‎"I am a failure. My best years are behind me. My worst habits are my strongest habits. That's why I will never succeed."

Precisely THEN you must go to your desk and continue writing, continue revising, continue praying on paper.

A desire to succeed is anathema to success; fulfilling one goal after another, despite success or anonymity, is the path to success.

Integrity is not a given, but gives freedom...

"Does one's integrity ever lie in what he is not able to do? I think that it usually does, for free will does not mean one will, but many wills conflicting in one man. Freedom cannot be conceived simply. It is a mystery and one which a novel, even a comic novel, can only be asked to deepen."

-- Flannery O'Connor, author's note to *Wise Blood* 2nd ed.

Integrity is the making-whole of many. Freedom is the "quantum collapse" of many possibilities--sheer potency--into a unified new whole. That humans are determined at every moment in their physiology and sensation is a given. That the power of free will does not derive from physiology and sensation is the thesis of libertarianism. For it is not without the integrating power of will--as an ordered appetition--that there is a human subject to be determined.

In the precincts...

You know you're not dealing with someone of wisdom when he utters the words "just a story." Nothing is "just a story," not even a story.

The goodness of people…

I'm always impressed by the goodness of people. Most people. Nothing you can do about a few bad eggs. I mean, like, the other day, or the other night, I mean, I was in an alley behind Deep Six, that old pub on Watershore Avenue. And I was jimmying the wheel lock on a guy's bike. It was about 4 in the morning, so I figured no one would be around. And things were pretty tranquil. But I forgot Deep Six closes after 3, so I should have expected some lush to stumble out. And sure enough, just as I'm hotwiring the bike, out stumbles this drunk in a brown leather jacket. A brown leather jacket! Just what I need while I'm working.

"He looks at me, squinting to focus, and says, "What are you doing?" I say, "I'm good, thanks, and how are you?" I guess he wasn't as drunk as I thought, 'cause he yelled back, "I said what are you doing to my bike?"

"Is this your bike?" I said. "Damn straight," he said, hitting his chest like Tarzan.

"Well, you see, my wife's real sick," I explained, "and I really need to get home to her."

He didn't buy it, so, to make a long story short, I bought him a few more beers at the local 24-hour, and me and him had a nice chat, without involving anyone else, you see. We settled it like gentlemen. In the end, this swell guy agreed to let me steal his bike on an installment plan. So now I've only got to make monthly payments for the bike at slightly lower than the market value. Like I say, I'm impressed by how good most people are! When the time is right, I'll be sure to do business with him again and I've already recommended him to my colleagues. This layaway theft deal is a dream come true.

I am I be…

So there!

I've been riffing on E-Prime lately and thought I should provide a little more perspective before providing the ultimate refutation of it. (I know, I'm citing mostly Wikipedia in this post, but it's better than citing myself, I guess.)

Aparrently, E-Prime was developed by a student of Alfred Korzybski, D. David Bourland, Jr. (1928–2000), who "proposed E-Prime as an addition to Alfred Korzybski's General Semantics some years after Korzybski's death in 1950. Bourland, who had studied under Korzybski, coined the term in a 1965 essay entitled A Linguistic Note: Writing in E-Prime (originally published in the General Semantics Bulletin). The essay quickly generated controversy within the General Semantics field, partly because practitioners of General Semantics sometimes saw Bourland as attacking the verb 'to be' as such, and not just certain usages."

According to the Wikientry on General Semantics,

Advocates of General Semantics view it as a form of mental hygiene that enables practitioners to avoid ideational traps built into natural language and "common sense" assumptions, thereby enabling practitioners to think more clearly and effectively. General Semantics thus shares some concerns with psychology but some do not consider it specifically as a therapeutic system, evaluating it as more focused on enhancing the abilities of normal individuals than curing pathology.

Korzybski described the central goal of General Semantics as developing in its practitioners what he called a "consciousness of abstracting," or an awareness of the map/territory distinction and of how information gets deleted/distorted in the linguistic and other representations we use. Korzybski considered sporadic and intellectual understanding of these concepts insufficient, rather that humans achieve full sanity only when the consciousness of abstracting becomes constant and a matter of reflex.

The same Wikientry elaborates on the main features of General Semantics:

Time binding: The human ability to pass information and knowledge between generations at an accelerating rate. Korzybski claimed this to be a unique capacity, separating us from other animals. Animals pass knowledge, but not at an exponential rate, that is to say, each generation of animals does things pretty much in the same way as the previous generation. For example, at one time most human societies were hunter-gatherers, but now more advanced means of food production (growing, raising, or buying) predominate. Excepting some insects (for example, ants), all other animals are still hunter-gatherer species, even though many have existed longer than the human species.

Silence on the objective levels: As 'the word is not the thing it represents,' Korzybski stressed the nonverbal experience of our inner and outer environments. During these periods of training, one would become "outwardly and inwardly silent."

The system advocates a general orientation by extension rather than intension, by relational facts rather than assumed properties, an attitude, regardless of how expressed in words, that, for example, George 'does things that seem foolish to me,' rather than that he is 'a fool.'

The entry then notes the 'ascetical' practice of General Semantics:

Much of General Semantics consists of training techniques and reminders intended to break mental habits that impede dealing with reality. Three of the most important reminders are expressed here by the shorthand "Null-A, Null-I, and Null-E".

Null-A is non-Aristotelianism; General Semantics stresses that two-valued (Aristotelian) logics cannot adequately map the totality of human experience. (See also: Abductive reasoning)

Null-I is non-Identity; General Semantics teaches that no two phenomena can ever be shown identical (if only because they may differ beyond the limits of measurement) and that it makes more sense to say that the seemingly-identical phenomena show "sufficient similarity for the purposes of the analysis we are currently performing".

Null-E is non-Euclideanism; General Semantics reminds us that the space we live in is not adequately described by Euclidean geometry.

The underlying purpose of these reminders is both to adjust our conceptual maps better to the territory of reality and to keep us reminded of the limitations of conceptual maps in general. Non-Aristotelian, in this particular case, refers to the use of non-Aristotelian logic rather than the aforementioned philosophical disagreement. However, Korzybski saw these as linked. The complex nature of the objects we interact with means that reasoning from "essence" or definitions will often lead us astray. This creates uncertainty, which general semantics links to the use of non-Aristotelian logic.

The entry then adds a proviso that "Non-Aristotelianism 'does not attack Aristotle,' and in fact does not necessarily concern the Greek philosopher himself. Within the preface to the first edition of his book Science and Sanity––in 1933––Korzybski wrote the following:

"The system by which the white race lives, suffers, 'prospers', starves, and dies today is not in a strict sense an aristotelian system. Aristotle had far too much of the sense of actualities for that. It represents, however, a system formulated by those who, for nearly two thousand years since Aristotle, have controlled our knowledge and methods of orientations, and who, for purposes of their own, selected what today appears as the worst from Aristotle and the worst from Plato and, with their own additions, imposed this composite system upon us. In this they were greatly aided by the structure of language and psycho-logical habits, which from the primitive down to this very day have affected all of us consciously or unconsciously, and have introduced serious difficulties even in science and in mathematics."

The Wikientry notes in its "Criticisms" section that "Martin Gardner wrote of Korzybski that he 'never tired of knocking over 'Aristotelian' habits of thought, in spite of the fact that what he called Aristotelian was a straw structure which bore almost no resemblance to the thought process of the Greek philosopher.'" It then reminds the reader that "the founder of general semantics originally 'took pains to point out' that Aristotle himself might not agree with any of the habits in question." These points are undocumented, so take them for what you will.

