"The city, she eats too much, and shits too much, and can't get up out of the pool of offal that surrounds her."

Too true, especially today. The day began with the shuttling of my corpus from one enclosure to the other: from a car stuck behind other cars frightened of hills and curvy roads, into a stuffy train, sitting too close to a fat snoring man, and then onto the upper decks of a ferry, covered with a haze of sweat-stinking engine smoke. At either end of my river view, both bridges--the George Washington and the Verazano--were mostly obscured by a high wall of brown-yellow haze. The river beneath the ferry hull seemed a particularly lifeless shade of Hudson green. It teemed with wildlife, a mere two centuries ago, and now algae won't even grow on its muddied industrial shores. It's a toxic soup of long-named trace chemicals and asphalt runoff, traversed by unregulated ferries that belch black exhaust directly into its waters, and churn it up for good measure with their propellers. Just to make sure that the carbon monoxide in the smoke gets properly mixed in, so that the oxygen leaches out. Mmm...sterile!

So, I started off the day with an acute, in-the-nose sense of the environmental impact of a city of eight million plus. My nose being the font of misery that it is--think pollen!--once upon the dread island I was subjected to yet another marvelous assortment of city odors...dog urine and donut shops, auto exhaust and construction equipment effluvia. Such is my hyperolfactory curse that even the donut-scents were revolting...oily butter vapor and bleached sugar notes suspended in miasma of burnt coffee and whatever it is they use to clean their floors, all mixing together and wafting out of the open doors with the force of projectile vomit.

Have I mentioned that I'm not a fan of the city?

And, once at my desk, a numbing onslaught of paralytic, panic-attack laden, this-job-is-sucking-my-life-from-me tedium. The last time I was this out of my mind at my workplace I ended up curled into a little ball on the floor of the handicapped stall, and it was twenty minuted before I could even think of leaving the bathroom without my head threatening to crack open. It's ths sort of sensation, I think, that leads less functional people into moments of eye-twitching shotgun loading.

Functional people, though, take John Holland's Self-Directed Search, in a blindly grasping search for career change information. Non-functional people without immediate access to firearms can also take Mr. Holland's test, but I seriously doubt that paying $8.95 to determine their three-letter RIASEC summary code will do any more than postpone the bleeding and the screaming and the dying.

I, myself, am an ARI. I went to school with an Ari, actually. He was kind of a prick. But I am not a prick! No, ARI means that my interests are mostly a combination of Artistic, Realistic and Investigative tendencies. In the six-tendencied world of Robert Reardon, PhD. (who created Mr. Holland's test), I've got artistic skills, I enjoy creating original work, and I have a good imagination.

Gosh. Ya think?

To a lesser extent (six points lesser, actually), I have mechanical and athletic abilities, and I like to work outdoors and with tools and machines. Now, I can fix and build many things, it's true. Sometimes I fix and build things outside, if they're really big or there's a danger of fire, explosion, or fission. But my tremendous gut makes a liar out of you, Doctor Reardon! Bastard.

To an even lesser extent, I have math and science abilities, and I like to work alone and solve problems. A much lesser extent, apparently. My math SAT score was a third of my verbal. Or maybe it was a fifth. At any rate: I do like the bit about working alone.

The "described as" listings for each of my tendencies are mostly bunk...except for the Artistic (A): complicated, disorderly, emotional, expressive, idealistic, imaginative, impractical, impulsive, independent, introspective, inutitive, nonconforming, open, and original. Nicely done, Doctor Reardon. That about sums me up, especially the bits about being complicated, disorderly, and emotional.

The test selected 11 suitable occupations from the 12,000 listed in the Dictionary of Occupational Titles. Given my ARIish tendencies, my top jobs are: Model Maker, Costumer, or Modeler (Brick and Tile).

Uh-huh.

And down at the bottom of the list, the two least-suitable jobs that still involve my A-ness, R-ness, and I-ness: Surgeon. And: Veterinarian, Poultry.

Now, while Pea is often over in her office sewing Elisabethan corsets for herself, I have never made an article of clothing, and the last thing I sewed together was a leather pouch I made at Boy Scout camp to hold my D&D dice, which doesn't really count, because that was all awl-punching and thick stringy-lanyard slinging and involved the skins of dead things. "Costumer," it seems, is right out.

And, uh, I've made models of things. They came in boxes, and I put them together with glue, and hung them on my bedroom ceiling until they fell off and broke. Then I moved out of my mom's house.

So. Perhaps I can model brick and tile, however that works.

What do you think?

Oh no, that terra-cotta lapel has simply got to go, and the glaze is just appalling.

Fine. Can I sit down now? This jacket weighs a ton.

Perhaps not.

Should I take the evil, goateed mirror-image IRA job, reversing the point-order of my tendencies, and become Ian Wood: Chicken Doctor? Dramatic, late-night runs out to the farm? Thank God you're here, doc! Betty's egg's all sidewise!

Um...no.

In between these extremes there are vaguely interesting things like Architect, Landscape Architect, Concrete Sculptor, and Biologist. Every single one of them requires at least a technical degree, and a minimum of 1-2 years of specialized training to be any good at the task.

I'm not particularly inclined to cough up the dough to attend the Harvard School of Concrete Sculpting and Brick Modeling, though, ignoring for a moment that that program is just impossible to get into these days.

Maybe I can become a Purveyor Of Online Tests That Desperate Unfulfilled People Will Shell Out Nine Dollars For.

Sigh.

This is going to get worse before it gets better.

How Many Heads in the Commentarium? (3)
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I watch TNN, but only because they've got lots of Star Trek: TNG on, which is good for watching or for background noise when you're doing something else. The news that they've been positioning themselves as The First Network For Men didn't concern me, because ST:TNG is the only thing I watch on TNN. I'd watch CSI re-runs, but their Mondays at 11:05PM timeslot is rather stupidly inconvenient for those of us with, you know, jobs. I must not be the sort of man that the First Network For Men caters to.

Or, as they want to be called, Spike TV. You know: spikes, men. Spiky masculinity. Manly pokey things. Get it?

Spike Lee doesn't, apparently. He's suing Viacom because he believes that the public "associates Spike with Lee."

Actually, Shelton, I associate "Spike" with excellently-cheekboned vampires. I associate you with mediocrity, ego-centrism, and chip-on-the-shoulder racism.

Shelton is armed with affidavits from Ed Norton (who has "almost forgotten what it's like" to be proud of his government), Ossie Davis (who? Oh, right--the voice of "Yar" in Disney's Dinosaur!) and Bill Bradley (didn't he play basketball for the Senators?), all of whom thought that he had somehow become affiliated with TNN.

Gosh, if Ed, Ossie and Bill were fooled...the public must surely be wallowing in confusion! TNN is clearly trying to lure in the countless legions of progressive Spike Lee fans, who will no doubt be even further confused by the fact that the only black characters routinely shown on the network are Warrick in CSI, Tubbs in Miami Vice, and Mr. T. (Worf doesn't count. He's a Klingon.)

Parent company Viacom has been "directed by the judge to explain why it should not be barred from using the name." Apparently the fact that Shelton is a dingbat has-been director wasn't sufficient.

I, for one, am appalled that Shelton thinks that he has the moral right to tell other people what to do. To say that Viacom has to fall in line is you-know-what. I hope more people will rise up.

How Many Heads in the Commentarium? (7)
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I can confirm, without the slightest hesitation or reservation, that Dr. Neal Barnard is absolutely correct. I've been addicted to cheese all my life. It's true...even when I concluded that it was partially responsible for massive, mucous-in-the-braincase allergy attacks, I'd still eat it right off the big econo-block.

Dr. Barnard maintains that cheese contains minute traces of morphine produced in cows' livers, which accounts for its addictive nature. I don't know about the science, there, but it would certainly explain that time I woke up on the bathroom floor with a leather belt around my bicep and a syringe full of Cheez-Whiz stuck in my arm...

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[This is, by the way, an ad for Astonished Head, not an ad for something I want you to buy so I can get a cut and kick back on my fat, juicy profits.]

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Well.

I am just tapped out. Nothing to say, and that's always a good time to say nothing.

SO: this week is Fiction Week here at Astonished Head.

Each day I will publish the first chapter (or first bit) of something I'm working on. Comments are welcome.

Nay...comments are demanded!

Y'see, one reason I want to do this--in addition to putting up content that I've already written, thus sparing me some dear mental effort while (hopefully) still entertaining my vast legion of fans--is to see which pieces have more pop in their first few pages, which might, in turn, help me decide which piece to focus on next.

Us hyperactive ADHD types, you see, can't focus on one thing at a time. So: all irons into the fire! Avast, ye swarthy fictitious manuscripts!

First bit will go up up tomorrow.

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[Here's the first portion of an as-yet-untitled bit, as promised..]

Altemonde Rest Home was the last home that most of its residents--average age, 84 years--would ever have. This was of varying concern to them, depending upon their degree of lucidity and affection for their children.

Lucinda Torres--92 last week--didn't mind so much, because her last child had died five years ago of congestive heart failure at the age of 69, and had been a good boy. In fact, he had visited her a week before he went facefirst into his Sunday bowl of lobster bisque. "Charlie, you should ought to watch your weight," she had chided him. "It's no good for you, at your age, to be shaped like such a pear." Charlie had been a good boy, despite his four marriages--two of them to the same person, that unpleasant Ludovitch girl--and his inability to dress himself nicely. But he had always visited, and established a trust fund for her continued care. So no, she didn't mind the home so much. When the weather was nice, she spent the afternoons out on the grounds, near the rhododendron grove, knitting vast shapeless blankets of acrylic yarn. When it was cold, she watched movies in the common room, or watched from the windows of her room as snow fell lazily across the manicured landscape, a white comforter.

