🚀 go-pugleaf

GOOKCITY

   by GR4302@siucvmb.siu.edu


Part One:  "GookCity"

Flipped, flipped, and rolling.  Rolling, a head roll dictates that the
first floobed is out for the count.  A counting without a head.  The
head says here it is--this is what I'm all about, no need to uncover
anything too personal yet.  A head is rolling and roll it will and so
the first lines say it's dictated that they be a fool's errand and so
a fool's words.  No sentences without a shot in the arm or the back of
the neck.  Check 'n back Nick into a side shot and nothing's clearer
than the first lines of nonsense.  Here's the word then, and, believe
me, as usual, there's no freedom in it.  That's why I write for the
list.  All my drives satisfied by you few feelies--a no paper write, a
night gig on a train to nowhere.  But Clyde's wondering why he's not
an anthropologist anymore and why he's eating chicken.  It doesn't
make much sense, but he assumes he'll find out more as he goes along.
Nick's not budging one bit and Laura's trying to break on through to a
book written twenty-four years in the future.  And there's a bomb
ticking, setting in motion a thousand nightmares and wetdreams.  A
bomb, a bomb.  It has a red ribbon on it.  It does not tell me why my
poetry gets me nowhere.  It does not tell me why Demeter demands b
lood or why she can't stay dead.  Alfie's come from nowhere--which in
this day and age he is, being forgotten--and's saddling up to the idea
of being a piece of the action after so long now.

     Now the organizations.  If you're not willing to read wind and
barf for at least thirty-five pages then what are you doing with a
degree in English?  Crabmeat?  Take up Spanish and learn the hoochie
coochie.  Thirty-five pages would hardly fill the world's annals of
conspiracy, but luckily, three day's in July is all we call for, M.
Three days because one would be too many, because unnumbered would
only stand to reason, and because three days is 72 hours, 36 day-side,
36 nite-side, each containing 9 intervals of four hours each, breaking
the days also and the nites into thirds.  Now you would say that no
day sings this true above 0 degrees and so count that in, and now you
have it, M., the formula in it's entirety, and the organizations can
be contained temporally.  Perhaps, then, our radius should also be in
threes?  Well, there are things that dictate space that even
Mandelbrot cannot fathom, so rather than compound foolishness upon
foolhardiness, might we not rather recognize our inabilities when we
see them?  Time, after all, being our minds, is easily sliced, but our
bodies, being in time, wander continuously, all interactions within
reach becoming part and parcel as we go.  So for safety sake let's
stick to social abstracts, then, in respect to bodies and the space
without time that we see on our maps and indicate New York City as our
spacial limit.  One, because I've never been there.  Two, because
neither, then, has anyone else, at least in this book.  And three
(ahah!) because enough people don't live there to be fooled by it all.
And what, my dear M., are you on, but a fool's errand.  And so we know
our third limitation is neither breadth depth nor heighth, but rather
the shallowness of our own souls, the emptiness that befits a sky-line
such as our characters see breaking over the day like a mighty
thunderbolt frozen in time, frozen without regard for what is sealed
up in the freeze and what is released when time once again wrests that
bullet from the sky.  A fool's errand, and so, fool, worry not about
any projection from this life to your own.  Consider this a different
world, or another time,  a New York City that in no way glitters with
the passion of the blood in your lungs on the street, and you won't
then mind the mugging what comes along for the ride.  If you are no
fool, then begone, M.; I have no patience for pack rats and regicides.
My limits have been placed, and laughingly I now in smugness return to
my pronouncement on organizations:  Thirty-three interact on this
plane and the clever may see more.  Clyde, our fearless masteophile,
never set foot on the sea, but leads the Students for the Foundation
of the Interregional College of the Great Oceans (ICGO) and is willing
to kill for this idea, though he doesn't know it yet.  Laura,
sovereign pontentate over the ressurerection of SDS is a parody.  She
has three PhDs, one from Sweden, two from Columbia, speaks thirteen
languages from entirely different parts of the world (thirteen only
because she, for reasons of Deep Socioradicalism, considers French and
English the same, "for all practical purposes," language.)  At age 48
she's studying computer science in order to get into the undergrad
scene so she can ressurerect SDS and start riots.  Florida Springfield
heads the coalition of Melianites from up-state that is planning to
attack in full force once Pluto lines up with Uranus.  Deprived Fish
and Stick Buntings are a multi-media group with intentions to devour
the world's floundering otter breeding industry as a sideline business
while negotiating for a disc deal with the multinationals.  They're
the sell-outs who can't manage to sell-out and are making a ton of
money on it.  You'll see them again when we get to Alaska.  Well, to
cut this short--imagine, M., if you will, a Buddhist demonstration in
Old Town gone awry, and the resulting pandemonium engulfing the
collective cerebral cortex of the whole city.  Imagine a time and
place when everyone, whatever power level in bombs and gooks, is equal
in the creativity department.  Now put into motion the notion that it
all goes from bad to worse.

