months, recall the need for my apology to Professor Chang, I learned to accept the fact that the teachers were doing the best they could do. They went to schools which didn't teach any sort of advanced math. It was not their fault that the State of Minnesota had suddenly and insanely gotten crazy serious about fulfilling Rudy Perpich's Dream of Minnesota being the Brain Power State.

Getting on with the condensed version of what happened to us in Kindergarten last year, and, again, I know you don't want to read a detailed account of any of the actual math and actual physics that we had to shove into our brains in 365 days, I know this for a fact - but we got lucky in that we were able to get a mathematics professor from the University of Wisconsin Superior to devote some time to helping us get through July and August. I mean, he helped bring the competency of our teachers up to a standard where they could be of actual help to us. Then some math and physics graduate students from UW Superior and UMinn Duluth got us through October, barely, but they got us through October. October was when we were struggling terribly to understand Sokolnikoff's Higher Mathematics for Engineers and Scientists. But then the graduate students abandoned us and we were left on our own for two weeks, and during these two weeks we were heading fast toward disaster, heading straight down, yet again. What saved us was that the little girls in the class had been doing pretty well. Everyone was doing well in fact when we had competent tutors. So, because the little girls were doing well with the tutors, money, albeit politically-motivated money, was made available to supply all of the kids in the class with some competent tutors. The girls were not going to fail as long as they had competent tutors. So the Politically correct politicians pushing the agenda that girls can handle math as well as boys made the money available to pay for the tutors, but the tutors weren't cheap. Saul Rosenblum and Paddy Lobachevski ran this business called Geniuses to the Rescue where they would travel round the USA and Canada helping Ph.D. candidates learn the math and physics required to enable these candidates to earn their doctorates. Perpich Elementary was paying, to both Saul and Paddy, paying to each of them, over $1,000 a day to teach us kids some really advanced math and physics, but they were worth it, at least we thought so - they were real good, real sharp, and they got us to understand: they cleared away the confusion. Where before there was darkness and chaos, and no end of frustration, and anguish, and fear, fear of failing, fear of the consequences of failing there to drive us to no end of frustration, to drive us to the brink of insanity and past the brink on some occasions, there is now knowledge and understanding and peace and serenity. I feel I have to come clean on some important matters. I haven't been perfectly honest with you! First, I'm not an orphan. I hope you can forgive me for lying to you. But, you know, it not as if my deception cost you any money. It's not like this deception kept you awake at night! There is no Orphanage of St. Theresa of Avilia on the Lake on London Road in Duluth, Minnesota. The truth of the matter is that I live in a commune, so, ipso facto, I'm a Communist! But I'm only a Communist in a facile, slippery, twisted syntactical sense. I live in a commune but I wield no police powers; the single moms and their kids don't have an army of secret agents, don't have any Bolshie killers who will eliminate all those who pose threats to the Bolshie power structure. We don't possess any sort of Lubyanka Prison. Rather than have each single mom pay for her own house or apartment, it's just easier and more conducive to sanity and serenity and economic common sense for the 7 single moms and their 11 kids to band together and rent a house together. When 4 of the women go off to work the night shift, there are 3 other women at the house to mind the kids. We had to get out of New Mexico because of huge lay-offs at a factory. Loaded up the five cars we got and came to Duluth. Finances are stable here. 7 moms each working 40 hours per week, that's 280 hours per week. Average wage is $10 per hour, so that's roughly $ 12,000 per month gross, say $9,000 per month net after taxes. Rent on the house is $2500 per month, so, anyway, there's no big stress over money at the commune. Well I am pleased that I, Al Kowasko, got that off my chest. It feels good to live clean and honest. It feels good to not be keeping any secrets from you. Sorry no Cabrini Convent in Duluth. If you're still angry with me, haven't you every cheated a little on your taxes? Haven't you ever told a police officer you were only doing 65mph when you were really doing 85? Now I'm telling you the truth, scouts honor, about meeting Tiffany Trump, and going to Mar-a-Lago, and meeting lots of hot cougars. Scouts honor now, I'm giving it to you straight and honest when I say that all kindergarteners will be sent to the Northern Front and forced to fight monsters should they be lazy enough or stupid enough to fail kindergarten. If you don't trust me on this you can ask anyone around here and they'll all tell you the same thing: there are monsters and people are needed to combat these monsters! I know you're still skeptical, probably feeling a little unsure, not quite ready to give me your full confidence, full confidence that I know what I'm talking about in regards to these monsters – these vile beasts from out of the pit of hell – but hang with me, let me explain a few things. With the help of the Genius Jews, the kindergarten class, everyone of us, is feeling pretty good after we finished up with our final exam. Everyone is feeling good, feeling confident, feeling strong, feeling like there is no way we could have failed. So they tell us to come down at our leisure, come down any time between 9:00 AM and 2:00 PM to get the news. I get to Perpich Elementary about 9:30 get, to Von Nammacher's office by 9:31, and now I'm super nervous, the knees are shaking again like they were that day when three girls from the 4th or 5th grade nearly pounded me. Oh, yeah I'm real nervous...Oh I can tell by looking at Von Nammacher's face that it's going to be bad news. I told myself to be prepared for bad news but I am not prepared. I am not prepared for this...'

`I failed didn't I?,'

`No, you passed. In fact you did great on the test. Easy A for you. But you're still going to the Front to fight them monsters' says Doc Von Nammacher.

`The deal was that if I pass the test I don't have to go north!'

`Hey, I'm just the messenger here. I'm just repeating what my bosses tell me to say.'

`And they say that I go to the Front, even after passing the test, huh?'

`Al, you were always going to the Front. You were always on the schedule to dance with them monsters. You was always going down, Al, you was always going down...Maybe you'll survive, but you were always going north...you're too young to serve as breeding stock, you're too damn old to not be fighting monsters...You know the routine, either you get on that train going north tomorrow or else some government issued hitman blows your brains out...guys are lining up to do the jobs...that's what dudes with lots of pretty ribbons on their uniforms tell me...sure you passed the test...sure, you're good, you're real good. You know what else? You were always the best, Al. You were always the best. We won't have enough body bags for all the damn monsters you're gonna hunt down and kill. Hell, you think I don't know that? Everyone knows you're the best, Al, that's why we need you up north. Plus orders is orders. And I got orders sayin you go north tomorrow. Now hear me on this, soldier boy, you is gonna serve your country...you ain't gettin no ticket to pass no Go, you ain't gettin no ticket to proceed straight to no Boardwalk or no easy street Park Place...you're either on that train tomorrow or else the hitman goes to work on you...it's time for you to put down them school books, soldier boy, and it is time for you to go kill some monsters....I want to thank you, Al Kowasko, for your military service to these here United States of America. I want to thank you in advance for your service to America in killing all them damn monsters that you're sure to meet up with.'

I shake my head and head home. I got a train to catch tomorrow.

Chapter 5. Fighting Monsters on the Northern Front

I found out pretty fast the next day that Von Nammacher would give the same speech to other kids that he sent north to fight monsters, at least he spoke more or less same words to the little girl from my kindergarten class I was sitting next to on the train – she was weeping but also comforting herself by quoting some kind words Von Nammacher had given her.