Anthony Scafia, 87 years old, had been at Altemonde for twelve years, and had seen his three children--Thomas, his oldest, was 57--a total of eight times. His youngest--Celeste, 50--was a guilty sort of person, courtesy of her mother--God rest her--and sent cards scrupulously, on all the holidays, his birthday, and sometimes just because she felt that she wasn't doing enough. Which she wasn't, as Anthony mercilessly reminded her during her annual telephone calls. He would have reminded her more frequently with cards of his own, but his arthritis kept him from holding a pen and he refused to write with the big fat markers or stubby pencils some of the other residents used. "If I can't write with a Bic like a normal man," he would declare, "Then I don't write at all." So he didn't. And he minded the home, very much. Everywhere he looked, people were old, and sick, and dying. His only real friend at Altemonde, a small fellow named Yul who spoke no English but played a mean game of dominos, had died last winter at the age of 90. Someone on the staff had left the window in his room open a crack, Anthony maintained, and so killed him with the cold. Anthony was very adamant that his windows be checked every night during the cold Vermont winter, sometimes more than once. He more than half-suspected that he was a marked man, and that come next November he would be playing dominos with Yul in the Great Beyond.

Then there was Frizzi--not her real name, but that's what everyone called her on account of her vast halo of white, curly hair. Frizzi was only 67 but in the advanced stages of an Alzheimer's-like dementia that didn't respond to any of the currently available treatments. Nevertheless, Frizzi was quite happy at Altemonde. Arthritis had badly knobbed her knees and confined her to a powered wheelchair. She enthusiastically directed it with a joystick to which Franklin--a member of the Altemonde staff who was handy with such things--had attached the 8-ball from the billiard set in the rec room. No one at the home played pool, and the big black sphere helped Frizzi's grip immensely. She spent most of her time zipping through the long halls of the home with an agility that belied her apparently complete lack of connection to the outside world. Frizzi had eight children, who came to visit in a rotational schedule that amounted to a visit from one child every seven weeks or so. She didn't recognize them, not really. Often, she regarded them as famous figures from the history of auto racing. When Roger, her 40-year old son, had come to visit last month, she had taken one look at him and screamed, "Ha! You'll never catch me, Frankie Clement!" before tearing out of the cafeteria at top speed and upsetting a tray full of applesauce bowls. Frank Clement, Roger discovered after a bit of research, was a driver from Great Britain who raced in the ‘20's and ‘30's, mostly in Bentleys. He had set the fastest lap at Le Mans in 1923 and 1927. All of which was very odd, because Frizzi, whose real name was Margaret and who had never shown any interest in or knowledge of racing before the onset of her present condition, hadn't been born until 1933.

Altogether, there were 47 permanent residents at Altemonde. The youngest was 61, and the oldest was 105. Jefferson, the oldest, spent all of his time in bed in his room beneath the eaves on the top floor. Not because he couldn't get around--he did well with a walker--but because he had worked eighteen-hour shifts, seven days a week, for the entire duration of the Great Depression and felt that he had never caught up on his sleep. "I'll die when I'm rested up, not before," he would say. He had been catching up on his sleep for over twenty years. Percy, the youngest, was very conscious of that status and spent a great deal of time trying to coax the female staff into giving him extra pudding. Or, failing that, a sponge bath.

There were also a dozen attendants on staff at Altemonde. About half a dozen less than would be minimally required to give the sort of care that would be optimum, but not so few as to make the residence unsafe. Altemonde was a privately run institution, but still the majority of its residents paid for their stay via governmental assistance...

How Many Heads in the Commentarium? (1)

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[Fiction Week continues. Next up: the first chapter of a science-fictiony novella, working title, "The Undercommander's Barbers." It's long--about 4,000 words--so be forewarned.]

I.

The Rotents came in the middle of the night, or perhaps early in the morning before the suns had risen, and took everyone who slept on the left side of the barracks away. Undercommander Rös told those remaining on the right side of the barracks that they were fortunate: “We don't need you for work this morning.” Those who were left tried to ignore Undercommander Rös' unpleasant emphasis. They told themselves that they were fortunate, very fortunate indeed, and tried to go back to sleep in the stifling gloom.

Sometime later, the first sun rose and the heat of the day began to creep through the plastic slatwalls of the barrack, riding along pale beams in the dusty air. The overhead horn blared, once, twice, then three long bursts, and they all fell pell-mell out of the bunks, gathering themselves into a semblance of order. Some of the newer additions straightened out their tattered bedclothes, and even neatened up their rough gray tunics. Cloak scratched at a sore on his arm and watched them. Presentation wouldn't matter one way or the other, he thought. But they didn't know that yet.

Undercommander Rös stepped smartly through the open barrack doorway a while later, dark gray from his mirror-bright boot tips to the thin sharp brim of his cap. Twin vermilion chevrons slashed across each shoulder. His chiseled face was clean-shaven, as was his head, a fact that few people knew because he was never without that cap-but Cloak knew, because he had been the Undercommander's barber for three months when he had first arrived.
It had been a strange game, played with an antiquated straight razor. Razor-burn merited a beating, punctuated by a shiny boot to the ribs. That happened once or twice a week, at first. A smooth shave would grow red and irritated in the day's heat and sweat, hours later, and the Undercommander would come and find him, wherever Cloak happened to be. Yet Cloak had relished the duty. Every day, he got to hold a sliver of sharpened metal against the Undercommander's throat. Every day! Cloak suspected that the Undercommander knew this...suspected his small delight. But Cloak could not take advantage of the vulnerability. Eventually, Cloak became concerned only with avoiding the beatings, and achieved perfection for two weeks: sixteen days straight, no burn, no beatings. Shortly after that, the Undercommander had gotten someone else for the job, and presumably the game began again.

“All of you,” the Undercommander told them in his oddly-accented K'rith, “Will gather in the Eastern Quad immediately after the morning feeding.” The Undercommander had practiced his K'rith with Cloak frequently as he shaved him, explaining that learning the “ugly tongue,” as he called it, helped him to understand the Krith psychology. To more properly motivate them. To Cloak's dismay, he had even taken to reciting memorized passages from the Books, butchering them with his blunt Haddish accent.

The Undercommander selected two of the men from the front of the barrack and left with them, leaving the others to assemble themselves in a ragged line and head for one of the long, narrow mess halls, capable of serving twenty-five thousand meals in a morning. Not that there was much to those meals: automated machinery dispensed precisely measured caloric glop with precision. Starting outside of the hall itself, they all filed in, past a machine that puffed lightweight gray tureens with attached spoons into their hands. They broke the spoons off of the tureen edge as they passed by the glop-nozzles. Blat! One serving. Then they shuffled along the narrow hall in the semi-darkness, eating quickly as they walked. Before passing into the white heat of the morning at the other end they dropped the empty tureens and spoons into open holes in the floor, where the material was quickly re-processed into new tureens and spoons for those at the beginning of the line. All very efficient. So efficient that, if someone kept a spoon or tureen or missed the hole, someone else at the end of the line wouldn't get a fully-formed set.

Cloak dropped his set into the hole and shuffled out into the dry sunlight, head down, contemplating the fine gray dust that his slippered feet kicked up. Behind him, Kalath muttered, lips almost motionless, “Where do you suppose they're putting us today?”

“Don't know,” Cloak replied, equally quiet. “Haven't heard yet.” The column shuffled and shambled in a line along a path made of dirty, extruded plastic, past the endless rows of low barracks, towards one of the vast open areas that looked out onto the distant fences and, beyond them, the dim plains. Ahead of him, one of the marchers-new, Cloak didn't have his name yet-turned his head slightly.

“The fellow in front of me said that he heard that the number twenty-six transporter misfired last night,” he told Cloak, louder than was strictly necessary. Loud enough so that Cloak could hear the quaver in his voice. “What's that mean?”

It meant, Cloak knew, that the one hundred remaining men of Barrack D-F had grim work ahead of them. “I don't know,” he told the man. “Keep your head down and your lips still when you talk.” The man snapped his head back down as though expecting to be struck down immediately. As he did so, they passed a body, laid out face down in the pale dust among a scattering of tiny button cacti, the arms outstretched as though the person had been flying, fast and high, and had been brought down to earth suddenly. It was Bal, Cloak saw: the man had lost two fingers and part of his left hand several months ago, giving him a distinctive, pincer-like appendage. Bal had been one of the men the Undercommander tad taken from the barracks earlier. The back of his head was gone. Shortly they passed another body, also missing most of its head-the other man. Ninety-eight remaining men, Cloak amended.

“What did they do?” the man ahead of Cloak wanted to know.

“I don't know,” Cloak repeated. The man didn't ask again. Eventually, they came to the tall, black obelisks that demarcated the corners of the East Quad. Waiting for them there were two dozen gray-helmeted Rotents and Sub-Rotents, wearing their deep vermilion tunics and ready with their prodding sticks-dark gray shafts, a meter and a half long, tipped by small blackened prongs that could hurl a man 10 meters with the force of kinetic impact, bursting him, or merely jolt the skin painfully. They used them judiciously and efficiently, herding the men into an even square, twenty-two men by twenty-two. Cloak made sure he was near the center of the square, even pushing one man outside of its bounds so that he had to run around behind it and scoot into the last row. When they were done, there were fourteen men milling around outside of the square, confused-mostly new, and some older fellows who couldn't move fast enough or didn't care anymore. The Rotents went to work with their sticks, shouting Haddish obscenities at the stragglers and, one by one, sending irresistible bolts of kinetic energy into faces, hearts, and guts, dropping the men where they stood. One tried to run to somewhere, and the Rotents let him get almost twenty meters away before they all lined up and, at a gutteral command, fired at once. The man exploded, meat dropping into the pale dust.