The early shot of New York skyline gives way to a dusty mist settling
over factories struggling to squeeze out of their phallic orifices a
little more smelly haze to heighten the sense of earliness.  We pan
down into a basement flat--wait!  We've missed the whole mood setting
sequence:  the horn honks down an alley, the cat who misses the shoe,
the sleeping drone under plastic wrap on the bench, the sniffles of a
jogger oblivious to the day's events, but being mugged on day two
contributes $75 dollars to a cause he'd never have given to of his own
accord and the 75 does, in a sense, hit the spot.  But, see the
trouble-- pan too deeply and we pop around too much.  Too much popping
around and this might be mistaken for a novel.  Let's just say that
from now on the scenery parts will be synchronized with the going and
coming of light and leave everything else to be filled in later.
Laura is waiting in the basement flat for a thirteen year old named
Stacy who is late, as is customary, to this early morning meeting of
Student's for a Democratic Society, Resurrerected.  Stacy is not a
student, except of life, but the new organization does not
discriminate on the basis of educational oppurtunity, despite its
nostalgic title--can't be afforded in this day and age.  All
organizations descriminate solely on the basis of the day's objective
and the availability of warm bodies to fill various posts.  Everyone
waits silently and tries not to look at the clock--this, they've all
learned, is a mistake.  Clock watchers selected out three passes ago.
We don't even know what year it is at this juncture and probably won't
find out until someone is again curious about the stars.  For now, all
curiosity rests in this moment of economic conflagration and the
world(s) which will or will not emerge from the ensuing chaos.  Riding
chaos, baby, that's what it's all about.  And that's what they're all
thinking about.  Stacy walks in looking at her shoes as she goes and
the meeting begins.

"So, my friends", intones our Heroine, "what have we learned today?"
And so every meeting starts.  On cue the head of the Redux committee
begins his diatribe.  The words pour out in even, rhythmic pulses with
a rasp of sleeplessness just barely masking the world that might've
been beneath his thin exterior.  The subject is whether or not the
Floobs are going to assault from the land or the sky.  It's a computer
analysis and all rather boring.  The conclusion is reached, almost
unamimously, that SDS need no longer bother with the Floobs.  As
usual, one question usually breeds the answer to one unasked often
rendering the original question irrelevant.  Stacy and one other
nameless hero flash the 'no' sign.  It is understood why:  no one
should be counted out, even if the computer says so.  Two disentions
isn't enough to reconsider the action, but everyone tries to remember
to remember these 'no' votes ocassionally at critical junctures--one
more item to keep in place.  Planning the future of the human race is
no easy task, you know.  It's also complete Bullshit, which is why we,
that is M., you and I, might just as easily count them all out as in.
All at once one of the Alfredo faction, sitting on a dusty wooden
crate in the corner looks around and recognizes his surroundings:
"Wow!" he says, "I remember this place...we used to come here when I
was a kid to sniff glue."   Across town an obsessive compulsive named
John Black is pinching imaginary zits off his face, scaring his nose
for life.  He figures in quite keenly into the action in that six
years ago it was a blind date with him that Emily Sidewinder was
fleeing, fleeing because he had left to wash his hands for the sixth
time in twenty minutes, when she was run down by the Gramps whose
grandson-slaughtered corse gives indirect rise to this action Jackson.
Here ghost of ghost has a flashback of 1828, a smirk on the Devil's
lips as President Andy corn-holes the public in one massive,
dinosaur-paced orgasm of greed and shit and the dredging forth of all
the purile interests popularized by L. XIV, Rex and his nasty progeny
(watered down, of course into the murderous drunken spasms of an
American taproom brawl), and though he beats me I'll not inlcude more
of this whoremongering than is necessary--but, alas, necessity comes
in many shapes and packages and we might, I fear, before this book is
out, dredge forth many tongue-wagging face shaming tidbits from the
monster-well of our cultural history; such lakes give forth many such
putrid decaying masses with the right utilization of cannon and net.
John Black, not as dumb as his name and history imply, knows what this
pinching is really doing to him and he revels in his finally giving in
to the inevitability of ugliness, that fate always following this next
magical trick, waiting in the wings as it were, and an inevitability
that many such as J B find consoling in the scaring cauterizing
separation from society that ugliness brings, because such souls as he
have always lived with that separation even when accidently young and
fresh of face.  John howls as his fingers slip and his thumbnail goes
slashing cross his nose, drawing blood and forcing him to steady
himself against the white porcelain sink with his already bloodied
hands.  Meanwhen our reminiscent glue sniffer has missed the bulk of
this as usual shortened meeting and shuffling out wonders where all
this crap about Louix XIV and Andrew Jackson and zit pinching crept in
from.... He's picking up some nasty prepostional combinations that
will one day be his undoing.  On may, no doubt, be both 'in' the room
and 'out' of one's mind--most people's problem, for others:  no
problem!