`He said I'm the best. He said I've always been the best. He said everyone knows I've always been the best,' said young Taylor Tyler as she wiped the tears from her eyes. `He said everyone knows I'm a pro's pro, he said that I'm gonna put a lot of them damn monsters into a lot of damn body bags....I appreciate that...It hurts to get thrown to the damn monsters, but I really appreciate what he said to me.'

I didn't see any reason to set her straight and clue her in to the fact that Von Nammacher liked to say lots of stuff to lots of people. `Wow,' I say, `I really wish he would have said something nice like that to me.'

`Yeah, he's a nice guy,' said Taylor. `But he's pretty weird too. One second he says I'm the best, a pro's pro, and then the next second he's singing some song called Livin La Vida Loca, where he's singing lyrics like, `She's in to superstition, black cats and voodoo dolls...woke up in New York City in a funky cheap hotel...'

`One time I was talking to him, and he was singing, 'I've been around the world, I've seen a million girls...the girl's got rhythm, the back seat rhythm, the girl's got rhythm, the back seat rhythm....' So I thought that was pretty much inappropriate.'

Me and Taylor Tyler were the only two kids from our kindergarten class shipped off to fight monsters. Both of us passed our final exam – at least she assured me that Von Nammacher told her she passed it. Anyway, I almost wanted to tell Taylor Tyler that Von Nammacher , in his final words to me, and her, did a pretty good job in his impersonation of Richard Crenna / Colonel Trautman in Rambo: First Blood. I'm not too bad at talking like Will Teasel...you wouldn't like this little town anyway, or like John Rambo...why you pushin me?... but I don't do a very good Crenna. He's pretty subtle. He was really good in that film where Audrey Hepburn plays a blind lady who lives in a basement apartment and is terrorized by a drug dealing psycho played by Alan Arkin. Crenna was great along with Alain Delon, Catherine Deneuve, Michael Conrad et. al. in Jean Pierre Melville's Un flic. There are some problems with that film in regards to a toy train and a toy helicopter, but the actors were really solid. So, not to bore you with too many trivial details, and not to try to impress you with my knowledge of the French Cinema, but to get on with the tale of how our biographies, Taylor's and mine, merged on this day, we had an emotional journey as the train pulled out of Duluth, pulled away from those we loved and were leaving behind. And we both teared-up as we watched the city we called home fade into the distance. Actually I was quite fortunate, and I knew pretty quickly that I was very lucky indeed to be sitting next to Taylor Tyler. She was the beauty queen / love princess of our Kindergarten class at Rudy Perpich Elementary. As the mile flew by she wept less and less, though, naturally, she wasn't in the best of moods, you know, obviously, what with the monsters and all the horrors which awaited us, but, all the same, she seemed to brighten up as the miles passed, as the Minnesota forest lands flew by our window. She certainly appeared sincere when she squeezed my hand and promised me that she would always stay by my side, and would never run away and leave me to die alone, as we battled the monsters together in the far north. Of course we had to clear customs at the Canadian line and that was rather tedious. Then we switched trains an hour later in Winnipeg. Taylor, was my sweet gorgeous darling beautiful angel, I really loved her a lot, not that I was going to confess any of this to her. I wanted to play it cool and not make a big embarrassment of myself in case she wasn't so red hot in love with me. We'll see if she left me to die the first time we faced some monsters together. So, all things considered, the journey up to Yellowknife was rather glorious, sweet and pleasant, intoxicating and wonderful, but still tinged with fear and apprehension at what awaited us in the near future. We slept on the train as it surged onward into the Canadian night, getting closer and close to the Great Slave Lake and then the city of Yellowknife. The next day we came back to reality and sore necks and shoulders from sleeping in awkward positions - had to sleep in our seats on the train, though the seats were not too terribly uncomfortable and you could recline in them. Taylor and I snuggled up under one of the blankets we had with us. Taylor snored some and kept me from sleeping. While awake I was thinking about how the world is inundated with so many brainless misconceptions about monsters. Some people insist you can only kill a werewolf with a silver bullet. Others are adamant in maintaining that only by exposing a vampire to direct sunlight, or by driving a wooden stake through its heart, can you destroy a vampire. Now common sense ought to tell everyone that if you douse a werewolf or a vampire with gasoline, and set it ablaze, and reduce it to ashes, then scatter the ashes really well so that they can not reassemble themselves into the bone, blood and brains of a monster, then you have destroyed that monster. Say you mix the ashes of burned monsters into concrete, just how likely is it that that concrete will break apart and the monster ashes within the concrete will be reconstituted into monsters again? Highly highly unlikely, I dare say. But if it happens, well, burn the ashes again, and then harness the ashes to turn turbines to create energy when the ashes move with great force to reconstitute themselves into monsters, and then burn the ashes again, and then harness the ashes again to turn turbines to create energy....When the train pulled into the train station in Yellowknife we gathered up our luggage and got ready to decamp. I found the piece of paper Von Nammacher had given me, found it in a pocket of a pair of jeans I had brought along. On the paper he had written the name and number of our contact person, our liaison officer. She would coordinate our activities in Canada. I rang her up on my cell phone. And she was like: `Who are you? Who are you with?...Give me a moment...OK now I see your names on my spreadsheet, Kowasko, A and Tyler, T – alright, well, we got lots of work for you two - we got tons of monsters at this trailer park out on the west side.' So Taylor and I call a cab and then we get to the trailer park, and it's a pretty bleak and depressing scene: there's just white trashy trailer after one dirty shabby white trailer after one greasy grubby trailer after another for as far as the eye can see. There aren't too many trees to speak of, a stunted pine here and there, some birch barely able to push through the permafrost, but between the blue sky and the blue waters of the big lake – The Great Slave Lake – there's some green grass growing between the grimy grubby white trailers. Taylor and I approach the first trailer home on our left. I look for a buzzer but don't find one. As I'm opening the screen door to knock on the inner wooden door a middle aged woman opens up and says, `I saw you coming, don't care what you're selling, get the hell off my property before I call the police.' We remove herself from her property and move on to the next little shack of a trailer and this guy in a wife-beater shirt says to us: `What the hell do you want?' So we explain we are Christians and are interested in sharing our faith in Christ with him, if he has a minute or two. Then he says: `Start preachin.' I'll give you 60 seconds.' So we give him the 60 second sermon - Jesus is the Way the Truth and the Light, and no one comes to the Father save through the Son. Jesus is God just the same as the Father and the Holy Spirit are God, and therefore Jesus must be worshipped as God – Isaiah 9. 6, John 1. 1-14, Colossians 2. 8-10, 1 Timothy 3. 16 etc. We have time to mention that scripture tells us that rebellion against God is like unto the sin of witchcraft. Before our 60 seconds expires we inform our target audience that if he repents and turns to Jesus he won't be damned. Then he goes off on us:`Don't want to hear none of that. Don't want to hear no theology from punks like you. Don't want to hear you say I'm going to perdition because I reject your Jesus. Don't want to hear you say that I'm damned if I say Jesus is a big superstition. Don't want to hear that I am a heretic and am therefore like unto a vile monster, a hideous murderer of souls, because I lead people to perdition with my heresies. Don't want to hear any of that crap from crap missionaries like you two. Got it? Don't want to hear no religion from you saying I'm a heretic and that I'm hellbound if I don't change my tune and agree with what you is preachin. Got it?'

Oh yeah we got it. We caught on where he is coming from pretty fast, and so we bid him a good day and shoved off.