In any case, returning to the article on E-Prime, "Korzybski (1879–1950) had determined that two forms of the verb 'to be'—the 'is' of identity and the 'is' of predication—had structural problems. For example, the sentence 'The coat is red' has no observer, the sentence "We see the coat as red" (where "we" indicates observers) appears more specific in context as regards light waves and colour as determined by modern science, that is, colour results from a reaction in the human brain." The entry also notes that "Bourland and other advocates also suggest that use of E-Prime leads to a less dogmatic style of language that reduces the possibility of misunderstanding and for conflict." (Is that a fact?) The Wikientry then explains that

Alfred Korzybski criticized the use of the verb "to be", and stated that "any proposition containing the word 'is' [or its other conjugations 'are,' be' etc] creates a linguistic structural confusion which will eventually give birth to serious fallacies"[5] However, he also justified the expression he coined — "the map is not the territory" — by saying that "the denial of identification (as in 'is not') has opposite neuro-linguistic effects on the brain from the assertion of identity (as in 'is')." Noam Chomsky, "[r]egarded as the father of modern linguistics",[6] commented on Korzybski's "insight":

Sometimes what we say can be misleading, sometimes not, depending on whether we are careful. If there's anything else [in Korzybski's work], I don't see it. That was the conclusion of my undergrad papers 60 years ago. Reading Korzybski extensively, I couldn't find anything that was not either trivial or false. As for neuro-linguistic effects on the brain, nothing was known when he wrote and very little of that is relevant now.[citation needed]

The Wikientry on Korzybski provides a useful caveat:

Many supporters and critics of Korzybski reduced his rather complex system to a simple matter of what he said about the verb 'to be.' His system, however, is based primarily on such terminology as the different 'orders of abstraction,' and formulations such as 'consciousness of abstracting.' It is often said that Korzybski opposed the use of the verb "to be," an unfortunate exaggeration…. He thought that certain uses of the verb "to be", called the "is of identity" and the "is of predication", were faulty in structure, e.g., a statement such as, "Joe is a fool" (said of a person named 'Joe' who has done something that we regard as foolish). In Korzybski's system, one's assessment of Joe belongs to a higher order of abstraction than Joe himself. Korzybski's remedy was to deny identity; in this example, to be continually aware that 'Joe' is not what we call him. We find Joe not in the verbal domain, the world of words, but the nonverbal domain (the two, he said, amount to different orders of abstraction). This was expressed in Korzybski's most famous premise, "the map is not the territory". Note that this premise uses the phrase "is not", a form of "to be"; this and many other examples show that he did not intend to abandon "to be" as such. In fact, he expressly said that there were no structural problems with the verb "to be" when used as an auxiliary verb or when used to state existence or location.

The E-Prime Wikientry notes that "James D. French, a computer programmer at the University of California, Berkeley, summarized ten arguments against E-Prime (in the context of General Semantics)," of which I shall cite only those I find most salient:

The context often ameliorates the possible harmful effects from the use of the is-of-identity and the is-of-predication, so it is not necessary to eliminate all such sentences. For example "George is a Judge" in response to a question of what he does for a living would not be a questionable statement.

To be statements do not only convey identity but also asymmetrical relations ("X is higher than Y"); negation ("A is not B"); location ("Berlin is in Germany"); auxiliary ("I am going to the store") etc., forms which would also have to be sacrificed.

Eliminating to be from English has little effect on eliminating identity. For example, a statement of apparently equal identification, "The silly ban on copula continues" can be made without the copula assuming an identity rather than asserting it, consequently hampering our awareness of it. …

A civilization advances when it can move from the idea of individual trees to that of forest. E-Prime tends to make the expression of higher orders of abstraction more difficult, e.g. a student is more likely to be described in E-Prime as "She attends classes at the university".

In a footnote for the E-Prime Wikientry, I discovered that E. W. Kellogg, in "Speaking in E-Prime: an experimental method for integrating General Semantics into daily life", argues that "if you saw a man, reeking of whisky, stagger down the street and then collapse, you might think (in ordinary English) "He is drunk." In E-Prime one would think instead "He acts drunk," or "He looks drunk," both of which statements obviously coming [sic] closer to an accurate description of the actual experience, and involving [sic] fewer covert assumptions than the English original.". But this is almost certainly incoherent. If "being drunk" is intrinsically unclear, as Kellogg suggests, then what do we mean by "He looks drunk"? It would be like objecting to the claim, "That guy over there is my brother" on the grounds that it's more accurate to say, "That guy over there looks like my brother." If "being drunk" has no content in its own right, how can we predicate "drunk" to the man in Kellogg's example? We would first have to know what "being drunk" is before we could decide "He looks drunk," in the same way that we'd first have to know what "the Eiffel Tower" is before could say "that radio tower looks like the Eiffel Tower."

This seems to be the crucial flaw in Korzybski's system, and with any anti-essentialist metaphysics. Consider the following from the Wikientry on General Semantics:

Korzybski's first book, Manhood of Humanity, published in 1921, introduced the notion of time-binding as the defining distinction between humans and other organisms. There, he used the imagery of dimension to spell out the unique niche humans occupy among organisms. The book became an immediate best-seller, and remained in that status for several years. He rejected explicitly the claim that we could consider a human as either a ‘monstrous hybrid’ of animal with some supernatural or immaterial ‘mind’, ‘soul’, or ‘spirit’, or simply as animal. In his defining of humans in terms of what they do rather than attempting to state what they are, he declared a fundamental revision of the 2,500-year old Western philosophic foundations of science, philosophy, and biology.

Note well, "In his defining of humans in terms of what they do…." This lapse indicates not only that "essence" (and therefore substantial finality) is inescapable for practicing scientists, which Étienne Gilson argues so deftly in From Aristotle to Darwin and Back Again, but also that Korzybski's "fundamental revision" of the Aristotelian anthropological legacy was very wide of the mark. Aristotle, after all, discerns essence not in pure definition, but in the very actions of a being. A thing's actions indicate its essence without exhausting it. Conversely, a thing's essence grounds its actions without deterministically forcing them out, on a concrete, existential level. Each action is a reduction of the being's material potency in relation to the perfect (but otherwise idealistically 'inert') finality of its essence. The point is that Aristotle, and classical hylomorphism generally, have always emphasized what creatures do in our grasping of their essence. This is why "If it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, and looks like a duck…" is a decent Aristotelian tagline. Even the austere definition of, say, a rabbit as "a mammal having two long ears and large hind feet" rests on a kind of act, insofar as the persistent having-of (or, teleological maintenance-of) those ears and feet is but a mode of the rabbit's one act of existence. An entity's natural action for Aristotle is the reduction of potency in the thing's essence, so that we can literally only know a thing's essence in its actions, a topic covered at great length in Gilson's Being and Some Philosophers. This is why in Aristotelian psychology, we only know our mind in the act of intellection, which stands in stark contrast to Descartes' doctrine that we have an immediate intuition of ourselves as an existent res cogitans ("thinking thing") apart from all sensible, material potency. We know ourselves in knowing things beyond ourselves; we don't know ourselves as principally knowing ourselves knowing ourselves.

Considering how prominent Korzybski once was and how pronounced his anti-essentialism is, I am disappointed to find no mention of Korzybski in David Oderberg's Real Essentialism. This is not a criticism of Oderberg, since his book already deals with enough strictly metaphysical and analytical arguments for and against essentialism. I first became aware of Korzybski while reading Walker Percy's Message in the Bottle (as he appears on page 193 and probably elsewhere). Hence, I can understand how Korzybski's anti-essentialism seems more properly to belong in (bio-)semiotics and cognitive neuroscience à la Konrad Lorenz, Jakob von Uexküll, Thomas Sebeok, and Gregory Bateson, as suggested by this essay, "Korzybski and Bateson: paradoxes in 'consciousness of abstracting'" by Corey Anton:

Korzybski's Science and Sanity (1933) discusses at length the non-identification between "words" and the "un-speakable objective level," and he succinctly summarizes his ideas with the pithy one-liner: "Whatever one might say something 'is,' it is not" (p. 409). In this very quotation Korzybski's actual utterance goes against his insights as he states them. By the syntax of the utterance he implies that the words "something" and "it" are not already something said. Korzybski undoubtedly would defend himself and say that this exactly is his point, as he sums it up elsewhere: "It is evident that every time we mistake the object for the event we are making a serious error, and if we further mistake the label for the object, and therefore for the event, our errors become more serious" (Korzybski, 1949, p. 245). Here we again find the same difficulties: he uses the words "object" and "event" to state his insights and thereby is forced to use the very resources that he calls into question.

Even so, according to a section of the Wikientry on General Semantics,

General Semantics has important links with analytic philosophy and the philosophy of science; it could be characterized without too much distortion as applied analytic philosophy. The influence of Ludwig Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle, and of early operationalists and pragmatists such as Charles Sanders Peirce, is particularly clear in the foundational ideas of General Semantics. Korzybski himself acknowledged many of these influences.

Plus, I glanced at small sections in Science and Sanity today and I have to say, it's a damn serious book (over 900 pages). Seeing as it managed to spawn the anti-existentialism of E-Prime, I think there may be a very real place for treating Korzybski's work as a nemesis with a lot of kick left in it as semiotic Thomism gathers momentum in our day.

But enough about Korzybski. This is my blog, damn it! (Er, this looks like my blog!) Now it's time for the ultimate refutation of E-Prime.

In my post yesterday, I joked that E-Prime is racist since it literally discriminates against the "I be, You be, He be, etc." that often shows up in "Black English" (or African American Vernacular English). While writing this post I came across the following corroborating statement in the E-Prime Wikientry: "Changes such as those proposed for E-Prime also might eliminate enough ways to express aspect in African American Vernacular English to prove unworkable if applied indiscriminately and pedantically to such language." (Have a look at the Tense and Aspect section in the Wikientry for Afro-American Vernacular English to see the conflict.) Well, here it is, the demise of E-Prime:

De La Soul's "I Am I Be"! Soul Force, beeyatch!

De La Soul- I Am I Be from Abe Twist on Vimeo.

