Jesus is coming, am I ready?

Yeah, I’d rent to the Guy.. Am I ‘Ready’? as the many signs on the highway in this part of Armerica keep asking? Almost; I do have a water-problem.. wet basement when it rains a lot. the house was built 200 years ago, before man invented rain, I guess. Anyway, a Guy who can walk on water should have no problem getting to the electrical box down there. Plus, yeah, I know he wasn’t exactly rich in the currency of this World, but if he can change the 55 gallon drum of water I left him on the porch into wine.. well, I’ll take it off the rent. Here’s a picture of an inside corner of the house. I tried again to shoot the Geese-from-Where-eva. They didn’t co-operate, hid or flew away real fast… probably un-documented.

  Oh, and it’s so damn frustrating to read interesting and eminently commentable entries here and not have the time or concentration to do them justice. I sincerely miss my on-line community, and expect to make amends in about a week. CYA

“Where’s Johnny!”

     Gotta start somewhere.. I’ll probably devolve into bullet-points shortly,

which are legal; hell, even Alexis de Tocqueville’s 1835 “Top Ten Reasons why

there’s Something Fishy going on on the Other side of the Pond” had chapters.

Impossible to describe it in one long soliloquy.. the scene, you know. So

bullet points. But first try diplomacy. And what smooths the ‘art of the

possible’ like a good stiff drink. So yeah, I felt like a fool asking the girl

at the Distributor “What beer you got has the most alcohol, in the most and

biggest cans, and for the least money?” This in pidgin Spanish, with lots of

‘muy mas’s’. She understood, bless her heart, did the calculation like a

research chemist, in her head, in pesos, I guess, and told the guy at the

counter, in Esparanto, to go get the Elephant. He spoke Hindi, bless his heart

also, and yes, $30 for 24 cans at 7.3% by volume, that’s do-able. And it’s

even Carlsberg, so I’m supporting Quantum physics research.

 
       Polyglot, that’s new here. I don’t really like it. “Polyglot, the Word”, I

mean. Isn’t the glot that chupchik at the back of your throat God put there so

you can’t eat a sandwich and say thank-you at the same time?  Ugh! Of course,

‘poly-lingual’ is dumb too. “Da man speak with-a many tongue-ses..” i guess

that’s why ‘merkins want everybody to please speak english.
Ok, I promised bullets, here’s bullets: remember, “Gun’s don’t kill people,

bullets do!” Great motto. That way I can fit in, be against gun-control, and

like, privately support ‘bullet-control’. It’ll be ok. Most of the folks with

the impaired members will feel just as potent with only an empty gun in their

hands. No one has to know…
1) I’m writing a letter to the ‘Union Electrician’ to whom I shelled out 500

bucks  from far-away Isreal where I used to live ‘way over there’, in regards

to the work he did. I’ve never seen such sloppiness, even in the Holy

Land-of-the-Sloppy. Live wires hanging out, three breakers just pulled out of

the box, which killed the kitchen lights and sun-room receps, his new

un-necessary feed to the Hot-Water Heater run through a doorway (!) and

exiting the breaker box without bothering to use like, a punch-out hole and a

strain-relief. I have to re-do the whole mess. And he’d sent a long e-mail

explaining how his work meets the most stringent code.. “so he can sleep at

night” in his words. Pleasant dreams, bozo, next time I’ll call the

Confederacy.
2) Got my new camera to work. It took a night or two to go through 179 pages

of pidgin-gibberish, to red-pencil “No it doesn’t, shit-head!” beside the

‘instructions on each page. You gotta see the graphic where they ‘show’ you

how to lock and/or unlock the memory-card to appreciate the horror. Yeah, of

course I can figure it out by trial and error, but then what’s the fucking

book for? Guess Fuji didn’t have a quarter to call a native speaker, (or any

Earthling, for that matter) the day the book went to the printer.
3) So now let’s talk about Armenia-On-Lime or whatever that horrid abomination

calls itself. Seems like I just can’t find anyone nearby who even expects

internet to be a clean scene; you know, turn on the computer, one-click to

connect to ADSL, click to Google and the world is yours (and brittany can suck

eggs.) AOL is so hogged-up with passwords, ads, little hearts for their

un-usable ‘favorites’, no details on “Back”, and half the time no back at all.