Canadian law is quite specific. We have a legal right to ring a buzzer and ask if the homeowner would like to hear about Jesus and the True Path to Heaven, but as soon as a homeowner or renter tells us to get lost we then have to move on, or else we can be arrested for trespassing...So as the day moves along we're finding about 25% of the people are not monsters but are quite supportive of our aims and efforts, and 50% of them are monsters indeed, quite hostile, quite lost in heresy and monstrous lies. These people invariably insist that Taylor and me are the real heretics, the real monsters, the real murderers of souls, because, they say, our religion leads people away from heaven and drags them down to perdition, or at least they insist our religion is a big lie and it stirs up fear and hate and stirring up fear and hate is what monsters do best. And then the last 25% of the people we meet are just pissed off that we are proselytizers from Trumpland standing on Canadian soil. These people insist that your typical American is very little different from your typical bloodsucking vampire. Sometimes you'll find exceptions to the rule of these three categories. For instance, we found one guy who was basically supportive of our efforts but he was also saying that since my mom was shacking up with her third boyfriend in the last three years – I had volunteered that info as he had volunteered some similar sorts of info about his parents – anyway, he was saying my mom is a slave to sin, a daughter of licentiousness, a promiscuous Christian, and a damnable sinner bound for perdition lest she repent, and therefore she needs to be excommunicated from the Church we belong to, assuming that she refuses to repent, or else the Church we belong to is just a big fraud of a Church. I concede that he has a point, and I even feel bold enough to say that my ma really does need to get married, and I say, in a joking way, even though it's a serious part of theology, that she needs to do a better job keeping her lusty desires and her steamy female passions within the bonds of holy matrimony, which gets a laugh from the guy, but Taylor gives me a straight look, and then I go on to say that my ma is always saying that most guys are thuggish male nymphos with one thing on their minds, and she sure as hell don't like guys who will beat a woman silly if she gets a little uppity, so she insists it would be stupid of her to marry some thug who beats the crap out of her whenever she gets a little moody. I won't argue with her on that point! So we shoot the bull with this guy a little longer and then he says to us - perhaps he was lying, I don't know, but he wanted to get rid of us - so he says, `Well, good luck with your preachin, but I got to run into town to begin my shift on the loading dock,' so Taylor and me move along to the next shack. Taylor starts in by addressing this young woman covered in piercings and tattoos by saying that the young woman can turn her life around and can avoid the fiery pit of hell and can avoid an eternity of painful banishment from the bliss of eternal heaven if she would only come to Lord Jesus with a humble heart, and give up her fornicatin', her cursin', her sinnin', her....The woman had first begun her wind up to slam the door in our faces when Taylor Tyler first mentioned the phrase `the fiery pit of hell.' After this humiliation I suggested to Taylor that we take a little break, and have a pre-lunch snack down by the shores of the immense lake unfolding to the horizon to the south of us. We could take a little break every once in a while. But they kept us on a tight leash in Yellowknife. If word got back to Minnesota that we were slack at fighting monsters, then Minnesota would make things unpleasant, perhaps hellishly unpleasant for us when school started up again in the Fall. Yeah I exaggerated a little when I implied the monsters were vicious killer sorts of monsters. But their heresies are vicious killers, their heresies are murderers of souls. That's the truth. And trust me on this: the State knew how to yank hard on the leash it had round a kid's neck. The Brain Power State knew exactly how to make the minions do whatever the Brain Power State ordered the minions to do.