It's a joke, sure, but if you stop to ponder, the place of "be/am" in African American culture is peculiar, to say the least. I don't have the energy or time to do even a partially sufficient analysis, but the question is, "What does it show us about a group of people that "be" becomes a dominant syntactical form?" Is there anything more than just circumstance to the constant emphasis on "be-ing" in Black English? Consider the first line of my favorite book, Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man:

I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids - and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.

If you haven't read Invisible Man––wait a minute, if you haven't read Invisible Man, stop reading my fluff and get on it!––you'll know that the themes of identity, recognition, and meaningful existence in American society for a black man suffuse the novel. Consider two other titles of African American novels by Richard Wright, a colleague and sometime friend of Ellison: Black Boy and Native Son. The titles are loaded with an implicit "copula", as in, "I am just a black boy," or "He is a real native son."

Now consider Booker T. Washington's opening words in Up From Slavery (1900):

I was born a slave on a plantation in Franklin County, Virginia. I am not quite sure of the exact place or exact date of my birth, but at any rate I suspect I must have been born somewhere and at some time. As nearly as I have been able to learn, I was born near a cross-roads post-office called Hale's Ford, and the year was 1858 or 1859. I do not know the month or the day. The earliest impressions I can now recall are of the plantation and the slave quarters -- the latter being the part of the plantation where the slaves had their cabins.

The second word is a form of the copular be. The recollections after that are hampered by their lack of substance, by their predominantly hazy and phenomenal character. Washington's past is comprised of fragmented appearances which were forced upon him by the dominant racial class, yet he immediately asserts his own existence, his own historcal be-ing.

I don't think an exhaustive examination of African American literature and thought would find a conscious, shockingly frequent use of the copular be, but my hunch is that for black Americans historically, there is something very encouraging about the simple word "be," something simple and solid that feels like it might ground their contested and complex existence in a "white man's land." On the one hand, blacks have long known the insidious power of images as manipulated by the powerholders, and, on the other hand, instinctively resonate with the sheer goodness of existence as the primal gift of the Creator, whose essence is to be. As Ellison wrote, "I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me." His existence is rendered invisible because it is unwelcome in the phenomenal consciousness of the dominant society. Nonetheless, he says, "I am."

Nor should we forget the immense importance of Christianity in historical black consciousness. Is there not something almost diabolical about a language which is diametrically opposed to God's declaration, "I AM WHO I AM"? Historically, this is the God of black Americans––the God Who Be Who He Be! This is not a trivial consideration, either, when we recall that God's "I AM THAT I AM" is found in Exodus, which has been a foundational source of hope for black slaves and their ancestors. Whereas E-Prime would have us divert only to subjective experiences for the sake of operational precision, perhaps there is something defiant about the preponderance of "be" in Black English. "You're not really a human like us," slaveowners and slave traders often argued, "You just appear to be one. Leave the decision about who is and who is not a real person up to us."

Interestingly, this is the same logic behind pro-choice ideology, which insists that fetuses aren't really human persons, they just look that way. As soon as we grant that "a human fetus is a human person," though, the abortion debate becomes much less "complex." That's why The Is Of Personhood must not be applied to fetuses, lest the moral position of pro-choice advocates be seen for what it is: homicide.

Lyrics…

“Trouble Enough”

Everybody's got trouble enough
Just keepin' one body strong and tough
Bindin' two bags of life together
[Drags your feet down/Makes going rough] in hard weather
Pullin' two embers from a fire
Burns worse than one before they expire

The only way to get by
Is to keep yourself [hosltered/cocked] at your side
Lovers crowding out the sky
You never breathe the air inside

The only way to stay strong and free
Is to keep yourself cocked [and loaded] at bedside
When lovers crowd the sky, stars, locusts, many
You'll never see the light found inside
When love crowds the horizon ahead
That's your only way out–– I came, I saw, I fled

Happiness is overrated
Fruit of sadness, understated
Darkness exiled, unbought on the shelves
Too much light blinds us to ourselves
Don't wear your life jacket too tightly
Smoke and fire, both live and die lightly

Light is gift only in good measure
Outside of darkness you miss the glow of treasure
The gift of failure left on the shelf
Unbought, untouched by the self

+++

“Can't Afford”

Everything I can't afford
Is everything I want
Everything I can afford is everything I need
Everything we cannot afford
Is everything we want
Everything that we can afford
Is everything that we need

Hand reaches out to the flame above
Long taught to seek more light, more light
The hand draws back, charred and withered
Didn't know how light must fit us

Careful what you wish for
Cuz it might just get you
Careful who you wish with
Cuz they might just blow you out
Like a candle
On a cake on a table
In a house you never really owned

Time to get out
Go-in-side and get out!
Time to get out
Go out and get what you need
Charred hand in withered hand
With those who need what you've got

Everything I can't afford
Is everything I want
Everything I can afford is everything I need
Everything we cannot afford
Is everything we want
Everything that we can afford
Is everything that we need

***

“Times When”

There are times
When my faith
Is but an ember
Flickering in the fire of the Lord saith

There are times
When your face
Is all I can remember
Flickering in the mirror of inner space

There are times
When sometimes
I fear crimes
I hear chimes
And my blood boils while my eyes go icy gray

And sometimes
There are times
That decide
Where I ride
And who shares my air as we rattle and sway
As we sway, down the line
Of time

There are times
When the words
On the page
Read the same either backwards or forwards

There are times
When the silence
Is the only word
That makes sense of what they call divine science

***

“Anything, Everything, Something, Nothing”

Anything for you
Anything for you
But not everything
Not everything for you

I've only got something
Only got something for you
Share my share of nothing
If nothing you will take

How much of my nothing
Will you, Can you take?
And some of my something,
How do I know you won't break?

If you don't take my something
At least take my nothing
Cuz at least my nothing
Is something you can't fake
Something you can't break

Everything has its time
Every time offers something
My everything can be yours in time
If your something will eat my nothing in time
But if nothing I have
Is something you want
But if the nothing I have
Is not the something you need
Then everything you promise
Is just some other taunt

Torque

Torqture…

"Perhaps he was having second thoughts about marrying Saint John. Perhaps he wasn't ready to give up O'Fallon. Perhaps he was torn between the two women and felt that he needed them both. Guilt can cause a man to act against his own best interests, but desire can do that as well, and when guilt and desire are mixed up equally in a man's heart, that man is apt to do strange things."

–– The Book of Illusions, p. 115, by Paul Auster

A brief history of European translators…

Lost and Found in Translation

Publish at Scribd or explore others: Fiction language literature

It takes a life…

A jaded old detective, call him something authoritative and off-putting, like McMurphyman, shows up at a flashing, nighttime crime scene. He raises a leg over the crime scene tape and stalks into the mash of clues his eyes are so adept at finding. Time passes. He observes. He queries. Young beat cops scratch their foreheads, try to sound forensic. He grimaces, tries to sound interested. He rocks back and forth on tired, wise heels. Morning comes. He went home. Couldn't sleep. Suspects needs faces, names. Downtown. He slips wrinkled, knobby fingers in and out of scene reports. Old arrests. Outstanding warrants. Suspects take on faces. Doors are knocked on. Heads are shaken and nodded with annoying, plebeian believability. Time passes. Heels ache. Our detective narrows the noose. Follows two hot leads. They putter, die. Darkness. Can't sleep. He wakes to a knock on the door. Officers brooding outside his door. Summoned. Dresses. Downtown. Under the lamp. First is casts no shadow off him, but onto him. Dark on his shirt, like the confused grimaces that infiltrate his old, sagging face. So he did it after all. Who would have thought to look for yourself as lead suspect?

The crime scene is your life. Blaming others works only so long. Eventually, truth comes knocking and you open to it. You see the light right in the darkness. You did it. The tape on the asphalt looks just like you. The crime called "your life so far" looks just like you, so far. Hell, the ultimate case: big people made of air and carbon blaming Everything but their bigness for where they end up, and where they don't. The hardness of heart the only thing that makes divine light hot, makes heaven hell, the transparency of graced repentance the only thing that makes divine light bearable, makes the heaviness of sin the lightness of new being. That same light, mistaken for infernal, hitting a wall of reckless, self-righteous freedom, heating up like the sun on solar dishes at desert's midday; that same light, taken for eternal, hitting a window of unrighteous freedom in wrecked grace risen to new life, cooling all things therein in crystalline perfection like The Nutcracker at the midnight of a child's mind.

You were born alive. And born to live. You were not born to die. So who said you could stop growing? Stop being mature and start being alive. It's your birth right. Or, otherwise, it'll be your birth wrong. Here I stand, I can do no other. Thus, remember, spake Zarathustra, the loser with a billion faces. Over ten billion served up, pwned. "This is the life I like, now leave me alone." But the first draft of everything, spake the Prophet Hemingway, is shit.