I just downloaded a one-Meg driver for a sound-card, on a dial-up connection,

at 860 bytes/second. Took a couple hours, but hey, this is Armenia. When I was

little it wasn’t possible at any speed; we had to learn to play the piano,

while we waited for Shockley to invent the transistor, the little nazi.
4) What else? Oh, the ex-tenants did save my mail. A hundred pounds of it

actually. Over two-hundred credit-cards, pre-approved, with my name in gold or

platinum or whatever. I added it up, seventeen billion dollars of credit.

that’s right $17,000,000,000! I told the Lufthansa-Leute that I won’t be

needing that return ticket. Boeing’s sending my new 777 to PHL on thursday’

can’t wait to finally sit in the cockpit like a mensch at Flight Level

three-five-zero.
5) And even though I’m filthy rich, I’m still working 18 hours a day getting

my house ready for new tennants. We’re gonna require a few more items in the

check-em-out process this time:
    a) oppose-able thumb(s)
    b) DNA testing: minimum 31 chromosomes
    c) candidates appearing on the PA ‘Public’s Right-to Know’ Web-site as

convicted sex-offenders will be docked three points. (Don’t laugh, my last two

tenants were right there, mug-shot and all)
    d) Reasonable command of spoken and written language. Note I don’t care

what language; it’s literacy we’re after here.
    e) oh, and lots of money…forgot that one.
6) Had a brief scare yesterday; the old Tenants-from-Hell I paid thousands to

evict showed up next door to rent from my neighbor. I had to pay a quick

midnight visit to make sure he knew what to expect. Turns out my neighbor’s a

little sharper than me, and had already told them ‘No’. Something about the

candidate having no liver left. I never saw my dead-beat when I rented to him,

in my defense. My neighbor also told me that the clown brought with him a

poorly-spelled list of ‘chemicals he found in my attic’. A new renter’s

tactic? I have no idea what that was supposed to net him. What, i only kicked

him out ’cause I was hopped-up on sodium-boro-hydride? Ok, I admit it, I wuz

gonna disolve the idiot in di-ethyl ether under nitrogen with stirring, and

then ‘reduce’ him in my fume-hood to a gooey mess of spent carbo-hydrates I

could safely flush down the toilet. Sue me.
7) Well that’s six bullets, hope the muzzle-velocity was somewhere near spec.

Oh, i did buy a new four-in-one screwdriver. Had to get it at K-Mart. They

were playing the Beatles’ ‘Penny Lane’; I stood under the speaker, then felt

like a fool when someone broke into the chorus with a blue-lite special. The

screwdriver’s apparently targeted to women, American women who’ll want to

screw that perfect halloween decoration to their plastic front door. It’s pink

with a floral motif. But the last one I sent through in my checked baggage

arrived at Ben Gurion as a handle-only; they’d taken the inserts out of it,

for security reasons, I assume. Little do they know I can divert a jumbo to

Libya with just the handle.

That’s the news; sorry I took so long. Here’s a picture, to prove I’m not

making this up, of my neighbor’s pond (hard to see) across the road, with

Canadian Geese (lots of them, real loud, but not in the picture.. I’ll shoot

them tomorrow)… and a big US of A flag to welcome me and the geese, I guess.

“Sir, this picture doesn’t look at all like you..”

    Off into the luft in the hansa a couple pilots and maybe a blow-up doll or two. Back when they were testing the 747, an aero-cowboy, probably on his last day of employment did a roll in one, without incident so I’ve heard. I usually watch to make sure the flight crew aren’t wearing parachutes, then settle in and keep an eye on the seat-back display with the litle airplane on it, just in case we drift off-course. I think probably more folks have met their maker on the way to the airport than airborne.. Oops, cab-driver is blowing his horn, scuze me, while I kiss this guy..