“Why did they do that?” hissed a voice behind him. It was the fellow who had been just ahead of him in line.

“Shut up,” Cloak told him.

“Why did they do that?” The man repeated, louder. Cloak could hear him shuffling.

“Shut the hell up,” Cloak said, echoed by others nearby. Then, to avoid panicking the man with the simple unknowability of it all, he gave him some more information. “They always do that. Always an even square, with some left over. Don't get left over.”

“Sh'if täv, Sh'if täv, Sh'if täv…” Cloak heard the man muttering, swaying. The opening verse of the Prayer for the Dead. “Män kände sachlanii, Sh'if täv...” Cloak tensed, ready to silence him, but the man kept it barely above a whisper, rhythmically sibilant. Cloak let him pray, but did not join him. He waited with all the others, while the blood of those left over quickly dried behind them in the ever-increasing heat of the day. Both suns were in the sky, now; the deep red furnace of Sachiim and the smaller, yellow disk of Sakliith bore down on them. Ahead of them, in a neat row, the twenty-four Rotents stood at the ready, prods at their sides, faces invisible behind darkened visors, brows cooled by small units within their helmets. So they all waited, baking, until the suns had risen another two degrees into the whitening sky. Eventually, a lone figure strode through the dust behind them, and took his place in front of the Rotents: Undercommander Rös.

“There has been an unfortunate accident,” he told them without preamble in his stilted K'rith. “The transporter unit numbered twenty and six has been misfired in the early morning. Before these required repairs can be performed, this unit a thorough cleaning requires. That is your task for all of the hours of this day.” Cloak glanced up from beneath his lowered brows, over the shoulders of the men in front of him, and noted immediately the two small neat adhesive bandages on the Undercommander's face, one on his left cheek, the other just below the line of his jaw on the right. One nick per body, Cloak guessed. Bal, with his pincer-hand, never had a chance.

The transporters were located far away from the Quad and the barracks, nearly ten kilometers. The detachment of Rotents split down to a dozen men, and herded the men from Barrack D-F onto a pair of floating skiffs for transport across the camp to the transporters. With a bowel-shuddering thrum! the skiffs rose above the ground and, kicking up great sheets of powdery gray, sliced across the camp with their laborer cargo. Along the way, Kalath carefully moved among the packed crowd until he was next to Cloak. “This will be bad, won't it.” It wasn't really a question. Kalath tugged at his scraggled beard fitfully.

“I expect so,” Cloak said. “But what is ‘bad'?” He gestured up at the suns, and wiped a thin mud of dust and sweat off his brow. “I can't tell anymore.”

“The new man, the one who prayed the Sh'if täv,” Kalath continued above the hum of the skiffs. “Who is he?” Cloak shrugged.

“I don't know.” He craned his head, looking for the man. “I think he's on the other skiff.” Kalath made a noncommittal noise, and joined Cloak in staring ahead at the flat landscape. They passed by columns of other men, being herded along to one place or another by groups of Rotents. At the farthest edge of the Quad, gangs of workers in sweat-darkened tunics dug trenches and laid liquid plastic foundations for the floors and walls of small factory-units. Eventually, they left this area, and the distant transporters slowly came into view. Huge, low structures, topped with thick, heavy machinery and fronted with wide, yawning doors. A symmetrical forest of tall black spires topped each one. The skiffs passed by twenty of the vast structures before stopping and settling to rest near one. The Rotents prodded the men off of the skiffs, and made them form a square before the vast open space of the transporter. A Rotent with a pair of bright yellow bars at his uniform shoulders stepped to the front and spoke loudly to them in thick Haddish, which was translated into K'rith by a tall, thin man from the Barrack with a scratchy voice, named Klim. “Each of you will be issued the necessary tools,” Klim screeched at them all. “When heavy equipment is required, it will be brought to the site. Go inside now, and begin your work.” The Rotents stepped to either side of the transporter, and dim overhead lighting buzzed into life, casting sickly yellow radiance, illuminating the darkness within.

Cloak peered inside as he awaited the issuance of his tool belt. It appeared as though the gray dust had drifted into the transporter from outside; thick drifts of it coated the glimmering floor of the low, cavernous space. Towards the back wall of the enclosure, in the distance, some sort of debris lay piled in low heaps. Cloak peered at the pile, and then put it out of his mind. First they'd want the dust cleared. The rest would come later.

The Rotents pushed, prodded, and jolted them into two lines two meters apart, each man two arms' lengths apart from his fellow. As luck-or, Cloak thought later, perhaps intention-would have it, the new man, the prayer, was immediately to his left. All of the men now wore belts holding various cleaning implements-scrapers, rotating brushes, solvent sprayers, baling hooks. But for now, they were to use vacuum devices tipped by wide, flat soft bristles that gently dislodged the layer of gray dust and swept it into the sacks each man carried slung over one shoulder. The floor of the transporter, beneath its powdery coating, was a fine grid of mirror-bright metal, thin but strong, that yielded slightly beneath their feet with spring-like tension. The walls and ceiling were covered with the same silver mesh. As the men slowly stepped forward into the transporter, sweeping the vacuums in careful arcs, they exposed the intricate, coppery-blue piping, very small, that lay packed tightly just beneath the grid's surface. After they had progressed a few meters in, the new man began to speak, as Cloak knew he would. “My name is Yeshula,” he said, raising his voice slightly above the noise of the cleaning machines. Cloak nodded, saying nothing, and they moved a few more meters. “Will you tell me your name?” Yeshula asked eventually.

“Cloak. You missed a sliver there, on your right.” Yeshula dutifully swung the whirring device, sweeping the mesh floor clean. They progressed deeper into the transporter.

“How long have you been here?” Yeshula asked.

“Nine months, I think.” Cloak shrugged. “I don't know, really. Body rhythms are all off, here. Lunar cycle's different. There are no seasons to speak of.”

“I arrived two days ago,” Yeshula told him, and coughed. Fine dust, kicked up by the vacuums, filled the space around them. It left a burnt taste in the back of their throats, and coated their tongues and teeth, drying out their mouths. “The Haddish took Sestre, and rounded up all of the Krith they could find. I hid for a week in the capital, but…” Cloak blinked, hard, almost a twitch.

“Sestre?” he asked numbly. “The Haddish have taken Sestre?”

“Oh yes,” Yeshula continued, his vacuum arcing to cover spots that Cloak was now missing as he staggered heavily forward, his arm barely moving. “Sestre, Daidono, Kellisch…in the past six months they've pushed beyond the System and well into the outer worlds.” Yeshula sighed, and coughed again. “The war goes badly for the Allied Worlds.” Yeshula glanced over at Cloak. “Did you have people on Sestre?”

After a moment, Hakiin said, “My wife. My daughters. I sent them there three years ago, before…things progressed. I didn't think that…” He stopped and began sweeping the vacuum with renewed vigor, exposing bright silver mesh beneath the thick dust.

“No one did, friend,” Yeshula said quietly.

“I'm not your friend,” Cloak said. “There are no friends, here.”

Yeshula, blessedly, let that lie, and concentrated on his sweeping, back and forth, progressing deeper into the transporter along with the rest of them. After an hour, they had cleared half of the distance between the entrance and the pile of debris that lay towards the back wall. Now, underlying the dry, acrid smell and taste of the dust, there was another odor, rising in the increasing heat of the enclosed metal space…cooked, slightly cloying. Unmistakably organic. It clung to them with oily persistence. Yeshula abruptly staggered, his whirling brush swinging wide, his throat working visibly. “Don't puke,” Cloak warned him. “Just don't. If they have to pry up any more of the floor than they already do they'll beat the lot of us. Breath through your mouth, look at your brush head, and keep moving.” He risked a glance back over his shoulders, towards that harsh light of the wide doorway. The Rotents lounged there, just inside the shadowed entrance, leaning against the walls. One of them idly twirled his prod, as though it were a baton. Yeshula had attracted no notice.

“Tell me about Sestre,” Cloak said. “How did it happen? What about the perimeter defenses?” Sestre, a neutral planet near the final outposts of the colonized sectors, possessed the most effective planetary defenses in the System. Of all the places in the System, Cloak had thought that Sestre was the safest for his family. Securing clearance for immigration to the planet had cost him everything he had.

Yeshula swallowed hard, his spinning brush whirring and waving erratically. “They were deactivated. The Haddish fleet was unopposed.”

Unopposed? “Traitors!” Cloak spat. Others in the brush-line glanced up, startled. “Who? Who deactivated them?” He pushed hard at his brush, causing the spinning motor within it to protest, sending humming vibrations up the shaft and into his elbow and shoulder.

Yeshula shrugged slightly. “We did not know. The first we knew of it was when the Haddish troop carriers landed in D'nab and occupied the Parliament complex.” Cloak's jaw clenched, so forcefully that the roots of his molars hurt. He forced himself to relax, to keep sweeping, back and forth, to suck the pale dust up into the ever-heavier bag slung onto his back.

“What of the K'rith,” he asked, quietly.

“They took all that they found. I was brought here.” Yeshula swept, carefully, with measured strokes. “I have not seen anyone else that I know from Sestre.” Cloak's heart leapt. Perhaps they had escaped into the countryside. Perhaps the Haddish had only swept the capital D'nab, and had not bothered with the Southern continents at all. Most of the major information processing centers, with their vast arrays of polyhumans and crystalline machinery, were located within D'nab. “I think that perhaps the Sestrian government hoped for leniency if it did not resist,” Yeshula continued. “But many cities were burned from orbit.”