Chapter 6. Wolfgang

So Taylor and me are snacking on donuts and Dr. Peppers and this guy walks up to as we're sitting on a park bench eating our donuts and drinking our Dr. Peppers and he says his name is Ali Abdullah and he starts in by waving a knife in our faces and saying he'll cut our throats if we say anything negative about Allah or Allah's prophet Mohammed. Well of course Taylor and me are trained for just this sort of monster. We spring up off the park bench and start screaming at him, saying Allah is a big fraud who cheats people out of heaven, saying Ali Abdullah will soon be languishing in the darkness and terror of eternal perdition if he doesn't wise up and dump the worthless fraud, Allah, and start worshipping the True Creators of the Universe, the Christian Trinity of Father, Son and Holy Spirit, and this of course drives the Islamic monster really insane with homicidal rage. But Ali Abdullah's too slow to catch us, and then this other guy, who we later learn goes by the name of Bertrand Marconi, comes running in to our defense. He's a papist, as we also learn later, and he's all about how there is only one True Church, the Roman Catholic Church, all others are of Satan. He doesn't know that me and Taylor are anti-papists, but he goes after Ali Abdullah after Ali Abdullah starts in with his jihad sermonizing, saying he'll slice Betrand Marconi into pepperoni slices if he says anything negative about Allah. So Betrand, the arch-papist, comes to our defense not knowing that we are anti-papists, and so Taylor and I watch as the two monsters slash each other with knives. Long story short, Bertrand carves up Ali Abdullah, cuts him up pretty bad, nothing lethal but still left him a bloody mess, if you must know the gory details. We thank Betrand Marconi for helping us out but then he gets real ugly when we tell him how Rome is a murderer of souls, tell him how Rome claims it lead people to heaven but actually leads them to perdition. Betrand tries to use his papist devil logic on us, talking about how we must venerate the people Rome has canonized, and how we must pray to the Virgin, and must professes she is sinless and born without the taint of original sin, and submit our bodies and our souls to the discipline of the magisterium, and renounce our vile Evangelical heresies which Betrand claims are the real murderers of souls, filthy satanic Protestant heresies, and do penance for our foul sins, and go to confession and confess the infinite depravity of our souls, and profess the Dogma of Papal Infallibility, and profess all other official Roman Catholic doctrines. Seeing we resist him as good Christians ought to resist the Devil, he tells us to go to hell and then runs off looking for easier victims of his papist heresy. Taylor and me go back to our donuts and Dr. Peppers, laying ourselves on the green grass this time. Taylor has her arms wrapt around me. She's pretty scared. What with all the flashing knives and spurting blood who wouldn't be? And I try my best to comfort her. She calms down quite a bit, and then she starts kissing me. We're hugging each other while we're kissing, and it's all very sweet and wonderful for a few minutes, but then I got sort of tired having our faces smashed together as they were, all smashed together, plus I had to get some breaths into my lungs. After all the kissing I hold her close and play with her left hand with my right hand, and I tell her she's beautiful, and brave, and sweet, and fearless, and gorgeous. I was looking for other adjectives but the five I found seemed adequate for the moment, though beautiful and gorgeous are more or less the same adjective, just as brave and fearless are basically the same thing, so I just continued to play with her hand, feeling its softness, you know, romantically trying to stay close to her without slobbering all over her. Maybe an hour elapses as we sit by the lake and hold each other close. We kissed some more, and I searched for more adjectives to use while sweet-talking her, and we kissed some more, and I tried to sweet-talk her some more, and we kissed some more, and then this guy named Wolfgang walks up to us while we are laying so close tighter on the grass. He just sort of stares at us without saying anything, and we're wondering: well, what the hell kind of monster are you? – and so we start to quiz him about Jesus and then he starts in by telling us he's a hitman for the State of Minnesota, and he says he is licensed to grease punks like Taylor and me for taking unauthorized breaks when we are supposed to be fighting monsters, but then he says it's a discretionary thing – he can waste us if he wants, or he can give us a second chance. He has a pretty nasty looking handgun, so I have to assume he's on the level. Evidently the State of Minnesota gives him some leeway in how he does his job. Then he says he hasn't made up his mind if he will waste us or not, but he says he'll let us know. This hired killer Wolfgang is saying all sorts of queer stuff about old movies: `Look at Kiss Me Deadly, with Ralph Meeker starring as Mike Hammer, and starring a young and nice-looking Cloris Leachman, who I suppose is most famous from those scenes in Young Frankenstein, where she isn't so young and nice-looking, those scenes where the horses rear up and scream in terror every time her name in that movie, Frau Blucher, is pronounced, but don't you think Kiss Me Deadly drags at times for a film which has some great stars in it - at least I think Meeker was great in that film - and which is a film which has all the ingredients for a great movie? John Sturgis' Mystery Street, which is another one of the supreme film noir classics, never drags. Ralph Meeker, who I learned the other day was from Minneapolis, was in Teresa, a beautiful film directed by Fred Zinnemann. Zinnemann's most famous film is probably From Here to Eternity – Burt Lancaster, Debrorah Kerr, Frank Sinatra, Donna Reed etc. Nominated for 13 Academy awards, won 8. That guy who starred as the pimp in Bob Swami's great great film about Parisian cops and gangsters, La Balance, played a cop in Zinnemann's excellent The Day of the Jackal. I found Zinnemann's Julia starring Jane Fonda more or less unwatchable - I liked Jane Fonda in Joy House. I just prefer her when she is glamorized and young – such as in Joy House and The Chase \- not when she is either old or unglamourized, e.g., Julia, Tu va bien etc. Winona Rider, who was very good in Girl, Interrupted, as was Angelina Jolie, went through that stretch there where she was stealing everything in sight. I mean if you owned a chic boutique in West Hollywood you better lock your doors when you saw Winona Rider heading toward your place. But she seems to have cleaned up her act, at least we don't read in the tabloids any more about her pulling heists. Angelina Jolie who has tons of star power but her movies are usually second rate and Johnny Depp were both good in The Tourist, which was directed by the director of The Lives of Others, Florian Henckel von Donnersmark, who I'll have you know was born Florian Maria Georg Christian Graf Henckel von Donnersmark. And of course everyone knows that The Lives of Others is a great, great film. But what's up with these long-winded Germans, my countrymen, and the names they give their kids and their books? Recall August Ferdinand Möbius and his towering masterpiece on quaternions: Der barycentrische Calcül, ein neues Huelfsmittel zur analytischen Behandlung der Geometry darstellt und insbesondere auf die Bildung neuer Classen von Aufgaben und die Entwickelung mehrerer Eigenschaften der Kegelschnitte angewendet. Of course you might let me know me that people are always going on about such and such being a great, great film, a towering colossus of cinematic art, but, then, after you watch it, you discover it's not a great, great film, and it's not a towering colossus of cinematic art, and, half the time, it's not even a minor colossus of cinematic art. The Lives of Others is however a superb film. So much of the art of comedy is simply the action of making fun of other people in a funny way. Sometimes you get the impression that no one was funny in the past, like before the 19th century. The art of comedy had it rough in the old days because it threw a wet blanket on things when kings and nobles would torture people to death if they made fun of them. In the Renaissance days when tyrants ruled Italy, if a neighbor insulted you and your daughter by calling her a whore if she had sex before marriage, then you kidnapped your neighbor's daughter, killed her, cut the meat from her bones, put this meat into a `Thyestean stew', then you invited your neighbor over for dinner, and after dinner you showed him what he had just eaten by showing him the head of his dead daughter. That was considered, by your more violent and energetic Christians in Italy 500 years ago, an artful and comedic way to take your revenge. Under the laws of les majesty which involved the torture and execution of those who besmirched the dignity of kings, popes, nobles etc., comedians in the old days learned via very tough love how to obey their betters. Who knows when modern comedy began? I was watching a film the other day from 1940 called `Night Train to Munich' starring Rex Harrison. It had these two English guys who were funny in a 21st century sort of way. Pickup from 1950 is really funny in parts. Beverly Michaels marries a guy's bank account – a whole $7,000 – she's sort of like Lana Turner and there's a lot of plot-swapping between Pickup and The Postman Always Rings Twice. Look at Sandro in Michelangelo Antonioni's L'Avventura. The film begins with those shots of Anna in the foreground, and, in the background, we see Michelangelo's dome - the dome created by the 16th century painter, sculptor and architect Michelangelo, not by the Michelangelo of the 20th century who created L'Eclisse, Blow-Up, L'Avventura etc. The Vatican is only a mile or two away from the scene at the beginning of L'Avventura though, if not for the presence of that dome you would think the film begins in a rural setting – anyway, Sandro is passionately in love with Anna, but then she disappears on that island, and then Sandro swiftly turns all his amorous attentions toward Claudia, played by Monica Vitti. She is distraught at the disappearance of her fried, but only a short time later she fears her friend will re-appear: she fears her friend will re-appear to take Sandro away from her. But then, soon enough, Sandro cheats on Claudia with that lovely Italian girl, who we met earlier in the film, cheats on Claudia at the palatial hotel; for further evidence of Sandro's instability he purposely spilled the ink on that guy`s drawing of a local architectural detail. Sandro obviously has some brains, as he has made lots of money giving financial assessments, enough to own beautiful homes in both Rome and Milan. But he is unstable. How could he chase after Claudia the very day Anna disappeared? How could he cheat on Claudia so soon after he wins her heart? He is driven by his passions, you see. You certainly wouldn't say Sandro is evil, but, rather, you would say he is a slave to his unstable character. He's a stereotypical Latin male and is therefore always looking to seduce females. You might compare and contrast him with the Celtic Emma Baudine – played by Siobhan McKenna - in Daughter of Darkness – which also starred a young Honor Blackman – she played a villain in the James Bond film Goldfinger. Emma, in Daughter of Darkness, is driven by something very dark and sinister. She starts out in a very sympathetic way with the audience. Her first two killings were not premeditated murders, though there's some ambiguity with the second killing, but her third killing is definitely pre-meditated murder - she kills an English lad named Larry – but even after her third killing Emma still doesn't lose all sympathy with the audience, because it is as if she is possessed by a demon, and you're thinking it is the demon inside her which is responsible for the evil, not the lovely Irish lass / femme fatale, Emma Baudine. I suppose one could ramble on forever about how literature and movies and real life give us no end of examples of people torn between warring passions. Hamlet is torn between the desire to avenge his murdered father and the fear of the punishment given to regicides; Othello loves the woman he murders; MacBeth murders the king because his wife has been nagging him, implying he's a damnable wimp with no ambition if he doesn't murder the king; Raskonikov thinks he's a Napoleon, or at least some sort of being who is above the moral law in Crime and Punishment; he murders an old pawnbroker to lay his hands on her cash; but he can not escape his tormented conscience though he never thought, before he stuck an axe in her head, that he would be tormented by a guilty conscience. Professors earn their money by elaborating on the classics to adolescents. The Iliad, The Odyssey, The Brothers Karamazov, War and Peace, Anna Karenina, Lord Jim, The Trial, The Castle, The Magic Mountain, 1984, The Grapes of Wrath etc., etc., are cash cows to these college professors. The protagonists in these fictional works, like