It takes a life to live a life. It takes a whole life to live a whole life. It takes all you have to be all of who you are. And even then, it takes what you don't have to be all of who you should be. It takes a life to become what you will be. And it took a life to bring you this far, to promise you that much farther in the light that bakes or brightens, depending. It took a life, His. It takes a life, yours. Stop calling dying a living.

Chinese Take 'im Out!

ERNIUS: Gleaming the Cube. It's on Cineview at nine.
BERTUS: Ahh, Gleaming the Cube. Gay title from the 80-90s? Or gayest title? "Jobbing the rim" sounds no better or worse to me.
ERNIUS: Not a good title for sure. Especially since it was about skateboarding.
BERTUS [hoists a can of Pabst Blue Ribbon]: Here's not to skateboard tribute movies. How do you spell "full body shudder"?
ERNIUS [purses lips and hoists matching can]:
BERTUS: I saw Taken and wanted to write a dissertation in film studies about how Chinese take out boxes are deployed in modern films. Since they are the only prominent prop in the first shot we have of Liam Neeson.
ERNIUS [hoists his Pabst again]: Segue alert!
BERTUS: And now I wonder how "gleaming" has been used. Well… not really. It's the Pabst talking.
ERNIUS [hoists his Pabst a third time, drones]: Here's to using the gleam!
BERTUS: The former, really. What's the deal with Chinese take out boxes? Should I call the NAACP?
ERNIUS: An intriguing premise. [He looks down at his Pabst without moving his head. Sadness blooms across his face.]
BERTUS: "Chinese take out boxes are the quintessential 'pathetic bachelor about to face dramatic challenge' trope." Reactions? Examples? Rebuttals? Pabst?
ERNIUS: As is spoiled milk in the carton… that pours out lumpy. Haphazardly arranged in the fridge next to the take out box.
BERTUS: Ahh, wisdom. Primal imagery.
[They both raise empty cans of Pabst Blue Ribbon, crossing arms at the elbow.]
BERTUS: One tired eye glaring at the alarm clock is also pretty good. The mighty morning hand slamming down on Old Man Time, futile, flaccid. Snooze!
ERNIUS: Here's to snoozing against fate! [Pabst finds its way heavenward.]
BERTUS: Wow, yeah, Chinese take out and curdled milk. A terrible duo of pitiful bachelorhood, but rife with potential for our pathetic hero!
ERNIUS: Potential disease, maybe.
BERTUS: I want a short film about a bachelor so effed up that he pours his milk and stale Chinese food tumbles out, then dejec–– de-jec-ted-ly goes to scoop his Chinese take out and comes up with curdles.
ERNIUS: YES.
BERTUS: And then he wakes up to a shrill alarm clock, the one eye glare, and he is someone else.
ERNIUS: Zing! Go on….
BERTUS: But he finds the dream so depressing and true to what he actually is, that he goes to buy a gun. Pulls out cash at the pawn shop. [He gulps at an empty can of Pabst.] And it is Monopoly money.
ERNIUS: You're a bastard. Let me get some Pabst.
BERTUS: Finally he purchases a gun. Takes it home. … Are you listening?
ERNIUS: Dude, I'm getting Pabst. I'm not deaf!
BERTUS: So our man fires his new, well, new used gun up into his head at his throat and…
ERNIUS: Aaand?
BERTUS: And it is just a "BANG!" gun.
ERNIUS: I repeat: You're a bastard in the skin of a man.
BERTUS: So he goes out to eat. Orders Chinese food.
ERNIUS: Take out?
BERTUS: Nope. Eats it in the store.
ERNIUS: His act of heroism?
BERTUS: He finds it actually palatable, really tasty, and decides his life is not bad after all.
ERNIUS: Here's to Pabst! And Chinese food, take out or not.
BERTUS [accepts a cold can of Pabst Blue Ribbon]: The awesome thing is that we could actually make that.
ERNIUS [swallows a mouthful of Pabst and juts out his tongue]: Chinese food?
BERTUS: No, I mean this short film. You or I could be his dream self.
ERNIUS: And I or you could be his waking self.
BERTUS: With the assist. [They tap their cans of Pabst together.] You know, Pabst won a blue ribbon.
ERNIUS: Yes, in 1892, I think.
BERTUS: Props to blue ribbons! [They tap their cans of Pabst together.]
ERNIUS: I think the ultimate absurdist comic ending would be that, as he walks out of Chinee Takee Outee, his dream self lingers behind him, a hired assassin become incarnate, and stalks behind him for the kill shot. Then, fade to black. Chinese Take 'im Out!
BERTUS: Now who's the bastard, you bastard? But it's brilliant!
ERNIUS: And for a final shot: his gravestone is a giant Chinese take out box.
BERTUS: A moment of silence. … And then more Pabst.

"Facebook Him, Danno"

• “Mr. Morbeck, I think you and I, and everyone in this room, know it’s just a matter of details from here on out.”
• “I’m innocent,” protested Morbeck. The hobbled wooden chair creaked under him as his hands flashed open for emphasis.
• “Let’s go from the beginning,” Detective Andresen droned. He dragged a small stack of printed documents to the center of the table.
• “Sometime in late August you added Ms. Chanser to your Facebook account,” Andresen explained.
• “Come on, I’ve told you already, I add lots of people. It’s Facebook,” countered Morbeck. “Do you think I really weigh every person I add to my friend list?” His eyebrows bobbed in time with his words.
• Andresen glanced up at Detective Felderfield standing behind Morbeck. He was spinning a rubber band thumb over thumb, gently shaking his head at Andresen.
• “Mr. Morbeck, we have reliable indications,” Andresen said, tapping the stack of papers glowing in the lamp light, “that Ms. Chanser had been in your friend request dock for weeks prior to you adding her.”
• “So?” snapped Morbeck. “And how would you know that? I already said that’s conjecture.”
• “We’ve accessed most of your friends’ pages,” Andresen explained, “and the ones that don’t have Ms. Chanser on their friend lists at least have her as someone they might know.”
• Morbeck inhaled sharply and spit a burst of contemptuous air. “Conjecture.”
• “You keep saying that word, Mr. Morbeck,” Felderfield spoke up, “but we’re the detectives. Let us decide, huh?” He stretched the rubber band between his thumbs as if to snap it but then kept rotating it slowly.
• “The point of this conjecture,” Andresen went on, “is that it looks mighty odd for you to all but know the victim, and for most of your friends to know her too, and then see you add her only a few days before her demise.”
• “I’ve got lots of people I still haven’t added,” protested Morbeck. “I get around to it when I get around to it.”
• “What took you so long with Ms. Chanser, though?” pried Andresen. “Why all of a sudden so buddy buddy with her, and then—”
• “And then the big kaboom,” inserted Felderfield. Morbeck looked back at him over his shoulder. Felderfield just twanged the rubber band a few times.
• “You have a very erratic history, Mr. Morbeck, of adding and dropping friends. You’ve gone from over 200 friends to under 100 and then back up to more than 300. Ms. Chanser was your 313th friend, in case you didn’t know.”
• “I,” stuttered Morbeck, “I get frustrated with having that many friends that are even really my friends. It’s like housecleaning. I just… delete people sometimes, if I see I don’t even keep in touch with them.”
• “Or if their constant updates annoy you, yeah?” suggested Felderfield.
• “Yeah, that’s right,” nodded Morbeck over his shoulder, glad to have a sympathetic ear for once.
• “So, you like to do away with people on a whim, Mr. Morbeck?” Andresen wondered out loud. “Does it give you a sense of power, of control, to, uh, ‘delete’ people, Mr. Morbeck?”
• “Hey! You’re putting words in my mouth,” Morbeck shouted.
• “Calm down, Morbeck, we’re just going over the details with you,” Felderfield crooned.
• Morbeck snapped his back over his shoulder to glare at Felderfield. His chair clattered with age.
• “Look, Mr. Morbeck,” continued Andresen, “you went from naming The Catcher in the Rye as your favorite book to naming Water for Elephants just before you added Ms. Chanser.”
• “So? How do you know that? Maybe I have two favorite books.”
• “So, Water for Elephants was Ms. Chanser’s favorite book for at least three weeks. We’ve got a stack of Twitter reports that give us a blow by blow look at your activity. Remember last March when Facebook merged with Twitter?”
• Morbeck’s eyes sank. He pursed his lips and rubbed the back of his jaw with both hands. “Well,” he began pleading, “I had heard good things about the book. I had bought a copy and was already a chapter in, so I made it my favorite book.”
• “Before you even read it?” queried Felderfield, stretching the rubber band diagonally back and forth between pinched fingers.
• “I needed some motivation to get through it,” Morbeck explained, “so I thought if I imagined it as my favorite book, I’d be that much more into it.”
“We’re getting away from the point, Mr. Morbeck,” interrupted Andresen. “What we have is a small list of suspects, and you’re on it. We have the sudden addition of Ms. Chanser onto your friend roll. We have the psychological profile from your Facebook history.”
• This was new. Felderfield and Andresen smiled at each other with their eyes. Felderfield flicked the frayed red rubber band at the back of Morbeck head. Morbeck wiped his hair where it hit and asked, “What do you mean?”
• “Oh, you don’t know about the new app Facebook added last month?” cooed Andresen. “I guess you wouldn’t, seeing as you’ve been in here,” he said, looking up and around at the city jail all around them outside the interrogation room.
• “What is it?” Morbeck asked.
• “Oh, you pay a small fee to a personality assessment firm in Rochester, and they process all the cached profile data of whatever Facebook friend you’re curious about. • Then they collate the data, run it by a psychiatrist— moonlighting, mostly— and then deliver a fairly detailed psychological profile of whoever it is by email.”
• “You’re making it up,” objected Morbeck. He started to laugh, from the heart, feeling for the first time like a real baddie catching the coppers at their old good cop, bad cop antics. Something, damn it all, held him back from calling "Bullshit!" on Andresen and Felderfield. Was there something such as good suspect, bad suspect?
• Andresen snapped to get Morbeck's wandering eyes back in alignment. Then he smirked for show and flipped through a few pages till came to a paper clipped bundle. He turned it towards Morbeck and placed it in before him like someone weighing fresh fruit on a scale. Morbeck’s eyes bugged then went cross-eyed for a second. A voucher was tucked in the paper clip over the first page of what looked like a professional personality report. He’d paid for some before for himself, but never for someone else.
• “Have a look at your collated comments about your educational background,” Andresen prodded. “How do you think that looks to us, you and Ms. Chanser being classmates in high school, I mean. Looks like you carried some hard feelings from those days.”
• “And it looks like Ms. Chanser got the worst of it,” added Felderfield.