     Underneath the sewers, in a world that few suspect and fewer know
of, Manegui lurks...waiting for chance....

     Upwards of twenty-five thousand people arrive on Sunday, crowding
the hotels around the court-house streets, wondering if this will be
another one of those 'public takes notice' cases, at least it had the
potential of breeding some special interest violence in the nearby
neighborhoods and residential districts, but among exactly whom was a
motor for speculation.  Surely the student groups mentioned will riot.
Columbia's been due for a hefty one for some time anyway, but the
smart money's giving odds that even the Art Schools might move in for
a taste and for the message value to the government:  "Take us
seriously, assholes!"  Certainly the younger and older liberal
factions of the Poverty People might get involved; this is, after all,
a poverty issue no matter what anyone says.  Of course, that leaves
all the minority issues up for grabs; one never knows how those groups
go.  Oh, and the age issue is the biggest of all.  Morituri's
Daughters and the Grey Helms have been stepping up the shedding of
each other's blood for weeks now in preparaation for this event.
Still, the Nielsen rating service is recommending the corn trials in
Minnesota and the fate of breakfast cereal over anything happening on
the wrong side of the Appalachians--the New York side, M., no I have
not forgotten you.  I have not forgotten who you are because we know
from the Horse's mouth that I am he as you are he as you are me and we
are all together.  Yes, I am me.  I'm proud to be unAmerican.  I'm
proud to be an American.  I'm proud to be on a woop-woop wee, on a
woop-woop wee around all the wotty-dot-dot-does and wodey-wa'-wa'-woes
and who are you anyway? who said you could come out to play? not
today, go away, come again in the morning.........

     Sarah Jane is taking Laura's order for two side dishes of fries
with extra catsup, the Ronald McDonald Reagan special, as she calls
it, in remembrance of a simpler time.  Sarah Jane has more on her mind
than the couple's order as she walks back to the kitchen with a glazed
smile.  She's thinking of someone who loves her, and its no joke.
It's no joke and she knows it and this makes Sarah Jane the happiest
person in the world, at least in this book.  Yes, M., are we not
perceptive this evening, 'couple' indeed I did say for Laura is
lunching with a man she knows from Ontario, an intelectual giant to
whom she was engaged to be married for a while (later in this book,
you must know, you might well find that this is a white lie and the
y were indeed married for a short time of 2 and 3/4 years, so do not
be alarmed by such things--on the other hand this point is in no way
certain, ok?) and with whom she continues to maintain a charming and
occasionally intimate relationship, though the latter had not emerged
for many months (in truth over a year) until again recently.  Their
conversation, M., among rumors of elections in various parts of the
country and world and, of course, the upcoming trial and its potential
implications, dances around the seemingly impractical convolutions of
nominalist ontologies, and then again to the social arena of the
trial.  And as, your divine charity notwithstanding, this is a subject
most fatiguing, indeed, one that covers the scope of this entire
assemble, and congnizant of the basic ignorance, M., about the one
conversant which you presently inhabit, and, moreover, the near total
ignorance of the other in which you will forever remain, I must
request, for the sake of clarity, a moment to pause and reflect on
these most central events, especially to the extent that they are
being manifested and masticated by the lunch-goers of Sarah Janes'
diner on this particular day.  No she has no paper claim on the
grounds and it accoutrements, but on this day the diner, by right of
faith and fate, is hers in every sense applicable to the our action.
As so, M., if you please....