“What cities?” Cloak strove to keep his voice low, and it emerged a strangled whisper. He compelled his arms anew: sweep…sweep…sweep.

“Kash. Dengahb. Tristan, and Jericho.” Yeshula, too, measured the effort of the muscles in his arms, scooting the soft whirling bristles of his wand over to remove an arc of powder that Cloak had missed. “There were others. Many were killed.”

“What of Tol,” Cloak pressed Yeshula.

“I have heard nothing of Tol,” Yeshula told him, and glanced up from the shining mesh exposed by his efforts. “You sent your family to Tol, didn't you?”

“I did.” Cloak said no more, and Yeshula respected his silence. The line of men advanced, meter by meter, until their shoulderbags were full of dust. Then, poked and prodded by the Rotents, they emerged from the transporter into the oven of the double-sunned day. The men were forced into a rough circle, a crowd, really, and then they sat in the dust while their guards tossed soft transparent pouches of water back and forth among themselves. The water sloshed and ploomped as the Rotents caught the containers in their fists, laughing and joking to each other in staccato Haddish as they drank.
“Hok, priest!” one of them called out, poking at Yeshula, who sat next to Cloak at the edge of the crowd. “Hok, you want some water, eh?” Yeshula froze; every muscle in his body drew taught and tense. His left hand pulled fitfully at the tiny leather vegetation that grew like scrub at his side. Abruptly the Rotent drew back and let fly with his fist, the water pouch smacked into Yeshula's face and fell into the dust. “Have some water!” The Rotent laughed robustly and moved on. Yeshula remained motionless, the water pouch by his side.

“I'd drink that if I were you,” Cloak advised him quietly. Yeshula, as though in a daze, shook his head to clear it. He pushed the pouch over to Cloak.

“You take it.” Cloak didn't argue and squeezed the half empty pouch into his mouth, washing out the burned metallic taste of the taste with barely disguised relief. Eventually, the Rotents pelted nearly everyone in the group with water pouches; they all drank, with the greed of necessity. Then they were led some distance away from the open doors of the transporters to empty their dust-bags, so that their mouths were once again filled with the stuff and clouds of it rose into the shimmering air. Halkiin had saved one swallow from his pouch, and now took it, swirling it into his caked mouth and spitting mud to the cracked ground. He tossed the empty pouch after it.

Once back inside the transporter the work began again, slow, careful, and monotonous. The clinging organic odor was much stronger now, overpowering even the omnipresent burnt metal of the dust. The men breathed through their mouths, trading even the ineffective dust-filtering of their noses for the chance to muffle the smell. Each arc of the whirring vacuum tube brought them closer to the undifferentiated debris that lay heaped against the back wall of the transporter. There came a muffled exclamation from the one end of the line, and the steady pace of the work faltered. At once, a half-dozen Rotents rushed in after them, their noses covered with small filters that depended from their darkened visors, giving them the appearance of birds with nut-cracking beaks. Klim was dragged from his place and translated new instructions for them. “When you come across material that cannot be removed by the vacuums, you are to use the scrapers and brushes,” he wheezed. “Do not damage the material of the floor. Such damage will be punished. While men are scraping, those on either side of them must vacuum the scrapers' path as he works. Failure to do so will be punished. Work!” Klim was pushed roughly back into his place in line.

And so they proceeded, ever closer to the back wall of the transporter. Yeshula came across pieces of charred or melted material, unidentifiable, every three or four meters. Each time, he stopped his sweeping, stooped on one knee and produced the flat scraper and wire brush, prying the resilient stuff away from the wire mesh and depositing it in a separate bag, slung from his belt. Others in the line advanced without him, clearing his path of dust.

And then they were upon it: the thick, charred debris of the pile. It wasn't very high-about to the waist-but the terrible familiarity of some of the protruding shapes caused it to loom as a tremendous mountain. Here, a black hand beckoned, fused to the floor. There, half of a pale face peered out with one milky eye from within a tangled grotesque of multiple legs and torsos, truncated with almost surgical precision. The shapes and forms were all cooked to some degree…some to charred carbon, others to split, raw pink. All bore the marks of exposure to intense, plasma-like heat.

The pile was nearly ninety meters wide, and stretched five meters before them. Cloak calmly surveyed its bulk, noting the degree to which the material had adhered to the floor, while beside him Yeshula began to tremble violently. “Mind yourself,” Cloak told him. “Think of it as the scene of a terrible accident.”

“I…I thought that this was an accident,” Yeshula managed.

“A terrible accident,” Cloak repeated, almost to himself.

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[It's still Fiction Week. And so here is another science-fiction sketch from a work-in-progress titled "Drinking Black."]

Ronald came to the Katta-K club because he saw absolutely no reason to deny himself anything. He didn't enjoy any of the things that went on at the Katta-K in particular but, he reasoned, these things do go on in the world, and there was really no reason not to see them, so he did. This didn't explain his continued patronage, long after the various insertions, expulsions, and contortions had lost any novelty they might once have had. His reasoning didn't go that far, because he wouldn't let it. His perversion, he told himself, was boredom. He was above it all. And, occasionally, when a client was in need of his peculiar services, he liked to meet them at the Katta-K. He learned a lot about them from where their eyes went.

This particular client was trying valiantly to be all business, sitting across from him at the small chrome cylinder table near one of the holograph boxes towards the back of the club, in the relative darkness. Ronald gave her some credit: it was hard to stay focused in this place. The Katta-K was loud, very loud, and bright, and sparkly. There were pinpoint projectors hidden everywhere, seeking out the whites of eyes and then projecting tiny monochrome graphics directly onto retinas, so that at any moment the laser wash of the stage lighting could be augmented by flickering cartoons gamboling in and out of peripheral vision. Ronald himself wore lenses that prevented such advertisements, but the white-haired girl clearly didn't, and was regularly startled anew as one lurid image after another flickered into her eyes. But she lacked the continuous darting glances of someone whose attention could truly be caught by the happenings onstage, or in the holograph boxes that lined the walls. She was trying, very hard, to pay attention to what he was saying.

“Once you've transferred the credits, there will be a forty-eight hour wait while the necessary parts are fabricated.” The white-haired girl frowned, her snowy brows furrowing. A nude-pink server-synthetic brushed by her, carrying a tray piled high with an impossibly precise pyramid of clear lexan tumblers full of various colored fluids, and she recoiled slightly, brushing absently at her silverweave sleeve. “Something the matter?” Ronald asked pointedly.

“Why two days?” she wanted to know. They usually did.

“One, it takes twenty-four hours to grow everything.” He paused. “And two, I tack another day onto that so you can think about what you're doing.”

“And if I change my mind?”

“You get to walk away with the body you've got.”

“But not my credits.”

“Parts are made, credits have been spent, and I've got to be compensated for my time.” He smiled thinly. “You understand, of course.”

“Of course.” Her eyes sparked brilliant blue as one of the projectors found her retinas, and she jerked her head to break the unit's tracking. Clubgoers who couldn't afford lenses developed a practiced twitch, and looked like they had some kind of neurological tic. “That's kind of you.”

“Pardon?” Ronald stopped with his Blue drink halfway to his lips. He had been called many things by clients-that word usually wasn't among the terms employed.

“To give a day, for thought.” She smiled a smile that was as incongruous as she was in this place-genuine. It made her look even younger. “Most people like you, in your business, I mean, wouldn't care if I was making the right decision or not.”

“I've got my credits,” Ronald replied, and tossed back his cool Blue, feeling it chill its way down his throat and into his brain. “It really doesn't matter to me what you do after the transfer.” She kept up with that smile. “In fact, I may even make more credits, if someone else can use the parts we've made for you.” The smile faded a bit.

“Unlikely. Don't you think?” She tilted her head slightly, and twitched to throw off another scan.

“Yeah.” Very unlikely, actually. He squinted at her through the sparkle and noise, trying to suss her out some more, to fathom some motivation. Young, certainly-no more than seventeen. Not used to places like the Katta-K. Not a drinker-not of Pinks, anyway; the one he comped her sat untouched on the mirror tabletop in front of her. Money from somewhere, though-enough to pay him, and to buy that very expensive silverweave she was wearing, not to mention the hair, and-he squinted-the Audiovox in her throat. Why she wanted what she wanted was beyond him. “Two days, then.” He rapped at the table to summon the server screen and pushed a drink icon for himself, ending the conversation. She took the cue and got up, tall for her age and lithe beneath the tight shimmer of her weave.

“Two days,” she returned, and hastened away, making directly for the exit, nimbly dodging the clubgoers, dancers, and servers on her way out. One of the servers she passed made for Ronald's table and set a squat tumbler down in front of him with its rubbery pink paddle. Ronald looked at the Black he had ordered for a moment, then shrugged and tossed it back. All in a day's work.

Twenty minutes later a soft tone sounded in his left ear. He clicked his teeth and called up his banking link. The numbered account he had assigned to the white-haired girl was full of many tens of thousands of credits, now. Apparently she had made her decision. Ronald grimaced and impulsively ordered another Black from the table. Then, before it arrived, he clicked his teeth again and left a message for Doctor Ohno.

How Many Heads in the Commentarium? (2)

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[Last day of Fiction Week! Here is the Forward and first chapter of a work-in-progress novel, titled "Boomtime." Any suggestions of author surrogacy will be vigorously resisted with sticks and knives.]