… …

[This story is a comic noir tale of a guy suspected of murdering an old high school classmate. The comicality comes in by way of nearly all the facts against him being shavings from his Facebook account. As far as I can at this point, Morbeck is innocent, so it's a Kafkaesque bad dream. The ‘idea’ is that by making our most superficial selves our most accessible and official selves, we end up getting caught by that same superficiality.]

"The Shit People Buy"

[This is the first draft of the first stab at a new story of mine, called "The Shit People Buy." The story ultimately hinges on the ambiguity in the word "buy" in English, as in, purchasing vs. believing. The protagonist is a sort of Travis Bickle meets Holden Caulfield meets Ignatius J. Reilly meets Patrick Bateman.

The one interesting aspect of this narrative is the fluid shifting I do between first person and third person. I'm not saying it's uniquely my own style, but I can't recall an author at the moment that writes like that. It is meant to accentuate the ambiguity between Derrick's running critique of society and his actual performance along, or not, those lines.

Anyway, see if you can tell where Derrick's actions are headed by the end of this excerpt. 2500+ words.]

¶ The shit people buy. I'm telling you. Looking at ads like they're going out of style, or, then again, just coming into style. Flip-flopping hot items in their hands at the checkout lines. Wondering where each one could fit in their bloated, hollow lives. Finally deciding to buy. Buying like there's no tomorrow, or, worse, like there is no yesterday. Like there is nothing other than this or that little something to define themselves. Silently demanding a refund on who they were up to that moment, that precious, defining moment of purchase. When all the past mistakes and future dreams dissolve in a wave of clever release. I got it while it's on sale! I can return it if I need to! That's why I avoid stores. Or any one place for too long, really. Just makes me more cynical, seeing people, all basically the same, ambling into the same monstrous nonsense.
¶ So I ride taxis. It keeps me out of a rut. Or at least gives me a rut that keeps me from getting into any other rut. I never see the same people twice. Their tired, streetside demeanors as vague and transient as the yellow of cab after cab.
¶ I have hailed cabs and only recognized them just as I was tumbling into the back seat. I have no compunction about tumbling right back out if not too much of me, don't ask me how much, has already tumbled in. If my knee or any part of my legs has touched the seat, of course, there's no way I leave the cab. I'm stuck by my own invisible ethics.
¶ "Where to, sir?" asked the cabbie. Derrick knew the face. A month before? A year? Could he really remember that far back? He could, but the cabbie probably couldn't. Would you remember the face of every fare that got in your taxi, honestly?
¶ "Harold's Hardware, please," answered Derrick, feigning interest in the smudges on the rear passenger window. Averting his gaze for form's sake.
¶ "Harold's Hardware? What street is that on?" asked the cabbie, glancing from window to window as sullen cars oozed around him in traffic. He hated being at a curb longer than ten seconds. He rubbed the back alley of his ear as if he were looking for a pencil that should be resting there.
¶ Had he spoken too quickly? He'd sat with this stubble-faced driver before, but felt confident he didn't remember him. Another fare, as unfelt and unremarked as the silent arching of his stubble away from his gritty skin. But did he remember Harold's Hardware? What are the odds he'd used the same destination twice for the same driver? Now he had to give the same street as before, or the odor of deja vu might curdle to an itchy inconsistency.
¶ "Street, oh, I know it's along Pemberton Drive," Derrick replied, buying for time and plying the cabbie for hints.
¶ "Pemberton! What isn't along Pemberton!" the cabbie snapped. His head was in constant motion now eyeing the cars oozing with disdain around this unmoving transport. For shame!
¶ "Well, yeah, that's what I mean," said Derrick, "I've never been there, but my friend swears it's got just what I need. Maybe I should check the phone book and go another day…."
¶ "What you need?" the cabbie asked, his head holding still just long enough to cock an eyebrow in the mirror. Forget begging off now. The tiniest root of rapport had wedged its way between him and the cabbie. Their Pemberton Problem was now a mutual destiny, a shared grief in their muffled, unmoving space by the curb.
¶ "Well, I mean, what my friend needs," Derrick replied, "for a project he's, we're working on."
¶ "Some kind of home design, yeah?" asked the cabbie.
¶ How could he not remember Harold's Hardware on Pemberton! It didn't exist, sure, but discovering that, or nearly discovering that, last time should have triggered something by now. Was he stupid or just implacably friendly? Time for a bucket pass out.
¶ He glanced at the dash. B. Clines.
¶ "Yeah, just some refurbishing before he gets married," mumbled Derrick.
¶ B. Clines grunted amicably. "You know, I'm sorry, but the meter is running. It's automatic," he said, shrugging apologetically.
¶ "Oh, by all means!" Derrick said, catching himself for sounding too starchy.
¶ "I got an idea," he suggested, softening his grammar to sound more simpatico. "Let's just head to another hardware store along the way, and then I can at least try to get what I need there."
¶ "Fine by me, sir," B. Clines answered, chopping at his left blinker and bulging into traffic like a foal out of its mother. He fought the urge to deploy one of his "just an average macho guy taking a taxi" lines with this B. Clines, but he decided he'd already drawn enough attention to himself this ride.
¶ "What's the B. stand for?" asked Derrick. He had to try covering his gaffe with chitchat. Sound like every other fare. I like my women like I like my coffee–– cheap and refillable. Ixnay! Ixnay!
¶ "You'll laugh," Clines answered. "You can call me Burt, but my mother named me Burton."
¶ "Burt, Burton. That's a fine– sounds like a good name to me," replied Derrick. He chuckled ineffectually. Simpatico. Anonymous. Distant without being enigmatic. The longer they drove, the deeper and hotter Harold's Hardware would burn into Burt's brain, thrashing about like hot coals rattling down a chimney, until it hit something tender and burst into flame. A memory. And Derrick would be pegged. So he roved the streets as dusk darkened over the day. Looking for any plausible detour.
¶ "You know, mister," mentioned Burt, "I have heard of Harold's Hardware before. I just couldn't place the name till now." Pegged.
¶ "Oh?" muttered Derrick.
¶ "A while back I had a guy looking for it too, on Pemberton, like you said," Burt continued. Was he playing with Derrick now? His cab, his turf. His turn?
¶ "Oh, really, well," mumbled Derrick, affecting a look of deep attention out the window. He must have sounded so ineffectual, like a drooping daisy. I like my women....
¶ "But I think it's closed," said Burt. "I mean, I couldn't find it last time, and if your friend didn't have an exact address, he might have just heard of it by, uh, hearsay. Who knows how long ago it might have been open, you know?"
¶ The cabbie was drowning the flame in the blind rain of his own kindness! What a break! Night fell and the traffic lights played their endless game of stop and go in full relief. Pretending to offer a way out just over the next hill, just past the next intersection, a way to green hope lit by green lights, a way to a warm red end lit by stop lights, but then showing up just over the next hill, after the next intersection, taunting the dreamer with a red to check his hope of green release, a panting green light to smother his longing for an end. Green light: no rest for you. Red light: no cookie for you. Yellow light: think about it but don't think so hard you don't keep playing.
¶ "You know, Burt," Derrick said in his warmest tone, "I think you have– got a good idea there." And then he saw it. Home Care Hardware.
¶ "That's it!" shouted Derrick, louder than he meant to. Burt jerked forward in his seat, yanking at the wheel with a start.
¶ "What, what?" he asked, suppressing a moment of unprofessional clumsiness like a lecturer edging in one step behind the podium after noticing his fly is down.
¶ "Home Care Hardware. Up on the right," Derrick directed, putting a virile tone of boredom into his voice. It sounded close enough to Harold's. A believable mistake. Harold's, Home Care. It's all hardware, right, Burt, right, Burty old baby?
¶ "Oooohhh," moaned Burt, gilding the sound with a crystal edge of mirth. "You mean Home Care, not Harold's. I could've told you that."
¶ "That's what you get when you take things by word from your friends, right…" Derrick said, losing the will to say Burt at the last minute. "Let me out here and I'll call my buddy."
¶ "You want me to wait?"
¶ "No, no, it's fine," Derrick insisted, "You've done enough already, too much, really. My mistake."
¶ Burt said nothing, but Derrick noticed he glanced over at the trembling red numbers on the meter. A little green bulbed flashed in the top left. The cab elbowed its way out of traffic to the curb and Derrick made a little show of reaching into his back pocket for his money, even he'd been holding a $20 bill since Cabbie Clines had started driving.
¶ "That'll be $13.65," Burt droned. He didn't want to rub it in Derrick's face.
¶ "There you go," Derrick replied, "Three dollars change, please." He couldn't tip too much or too little, otherwise he'd make that much more tinder in Burt's brain. He was already pretty sure Harold's Hardware was going to make the rounds in whatever little conversations Burt had with his fellow cabbies, at least for the next day or two. He took a clandestine comfort in the fact that it was just a matter of time before Derrick's peccadillo would get water logged in the sea of Burt's friendliness and dragged down to darkness like a fallen penny from the eyes of the dead crossing Lethe.
¶ So you can see what I mean about staying out of a rut. Something as seemingly simple–– sorry, as deceptively mundane–– no, something as humdrum and workaday as riding a taxi to a store that doesn't exist is rife with perilous missteps. What will I do if, per impossibile, I ever find myself tumbling into Burt's moist little cab? Who knows? That's just the point. No rut. No predictability. No patterns. No prison. Just me watching the shit people buy drag them down as soon as it lifts them up.
¶ Take two nights ago as an example. I was in the back seat of a taxi, pretending to copy important business contacts off of business cards. (They were just business cards and mini take-out menus I had palmed from restaurants I'd dropped in on the past few nights.) We hit a long red light near the city council, and so I hallowed the moment by leaning my head back onto my cushion. I find that little things like that–– say, fumbling without protest for something until the cabbie ever so kindly flips on the cab light, or dropping a few coins under the front passenger seat so the cabbie helps you dig around for them at the next stop light–– gives most cabbies a real sense of worth. Little things make your ride seem special makes most cabbies beam. Like seeing a fare make himself at home, almost comfortable and secure enough to sleep, on the well groomed head rest in the back seat at a long red light downtown.
¶ Anyway, there I was, living it up at the long red, when I saw a huge billboard across the street over a used car lot.
¶