To begin with, 'bordeom' should not be left out of this burning house,
this conflagration of synonymous garbage, our quest; you see, M.,
'boredom' is the hook--the boredom that drove ol' Dixie down, the
bordeom that brought on the rice famines in Indonesia and the junkshop
wars against Coolies and other pathenogens beginning with the letter
'C', the bordeom that brought Atom to its Eve, that ignites each new
day with tears from the smoke of boredom smoldering in the barrio
below, the boredom that's got you pinned, my friend, with a jug of
tequila and an old nightshirt for company, boredom that burns the
flesh off babies in Rio del Campo for our great god the expediency of
this moments boring episode.  Boredom, my friend, with a capital 'B'
crept into our lives like a kid in a candy store--what sad proprietors
are we, noisy cats and shit diggers, diggin' shit to keep bordeom at
bay and it's a lie, I tell ye, a godforsaken motherfuckin' lie what
keeps you on the edge of your seat just propped enough to keep you
from falling into the Gulf of Hell or from lurching up to bump your
head against the Balcony of Heaven whose groans only increase the
boredom of the soundtrack--and the nauseating scene sequence, please!
Anything, broken lines, off the air fuzz, anything but the 3-D
throwing spear hurtling toward our nauseated heads by some asshole's
cheap excuse for a wild primitive, face painted apple red by cheap
paint and cheaper processing.  Get the picture, tiddly M., or the
spot?  Oh for a dark cave and a few passing shadows to soothe the
senses!  Oh for an ocean floor in which to sink my trunk!  I offer no
understanding; I tell you I do not want this life!  Let's have a
little chaos...

     Laura's gone back to her estranged husband for this evening
because she thinks this time she has something to teach him, which
turns out, to everyone's surprise but mine, to be true.  He was angry
and looked silly in the dim lights with only his socks on.  He did not
take to humiliating ecstasies as readily as someone so Tireisian might
be expected to--well, the world's filled with false hopes, eh?, and
their expatriate expounders, eh?  Taught, though, his spine failed not
to motivate his checkbook pen, and so our Heroine gets her smug reply,
a kick in the teeth as is usual for acts of kindness these days, but a
kick she plans to spend to its fullest capacity.  What is the value of
a dollar these days?  Depends on whether you clip coupons, and how
susceptible you are to mass marketing.  A properly tuned brain knows
just when to spend its money and why.  A nose for Wall Street can be
translated to computer, but try a nose for conspiracy.  No computer
necessary.  Look, if there are parasites of some kind eating our
consciousness they live on boredeom and she killed his that night.
His insult is the result of a laziness that has lost all excuses but
the most base and selfish ones.  Born a genius, this poor man is now
foisted into the race for the Ubermensch.  His thrusting of Simony
onto his lover is a mere spit in the face rather than a slap or shove.
He adds another zero to the amount on a sudden insight to where this
fate takes him and how cold and long the winters are there and he
longs for the tropics he'll never know again.  Laura tears up the
check after she gets outside of the house and onto the street, tears
it right down the middle of his name and grinds the pieces into the
muddy snow.  It was an enormous sum and she's spent it on
solitude--for now.  If her ex doesn't fly the coop soon she might have
to get Simon to cash the check electronically anyway to keep him from
finding out.  And sure enough a delayed flight, a case of airport food
ptomaine poisoning and the entire SDS army find themselves with
personal teleprompters each--but wait, they aren't an army, they're a
group of young hominids evolving toward a better species...Well, I
suppose they're an army as well if you happen to be dumb enough to get
in their way on the wrong day, which is coming up very soon and in
which those personal teleprompters do come in handy.