Forward

Apparently it is customary, or usual, for the narrator to be identified. Failing that, so conventional literary wisdom goes, the narrator ought to be somewhat familiar, if only slightly, so thaMt even if the reader has no specific image to go with the narrative voice, he or she may at least be able to recognize it, and the story may then proceed apace with a bare modicum of familiarity.

That, unfortunately, will not be the case here. Supposedly, a lack of empathy between the reader and the narrator—when a story uses such a device—will result in a lack of interest and engagement. Furthermore, such a divide will result in the manuscript being rejected for publication, as both interest and engagement on the part of the reader are deemed necessary prerequisites for eventual sale to the reading public. However, that is not really relevant here, because in this instance the narrator has control over all of time and space and the individual preferences of an editor are immaterial at best.

That being said, it's probably best to get any preconceptions that you as the reader may have out of the way now. This way, any discomfort or disengagement you may experience due to the unfamiliarity of the narrator and of the narrative itself may be alleviated.

First: the fact that you may completely and utterly disbelieve everything written here is of absolutely no consequence whatsoever, any more than a hypothetical belief in the sponginess of red bricks would prevent your skull from getting cracked open were someone to lob one at your head.

Second: if you have any notions about the structure of reality as it relates to the human soul and its eventual disposition, please dispose of them now. Plato has come closer than anyone else in this particular bubble of reality to properly outlining the whole thing—read the Phaedrus—but even that account was marred by an appalling lack of clarity, most of which he eventually rectified after his reincarnation in 3063. One can't blame him for his dismal perception, really; it's quite difficult to interpret the nature of space and time when one is so inextricably bound up in it.

Third: while everything written here is true, it probably hasn't happened.

1. Quit Your Whining

Sean was desperately dissatisfied. The adverb is intended to represent the uniquely Sean-like quality of his unhappiness. Any old soul can be merely discontented, or reasonably unhappy. However, this particular collection of autonomous behaviors, this unique crystalline tower of quantum consciousness, excellently produced the depth of despair more often found in those with serious intellectual, artistic, or literary pretensions. Unfortunately for Sean, his latest incarnation, toddling about there in the last bit of the twentieth century, lacked the ego-drive of his previous seventeenth-century manifestation as Lord Herbert of Chibury. Lord Herbert pretended to fashionable melancholy for his portraits but was actually quite a lively fellow. The difference is that the unfashionable sort of despair—the sort that manifests when one is not sitting for portraits—can be mitigated by channeling it into creative work of some kind, such as Lord Herbert's philosophical treatises. Unvented, this despair makes one fat and soft and generally unpleasant to be around, and eventually results in a kind of extremis. There is no more bitter emotion than the sinking, seemingly sourceless anxiety of uniform dissatisfaction, stemming as it does from the thwarting consciousness' most essential purpose. It is the very nature of consciousness to reorganize the matter-stuff around it in some way…to render into permanence its fleeting fruit, the idea. Failure to satisfy this need in results in a dissatisfaction so profound that it does not easily lend itself to rapid analysis or to simple resolution, particularly by those who suffer from it. They tend to look elsewhere, to the outside world of the sensible, rather than inward to the sensing. Most often they get it exactly backwards and delve into the sensualities of drugs like alcohol, cannabis or Zoloft, thus wreaking change upon their perceptions instead of the world around them. Only by affecting change can such personalities be content.

The whole process is somewhat tedious, actually, especially when seen from an…outside perspective. All of that bumbling about, poking at the limits of perception to find out what's on the other side. Rather like watching the blind waltz: all that finery, crashing into the sideboard and upsetting the felines. But you spatio-temporally-constrained sorts aren't really to blame. If you could easily see your way out of the whole mess, there wouldn't be much point, would there?

Sean—the subject at hand—hadn't the slightest idea about the true source of his desperation, because he was trapped within his behavioral cycle, jitterbugging with three left feet, and couldn't see his way out if it. The conflict played itself out as anxiety and depression, or binge sensuality: eating, drinking, drugs occasionally, and a bored sort of onanism that bordered on the pathological. But these were all symptoms, and their cause lay deeper. It infused his blood with a tremulous, keening knowledge: things ought to be better than they are…my purpose is not being fulfilled…I should use this coupon for another box of Ho-hos because it would be wasting money if I didn't.

He spent his working days within the confines of a fluorescently lit office cubicle. On this particular day—the one that we're going to visit now, plucking the glass bauble out of time's tapestry—he was wrestling with the fact that while everyone in the company seemed to want documentation, no one seemed to know what “documentation” was, including himself. When he had started this particular contract two years previously, he had known what documentation was. He spent a year generating 15 linear feet of hard copy documentation, all of which could be summed up in a single phrase:

Here is proof that we have spent all the money required to demonstrate that we are not liable if the world is destroyed as the result of a Y2K Bug in one of our systems.

It was all a very complicated, intricately worded incantation made up of signatures, statements, proofs, standards, diagrams, charts, and graphs. It took up 122 white three-ring binders and 60,000 pages. Late in January of 2000, they packed the binders into cardboard boxes. Then they put the boxes in storage in Iowa. And that was how the Millennium Bug was defeated.

The company had extended his contract, and now Sean wrote policies and procedures for the Information Systems department. Sean considered his work to be rather odd. Essentially, his job was to take knowledge from the mind of each important worker in the department, and put it into the more permanent form of the corporate intranet. Each procedure, each policy, was to be set down in shifting pixels, for ready access. He was the tribal scribe, and his charge was to commit the knowledge base to the ages. For he knew the magic of the making of the paint, and could use HTML.

This mythologizing did not help him, however. His problem wasn't the writing of the content, or the forming of the page—it was the interaction required to get the information out of the heads of the knowledge-holders. Just this morning, he had spent an hour with a Mr. John Fitzgerald, the Information Systems consultant whose head contained the sole record of many things, including certain important procedures regarding the movement of files among the various servers on the company network. Sean had listened intently, had written some notes, and asked some questions. Now, looking at his yellow pad, covered with his 4th-grade scrawl, he realized that he had not asked the right questions, or perhaps not enough of them. His information-gathering strategy had failed, which meant more interaction was required. He frowned.

At this point in his life, Sean was unaware of the extent to which his early exposure to a pair of chemicals—dextroamphetamine sulfate and methylphenidate hydrochloride—had impaired the development of his spatiotemporal consciousness in that particular incarnation. Ostensibly designed as an attempt to control the behavior of young children—mostly males—whose behavioral patterns were deemed detrimental to their development, these chemicals and others were used within the last part of the twentieth century and the early twenty-first as a means of social engineering. Unfortunately, it took a generation before the full dissociative effects of the use of such compounds began to become evident. All Sean knew was that when interacting with others, they often felt somewhat like simulacrums to him…he had a strange difficulty conceptualizing others as independent beings. Even people Sean didn't know felt oddly like imposters: he would see a stranger on the street, and would have the distinct impression that the stranger wasn't who he appeared to be at all. That the stranger was not, in fact, conscious, as Sean knew himself to be. It was a strange and curious way to live. The profound isolation of his developing childhood consciousness, caused by the repeated administration of the chemicals had in time led to subtle changes within the limbic systems of his developing brain. Pathos became difficult to experience. Sympathy and empathy felt odd and unreal, or forced. But these are not required when one is alone, so Sean often found his comfort in isolation, and dipped frequently into the warm waters of alcohol or other drugs. The isolation kept him safe, at a deep, neurological level.

Forced interaction, such as that required by his current employment, produced odd sensations and experiences. Most people in the department, he thought, somehow expected him to know more than he actually did. They failed to understand that his expertise was not in the management of the company's network, but in the ability to organize information. He often wished that he could pluck it out of their heads, just open their brains up and pop the ideas out like pomegranate seeds. This morning, while he talked to Mr. Fitgerald, the man “flattened-out,” as Sean thought of it. He became merely an organization of information, or perhaps a projection of ideas. The subtle sense of “depth” that other individuals are supposed to have vanished, and Sean felt oddly exposed—as though he were the only conscious entity in the room, or maybe even the world. Sean's note-taking deteriorated after that, and he spent the last twenty minutes of the meeting letting his body run the show, nodding, hmm-ing, and scribbling note-type scribblings, while his mind pondered the phenomenon.

His mind was still pondering the phenomenon as he picked up the black AT&T corporate phone and dialed Mr. Fitzgerald's extension. Getting voicemail, Sean vibrated a column of air in his esophagus and manipulated it with the intricate muscles of his larynx, face and jaw. He made a sound like this:

Hi there John, this is Sean Holz. I ah, would like to schedule some more time with you to, ah, get some more details down, here, so, if you could please give me a call at 5194 I'd, ah, appreciate it. Thanks. Buh-Bye.

The vibration of his vocal cords transduced into the air around him, setting up a series of waves through it. These waves impacted upon a thin film of piezoelectric material within the handset of the phone, causing it to vibrate. Its vibrations in turn were transduced into an electric current.

Then he ignored the rest of the work he could have started, and spent the afternoon reading the online content that flowed from the computer monitor and into his brain. Mr. Fitzgerald never returned his call. At four PM Sean decided that enough was enough, and headed out into the New York afternoon for 40 minutes' worth of public transportation. On the subway, if he listened in just the right way, he could hear dolphins, somewhere in the rushing clatter and boom of the speeding cars.

Once in his apartment, Sean transformed into a sloucher. He would do this frequently, slouching in his recliner, clutching fitfully at tumblers of hard cider or goblets of wine, depending on the severity of his need for isolation. Spent six-pack cider cartons still in their plastic grocery-store bags littered the tiny kitchen, grease-spotted pizza boxes mountained in the sink. Sean had recently put on forty pounds in two months, with no end in sight. Bob—a flighty, slightly runted calico cat—grew fat along with him.