the heroes in Plutarch's Lives, are all torn between conflicting forces and warring desires. Espionage novels have a connection with religion because in religion we are asking: who are God's agents and who are the agents of the devil? In Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, I can't remember if Le Carré ever really explained why the spy for the Soviets inside British Intelligence, Bill Haydon, decided to betray his country. We're told he hated of the USA. I seem to recall he hated pushy evangelicals, and perhaps he couldn't find any aura of romance or aristocratic charm in the corporate culture we have over here. Don't you think there is greatness in our corporate expertise: GM, Chrysler, Ford, Boeing, Intel, 3M, Microsoft, Seagate, Exxon-Mobil, Caterpillar, Apple, Du Pont, Google, MGM, Warner Brothers, Columbia Studios, Paramount, the NFL, the NBA, the NHL, MLB, NASCAR etc? Anyway, Haydon's ex-best friend wrings his neck. And you can never be said to have led a truly successful life when your ex-best friend is justified for wringing your neck. Le Carré made Haydon a Tory at Oxford - which reminds one of John Buchan, who was a Tory at Oxford. Buchan was not a traitor of course, but I seem to recall a critic who had a theory that Buchan might have believed the words that he put into Lumley's mouth in The Power House that the difference between civilization and the law of the jungle was as thin as the glass in a coffee table, and Buchan's novels are filled with these charismatic, genius villains \- Medina, Moxson Ivory etc. Buchan was one of those geniuses who was not slow to attain his full genius potential - he's in the pantheon with Disraeli, Gladstone, Shakespeare, Dickens, Churchill, Florence Nightingale etc. - being both a statesman and a prolific writer of thrillers, espionage novels, biographies, no end of magazine articles. Buchan was also a poet and his novels are filled with marvelous descriptions of nature. His best book might be his autobiography Memory-hold-the-Door because his novels are a little corny by modern standards, and I suppose none of his novels are masterpieces in the same class with Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, and Smiley's People, or with Erskine Childer's The Riddle of the Sands \- a great novel from an author with a very curious biography \- he was decorated for bravery by the British in the Boer War but he was also executed by the British for his support of Ireland years later. He invented a character in The Riddle of the Sands, a traitor named Dolman, and you wonder what part of Childers went into Dolman. Getting back to Le Carré, it's hard to find any big problems with his best novels, such as Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, and Smiley's People. Devout Christians will not like the worldly tone of these novels, but they are works of genius. Very expertly plotted. For instance, Karla, the Soviet spy master, gets burned by the British spy master, Smiley, after Smiley learns Karla has been misusing Soviet funds to pay for his daughter's treatment in a Swiss hospital, with the upshot that the Soviet spy master has to tuck his tail between his legs and defect to the West and get out of Dodge before his Soviet masters learn about his financial shenanigans and send him to a gulag. When Haldane says to Avery in The Looking-Glass War that he is a collator not an operations man, this implies the existence of a dumb-ass, because, perhaps, only a dumb-ass would put a collator, an analyst, in charge of running a big operation - Leiser's insertion into East Germany - which ended in disaster. Doesn't everyone know that you want an operations man, or at least an ex-operations man, to run an operation? When the General, the ladies' man leader of the exiles of the Baltic Republics, is driven to his death - driven mind you – driven by his killers - murdered in Hampstead Heath by Karla's Moscow Centre thugs using a Moscow Centre assassination weapon - and then when Karla uses his thugs to torture and murdered the `Magic Friend' on that sailboat in Hamburg's harbor, after the Magic Friend burned the Ginger Pig in that Hamburg night club full of naked German girls – I mean got photos of him naked with those naked girls – burned him in the sense of making him liable to blackmail and thus a security risk to the USSR - you might be thinking the West would be acting in the fashion of les dumb-asses if they made life in the West comfortable for Karla after he defects. But you can't treat defectors shabbily if you want to get more defectors in the future to defect and reveal more of the devilish secrets of the devilish Soviet Union. Still, you hate to lavish in Western luxury and throw lots of money at a guy who has tortured and murdered Western agents. Look at that huge, unsightly giantess, Connie, or try to look at her, with the saliva dripping from her huge mouth in her huge head holding her huge memory, the giantess who could recall every detail of every Soviet thug, spy and bureaucrat who ever saw the inside of the Lubyanka. She was indeed no dumb-ass. She ends up living at that hideous pet motel - living an exilic sort of existence banished from her beloved boys at the Circus, unable to find some sort of rewarding work in which she can employ her superhuman memory. Doesn't one have to be a dumb-ass if one is responsible for sending Connie into exile? Maybe she was just too hideous to have around, with her saliva dripping from her huge mouth, I don't know. If works of great literature are tedious things in your eyes then look at the most famous works of the modern cinema - Gone with the Wind, The Wizard of Oz, Rebecca, Vertigo, Rear Window, Platoon, Wall Street, The Paths of Glory, Full Metal Jacket, Dr. Stangelove, Mirror, Solaris etc. I was watching this movie called The Oxford Murders starring Elijah Wood – he was Frodo in The Lord of the Rings trilogy. It was semi-pornographic though I suppose it was more or less watchable. You might try I See a Dark Stranger starring Trevor Howard and a very beautiful young Deborah Kerr, and there's Tread Softly Stranger, starring a very beautiful young Diana Dors, and try Hunted starring Dirk Bogarde and Jon Whitely, and try also Daughter of Darkness, and The Sleeping Car Murder with Yves Montand, and Five Fingers (Cicero) Spy in Ankara. 15 years ago I watched the 6-hour 1997 BBC production of Joseph Conrad's Nostromo ,starring Claudio Amendola, Roberto Escobar, Brian Dennehy, Colin Firth, Kristen Scott Thomas etc. - but Netflix doesn't have it so I only saw it once. It struck me as perfectly made at the time but I'd like to see it again to see if that initial judgment was accurate or not. The novel by Conrad can be a little tedious, as Conrad wrote in that odd style of his which is fun to study but it nevertheless tries your patience – he gives you extraordinary passages which could only have written by a great artist, but then, also, his prose can become very baroque and overloaded. So the film Joseph Conrad's Nostromo is something you might want to see before your read the novel Nostromo. I don't know that I would say it is the best opening scene in the history of world cinema, but I like the opening of Grand Slam, starring Klaus Kinksi, Adolfo Celi, Janet Leigh, Edward G. Robinson etc. I like the way you get those great shots of the New York skyline from the helicopter while that music from Ennio Morricone is playing. You Tube lets you relive the opening scenes of lots of memorable films and TV shows. If you are living in Siberia or Manitoba or Minnesota or some such frozen place it had to be cool to watch the opening of Hawaii 5-0, especially with those gorgeous shots of the sunsets over the Pacific, and then you had those great Asian faces – Kam Fong as Chin Ho, Zulu as Kono etc. – but the darker faces didn't seem like tokens, you know? They seemed natural and you were really ready to see something besides more palefaces on yet another cop show. Tons of great old school TV Westerns: Cheyenne, Death Valley Days, Rawhide, the Wild Wild West, Laredo, Bonanza, Maverick, The Big Valley, The High Chapparal. Laredo was John Lennon's favorite TV show. It starred Philp Carey, Robert Wolders, William Smith, Peter Brown and Neville Brand. Smith was real good at playing a thug on TV. Brand was also good at playing a thug, Where the Sidewalk Ends etc. Brand was a WW2 War hero and Smith was a Korean War hero, and both were scholars – Brand was a voracious reader with a library with 30,000 books. Wolders was this Dutch playboy / actor who married Merle Oberon after she left the Italian billionaire, and then when she passed on he was boyfriend of Audrey Hepburn and then Leslie Caron. As for Carey, well Wikipedia has it all. The Virginian had a great intro. The music starts up and you meet Lee J. Cobb, who was in tons of great films, such as The Three Faces of Eve and On the Waterfront, and then you met Doug McClure and James Drury who both had lots of star power. You see parents with the Hard-Ass Angle in The Three Faces of Eve...your ma was a hard-ass, and your pa was a hard-ass, and that's why you are a hard-ass...or that's why you are a crazy lady. They made that little girl kiss the face of her dead grandmother when she was screaming at the top of her lungs saying that she didn't want to kiss the corpse, and then, post trauma, she developed those three completely different personalities in her one body. I forget what the French title was, but the English version had the title of Going Places, a film starring a young Gerard Depardieu. It wasn't shocking in the way so many slasher films are shocking - nasty violence delivered in a style designed to fascinate stupid juveniles. It was shocking in that it had high production values and some first-rate actors, but it really dragged you into a gutter; it took you places very far removed from the noble places that films like Jean de Florette, also starring Gerard Depardieu, take you. Look at the characters in the films of Capra, Dassin, Wilder, Preminger, Lang, Hitchcock, Frankenheimer, Friedkin, Sirk, Zinnemann, Melville, Truffaut, Rohmer, Lelouch, Chabrol, Herzog, Stone, Tarantino etc., etc. The heroes or protagonists in their films are torn by conflicting passions. Look at Brando in On the Waterfront. He is a man torn between two courses of action. He can rat on the mob or he can refuse to rat on the mob. Look at Brando in Night after the Following Day. He tells one of his partners in crime that the caper is over, because another guy in their ring of kidnappers is a homicidal maniac – and in France they'll cut your head off if you are involved in the murder of a kidnapping victim. Brando wants the ransom money, but he's torn, you see, because the caper has gone sour, and though he wants the cash he also doesn't want his head cut off by some French executioner, but then his pal convinces him the cash is just too tempting to not chase after, so Brando concedes the caper is on again, but then at the end of the film the kidnapped girl is tortured to death by the homicidal maniac, so Brando's instinct to call off the caper was correct, but the lure of the cash clouded his vision. Look at Alain Delon who plays Julien Something-or-Other in Creezy, aka La Race de Seigneurs. You get those opening shots of a beautiful girl in bed. The director shoots her from a low camera angle to accentuate the most glamorous aspects of her face. Julien wants to keep his photogenic cover-girl girlfriend, but he also wants to advance his political career. In order to advance his political career he needs to spend lots and lots of time away from his clingy girlfriend, but if he wants to keep his girlfriend he needs to sacrifice his political career by spending lots more time with her and lots less time furthering his political career. There was a mountain climber named George Mallory, and he wanted to be the first to climb Mt. Everest. He also had a lovely wife and 3 adorable children. By being the first person to climb Everest he would satisfy one passion, and he would also have enough celebrity status to launch a writing career, by which he could make lots of money to support the family he loved. But his passion to climb the highest mountain in the world led to tragedy, as he died climbing Mt. Everest. Leaving a wife and three kids to climb a dangerous mountain, a huge peak which might easily kill you via avalanches, or kill you via a slip and a fall of thousands of feet, or kill you by freezing you to death, or kill you via oxygen starvation etc., etc., doesn't look terribly intelligent! You might think bouncing off the hard rocks as you plummet down a mountainside, with all your bones and limbs and features being horribly mangled, would be an especially nasty way to check out; but I imagine death or at least the anesthesia of unconsciousness comes rather quickly – the really nasty way to go is to be slowly suffocated to death under an avalanche, that sort of death is probably a million times worse than either death by falling or death by the luxury of freezing to death in a blizzard. In any event, if you are driven by an overpowering passion to take insane risks, what else can you do except surrender to the overpowering passion?