     Did I tell you there's a bomb ticking somewhere?  I lied.  The
bomb's rilly an event, a thing, a happening down the street, a jump
port for new horizons would be pushing it, but perhaps a surge of
purge against the regiments of boredom rushing in from all directions
here in this post-post-post-modern world as if to crush the laws of
physics into one Z-particle of truth.  Truth is only freshly combatted
with excitement.  Excitement is the scourge of all tickings, arrivals
at the pounce of a fit of ecstasy, you can feel it in your jeans.
That's why the best clocks are timers--tickers that make nothing go
off are designed to keep you in perpetual suspense, like bank loans
and middle class dreams.  I suppose, then, that I didn't lie:  some
bombs are involved and some people do get blown up, so take this book
away from your children.  The best bomb ever set, ghost of ghost tells
me, was set to spring Sacco and Venzetti before the FBI and the
Justice Department got there teeth into them.  Ironically a mouse
chewed a wire and the ticker just ticked away, told history in a wall
for 37 hours while the vultures and their trainees narrowed in for the
kill and then went silent, forgotten behind the brick and mortar, the
blood, sweat and lost body hair of a beaten nation.  Fifty more years
of beating and the bleeding became uncontrolable.  By the time of our
story no-one even seemed to notice or care.  "Of course a Nation
bleeds," they say, "this is always certain.  Get out of my way!  Go
home!"

     Arrived in Grand Central Station, Clyde has gotten a grip on
himself and's decided that this is as good a gig as any.  And why not?
He'd never been on the ocean and this might be a chance.  Fat chance.
Still, if it works the rocking of the gentle waves might wake him up
and he might remember that in another life he's an anthropologist and
in yet another a philosopher.  Someday he may determine his true
life's fate:  to study penguins.  This should take no more than two or
three more lifetimes, of which, we see, M., he literally has many.  He
rilly has the spirit of a chimpanzee locked inside a human
frame--Chimpanzees love penguins, it makes sense, at least they would
if they could.  Nonetheless Clyde is changing his name to Jack, it
used to be his dog's name, and's deciding to make his first speech
right there in Grand Central Station.  Normally this would do no good,
but as he isn't lame, missing an arm, wearing a uniform or robe and
obviously has clean teeth a few young marrieds stop to listen in order
to more easily ignore the unclean around them.  Instatnly, by fate of
course, they are mesmerized by his words and reach for their
checkbooks.  Before the day is out he has $600 and a groupie, the
first of many.  She is young and without wit or useful information but
will attract others, including a certain convalescing genius who meets
Clyde in the hospital after the dogbite and who introduces him to
Sirhan Mandika, PhD, who willingly certifies Clyd'es ICGO movement and
buys him a boat.  All this happened either in Clyde's mind or on
paper, but either way he has a showing when the skyline crashes and
this is what it's all about, see?  M.?  M.?

     OK.  Now if you want to know what it's all about then to Hell
with it, I tell you, M.  M.?  I'll tell you....Well, it was like
this....   Dick O'Connor killed his Grandfather and a riot started.  I
should say, Dick O'Connor killed his Grandfather and got convicted and
a riot started.  Tears of Malachi!  It's true!  And it all went up in
flames and fell down in ashes.  A dirty old man got stabbed in a dirty
old basement by a punk who he happened to be related to, who happened
to be his heir apparent, who he happened to have raised, who did it
out of spite and finished it off with a touch of greed, who barely
ever looked above that skyline, and he got convicted and he was guilty
as Hell and a riot started.  Burned the whole damned thing down.  New
York, that is.  Or was it Montreal?  Can we erase the border that
easily?  I think not.  So, it was New York, purveyor of wretched forth
bodily fluids for the world.  A universe contemplates this fate,
y'know.  I'm not the fool, y'know, though I may be the dirty ol' man
of my own dreams.  As I was saying, the greatest injustice, bordeom,
granted a shitlot of X's and O's (and they took it like a dog to meat)
to shake rattle and roll the rill out the door, down the floor, out
into the gutter with the rats and bile, and in that rodent grimace,
frozen for eternity in the mind's eye of the author, in that glance is
defined the wide gulf of this city's unholy character, and its damned
future in the snicker that follows the frozen sneer we'd find if we
could see it and hear it, feel it.  But too late.  Don't they look
dear as they scurry about in their furry little worlds?  All but the
tales.  Couldn't we saw them off and make them hamsters?  Too true, we
could, my M., too true--we could at least try.