Sean recognized that he cut a pathetic figure. At the very least, a self-indulgent figure, someone mired in self-pity and wallowing languidly in the muddiness of emotional irresponsibility. Sean's standards for himself were actually quite high—a vestigial memory, perhaps, of Lord Herbert's accomplishments as Knight, soldier of fortune, peer and philosopher. Unable to rise to similar heights, these standards made him all the more miserable when he fell so far short of them. If not for Bob's company he would be completely alone in the city, having broken off his tenuous romance with a woman named Linda—herself of several noble lives—some two months previous. Knowing that there were millions of people surrounding him and going about their own lives only served to increase his isolation. Sean wondered if anyone, anywhere, could possibly be happy—it seemed unreal to him, that state, and he felt that anyone who professed it was deluded, or lying.

The genesis of his misery was uncertain, not because Sean could not put a moment to it, but because each such moment inevitably seemed the result of a profusion of other moments. The most recent collection of moments—the particularly dramatic telephone call that had marked the end of his romance with Linda—seemed to Sean the inevitable convergence of effects of hundreds of prior such moments. He saw that each action was entirely appropriate in its own way and within its own context, but—because each action was somehow temporally isolated from the others—the overall cumulative pattern could not be seen except in retrospect, when it was locked firmly in the past, a lattice in amber. Viewed through a rearward lens, the simplicity of the congruent influences was almost striking in its perfection. Sean tried, with little success, to avoid the idea that such simple perfection was not evidence of malevolent intent, either on the part of his own subconscious, or perhaps on some god's somewhere.

Sean was perceptive enough to realize that there were two forces at work in his life. The first was falsely vivid: the representation that he made to himself of the events in his life. This was the loud and flashy picture show, the chemical soup between his ears that colored his experience of the second force, which was hidden. The second force was reality itself—whatever that was, hidden behind the thick veil of his experience of it from within his body. By regarding this as a sort of tautology, Sean had answered to his own satisfaction the age-old query of the falling tree in the forest. “Yes,” he declared. “It makes a big goddamn noise.” He thought it arrogant to presume that reality would suffer itself to be confined by the bounds of human perception. As if, he scoffed, in the absence of a perceptive mechanism reality does a funny dance and thumbs its nose at us.

Generally, Sean had to be really drunk to start thinking about things like that, or—more rarely—stoned and sitting in the bathtub while the hot shower splashed across his back. This was one of the primary reasons that his despair welled within him…whatever creative energy might have been applied towards the writing down of his musings was mostly used up by his liver. At moments like those, when the alcohol or the smoke had thoroughly entered his physiology, he would trace the causal roots of his despair. Taking cues from the recent breakup, he reconstructed a certain kind of gut-level skepticism. He felt, he had once told Linda, as though he had been robbed of his ability to make leaps of faith. Even the faith that yes, there is another consciousness behind someone else's eyes, was difficult for him.

Sean had the vague notion that his lack of faith was the result of a netlike web of influences that converged around childhood, when his developing memories were partially obscured by the two chemicals. There were other threads within the web, equally thick and ropy—obvious, really, given Sean's late twentieth-century societal context. Lack of an authoritative male figure. A depressive single mother, coming unhinged at certain crucial developmental stages. That sort of thing. And there were other threads, even thicker, yet not so obvious to Sean. The shock of circumcision, that ritual hack designed to appease a God who, actually, has never had very much interest in the human penis. His Caesarian birth, another rude surgical invention, depriving its subjects of what was intended to be a universal human experience of challenge and trauma, a primordial memory laid down deep within the core of natal brain tissue and upon which a common consciousness could eventually be built. Before that, his mother's poor nutrition, which adversely affected his pre-natal development. Then: conception, the union of a handful of long-monikered chemicals that—pop!—sparked his incarnation, drawing his soul from across the great river and down into the muck with all the rest of you smart monkeys. And before that, the lives of the various atoms that made up those chemicals, as a breath of oxygen inhaled by Christ, as bits of comets, or scraps of Jurassic chlorophyll. An undying spiral that Sean could not resolve into any specific significance. His scant perception of that spiral—as a kind of ghostly overarching principle, governing all—helped him not a bit, and created more blackness. Have another draught of cider and a slice of pepperoni pizza, he would tell himself, and lighten up. In his delicate state, staring into the infinite was unsettling.

Sean was also aware that there was definitely too much masturbation and pornography in his life now. The brief burp of endorphins into his brain following a frantic tugging further isolated him from the rest of the world. The most intimate of human interactions had become flickering video, endless scenes of sad women and callous men and spurts of fetishised semen. Really disgraceful, he thought. But he continued to sink into his self-defined depravity with the same lazy resignation he felt when settling into his battered recliner. He spent thirty-five dollars a week on hard cider, twenty-four dollars a week on videos from Blockbuster, and nine dollars a week on pornography from Leisure Video. That meant that he spent two hundred and seventy-two dollars a month on his continued disintegration. He could afford this. His wages were high enough.

And so, Sean's life had become a series of compulsive acts.

On the outside, looking in at Sean and his small, sad world, it would be easy to dismiss him as he sometimes—in his weaker, darker moments—dismissed himself: another victim, a casualty of a schizoid culture that demands happy conformity under the guise of cherishing individualism. Simpler to think that, like so many others in his culture, he had opted to find relief from the cumulative effects of this cognitive dissonance in alcohol instead of certain brand-name selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors. But Sean himself hated victims. Too often he thought that they were simply misplacing blame: the chip-shouldered Negro who could have had a minority scholarship to any one of a dozen colleges if he had just managed to maintain a B average in high school but who blamed the So-Called White Man for his failings; the Angry Feminist who didn't realize that the cage door had been opened while she remained inside, Oppressed and complaining; the whining Gay Man whose pathological need to be his Sexuality brought him no end of trouble. All sorts of Identities crashing and thrashing within the collective culture of the nation. It wasn't that Sean didn't respect the legitimate suffering that could be found in many cases, it was that most people failed to realize that no one else could truly help them in any sense that mattered, and, further, that the expectation of that help was actually robbing them of the self-determination their reason allowed them. A feeling of entitlement was bound to result in disappointment. Waiting to be given power and individuality was a fool's game. Such things must be self-created, taken by force. Sean reserved particular loathing for those whose misery was predicated on the continual failure of others to meet their expectations. What easier way is there to become powerless, he thought, than to rely on the attitudes and actions of others! And how convenient to then blame those others for one's own feelings of smallness and inadequacy.

With that in mind Sean was fully aware that his own dissatisfaction was no one's fault but his own. He didn't blame Linda, or his mother, or any of the countless, irritating people he met during the course of his daily life. To do so would be hypocrisy of the highest order…although he did occasionally allow himself the luxury of anger towards Linda, simply because that particular psychodrama was the freshest and most piquant. Given his peculiar affect, he took a sort of perverse enjoyment when dipping into strong emotion…sometimes, it was the only way he could empathize with the rest of humanity, thinking that perhaps other people had felt this way. But there was not so much anger towards his mother, anymore, or towards the pharmaceutical-industrial complex that had made the drugging of small children with amphetamine-related compounds an acceptable parenting option. That had been a long time ago, and although the repercussions of his speed-hazed childhood were still with him, he knew that there was nothing that could be done about that now.

Sean had come to realize that the easy and convenient thing to do would be to blame it all on everything else—on his circumstances, his ex-lover, his mother, drug companies, society, Christianity, bums, commuters, poor people, and Bill Gates. It was certainly tempting. But he couldn't do it. Every crack! and hiss! of an opening cider bottle was the result of his action, every stuffed mouthful of extra-cheese and pepperoni pizza was taken to satisfy his emotional hunger, each spurted climax was achieved to distract him from his loneliness. He, Sean Holz, took these actions and owned their emotional precursors. No one else.

And so, on this particular Sunday night, as

flashed across the darkened television screen and Sean's stomach rumbled, full of grease and dough and six bottles of hard cider, he decided that it was time to get back in the groove, the groove of Sean's Life As Sean Sees It. This sourceless, paralyzing dissatisfaction could be resolved with an act of will, he knew. He would haul himself up and out of this deep rut, without the benefit of any happy-pill pharmaceuticals. He needed to stop drinking, that was first. Twenty of his forty extra pounds were from cider alone, he knew. Then he needed to rein in his burgeoning appetite, to take care of those other twenty. Those two steps were crucial, and from them all else would follow.

He took in his surroundings, trying to see them properly: the cheap imitation oriental carpet, embedded with crumbs; the pile of dishes on the coffee table, crusted; the empty liquor store bags, cat-shredded; the piles of unopened junk mail and other sundry items covering the places on the sectional sofa where he never sat. Glasses, most with sticky amber-colored stains of dried cider at their bottoms, hid in the corners. Bottles perched everywhere. Bob crouched in one corner, her eyes wide and manic, her tail twitching—it was that time of night, when an apartment-cat's brain tries to tell it that it ought to be out hunting small forest creatures. “Bob,” Sean told her, “this has got to stop.” She burbled curiously. “I mean it. I'll do it.”

And he probably would have. But the next morning on the way to work, a taxicab driven by a drunken Muslim hopped a curb and plowed into him at the intersection of Wall Street and Broadway, right in front of brown-stoned Trinity Church. He was tossed headfirst into the high, wrought iron fence that surrounds the seventeenth-century graveyard, and split his skull open from just above his left eye to just below his right ear.

Which, if you can picture it, is not the sort of thing you just get over.