Chapter 7. Marybeth

So it was odd how Wolfgang, after rambling on and on and then finally summing things up by saying you never want to die by being suffocated by an avalanche, was all fired up to climb Denali. He went so far to tell us that if he wasted Taylor and me it wouldn't be death by gunplay, but he was thinking of making the two of us climb Denali with him. Soon enough Wolfgang introduces Taylor and me to his girlfriends, Marybeth and Marylou, don't ask me why a Christian - Wolfgang claimed to be a Christian - would need to have two girlfriends, unless of course he didn't want to break the heart of the one girlfriend he liked second best, but would a hit man have that much compassion? Anyway, the five us pile into Wolfgang's 10-year-old Ford F-350 super duty extended cab truck and head out of Yellowknife and start looking for the road to Alaska.

So Marybeth and Marylou are interested in me and Taylor because we are from Duluth and because they're from Minneapolis. Taylor Tyler is soon trying to determine if Marybeth and Marylou are monsters or not, vile heretics who spew vile heresies. Marybeth and Marylou tell us they are Protestants, so this tells us they might be monsters or they might not, it all depends on what sort of Protestants they are, but as Marybeth and Marylou are sort of like Wolfgang's little helpers in his hit man job, what else can we conclude but that they are quite fanatical in some sense, but they might not have much zeal for the True Faith, assuming they hold to the True Faith, I mean hold to it assuming they didn't kill people as part of their job. Anyway, Marybeth starts in with a long-winded rant, perhaps the marijuana she was smoking liberated her eloquence from the chains of her inhibitions, I wouldn't know, most people get stupid when they smoke weed, but every rule has its exceptions and she became quite chatty and exuberant in her analysis of Protestant affairs: `From my observations of the Protestant scene in the Minneapolis - St. Paul area - the ELCA with its lusty embrace of gay marriage is most decidedly something of an aristocratic church, or at least it's white-collar. It has an elegant liturgy whereas the Protestant Fundamentalist churches tend to be very informal. The Hootenanny Center of the Universe might be closer to the Dallas - Fort Worth metroplex than the Minneapolis -St. Paul metroland but the Fundamentalist congregations in Minneapolis - St. Paul often exude a hootenanny style with enormous underclass or blue-collar overtones. I suppose it is a cliché to think of blue-collar people as people who spit and cuss and smoke cigarettes, who sit around drinking beer and watching TV on nasty old couches that probably need to be burned because they still have food in them which was spilled during the Super Bowl in 1967 and still have beer stains on them from spills which occurred during the 1972 World Series. And it's probably a cliché to think of white-collar people as people whose biggest fear in life is that their daughter will marry some garbage man. But clichés usually contain some truth you know. I suppose there are blue collar people who enjoy the opera and the ballet and the theatre. I suppose there are some blue-collar people in the world who visit museums and who go into nature for reasons other than to blast some animal out of its existence during hunting season. I don't know, if, in the history of the world, there has even been a verified sighting of a copy of Architectural Digest on a blue-collar person's coffee table. One of the best portrayals of the conflict between blue-collar people and white-collar people is seen in Claude Lelouch's La bonne anne from 1973, starring Lino Ventura, Françoise Fabian and I forget who else. A group of white-collar people and a group of blue-collar people are together at a chic restaurant on the Riviera, and they go from having nothing to say to each other straight to being hostile to each other, all because they have nothing to say to each other. I suppose many rich white-collar ELCA people have some suspicions that God is no fan of the pro-choice philosophy, and they probably have some suspicions that God is no fan of gay marriage and guys sodomizing each other, but the ELCA people resist moving on to the Fundamentalist churches for aesthetic reasons or for snobbish reasons. What on earth would a rich ELCA person with an advanced degree have to say to some Fundamentalist with a 6th grade education? No doubt a lot of Fundamentalists think you are talking about a couple of dudes when you say you've been reading George Elliot and George Sand. And I'll bet you money there are still some Fundamentalists in the world who think the film director Carol Reed and the poet Joyce Kilmer were a couple of chicks. If you like listening to Handel's Messiah performed by a professional choir and orchestra at an ELCA church then, naturally, you will resist going to some hootenanny church where you'll find some guy with a mullet banging on a piano while Wal-Mart shoppers are waving their arms over their heads in hootenanny fashion. You feel like a dumb-ass if you join in and start waving your arms over your head, but then feel like a dumb-ass if you just stand there and don't weave your arms over your head when everyone else is.'