     Battling egos are born and die in time.  Time to know time,
that's how we know in time.  Time being equal and all--I mean, if the
spot your sitting in right now is the center of the universe then so
is this moment. No?  Yes?  A softer silence is unkown then that which
resides in the center of the machine, in the belly of the beast so to
say, down deep below the intervals, the agitators, the synapse firing
merry-go-round associations among the solitary moments of mentation
one manages to generate, birth to death, round and round until some
kind of postulate begins to occur--nomimalism at its worst and best--a
depth beyond the shimmering pool of consciousness.  Here minds are one
with the beast of living, the invasion of this mountain home, the
moment of generation, a bang so big its makes bangness as it goes,
makes everything out of nothing, a moment as rill and as at the center
of everything as both the here and now, the now and when, both the how
and the what for:  this is the place to begin.  Down this hole, past
the playthings and giants, past the sea of tranquility, one finds the
mountain of will to go to the moon with a controled explostion at
one's butt, below this one finds hell.  What one sorrow brings mercy
to a dying world?   What imagination is preened to power the thoughts
of the everyday runaway nightmare of distress at success?  Ah to be
young again, to be young and human with no shackles or fleas.  A sea,
a sea, an open boat, seventeen wounded tribesmen trying to find an
answer to this sea's tidings--courage to try one more sighting, try to
find home again home again, lickety split pea with melba-toast and
ketchup soup.  In a soup kitchen behind the bay one lonely beggar
contemplates his hairy navel and sings in his mind:  "Dum-diddy
dum-diddy dum-diddy day/ Dum-diddy diddly oh way," but misses the
ancient echo, this song older than language itself.  The beggar is
contemplating one new approach to his trade:  a sanction war.  It
must've come up because it'll mean something somewhere down the road,
when the shooting starts, when the rats all crawl out of their holes
and gawk in disbelief at the rantings of the master race, bored as a
broadway bordello and so turned sour as milk left in the pail.  Cut
their tales off, cut off their phone lines, cut off their testicles
and analyze them at 5000X, photograph it all for the Chinese, who,
whatever they're up to, will eventually wipe us all off the map with
their very formidable genetic potential.  Genetics, yes, that's the
key.  The story's supposed to be one of a family's failure to cope
with the changing times, with the ignorance of mortal illusions and
the power of their honest exertions, but honesty has become a code
word for violation  and the key to human suffering has changed
dramatically in the modern sense.  H-bombs to nose blowings and
poisoned booze.  It's all a 'hey' ride.  All a jujube jumble joe.  A
snot nosed yelling out with rock throwing: "Go home!  You!  Go home!"
Lickety-split.