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I've...got mystification! I've got big bolshy clumps of puzzlement rolicking around in my noggin' It'sa not even' amazement it'sa sheer and utter befuddlement-a!

I'm talkin' skull-crackin', bone-breakin' monkey-violence! Great big heaps o' human brains-n'-guts in a big pile! Whole lotta killin' goin' on!

But it's all in a good cause! You betcha!

Just relax.

Man I am so sick of the all-fired fumigatin' supremacy assigned to the Great Big Gorilla Brain. Ever'body pretendin' we gots the Big Big Knowing, when all we gots is the big opposable thumb and the clever ways of makin' our enemies explode.

I...am in an epistemological void! Trust no one. Know nothing! It's safer that way.

This has been Incoherent Rage Minute.

Join me next week when I'll splutter about the zinc industry, pennies, and Lee Iacocca.

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That's it. The nation is officially going to hell in a handbasket.

Or, at least, the New York State Supreme Court is.

Then again:

"State Supreme Court Justice Walter Tolub ordered Lee to post a $500,000 bond to cover Viacom's losses in case the company wins."

It's possible that Judge Tolub knows that Viacom will win and wants to stick Shelton for a half million.

That would be acceptable...except that Shelton needs to lose a half million and then be beaten with a rubber truncheon by Ted Danson.

The judge wrote,

"In the age of mass communication, a celebrity can in fact establish a vested right in the use of only their first name or a surname."

Really.

Guess that puts the big kabosh my plans to change this site to Keanukeifferbaldwin.com. Damn.

Bill.com? Nope...Shatner would come down on me like a hammer.

Arthur.com! Who's famous and named Arthur? Carney's dead...wait, isn't there a goofy animated hydrocephalic hamster named Arthur?

Feh. Feh, I say!

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An exact summation of why I blew out of the halls of academe, never to return: I don't dance. I said those words to the College President, then turned with a steely glare and marched out of his office.

Or maybe that was Harrison Ford.

At any rate, The reader responses to the post are illuminating, as well. There's just something iredeemably fake about the whole enterprise, and the more accounts I read from people within the institutions, the better I feel about derailing my academic career before it was too late.

Of course, maybe I could have stayed and been one of the young mavericks...bucking the system...reaching them, dammit! Standing on my desk! Making a difference.

Nah. I've always had a problem with jumping through hoops. I never would've survived intact.

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Returning now, for a moment, to my epistemological void.

This site has become a blank page...the same sort of blank page that I confront when trying to write a story. A tractless open space...desert-dry, just waiting to suck whatever moisture it can from my brain.

But, lately, I haven't had much in the old wet head. I seem to have lost whatever quality allowed me to extensively comment on that about which I knew nothing...hmm. I think that sentence really needed a preposition dangled off its end.

Never mind that! People have paid good nickels to see you dance...so dance! Bang! Bangbang!

Actually, no one's paid me anything, my little Lunatic Inhead Voice, so I think you need to shut up.

Dance!

Sigh. Such is is the state of my neuronal soup. But ignoring the voices for a moment: there is indeed a shift of attitude, here, a certain word-malaise, if you would, a lazy, fat, furry, tuna-filled-cat-in-the-patch-of-sun-on-the-couch kind of reluctance to do...well, anything.

Witness: those buttons over there to the left. Still constructing, I am! It's been, what, a month? Six weeks?

Clearly, you must be beaten.

Shut up!

My point is that I've lost a bit of the spark, I think...but, then, that may be attributable to my recent bout of anxieto-neuroticalism. (That's a technical psychological term for loopy-depressive-batshitness). It happens from time to time, particularly in males who were tranked up as small children and/or keelhauled as pubescent eager wanna-be pirates.

Or did I dream that?

Never mind!

The aforementioned epistemological void plays into this, a bit...sometimes, the knowledge that I don't really know anything wrecks a bit of havoc in the old noggin. Live without a net! Or any completely verifiable metaphysical ideas grounded in sensory perception or experience! Watch out! If he makes it, it'll be a record! If he doesn't, he'll tumble into the first row and make you spill your popcorn!

Oh, please...stop pretending you're the Smartest Monkey and start acting like all the other primates, would you? Christ on a crutch.

I believe I suggested that you shut up.

You did.

So do it.

Perhaps it's a reaction to all of the There Are Things Worth Sending Troops And Tax Dollars To Die And Be Spent For fervor of a couple of months back. Not saying that that isn't so, of course...but I seem to have developed this problem with conviction. Not quite radical skepticism...that's the sort of sophomoric philosophical masturbation that results in getting a beer bottle smashed into your forehead after you drunkenly exclaim, "Yeah, but does it like really exist?"

I think it's an extention of my April 16 freakout. I just can't get over all these folks with their convictions and their principles, from Oh What Tremendous Insight I Lack O'Reilly to Orrin "Kill 'Em All And Let RIAA Sort 'Em Out" Hatch, to the myriad tiny stars in the blogging Bowl of Night, all out-clevering each other with the cleverness of their clever cleverness...

Wow. That's a keeper. I think it's time to have another glass of wine. Don't you?

Yes. And shut up.

Excuse me for a minute.

Anyway. I may have to rethink how this whole HTML-driven circus is organized...simply throwing all of the high-fashion essays in among the mindless blather like this is not satisfying my ego. Things should be so arranged so that those who want blather can get it, and those innarested in, you know, like deeper things can get that.

We're full service, here.

Shut up!

So...maybe I'll do something about that someday soon.

Or not.

Will you--!

Hell with it.

Goodnight, Gracie.

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This afternoon, as part of a long, peculiar ritual, I disassembled my bicycle. Hauled it up onto the deck out back and just took it all apart: wheels off, cranks off, derailleurs and seatpost and brakes, off. All grotty cables and cable housings snipped and removed. This is the Raleigh M50 that I commuted to work with when I lived in New York, and it's the bike I was riding on September 11. I ground dust and ashes into its drivetrain as I rode through the darkened silence and away from the devastation. It's always been my City Bike, tricked out with aftermarket parts that, together, are worth more than I paid for the entire bike (I'm particularly fond of the Thudbuster and my Hal-built wheels from Bicycle Habitat on Lafayette Street). I carefully wrapped the frame with electrical tape the week I brought it home, which protected it from repeated encounters with locks and bike racks, and wiping out on the icy Queensboro Bridge in winter. This afternoon I peeled that tape off, along with accumulated grime and the various bike-power stickers I'd added to it over the past three years. Electrical tape, for those of you who don't know of its marvelous qualities, won't leave any residue behind if it's stuck to a smooth surface. So the black finish with the blue fade at the ends of the frame is almost as new as the day I bought it, which was the point. I wanted to protect my ride from the damage that New York wanted to inflict on it.

I disassembled it, and started the long process of cleaning it. This is the sort of cleaning that you do with an old toothbrush and alot of degreaser. The bike has been in the basement which, as it turns it, is damp enough to be unkind to it. Spiders nested in its spokes and red rust bloomed on anything that wasn't aluminum, like the water bottle cage bolts and, unfortunately, the chain. The chain is now soaking in a coffee can full of gasoline in the shed. It's nickel-plated, and will recover. The brakes need to be degunked and de-corroded. The derailleurs have been scrubbed and degreased; hopefully they'll work as well as they did before I took them apart (always a concern). Tomorrow I'll head over to Barry's Bikes for a new set of brake and shifter cables plus some cable housing. The rear cassette needs to be scrubbed, and the front shock lubed and filled with a load of new grease. When it's all cleaned and reassembled, there will be a four-week period while the cables stretch and I adjust the brakes and the shifting a hundred times each. Then, it'll be perfect. Smooth and bouncy and quick.

At which point, I'll probably start riding my Gordon instead.

One of the reasons I came to loathe the city--in addition to the exploding and the dying--was that it beat the love of riding out of me. Just wore me down, and down, until I couldn't face the eight-mile trek from Queens to Wall Street anymore. I would rather take the subway than deal with the jackasses in cars, the mindless pedestrians, the exhaust, the dirt. There was a time when I loved nothing more than hauling ass up the long incline of the east side of the Queensboro, then swooping down the steep west side, topping out at thirty MPH or so. Dodging traffic was fun, for awhile. And, of course, on the day that the buildings came down, my bike got me out of the area and into the arms of my Pea in short order. But after that, being out in the city, and so intimate with its asphalt and its gravel, its puddles and its citizens, eventually became too much. I just wanted to move from enclosed space to enclosed space, to spend as little time experiencing that place as possible.

So I quit riding, and looked longingly from the car at the shoulders of the roads in Orange County, which were so ripe for riding, for slipping and swooping along hills and through farmland. Then we moved here...and the bikes--all three of them--gathered dust, cobwebs and rust in the basement. Even from 70 miles away the city seemed to poison my ride. I couldn't get on the saddle again.

And I got fat! The twenty-five pounds shed as sweat onto the streets of New York returned, and they brought friends. There had been days when I could taste the fat in my sweat as my body burned it and turned it into forward motion...a faint, clean, buttery note. My brain--so in need of the endorphins produced by the ride--fattened up as well, becoming slow and thick and depressed.

Now, summer is a few days away. The county roads still beckon.

The ride needs the machine. So I've started the process of reclaiming the ride by reclaiming the machine, uncovering the taped-up City Bike, peeling off its ragged vinyl armor, scrubbing the urban grime from it, rebuilding it. It doesn't matter whether this is the bike that I will ride, here, along the roads of my new home. There's something about the process of maintenance, of care and assembly, that is meeting a need that I wasn't quite aware of. There's always that ritual, the care of the machine...but this is different. This is a cleansing. I'm taking back what was taken from me by the accumlated weight of a million tons of skyscraper hitting the streets combined with the endless noise and rat-maze intensity of a place that I don't live in anymore.