Coming up: Mixed Synchronous Spawning- Doubles

    Overlooking for a second Herr Pauli’s hurtful and glib putdown of my 1934 Journal of Applied Physics paper, a treatise which I’d generously, (so I thought), entitled “Toward a Kinder, Gentler, more ‘Inclusive’ Exclusion Principle” {   ed- Pauli was reported to have said: ‘…Solberg isn’t even wrong!’  }, I must now admit that Wolfie’s work with Carl Jung on the then-and-still-now fuzzy issue of ‘Synchronicity‘ was at least justified by the data, increasingly obvious in our times, on strange coincidences improbable to the extreme. What might have been writen off as a pitiable last-gasp of a man past his prime now seems to have been the logical macro object-of-scrutiny for a quantum pioneer, even one of his diminuitive stature. (ha!) Or in simpler terms,

“Why does weird shit seem to happen, like, all the time?”
    My own inquiry, hampered somewhat by my being also ‘past my prime’, centers mainly around the linguistic expression of the ‘effect’, that is; many ‘synchronous’ phenomena have a word-based aspect; to wit:

“Woke up having dreamed about gold-fish, the first post I read on Xanga mentions ‘gold-fish’, the morning paper, as I walk past the kiosk, has a front-page picture of a prize-winning.. goldfish, I get to work, where the secretary is busily fine-tuning her new contribution to office-decor.. a gold-fish bowl, there’s a call on hold waiting from Bob Geldoff, (“He’s a pisces, remember, Johnny“, she tells me as she hands me the phone);  by then I’m about ready to order “goldfish enflambe” for lunch at my favorite eaterie, which to my suprise has overnight re-named iself “Ha-Dag Ha-za’hav”.
“At least goldfish don’t bite..” , I console myself, but what sucks is having no rigorous framework for understanding this..this.. ok, we’ll keep calling it “weird shit” till the industry adopts a Standard Usage.
   And so for now all I can do is add to the literature, suggest several sub-genre which have never before been itemized as far as I know. Here-with is a partial list of ‘W-S’ effects you may want to be looking for:

---

1) Synchro-nicety: When you and your table-guest simultaneously cock your heads thoughtfully and start with “So, how’s life been treating you?”
2) Synchro-nudity: You are awoken in the dead of night by your cat’s chasing a previously unknown mouse around the room, stub your toe painfully attempting to chase both of them out the front door, and, slipping on a fish placed on your doorstep apparently by your kitty’s frustrated paramour, you fall embarassingly down the front steps, ending up naked and ‘in delicto’ on the sidewalk. “Lucky there’s no one up at this hour” you say to yourself, only to glance across the street and, in the light of the new high-wattage street-lamp installed just that morning, you see your neighbor, in exactly the same position, glaring at you, as if to say, “Copy-cat! I thought of it first!”
3) Synchro-noosity; This one was first reported by Hugo, Victor. “K”, a sensitive and bashful gent in his early 30’s walks four days to the house of his girlfriend, with whom he’d had a bit of a spat, carrying a parakeet in a cage as a present for her. Not finding her at home, and suspecting disloyalty, he none-the-less leaves the bird on her door-step, if only to be able more quickly to arrive back home, by a different route. When he returns, he finds a cage with a dead bird in it on his porch. Taking it as her macabre comment on their doomed relationship, he has no choice but to forthwith hang himself. His lover, who as it turns out had forgiven him with all her heart and had also journeyed by foot to leave a bird as a peace-offering, (forgetting to bring along any food, so wrapped up in forgivness was she) arrives home only to find a dead bird on her doorstep. Taking it as a bitter reply to her gift, she of course hangs herself also. And the weird thing is, the birds were brother and sister! Sad, but who said synchro’s got to be optimistic?
4) Synchro-niecity: Two twin brothers marry twin sisters from their small town in Idaho in a dual ceremony, Eight months later both couples are blessed with baby girls. The new mothers, always very close, go to Walmart™ one day and never return. The brothers raise their half-orphaned daughters with difficulty, Spock in one hand and ‘Lolita’ in the other. After an appropriate mourning period of fifteen years, they both re-marry, and guess what? They marry each other’s daughters! Inexplicable, but poignant. And finally,
5) Synchro-natomy: I meet a girl backstage before a show, we’ll call her ‘Susie‘. I’m struck by the odd fact that she has exactly the same number of eyes and ears as I do(!). We exchange a few words, and watch each other during the performance. With every shy glance it becomes more and more obvious that this must be a sign from heaven somewhere. I pack up, she takes my arm, and we drive home, her head in my lap, deep in thought. Most of the night we spend gasping for air, completely blown away by the almost complete similarity between our bodies. And get this!  In the one or two areas where we do differ, there is a perfect fit between them, as if we were some kind of cosmic crossword puzzle. Weird, like I said, but you get used to it.
Readers are now asked to be aware of these sometimes delightful, sometimes sad occurences, and to report them to this site, to assist my on-going research. Sub-genre #5 will be especially welcome.