Chapter 8. Marylou

`Well, it's like this,' Marylou was saying, `if you want to get elected to high office in the USA then you have to please certain Key Special Interest Groups. Did you ever see, kids, how a really hungry hound dog looks when you dangle a big juicy T-bone with lots of red meat still clinging to it in front of that hound dog's eyes? Well that hound dog's eyes get all big, don't they? And his tail is wagging a 100 miles an hour, and he's licking his chops and begging you and begging you to please give him that lovely delicious T-bone. Well that's the way people get when they run for President. When they think of living in the White House and when they think of all the folks who will want to be their friends and all the perquisites of being rich and famous and important in the world, their eyes get hugely big and they get all excited and they start drooling like some hungry old hound dog staring at a big juicy T-bone - they'll do anything, promise anything, say anything, to get the votes to get elected. I saw this French film once or twice called Le Deuxieme Souffle, and there's this middle-aged gangster and there's this young gangster in it, and the two gangsters are plotting a heist, and to pull the heist so that they get lots and lots of money they have to murder a guard. So the young gangster kills the guard - shoots him dead in the head - and they get the money, and then the middle-aged gangster and the young gangster look at each other. And there is mutual respect in their eyes, you know? You got to be a tough guy to murder a guard, because, though one might not believe in God, still you never know, maybe there is a God, and maybe you'll burn in hell for a long long time if you murder someone while pulling a heist. So the middle-aged French gangster and the young French gangster have respect for each other, because they are tough guys, because they aren't afraid of no God and no hellfire. Well, getting back to Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinski, look kids, if you were President and lots of chicks were throwing themselves at you, then you too would have to weigh the rewards against the risks, you would have to ask yourself: what will be the return on my investment if I invest some time playing with Monica? But you have to manage the risks, because there are always risks when you're playing around with woman other than your wife, and you also have to resolve the moral imperatives or ambiguities which press so insistently upon your beleaguered psyche, at least resolve then enough to enable you to function, and you know damn well you can't get caught if you do decide to take a few risks to earn yourself a few rewards. You kids of course know Monica was smart to not dry-clean that blue dress. Usually it's OK to clean your clothes as soon as they need cleaning, but there are exceptions to that rule. That would have been a big-time mistake if Monica cleaned the dress and destroyed the evidence, and thereby destroyed her leverage, her meal ticket. You don't ever want to destroy your leverage: you don't ever want destroy your meal ticket. You think Vernon Jordan would have come through with that job for Monica if the Prez wasn't begging him for help? Welcome to Babylon kids, a society built upon covetousness, abortion, Gay Marriage etc., etc. Babylon, in case you don't know, was the terrible enemy of the children of Israel in ancient times. When you say such and such is a Babylon you mean such and such is a place that will be damned to hell...Well, lets get off the subject of Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinski, I've droned on long enough about how some authorities insist that you can can't judge a man that chicks dig in the same way that you judge a man that chicks don't dig - Clinton always reminded me a little of Christopher Walken, who first became a big star in The Deer-Hunter, and he was good in this movie called The Dogs of War and of course he was good in The Dead Zone and some other movies. So, kids, there was this Viennese doctor named Sigmund Freud and he discovered the Id, the Ego and the Superego. Well the Id is like your most Basic Instinct - which was a movie you kids are far too young to learn about, anyway, for example, boys, say you're a little older than you are now, like you're in college, and you're drinking beer with your buddies at a party, and then you look up and there's this hot chick giving you the eye, and so you say to yourself `I want to get me some of that!' In the Alain Delon film Le Gitan, also starring Marcel Bozzuffi, Renato Salvatoi, Paul Meurisse, who played a connoisseur / safe cracker. Meurisse had one of those faces, like Bogart's, which exuded intelligence or at least cunning. He was very good in Le Deuxieme Souffle. Anyway there's a gangster named Gene Newman in Le Gitan, I forget his name in real life, but he's only got one thing on his mind, all the time. Even when he's getting shot up by the cops, and then put stuffed into a cruiser, he still keeps an eye on the ladies, so his Id is rather prominent in that direction. Or say it is ten below zero outside on a winter's day and you run outside in your pajamas to get the newspaper - and so you're saying to yourself as you fetch the paper - `damn it's cold out here! I wish I put some shoes on and I wish I put a coat on before I came out here in this Siberian ice hell to get the newspaper!' So your Id is telling you to put some shoes on your feet when it's ten degrees below zero outside - yes, that's your Id that is telling you that stuff. You don't have to be too smart to understand the stuff your Id is telling you. But you have to be smart to understand stuff that pertains to your Ego. Your Ego is your higher intellectual thought processes, like when you take two fingers on your hand and then take two more fingers to the two fingers you already got, and so you know by the magic of addition that you now got four fingers, or say you know that you have seven pockets - four in your pants and three in your coat - and in each pocket you have $50 then you intellect - your Ego - using the mathematical operation of multiplication - will tell you how much money you have altogether, without you having to do any counting. Recall in Fargo where Margie has to correct her cop partner who was slow to read the clues which were telling them they were looking for a car with dealer plates on it, or like when they were grilling that Native American ex-con and he was thinking hard how he was going to explain how he didn't have any contact with the suspects when the phone records proved that the suspects had called his phone and proved that a conversation lasting several minutes was definitely made on his phone. Or like when a car dealer asks you if you want to get the undercoating for your new car, you have to use your brain to figure out if getting the undercoating is a good deal or if it is just a way for sleaze-ball auto dealers to make money off of chumps. Do you think the car might collapse in a pile of rust some day while you're doing 75 mph on the freeway if you don't get the undercoating? Why would you buy that brand of car if you think it might? So your Ego is your thinking ability - say you were one of those kidnappers in Fargo \- if your Ego is working at all then you ought to be able to figure out a way to pick up the ransom money without getting half your face blown off by a guy's revolver, right? Or like when Margie was interviewing that one prostitute who was from Chaska – and Margie is asking her what the suspect that she slept with, played by Steve Buscemi, looked like, and all she could say was that he was `funny-looking'. You have to think hard to find the words to describe him, you have to really exercise your Ego, not your Id mind you but your Ego, because it is sort of hard to come up with a more detailed description of Steve Buscemi than just plain `funny looking'. I suppose you could say he is `interesting looking,' or that `he looks like an impoverished or down-on-his-luck not to say dissolute 18th century Italian nobleman' etc., etc. Anyway we've covered the Id (Basic Instincts) and the Ego (the Intellect), so now for the Superego. The Superego is the stuff that your mom and your dad taught you when you were a little kid. Say you're no longer a baby, say you're about two or three years old, well, when your mama or your papa tell you stuff then you tend to think they know what they're talking about. They feed and clothe you don't they? So why would you assume they are a couple of lying S.O.B.s? So you tend to trust the stuff they tell you. If they tell you Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy exist then you act like a chump and you believe them. So when they teach you about religion, well, say your mama is a Muslim, then you become a Muslim because your mama is a Muslim, because you tend to think your mama is not a dumb-ass, because you tend to think that she knows what she's doing when she lectures on the subject of religion. If your father is a Lutheran then you become a Lutheran, because it is natural for you to think your papa is not a dumb-ass on the subject of religion. Now when you get older you might want to involve your Ego - your intellectual ability - when you formulate your religious beliefs, and you might not want to rely exclusively on your Superego, which after all, when you get right down to it, is something which is telling you to act like a dumb-ass robot, because it is telling you to just believe everything that your old man and your old lady say. Your old man and your old lady might teach you some intelligent stuff. They might not be bona fide dumb-asses, but, nevertheless, you're acting like a dumb-ass robot if you think everything they teach you must be true, and that everything they teach you can not possibly be a mistake. Let's look now at the subject of Scenarios. Like in The Postman Always Rings Twice, you got that hot young Lana Turner married to that old guy, and then that young guy played by John Garfield comes along and the young hot Lana Turner and young guy played by John Garfield decide they want to eliminate the old guy, but they got to make his death look like an accident, because if the Insurance Company learns he was murdered then they won't hand over lots of money to the chick played by Lana Turner, and getting the money is whole reason for greasing the old guy. So we have these things called Scenarios. How do the movie makers want to make the movie? How do they want the movie to begin and end? Well, there are Various Scenarios. There are various ways to make the movie, for instance, there are different ways to make the old guy's death look like an accident. In Scenario 1 Lana Turner and John Garfield could get the old guy drunk, and then John Garfield could run him over with a stolen car, making it look like he was killed by some stranger in a hit-and-run job. In Scenario 2 they could send the old guy on a fishing trip, but they could put him into a boat that tips over, so it's death by drowning, or in Scenario 3 they could send him on a hunting trip with his buddies, where he would have a terrible accident, or in Scenario 4 they could rig up the fuse box in such a way that when the old geezer goes to check a fuse he gets a lethal dose of 10,000 volts surging through violently convulsing body. You'd be shaking like a wet dog shakes when he tries to dry himself, and your eyeballs would be busting out of their sockets, boy, if you had 10,000 volts surging through your body! So when we turn to religion and philosophy we can make use of this idea of scenarios, such as when we evaluate books such as The Koran, the Old Testament and the New Testament. Look at Tarantino's Jackie Brown, where Robert De Niro kills that chick in that parking lot because she was teasing him about something and she wouldn't give it a rest. If you tease a gangster you should probably realize that he might lose his patience and shoot you. It sucks for you if you got a worthless Ego / intellect. Your Superego might be as worthless as your ID in helping you to make sound religious decisions. If you join the Scientologists because your old lady is a Scientologist then you got a Superego that sucks, right? I realize all this is rather clinical in its pristine Ivory Tower Freudian theorizing, whereas, in the real world, things get rather nasty and tumultuous. If one is a Muslim and one decides to renounce Allah and instead worship the Christian Trinity, then one might be executed by some angry Muslims. If you were raised in a Christian family and if you decide to renounce Christ and the New Testament, then, some of your relatives might call you a dirty Judas - but don't let their lack of diplomacy re-enforce your decision. As a Christian I'd certainly advise you to never renounce Christ. Why would you want to become like Judas? Why would you want to betray Christ? That's something a moron would do. That's something a big-time dumb-ass would do. We saw you two kissing and holding each other close when you should have been contending valiantly against monsters. You're untrustworthy in your work. You're slack in carrying out your assignment. Either you're lazy or else you are luke-warm in your Christian faith. The State of Minnesota pays us to eliminate those who are untrustworthy and slack in their assignments to fight monsters. We do have some discretionary wiggle room. But don't give us any more reasons to think you two are lukewarm in your faith. A Christian who is luke-warm in his faith is more or less a Judas-traitor.'