     Sunny-John was born without any shoes on, but that was soon
remedied.  Those Oxfords never saw more than a week's work and were
bronzed.  Soon, though, the P's saw another rode out and went down in
flames over North Carolina on their way to a Hoot in the Blue Ridge
where many 70s delights were promised, which fueled the pre-flight
drinking, making, not the crash happen, but the heroics that would've
been necessary to prevent it quit improbable.  An endocrine system can
only be pushed so far, you know.  You can only think with your guts
and gonads for so long, specially when you're flying a plane.  But did
it all happen that fast?  Birth and death in one mouthful?  The memory
so distant?  Weren't there days and party-games?  Fishing trips to
remember, or pain to regret?  There were years no doubt, but their
imprecission is proof that it went the way it sounded.  Birth and
death in one breath--they should've realized, they should've seen the
hope in his little eyes.  Anyway Gramps got the young toad and named
him Billy.  S-J never forgave him for that, nor his parents for having
died in a firey crash over Hanasake ridge.  Were there beatings in
little Billy's home?  Were there late-night exercises in the futility
of neolithic parenting method?  Is it true that Grandparents mellow
with age unless their children have the rudeness to kick off before
them?  The problem was they were too rich; just like the folks.  Too
rich and unforntunately getting richer by the day.  Retirement just
can't cure some people.  More illusions.  "Some day our great-great
granchildren will marry into the Bostonian nobility and rule the
world!!"  "Some day we may have a boat on every major lake upstate..."
When Grandma hit the hospital for abusing vodka and libriums the
tabloids screamed.  When Gramps ran down Ms. Sidewinder with his
stereo-Jag they ranted for weeks and the phones rang off their hooks.
Deprived of decent phone service, the trial dragged on for years and
when he was aquitted of all the major charges only minor lootings were
reported in the lower borroughs and in metropolitan Cleveland,
childhood home of the dead woman whose thoughtlessness had set all
this grief in motion, indirectly.  But when Billy, now Constanzi Boy
One, gunned him down in broad daylight with a plastic automatic pistol
and a video crew on hand all hell broke loose--media-wise that is,
no-one else seemed to give a damn.  The giving a damn, some say, was
engineered by the True Leftists to unbalance the commodities markets,
but the bomb statistics don't rilly bear that out.  I'd say the
beast's belly was ready to burst (no excuses needed), and CB-1 just
gave it the easiest chance to let it all rip.  One giant flatulation
of boredom's menacing alter ego.  Her name was Emily Sidewinder, and
make no mistake, M., she was very fine, worth a little anger, a little
regret on this side of the cast die.  Flipped and flipped.  Oh why,
why did we evolve these lobes?  Why evolve these arms and legs that
flip-flop flip-flop?  Swell...  Sounds...ok.

     In a lab below the city sewer complex, laser guns are being
manufactured by the son of another rich man, much richer than the
others.  He hopes to have them ready by next Easter.  His most
optimistic expectations are about to take an astounding leap forward.
His brain as well, though, is in great danger of evolution.  One might
hope for the best, one might, but...