Digging with Dignity

    So it’s 3AM. You’re dead tired but there’s a plane to catch. You’ve just wasted a half hour looking for a couple thousand bucks you hid.. from yourself, apparently. Hmm.. maybe inside that old boat-anchor power-supply you found on the sidewalk and dragged home. “Money is Power”? That’s how I was supposed to remember where I put it?
   In the end it was on the kitchen table! I’d already ‘found’ it yesterday and had  forgotten. Hey, this man shouldn’t be trusted with large bills, let alone purloined letters.

---

   And then cometh a knock on the door:
The tax-man? (“Sorry, I already paid 18% on it, Go away!“)
“Your car’s been stolen…again”? (“Thanks, call me if you find it, I just bought a 747”) 
   No, I open the door to greet my neighbor, a sweet women about my age, for whom I’d do just about anything. She looks ‘sombre’, but that sombre we wear when we are expected to look sombre, like at a funeral for someone we might not have known all that well. No disrespect for the dead here, but there is a spectrum, from sombre to morose to unconsolably heart-broken; I’ve seen all those stations, and was relieved to see her merely sombre. ( ‘sans sombrero’-ed)
“Have you got a shovel?” in that privileged London accent I will never tire of, even dead-tired.
“Um.. a shovel to …to  ‘borrow’?”  It was worth a try.
“My friend’s dog has.. ‘passed on’.. and we need to bury him… down there.” She pointed to a spot in the orange grove, very close to where I’d experimented with a potato-patch.. and lost about ten pounds in one day, loosening up the hard-packed soil.
“He’s extremely distraught.” She explained. She’s so good at filling in the background details, the context. I have such a soft spot for the intelligent.
“Not the softest ground ‘b’medinah‘” (‘in the country’) I protested but mildly, not going so far as a formal refusal.
   Fast-forward (Ahh, if it had only been so!) to the macabre scene, lit by none-too-trustworthy flashlights, of two men grimly digging…digging, one of them bereaved, the other silently rehearsing the un-askable questions:
“So, how big was Fido, then?” (Are chihuahuas ever named ‘Fido’?)
” Has rigor-mortis set in?” (Sorry, but this has relevance to the question:
“Are we deep enough?” Spoken with sweat pouring from every pore.
But as I said, not a word is spoken, be it out of respect or tact, as we continue our downward “Land-route to China”
   I was in a plane crash as a child. I crawled out unscathed, although drenched in aviation fuel, and I remember running… and running.. and running. Until the wreckage was just barely visible from where I stood, behind a lone black locust tree, breathing hard and counting my fingers and toes. “I’ve run a bit too far, I suppose..” I said to myself after coming to some of my senses, and so I ran the whole way back to the scene, where men were already trying to right the bird on its broken legs, gathering up the body-parts, if only out of respect.
   And my co-digger was also running, I quickly realized, as we dug onward. Gathering courage, I allowed myself to become the voice of reason, having ‘been there’. 
     See, I know dogs. Terrestrial canines, at least; they come in only a limited range of sizes, and surely even an Extra-Large should find this final resting place… um.. ‘adequate‘, if not.. ‘roomy‘.
“Nu, mas’peekh” (‘enough already’) I finally broke the silence, deliberately not using the more common hebrew word “Die” for ‘enough’.
“Od kat’tsat..” (‘a little more’) he replied, but I’d already laid down my shovel, and little Woofie’s next-of-kin relented.
We brought the deceased, who was carefully, lovingly gift-wrapped in a cardboard box, taped on all seams. I wish I could have read what the carton had originally held; It’s a tricky business, but I might have been able to make a comment both witty and supportive. Probably not though…
We then  gracefully dragged the unseen animal to the excavation and, using specialized heavy equipment salvaged from the abandoned Project MoHo, (which had attempted, in the 60’s to drill down through the earth’s crust to the Mohorovicic Discontinuity), lowered the bier to the bottom. The rest of the night was spent returning a few tons of soil to where it had happily been before the midnight rite of passage. I was thanked, my hand was shaken all around, a round of Guiness was discussed and ‘rain-checked’ due to the lateness of the hour, and I returned to my own problems, one of which had been, as I reflected, remarkably similar: digging through my house in search of  my hidden gold. I was glad I’d already found it, as, in my profound fatigue and confusion, I might easily have caught myself tearing up the floor tiles and digging down through the salon floor!
Oh yeah, there did remain one additional chore: moving a rock roughly the size of a blue whale, and somehow placing it on the gravesite. “We do have a border with Egypt”, I suggested, and went to bed.