Well that was Marylou. In a few more days we found ourselves deep in Alaska. There Denali loomed straight ahead of us. The mountain, the great colossus, rose up like a huge monster: indomitable, towering, ferocious, awe-inspiring: standing poised to devour anyone brainless enough to try to climb it. `It gets crazy cold up on the Harper,' Wolfgang was saying referring to a high glacier. Winds of 150 kilometers per hour are not uncommon. A cold of minus 30 degress centigrade, even in mid-summer, is also common enough. Yeah if I wanted to waste you punks I know just how I would waste you.'

So that was sort of a conversation killer. We eventually got to Anchorage and that's where Wolfgang, Marybeth and Marylou left us. Our appeal to federal district court to force Minnesota to end our conscription in the war against the monsters was judged in our favor. And the State of Minnesota decided to not appeal the district court's decision. Yay! Free at last! Free at Last! Thank God we're free at last! But what a travesty! The State promised we wouldn't have to fight monsters if we passed the grueling math and physics test, and we passed the test. Fair is fair. So now Taylor and me no longer had to knock on doors, no longer had to fight the monsters and their infernal heresies. Taylor and I drifted apart for a few days, but then we sort of drifted back together, maybe we were just meant to be together – who knows? - anyway we were living a life I was well used to, Communal life, sleeping on the couches of local veterans of the Monster Wars who were kind enough to put us up for a night or two. We went often to the mathematics library at the University of Alaska at Anchorage. Both of us wanted to build on the knowledge and expertise which we had acquired in kindergarten. In the evenings we usually went to a Starbucks and then to this art house theatre in a bohemian section of Anchorage. We wanted to get an early start on 1st Grade, because in a few more weeks we would be back at Rudy G. Perpich Elementary School, and in 1st grade kids had to watch and then analyze and synthesize and categorize about 300 classics from 20th century European cinema. We got a lift up to Wasilla one Saturday from these loggers driving a big rig. There we did all the touristy stuff that tourists do in Wasilla, like riding rented bikes past Todd and Sarah Palin's house, going to the coffee shop where Todd and Sarah went to enjoy coffee and donuts, going to the antiques store that Sarah loved so much. Todd and Sarah were rumored to be in town but even if they were you couldn't see them because of the big fence they put up round their place to give them some privacy from all the tourists wanting to get a peek at them. Well that was one Saturday. The summer drifted on. When not at the library or at Starbucks or at the theatre, and when not crashing on someone's couch, I worked part time washing dishes and bussing tables at a Waffle House, and Taylor did some unpaid acting and singing and dancing in local theatre, and she did some modeling for money for local free-lance photographers, and she hired herself out as a free lance weed puller and grass cutter at various mansions on the rich side of Anchorage. Life wasn't as luxurious as life at Mar-a-Lago, but still, all things considered, for kids just out of kindergarten, things could be a lot worse.

The End