"Hair, hair, everywhere? Want a peachy body without the wolf man fuzz? Don't buzz that fuzz...
Try Foam-Alone Hair Removal! Guaranteed to remove unwanted hair without damaging skin. Available at all Cosmetic Bloom retailers."

¶ Strewn along the bottom were anime-style humanoids all displaying a unique hair problem: one grizzled old man with hairs bursting from his ears like TNT from a mine, a lumpy young lady frowning and staring at her mustached lip, a dazed rake-thin man whose arms and legs looked like redhead floor mats on a torso, a muscular dude with hair covering, I presume, his buff chest. And so on, right off the margins of the billboard.
¶ Shit people buy. People, that is, buy shit. How did Rudolph, Rudy the Booty, put it back in school? "People like dreck?" Good enough. Hat tip to Rudy, even if he didn't earn it. If it weren't for ads like that, there wouldn't be "unwanted hair." Small minds don't want the hair they have because they think they need to look like a billboard model. Everyone knows how fake ads are, and how companies just want your money, but they still go for products like Foam-Alone. Not even slaves to ads, since slaves at least know they are slaves. Worse: ants answering a call from a queen they don't even believe exists. The Market. Too abstract to fear, too abundant not to love. If Mommy Market told them their little whiskers had to go, their little whiskers just had to go. If Mommy Market stared at their soft bellies and pouted about six-pack abs, it was right on their backs to get rocked and pumped by an ab roller that seemed to cradle them at every grunting step towards six-packdom. I don't even want to imagine how expensive Foam-Alone is. At least addicts of other drugs get enjoyment with every fix. But these Market mummies just get a deeper sense of guilt every time they look up to the skies and see what they need next.
¶ The light turned green and Derrick's cab surged forward, trying to get around the thumping little Mazda that had gotten caught behind a pickup, warbling and growling like a dog in a cage. A few blocks ahead traffic was dispersed and only dull hum from the city. His cab turned right and dropped Derrick off at his apartment. As he got out Derrick offered the driver a very large tip without noticing it and Derrick was forced to take back almost $20. He walked up stairs, stuck his finger in his mailbox just for form's sake, and made his way upstairs as his shoes hissed on each splintery wooden step. He played with the change he'd gotten from the cabbie until he got to his door on the fourth floor, and then stuffed it into his breast pocket as his other hand reached for his keys. He entered and reached into the kitchen for a light switch. In the kitchen he leaned over the open door at the waist, one hand gripping the door jamb, the other arm sagging over the fridge door. He reached in for a bowl of soft mottled grapes. The money tumbled out of his pocket. He sighed, grunted, knelt down to collect it with his free hand, the bowl of grapes hovering in the dim light in his other hand.
¶ He stood up, closed the door, put the money down on the cutting board, and rested his hip against the counter as he slowly ate one grape after another. A mosquito buzzed by his ear. He reached up to swat it away, and then started rubbing his ear. He felt little hairs all over it. Tiny stiff probes jutting off the lip into his ear canal. Longer soft hairs perched on the upper rim of his ear, lost until now in the general hairiness of his head. A flimsy record needle sprouted from each of his earlobes; he could hear them scratching like drunken DJ's along the grooves of his studious finger tip.
[17.4.09, 367 words.]
¶ His one hand was becoming so transfixed by the stubbly wonder of his ear, in fact, that it seemed to jam the works in his other hand, that hapless other hand, which was, until now, blissfully occupied with the raising of grape after grape to silent, romping, maroon lips, but was now frozen with the transmuted anxiety of its partner hand. It was now caught in the glare of lips that no longer chewed so much as pantomimed the worry of the man's mind by slowly frisking a grape, long dead and nigh juiceless, the spoiled, split corpse of Hector around Troy, over and around his teeth in time with fingers at his ear as they frisked the hirsute impudence of the man's hormones, impudent for having covertly sprouted record-needle hairs on helpless earlobes, slender flags staked in the name of testosterone for studious fingers guided by an absent mind to find–– to find and to freeze that other hapless hand in midair as it raised a new grape to lips dedicated to thoughtless chewing.
¶ Now the feet heard the scratchy melody, too. The melody being broadcast from outside in from the earlobe to the fingertip, into the brain, down the sciatic nerve and into the soles of feet, cajoled the soles of those feet to scrape themselves from a grape-eating stance to a slow, pensive walk towards the bathroom. To the bathroom where one free hand, covered by another hand, full of assurance that the little hairs, like little foxes in a vineyard, would not get away this time, glided towards a bathroom mirror that, this whole time, this whole damned hair-sprouting time, had sightlessly reflected a pair of tweezers gleaming under neon lights. A gleaming pair of tweezers now poised in the free fingers of a free hand in the free air of a free man's bathroom, rising like the head of an adder, chrome tongue spit outward, chrome tines fused tweezerward, arching back in that no longer hapless hand, back, no longer blind and transfixed but silently fervent and guided towards an ear that played its scratchy little tune after all these weeks (days?) of growth under the relentless caress of an outraged finger.