Ok, now let’s choose a career..

    Been having some vision problems lately; last night as I went up the stair I saw a girl who wasn’t there. That in itself wouldn’t be a big deal, but she wasn’t there again today, so I sought professional help to make her go away. Lots of equipment, shiny and digital, but still overall a nuisance. Like the damn Blood test. I studied for it all night and still got a ‘B’. Yeah I’m positive. Can’t argue with the print-out.

    And under ‘remarks‘ it said: ‘ R-099A–too smart for own good’. Now how do they know that? The Doctor diagnosed me as a ‘di-agnostic’. Probably shouldn’t have written “While there may exist some Big Questions that I can’t answer, I frankly don’t know what they could be.” Hey, it said, “Feel free to use other side” and yeah, I felt free. Israeli health-care works, at least. Twenty bucks a month and they guarantee you’ll live forever..unless you, like, ‘get dead’.

   Made me consider entering the field, actually. So I took the short-cut through the clover on the way home. And thought deep thoughts. Enterology?.. nah, don’t have the stomach to go into that. Maybe Cardiology? Not sure I got the heart for it.. and frankly, I don’t give a shit about Proctology, so what does that leave? Sociology? Don’t make me laugh. Three days and twenty nights in Muncie, Indiana door-to-door, just so I can turn in my lame “In our survey {attached} 89% of respondents, asked whether they consider sociology a real science, replied in the negative. The mean standard deviation was a statistically-significant 0.28, thus confirming our hyperthesis.. blah, blah, and more blah.”
      Wait! The weather.. everybody’s talking about it at least.. ought to be bucks there, somewhere… I check the israeli Meteorological Institute web-site; I’m fired up… until I see their pitiful english version. Hell. if they ain’t got 25 cents to their name to call a half-assed native english speaker, that says something, am I right? The text looks like it was translated by The Goat-Boy of Odessa: “There will future be drops in perhaps East aries”. Good, I’ll take a fucking umbrella.
   So something meatier than Soc.. Hell, their main un-answered question is “Is it So-‘she‘-ology., or So-‘see‘-ology? Y/N??  Then it hits me: “Meatier-ology“, a hand-crafted meta-field.. just me, as the distinguished scholar, successfully predicting the Perseid-Shower ok, but wait, I also investigate, rigorously, why so many damn academic fields contribute so precious little, basically  goose-eggs, to, like, a Better World in which to Live duh. So now it’s final. Ima goona give it mah awl, soon as I answer the Xanga Featured Question. “What makes U happy when Ur sad?” Oh, methaqualone, I guess.. next question.. But if I can’t find a sponsor in like, a week,  I’d still consider looking at Mammarology: {ed-sic!} I actually keep abreast of the latest developments in that specialty, every night, on the stair.

**and by the way, the link under ‘a Better World in which to Live’ is to a piece, apropo academia’s contribution to progress, which, were I ever serious that long, and as perceptive and as careful a writer as he, well… I would have written it myself. **.