     That was dirty, I know.  Lay it all out like that on a slab of
shit as if human beings were pig offal to be masacred in thought and
with wicked astringent cleaners.  His name was so-and-so, he killed
such-and-such, and it all fits together in a shitty little way.  You
expected maybe a prize?  Sorry, I will not apologize for my literary
lameness.  This is the only time I'm even mentioning it--for further
response on this subject see the Introduction.  And so, M., the move
left to you: yes, stick me in the gizzard and say I should cough it
up.  No, not the smooth line, the sinner's plot and libretto--the rill
dig, your very own half-hole soul.  And why not?  Cybernetics?
Sustaining paradigms?  Overscrew undersold semitage on a stick with
rye and picklelilly? The jujube truth begins at the beginning of
time...4th century, invented by Greogry the Great on holiday in
Brittany....  What, the 6th you say, my M.?  Could it be perhaps that
history has deprived you of some essential particle or two that would
lead anyone to doubt the truth?  As you say then, M., 6th
century....late, very late, the troops amass along the bank and await
the General's signal fire...  Somewhere a lathe is turning out an axe
handle twelve hundred years in the future.  And two men lost on the
banks of time's seventh seal, knowing not that they'll never return,
but fearing the worse, cheer themselves singing "What's good for the
gullet is good for the gizzard/ What's good for my stomache's a nice
tasty lizzard/ My left hemisphere is a monkey up a tree/ And what
ever's good for you is double good for me/  Hiedi-ho Heidi-ho far as
you can see...."  Right, well, if you want my gizzard I'll give it, M.
I have no hangups.  Do you have any hangups?  It's an AI problem.
Turing and Swedenborg versus Taube and Goedel...the answer is Blake
and William of Occam.  I guess you rilly gotta go back to ancient
history.  I guess you rilly gotta go back to the dawn of time.  I
guess you rilly gotta go back to the flippin' big bang.  No.  Wait.
That's not true.  Lem's right.  Any given moment, birth, death,
breakfast in Tahiti is increasingly improbable as one moves backward
in time.  The big bang is not part of this--I lied, it is, but we
won't disucss it for now.  Anyway let's compromise and go back to
Boethius (Augustine being, along with the Paleolithic, Neolithic,
Bronze and Iron Ages, a given); now trace in your mind the development
of the metaphysics inherent in the Alchemical Psychologies (not
necessarily in chronological order unless you feel you have too, my
M.--Is there logic in chronos?  Is logos indeed then chronic?  Is this
not some salesman's joke in the guise of a uppity Latinism?) starting
then after Boethius with Alan of Lille and Bernardus Silvestris, and
then however far you choose to go... Wait.  No.  I guess if people are
going to read this in the twentieth century I better stick with the
simpletons.  OK, so we have Aquinas who not only fully reawakens the
logical faculties of ancient Greece but manages to subtly take them to
unprecedented heights.  Great philosophers always pull that shit on
societies which, not being able to take it, let it rot on the vine, or
worse, fester into a nasty boil on society's hiney.  Not so Aquinas
and Medieval Western Europe!  (Thanks Abelard!  Thanks Savonarola!
Thanks Salerno and Bologna!)  Us pseudointellecutal moderns thinks
that way, kinda, but taint true!  They knew just what to do with
Aquinas and St. Bernard both when the world found them suddenly dead
and in their graves; they did indeed.  Us in'ard mod types what got a
pig in are heads--what--thinks, what, ifin they knew so much, how come
you got us now, huh?  what?  Otay.  Straight sales to choose from,
look in the big tent--think that Duns Scotus and William of Occam and
Nicholas of Cusa or even the condemned Roscellenius had some kinda
bronze age bozoid agenda to proclaim the Word, et. al., well what the
flip do you expect?  And you an ethnobotanist and all....  Listen, it
was no joke. Period. Nor was it some kind of escape into tribalist
bullshit for no apparent reason except a postulated crumbling of the
social fabric (but this is a metaphor common to a thousand year age!)
and a supposition that since the Church canonized Thomas and Thomas
canonized Aristotle that we should still believe that meaning is a
stasis composed of formalized elements when even our physics and
mathematics tell us otherwise.  If you're going to dismiss everyone in
the Middle Ages who ever said anything about religion except Thomas
(recanonized by the Fabians and others who didn't have the guts to
divorce our Faustian racist nightmare for the existentialist dream)
then you'll likely, M., continue believing that everything was
invented in America or Russia or even London or Berlin as long as its
the modern day--never Istanbul!  Why should we as Pragmatists (we are
Jamesian Deweyeans aren't we, M.?) concern ourselves with the weekend
practices of anyone but ourselves?  Nicholas of Cusa's religious
beliefs have as little to do with his intellectual viability as a
politicians churchgoing has to do with feeding the poor or cleaning
the naked.  There are quaint antiquarian nutcases in the world, my
friend M., who could, if provoked, explode your proverbial nutshell
existence into the myriad fragmented lies it rests upon with a wave of
the rhetorical wand and a cold stare, if you would.  The complexity of
late medieval Ptolemaic systems, through astounding contortions of
theory and mathematics could account for deviations in the movements
of heavenly bodies that afterward were ignored till Einstein and the
discovery of the Redshift.  Go back and look at Occam carefully
without the cliches and goofball stereotypes.  Put thy face in a
domino, woman!  Look into the possibilities of a bubble on the edge of
awareness, a contingent bubble of meaning on the edge of a jack's eye,
on a schoolgirls tongue--a single dot rides across the tension curve
then darts down and apart as the memory bursts into possiblity,
settling down to a notion, a sense of round slippery continuity our
minds call sensation, experience, laughter, a walk.  My friends, wear
the pointed head.  Sit in the corner they made you stay there.  Wear
it and stare at the possiblities of a memory that might wipe it all
away in a glance.  Wear that pointed head and squeeze out one thought
for the gripper, one naught-ought-naught for the ho ho ho, and the
hoot hoot hootie hoo hoo, one rip, rip for all the aces, places, and
traces.  Sit in your corner and pinch out a thought for me on the edge
of possibility.  That's it.  As best as I could put it to you without
a winch and thrity tons of torque.   There are twelve missing pages to
symbolize all that might have been and was left unsaid.  A memorial.
And it least in theory needed to make thirty-five.  A counting without
a head.

One last note to patch another point:  The rioting Buddhists are in
support of the Aged Ageists against the upstartedness of youth and new
religions, but the three generation hence postscript is all Animist
and life-prime, the butchering of a dog for meat rather than jaded
sport and "Apres moi, le deluge!" jauntyings.  In the end, New York is
sold back to the Indians at a cut rate who then bulldoze it into the
sea.
;^##