I'm sorry, madam, it seems you won't make quite good enough a mother…

¶ How could a clinic in this day and age still be using linoleum? Linoleum! Even the word tasted like petrified wood. The same spattering of dull gray-gold dots on white. She stifled the urge to glance outwards, in jest, at the candid camera behind the plant, or up on the bookshelf to the right. For all that, though, she couldn't refrain from patting the table, then rubbing ever so gently, expecting unseen cracks to betray its age and––
¶ "Mrs. Wommel," asked the clinician, over his olive green glass frames, "is something the matter?"
¶ She retracted her hand into the anonymous security of her other, open palm, hoping it looked more like she had been stretching than fondling linoleum.
¶ "You seem... preoccupied," continued the clinician.
¶ "No, I," began Marylin Wommel, "I merely thought your desk had a tiny floral pattern on it." No! She had been stretching! How embarrassing!
¶ "I see," the clinician replied, leaning forward out of his beige swivel chair and wobbling his glasses on his nose as he inspected the tiny floral pattern that was not there. He seemed satisfied that there was no such pattern, or at least that he could not see it, and leaned back into his chair. His long, thin hand arced up and gently landed on a manila folder Mrs. Wommel had not seen behind the potted plant, and slid it across the linoleum. Mrs. Wommel leaned to her left so she could have a better look at the surprise folder, compelling her eyes not to dip down for a peek at the linoleum trembling with faux flora under her chin.
¶ "You are not comfortable in clinics, are you Mrs. Wommel?" inquired the clinician, as he covered the folder, like a man would on a bus if he had soiled himself.
¶ "Me? No, I'm fine. I'm fine," replied Mrs. Wommel, peering through the clinician's diffident hands at the possible words in the folder. When would her husband be here? She thought he'd said 3:30, but why had set the appointment for 4:00, then? Maybe he'd said 4:30.
¶ "Mrs. Wommel, it's nearly 4 o'clock, and Dr. Buser will be in in a few minutes," said the clinician, stumbling over two in's in a row, "Will your husband be here soon?"
¶ "Yes, he's on his way," she answered, glancing up at the bookshelf.
¶ As if on cue, as if watching from next door via the bookshelf's nonexistent camera, her husband, Mr. Aphan Wommel, knocked on the office door as he pushed it open.
¶ "Sorry I'm early," he chortled. He was a wit without pause.
¶ "Aphan, I knew you'd make it on time," Marylin chirped, glancing at the clinician before giving her husband a slow hug. His hands warbled over the folder when she glanced at him and he strained to look intent on the page while they hugged.
¶ The Wommels took their seats at the linoleum office desk, Aphan on the right, Marylin on the left.

… … …

¶ Dr. Buser thanked Perry for the glass of water and drank it in two steady, concerted nodding gulps. "Congratulations on wanting to be parents!" he said, his lips glistening with water, his eyes flushed from the effort of downing so much of it so fast.
¶ "It's what I was made to do," Aphan answered, laughing at his own wit. His wife tilted her head towards Aphan and laughed, as if to show Dr. Buser how it was done.
¶ "Well, yes," Dr. Buser proceeded, "if you mean biologically, you're right. But of course in our day and age––" Marylin eyed the linoleum "––there is so much to it than mere biology."
¶ "Wel, Doc, that's why we came to you, right, babe?" Apham said, rubbing his hand with vigorous affection around his wife's always erect back. "So how's it look, Doc?"
¶ "Well, that all depends, as you know, on just what we think is worth looking at," answered Dr. Buser. He secretly thought of himself as a poet, nay, a bard, trapped, nay, sequestered in a physician's body. That perspective had, he firmly averred, bestowed upon his otherwise menial clinical tasks, a psychic sensibility that other doctors lacked. To see in himself a sequestered muse enabled him to see in his patients prisoners of a different sort to their body's rebellious convulsions. Or should he say perturbations?
¶ "Well, Dr. Buser," interjected Marylin, "we are just interested in our child's best interests."
¶ Dr. Buser failed to mask his displeasure at hearing the Wommels' were "interested in" their child's best "interests." Ghastly prose.
¶ "I'm sure you are interested in your child's best interests," he replied, deciding to have a little fun, "and I find that very inspiring, but what we first need to investigate at this instant, is how well you two seem to be suited for investing in your child's interests in the long run."

… … … 

[It's late and I need to sleep, but the above belongs in a story in which science is so well developed that doctors can actually predict with great certainty how a couple's child(ren) will turn out. And with this prescience, they can counsel couples out of being fertilized with the sperm to make that child. Fertilization is, in this world, clinically administered. Each family has its own private sperm bank. If it is clear that the parents will fail, or abuse, etc. their child(ren), child services can step in to prevent some fertilizations. Less drastically, parents can be forewarned of the difficulties they will have in raising this or that child. Do they really want to have the guilt of stifling a great artist's native instinct for music, just so he can be a doctor? Etc. Parents are also expected to sign a contract of culpability for the future if some of the worst projections do occur in their child's life.

It is, I admit, an unabashed variation on Philip K. Dick's idea in The Minority Report, but I also think it affords enough comical gravitas to stand on its own legs. I'm still not sure where the crisis will arise, but I think it will be enough for us to see this society through the life of one couple, say, the Wommels. The 'idea' is that this society now allows children to, as it were, abort their parents. If a projected child is seen to bitterly resent having been born of certain parents, under certain conditions, he can prosecute them in the future and revoke his own (in the past, still merely potential) fertilization. The 'idea' is to ponder the logic of pro-choice rhetoric when turned inside out in favor of the fetuses. I suspect this is a long gestated, much milder version of a surrealist-expressionist tale I came up with years ago about a gigantic fetus that stalks the city like the Hunchback of Notre Dame, seeking either vengeance on or acceptance from the mother than tried to abort him.]

Like oatmeal…

ERNIUS: Hey, how are Ellen and Ben doing? Last time I saw them, it was…

BERTUS: Weird?

ERNIUS: Awkward?

BERTUS: Yeah. From what I can gather, being with Ellen most the time is like eating cold oatmeal. For Ben, I mean.

ERNIUS: Did Ben actually say that?

BERTUS: Well, in so many words.

ERNIUS: He talked cold oatmeal?

BERTUS: No, but, you know how it is. You get up from the table, go to the bathroom, check your email, make a call, whatever. But when you come back, the oatmeal is all chilled down and congealed. Clammy and unwelcoming.

ERNIUS: Congealed. Clammy.

BERTUS: Right. There's no inviting steam coming from the bowl. That waxy film is on the top.

ERNIUS: Arrghh, the waxy film! Quaker Instant Goatmeal strikes again! Is Ellen the waxy film?

BERTUS: Well, no, it's that bad. I mean, she's not that bad. But I guess Ben feels like he got up from the table one day for something, and when he came back, things were all cold. And now he's got to slog through this whole bowl cold oatmeal, presumably for the rest of his life.

ERNIUS: That's a lot of oatmeal. So why is he with her, then? Why not just go for some Pop Tarts or something? A bagel.

BERTUS: Well, why do we eat cold oatmeal? Because we know should. Because we know it's healthy. Because we can remember all those other times when oatmeal was so good, when it woke us up and made us warm! And we hang on to those ideas just so we can make it through this one lousy bowl. Deep down we know oatmeal is better than this––it's been awesome before––but now we have this, like, cognitive dissonance between what we know about oatmeal and what we're padding around in our mouth to warm it up, our tongue avoiding it and yet running into again and again like seeing an old classmate whose name you forgot at a party you're not even really invited to.

ERNIUS: Ben said all this?

BERTUS: In so many words.

ERNIUS: So can't Ben just, uh, microwave things? I mean, when in Rome, right?

BERTUS: Dude, you're focusing on the wrong part of the story. I'm just trying to say, Ben knows he's supposed to be loyal, and he knows Ellen is "good for him," but it just seems like he's trying to get from one bite to the next, and not really having fun. And even when he does heat it up, it's like something always happens and when he comes back to it, it's cold and soggy again.

ERNIUS: So he's eating cold oatmeal out of duty. Is Ellen, too?

BERTUS: No idea. I imagine she's pretty happy. Maybe she's the brown sugar that makes the oatmeal sweet enough to finish. Brown sugar is always pretty happy, right?

ERNIUS: It looks good to me.

BERTUS: Anyway, he's got this big bowl of cold, thick oatmeal in front of him––and it's got raisins in it––

ERNIUS: Raisins!

BERTUS: ––and they're all swollen and mushy from the oatmeal, and eating each one is like eating a mushroom filled with maple syrup, or a little diabetic slug.

ERNIUS: Dude, dude––dude! The line is right here––you're way over it over there!

BERTUS: He knows he can't just throw it out. So he's taking it one bite at a time. Like a man. Trying to hide his frown with the funnies, or orange juice, or something. You know, like when you're eating something really "interesting" that your friend's mom made, and you're trying not to frown, but your mouth is all stiff while you're trying to chew, and things only get harder and more awkward when you try to force a smile and say something really, really complimentary? Like trying to smile and sing happy birthday at your friend's birthday party when you're right on the verge of puking from too much soda and snacks before you even get to the cake.

ERNIUS: In so many words. But I mean, Ben doesn't know how to reheat the oatmeal?