The ride is mine. It's mine.

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Courtesy of Sullivan, here's a piece that's relevant, I think, to the ongoing discussion that began last Wednesday. It's a bit on Emerson and blogging, by NPR talkshow host Christopher Lydon.

It was Lydon's characterization of Emerson's thinking--"Speak your own convictions, and your own contradictions, he urged"--that caught my eye. Upon reading further, I was struck by his ultimate description of today's Emersonian as:

...in short, an ecstatic melancholic, an unquenchable optimist in a darkening world, aware that the big trick for grown-ups is to look unblinking at the torture and tyranny, the pandemic disease and progressive brutalization of people and the planet—and know that is not the whole story and that this is no time to give up.

That, in a nutshell, is what drives me batshit about the knee-jerk simple doomsaying found at Indymedia, BoingBoing, and elsewhere: Bush is polishing up his jackboots and growing his little mustache; millions of Iraqis will die for our oiiiil; any and every foolish overreach of Big Gov'mint is surely the tip of the fascist iceberg; and on and on, a litany of What Oppression Means To The Comfortable Me. That's not the whole story. Lydon is right: it takes an adult to realize this.

And, further: this is no time to give up, and that's the precipice that I've been toddling along the edge of for several weeks, now. It is my social neuroses, not my intellectual or spiritual failings, that have robbed me of my confidence.

In this, I am Bugs Bunny on the darkened stage, looking out into the blackness beyond the footlights...hearing a cough, the rustling of the watching audience...and then realizing what's Out There: PEOPLLLE! he shrieks.

People with wrong ideas! Dastardly beliefs! And foolishness! Great big heaps of foolishness! Good God, look at the size of that pile of fools! I've never seen such a towering, wobbling mass of sheer wrong-headedness! And they might even have the temerity to defend their nonsense with still more foolishness!

Hell with all of that. Buck up son, you're a man, now!

That's what I say.

We'll see how it pans out.

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Bom-bom-bom-b'BOM-bom...bom-bom-bom-b'BOM-bom...bom-bom-bom-b'BOM-bom...

EeeeEEEEEEEEE---eeeeeeee-oooooo-oooo-ooooo....eeeeee, ooo-ooo-ooo...

I'm singin'!

It would probably help if there was, you know, sound to go with that, but life is full of disappointments, innit?

In News Of The Unimportant: Spike Jones, Jr., son of bandleader Spike "Yes, We Have No Bananas" Jones, is frightened by Shelton Lee's attempt to claim total ownership of all things Spike for all time, and has filed papers with the court expressing his concern. Joss Whedon, creator of yet another Spike, should get in on this. In the meantime: I saw last night that "SpikeTV" is now TNN: The Network for Men.

Doesn't have quite the same poke.

Moving on: soon, we will no longer be subjected to short, bald, and oily-voiced Jason Alexander encouraging us to try KFC's reasonably priced bucket-o'-bird-bits because of its joossy flavuh. PETA told him KFC maltreats its chickens. Surprised that a company that traffics in chicken corpses would do such a thing, Alexander encouraged KFC to put them up in avian Motel 6's instead of vast chicken Auschwitzes, and provide them all with cabbage-on-a-string. KFC fired him.

At long last, the lingering vestiges of the Show About Nothing That I Never Watched will be gone.

My joy is indescribable.

Actually, it's probably akin to the joy one feels when one gets through the entire day without being hit on the head by an onion.

Passing by the wall on the South side of Ground Zero, I've noticed a marginal increase in the amount of magic-markered naïveté:

DON'T FIGHT TERROR WITH TERROR

Damn. I guess we shouldn't have covered those three thousand Iraqi office workers with jet fuel and set them on fire.

TRY PEACE - TRY LOVE - TRY UNDERSTANDING

Will you love me or understand why I am peacefully knocking this building over onto you? I knew you would, because you have a firm grasp of the human condition.

In related news, there was a bit in the NYT about the bathtub--the seven-story remains of the retaining wall that surrounds what used to be the World Trade Center. There's talk of making it an integral part of Daniel Libeskind's winning design for whatever it is they're going to build there next...perhaps even putting a whole section of it under glass, like the preserved wall of some Egyptian tomb.

I, myself, would seriously consider topping it with a row of spikes. It could be our national city gates, topped with the heads of our enemies, carefully encased in acrylic to prevent rottage and flyblown-ness. Would serve 'em right, it would. You could buy small replica heads in little lucite blocks from the street vendors for ten bucks a pop, or two for fifteen. Collect 'em all! We could bring folks up from Guantanamo, and every Tuesday afternoon we could have public executions atop the wall. Yeah! And--hang on...

[whisperwhisperwhisper]

We don't?

[whisper whisper]

Really.

[whisper]

Are you sure about that?

[whisperwhisperwhisperwhisperwhisper]

Huh.

I have been informed by my aide that we don't do that sort of thing here.

That's a shame...the miniature lucite-encased head concession would've been a sweet, sweet plum.

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Oh, blech. It's wonderful to have a room upstairs...it's wonderful to have an upstairs at all. But now I feel the heat. See, this weekend, summer officially arrived, and bang! Like that into the 90s. NYC will hit 97 tomorrow, with a Heat Index of Melted Brain.

Fortunately, I won't be in NYC. I'll be here, deciding whether I can survive with the cross-breeze from the Lowes-purchased dual-fan window ventilation system (two at $19.99 each), or whether it's time to bust out with the air conditioners that are, at this moment, corroding in the damp basement.

Alternately, I could just hole up with a bottle of gin, a like quantity of tonic, eight limes and a bucket of ice. Then I wouldn't care about the heat at all, nor clothing, nor running through the streets.

Gin is the Devil's drink; it gets one tossed out of jazz clubs and turns one into an ass at weddings. The. Devil's. Drink.

In all likelihood I will spend tomorrow watering things. There's this lovely place in Vermont that will sell hundreds of millions of flower seeds to you for ten dollars, or some such thing. I myself have scattered an honest quarter-million seeds in various patches of dirt in the yard. These have sprouted into nondescript green sprouty things, but in four weeks they will resemble...tall weeds. Then they'll bloom into many, many colorful flowery things.

Except the sunflowers.

I purchased the Sunflower Mix: Wild Sunflowers, Giant Sunflowers, Red Sunflowers (a randy flora, also called "Crimson Thriller"), Double Dwarf Sunflowers, and Mexican Sunflowers. I planted the Giant Sunflower seeds along the back fence, behind the growing carpet of northeastern wildflower sprouts. They would, I reasoned, grow into a neat row of tall, impressive...well, giant flowers.

An hour or two later, I headed to the back fence to do some watering. Wow! I thought. They've already cracked open! No...wait. They've been cracked open. And eaten. Ten pairs of neat little half-shells, all in a row. So: no impressive row of tall flowers.

At first, I blamed Flick or Flack or one of their brat kids, all of whom have moved back into the front porch roof and do not know how close they are to being gassed, clubbed and napalmed.

Then, an observant yet utterly incompetent Bob the Cat alerted us to the fact that Guido the chipmunk has taken an efficiency apartment in one of the old cinderblocks under the deck. Guido had been raiding the local patch of shade-tolerant wildflower seeds I planted near the basement door. Bob, perched on the deck, should have rained down like death from above, an unstoppable juggernaut of claws and teeth. But she just sat there, very alert and fat.

Still...I suspect the squirrels. The back fence is one of their thoroughfares; I often see them tripping along it on their way to the deli or the bar or wherever it is that squirrels are always off to. Doubtless they spotted a seed or two and mowed them up as free snackage.

Bastards.

So, tomorrow I will tend to the survivors, and also the potted domestics on the deck, which at the moment include wheat, oats, rye, lettuce, catnip, thyme, lavender, and tomatos. The first five are for Bob to munch on (she prefers oat grass, and loves lettuce but can't quite figure out how to eat the fluffy sprouts, so she just rubs her face in them and makes like Pacino with a tray of cocaine). Our garden plans for an extravaganza of climbing roses and exploding colorful blooming things is still taking shape, along with plans for refurbishing the old siding, the front porch, the roof, putting a little path in, planting some trees to block out the car wash, and adding a bomb shelter cum wine celler. Such is the maintenance of a wooden cave.

And now to bed, maybe with a stop by the television on the way there...maybe a glass of seltzer...some cheese and crackers...or a stromboli. Mmm.

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I saw Allen Ginsberg read at CBGB's gallery near the end of his life. I remember two things about the evening: Allen chanting don'tsmoke don'tsmoke don'tsmoke--the Officiaal Dope! to some atonal electric guitar accompaniment, and an earnest, anachronistic yahoo clumsily lighting a joint onstage in quaint defiance of something-or-other.

Ginsberg's been dead for a few years now, but that weird gnomish chant of his has stuck with me. The Official Dope. Folks smoke the unOfficial Dope for all kinds of reasons: to mellow out, to free up the mind, to get the giggles or to cope. Throughout our history humans have continually looked for ways to tweak the perceptive goo 'twixt our ears, for reasons as diverse as the people doing the tweaking. Despite the gloriously ineffective attempts by certain sectors of our government to change human nature through punishment and forfeiture, we'll probably go right on tweaking. And there, it seems, hangs a tale.

I've mentioned my drug experience before. Miss Barrymore has nothing on me: I was doing speed at three. Dexedrine, actually, which was what they gave Hard To Manage childre