BERTUS: Dude, reheat it? I think you're reading too much into this. It's just an analogy. She's not literally cold. Forget about the microwave.

ERNIUS: I'm just saying, maybe he can focus on the good things. The brown sugar.

BERTUS: It can only do so much, I think. Man shall not live by brown sugar alone.

ERNIUS: Do we know anyone named Mikey? Or anyone related to Milton Burle?

BERTUS: You mean Wilford Brimley?

ERNIUS: Him too, I guess.

沒有你的我…

沒有你的我
是我不想當的我
沒有我的你
是我無法愛的你
沒有我們的我們
是我不要住的宇宙
沒有你愛的世界
不是我夢到的生活
[A song in progress…]

Die Umwandlung...

[For those of you with some German savvy, you might not only know this word means "commutation" or "transmutation", but also realize it is a play on Kafka's famous story, "Die Verwandlung" (The Metamorphosis).]

A man wakes to find himself in silk sheets, staring up at a fine wood ceiling. He looks around him. His surroundings are immaculate and chic. "What incredible luck," he says to himself, to no one in particular, which might just amount to the same thing. "What unbelievably good fortune," he murmurs, rolling on his side to look at his night table. A silver Rolex lies curled next to his alarm clock as the golden pendulum rotates back and forth under its glass bulb. He tosses his blanket and sheet off him and sits up to look around. He can hardly believe he's here. How long has it been? It all seems so new, and yet so obviously lived in. He walks over to the closet, slowly flips jackets, shirts, slacks from to side, his grin not sure whether to widen or just perch there like a cat burglar poised midstep while a guard passes in the hallway. Suddenly, without thinking about it, he sniffs the air. Leans into the closet and sniffs as deeply as he can. Is that what he smells like? Funny to think about his own smell. Like hearing your voice on a recording for the first time. How odd to meet himself with his nose, he muses. Who knows--whose nose?

...

This story is about a man who wakes one day to find himself in another man's life. It's not that he is inhabiting his body, so much as everyone he meets reacts to him as if he were. He can see his own hands and feet, hear his own voice, but he is constantly catching up to who he is. For example, whoever it is, apparently, had a slight but noticeable slouch; our man does not. His acquaintances comment on this--sore back? New year's resolution?--so he finds himself constantly bobbing between faking a hunch and just standing erect. He immediately finds he is wealthy, connected, and successful. He has a beautiful fiancee and a stellar apartment. He would try to extricate himself from whatever life he's entered, but at the same time, he realizes, extricating himself from himself would be just as easy. Everything he does, he does as this man. For a time he stifles the cognitive dissonance, but gradually he is morally troubled to be leading (or misleading) another man's life. How did this happen? What happened to the original man? Who is he?

Over the weeks he amasses more and more clues as to his origin (photos, notes, vague memories, etc.), and eventually finds his former neighborhood. It is a much dingier, humbler place than his new life. Unfortunately, however, no one there recognizes him. He is as much a stranger to them as he is to himself. So he goes about asking about himself, looking for his past among people who are inclined to acknowledge that someone by that once lived among them, but can offer only diffident recollections and mildly baffled suggestions. After some time he discovers the woman that was his lover in his past, or at least passed, life. When he confronts her, however, she seems oblivious to who he really is. After enough encounters, however, he begins to sense she is feigning ignorance, and eventually she admits to being the only person who recognizes him.

Meanwhile, of course, he is living his other posh life. He comes to see that while, from the outside, it is a superior, even "great," life; but he can't live such a lie. This "existential schizophrenia" leads to much turmoil in his posh life: business failures, turmoil with his fiancee, mental anguish, etc. He is caught: the more damage he causes in his new life, the more damage he causes the man he is being taken for; and yet the more damage he causes, the more leverage he has for breaking away back into his old life. Finally, he ruins most of what he has and flees back to his "home life"--only to find of course that there is no place for him. His beloved has a new lover, someone chillingly reminiscent of himself, and he is only taken for a madman by others there. Having two lives amounts to having no life; dwelling in two worlds robs him of any dwelling in either. Once more, from the outside, he longs to enjoy the fruit of his new life; he fully recognizes how fortunate he is, and yet he can never find his place there.

...

This is a sort of allegory, about how decisions look to us from an objective perspective versus how they feel as the very fabric of our lives. It also examines the damage we can do to others by living too much in our past, or based too much on who we thought we should have been, or, indeed. Just as much, it explores the damage we can do to ourselves by trying to live up to a false pattern for ourselves. The story is driven by the anguish a man feels when he steps back from his own life, consults with friends, reflects on human life in general, sizes his lot up in comparison, and recognizes that "such a man" would be a lucky man--and yet is agonzied that he cannot bring himself to be that lucky man. It is a surrealistic combination drawing, in various ways, upon Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, Paul Auster's New York Trilogy, Christopher Nolan's Memento, Kafka's Die Verwandlung, Frank Capra's It's a Wonderful Life, Ridley Scott's Blade Runner (à la Philip K. Dick), Paul Verhoeven's Total Recall (à la Philip K. Dick), the Wachowskis' Matrix, Terry Gilliam's Brazil, Alex Proyas's Dark City, and Peter Jackson's The Truman Show, among other influences.

I still am not sure how to account for this man's "Umwandlung" into another man's life. I believe it will involve a dark conspiracy to rub out his surrogate, who was perhaps an important economic or political figure--in which case the protagonist himself will be killed once 'his' enemies realize he is still alive. Or perhaps it is just an elaborate prince-and-pauper set-up for some other purpose. I think it might even be better that the protagonist ultimately finds his surrogate, now inhabiting his former world, and kills him in order to occupy that man's new place in what was once the protagonist's own world. (His surrogate is just as unable to return to his life as the protagonist is; he is taken for someone else entirely.) Thus, the protagonist can at least live his own anonymous life, unknown by others, but known to himself.

Past On

Past On, or

The Past too Shall Pass

by Elliot Bougis

(591 words)

The past

parts.

But the past parts

––do they part?

Time lost

is the only time

we know,

the only time

we gain

with the tender called pain.

We speak in echoes;

we serve the dead.

The passed on

we know

are free

from the pull of the past

as the fallen vase

we hide,

and the fallen heart

we hid,

are free

from the pull of gravity,

and the hard hands of hope.

To be free of time,

outside time…

To surpass the past

by passing…

Gam zeh ya’avor.

+ + +

Memory flees

the touch of the mind

as oil from the touch of soap

on the empty face of water

four-cornered flees.

At the faintest touch

the past collapses

into itself

like a folded blanket

of darkness––

stripped, shelved, delved, but mute––

strangely,

like a dark comforter.

Memory hides

from the tongue of recollection,

from the lips of introspection,

as darkness only darkens

when a beam of 'lectric light

licks the night.

The gleam of the present

blinds the eye of the mind––

tiny rods toppled and burst,

incandescent,

like bowling pins aflame––

as a torch in hand

blinds the probing

nighttime eye, aye, I.

Thus does dark's ancient foe,

thus does the light,

become a tool of darkness

for the fool in darkness,

much as the present––

the fruit of the past,

unripe or rotten,

only we can say

in time––

casts its full-grown hunched shadow

over the soiled seeds

of the past.

Get thee behind me.

+ + +

In time

the mind drifts back

in time:

just as the body melts into its present––

stark, dense, fleeting,

inescapable, and invisible––

so paraffin fumes fume,

and escape,

so hot

then not,

in time;

while the body,

the body built of wax

so cool,

then hot,

melds in place,

the brittle debris of flickering glory:

a cenotaph of light

in the cenotaph

of time,

in space.

Was it here that I stood

that day, or

is it only here that I stand

this day?

Which is the press

and which the palimpsest?

“Memory speaks

before knowing remembers.”

But I wonder, aye,

who is at which end

of the microscope…

And who dials,

and who picks up.

+ + +

Where I find myself––

is it the same where

where I found a place

for myself?

One when

where I won,

staked my claim

in time;

struck a furrow in space,

scattered seeds,

in case;

my nails scratching, digging,

saying this is mine,

in time,

this place,

this furrowed face,

all mine

to mine.

The puzzle of myself––

is it really made of the pieces I find

in myself?

Am I just a collage

of my past, or

am I just the shadow

cast ahead

in time,

my future,

a corridor of opaque hope,

cast for me, from me, by me, despite me,

by the dying light of past-lit candles

called memories?

What does the past impart

when it parts?

What does the present leave

when it leaves?

Is my present

the key

in that dark void of past passion,

or only just another way

of telling the riddle

in reverse?

We shroud, we shred

the echoes

under a laughter––

call it progress––

that mocks the dead

for making us.

Slip the yoke and change

the joke––

or is it just

a change of the joke

with a self-tied yoke?

+ + +

My past has cost me

so much of my past.

The time has come,

time has come

and gone,

for the past…

Time is up

for the past:

to go now,

in time.