Touching

 All you want, all you can think of, is to be inside her. It’s a place you’ve never been, frankly. But pure Desire, for someone of your complexity  feels, I don’t know.. ‘simplistic‘? There needs to be a metaphor, or several, and then over them a Guiding principle, to validate your cosmic driver’s license. Procreation, yes that could suffice, and you try it on, flubbing a line or two in what you are still trying to call a ‘conversation‘. A paradox quickly surfaces, and rather than choose sides you slide sideways into the new keyword, Conversation. Yes, this is all about Art, Lit’rature, Science, Condensed Matter… You are simply drinking deeply from her inspiring cup. Yes, character-development…research.. all for the cause. But what of her thirst? Could she be merely softening you up for the day she asks to borrow (and maybe ‘forget’ to return) your G.K.Batchelor: “An Introduction to Fluid Dynamics”?. With her arms around your shoulders, yours around hers, and cheeks pressed together, you’re not too sure… of that thesis, or in fact, or anything, save the dimming light of the contracting universe.

See, the human body has a fixed amount of blood, and has not been famous for creating more, on the spot, when most of it chooses to flow to the extremities.
   But you are not alone in this. Her breathing has become as shallow as yours. You hear the ‘shallow‘ and once again panic for an alibi. “I was a pawn in her chess-game.. mated before I ever had a chance. Only one piece I managed to get into position, and it was swallowed up by the Queen, her horses pounding past me in the night, tails high and nostrils flared….”

    No, that won’t do. I must be the conqueror. I will enter her territory, climb her mountain, and kiss the shrine waiting at its precipice. But she, having quickly undone most of her fastenings by now, (and with a skill that is always fascinating in itself), must surely have her own Metaphor. And if it is the inverse of mine, as it must be for both to be correct, then… then she must surely be thinking:. “I am a mountain, we shall climb together to the peak, and lie there, together, as time disappears” or perhaps “Hold me, we will close our eyes and, thus disappearing, crawl unseen into that Cave, overpower the monsters, and have them for lunch after..”

    From this you will hear only  that she can cook… oh, and remember where you left your shoes, when you will both be late for work someday. Is that why you need to be inside her, so desperately now that vision and taste and smell have all become one unified field, one fuzzy blurr that is rapidly abdicating to.. to the power of… of Touch? You’d forgotten that one! Everything gels in a split-second; the realization which sets you Free. “I only want to touch her, and deeply.” We are babies, baby animals. She fondles me, and I her. This is touching, and touching, is all.

 
So you open the door, slide into the driver’s seat, let the engine purr, adjust the mirrors, and on the cut-back road up the mountain, breathe in the forest’s smells, mixed with the magic scent of genuine leather upholstery…  What did you think we were talking about? 

 

“Daddy, do I have to wear this on the plane?”

Ok, a New Land demands a New Religion. And so I find myself unable to refrain from singing that old refrain

‘I once was lost, but now, dumb-founded/

Was blind, but now, High ‘C’
Yes,dumbstruck but still smarting from my little Epiffany, bless her trembling thighs and fervid sighs. Oh, and “Size does count.” she told me, her blue eyes closed. “..but don’t tell my girl-friends, kewl?”
And I sayeth “Right, child, they’ll find out for themselves”
“Paul!” she protested, but I set her straight:
“Paul is dead, I’ve heard it backwards and forwards. Call me Saul, honey”
And yes, I can now never lie; God’s Proof: the Oral Roberts albums, after re-drilling the hole in the center, which had healed shut over the years of my apostacy, do clearly mention Paul’s demise, on the road to Damascus, or Antioch, I forget which, but it’s in the Book of Letters to the Philapeenians too, Chapter six or something, he’s warning the minions against chapstick.. And we’re right back to phalluses, or ‘phalli’ in the ancient Greek, which I, as a regular re-born goy study of course, night after night, have I mentioned that? Tonight’s text involves the maxim, “A man’s palace is his phallus”;  there are tips on re-modeling, acquiring super-models, stuff like that there. I sit in the candelight, mouth agape, filled to the ear-holes with ‘agape’, and of course I am busily writing this tract. Attractively printed, it’ll be a Lorentz strange attractor, or as Poe (or the Pope?) called it on Green Acres, ‘a strange-a tractor’. I should not have mentioned it yet.
“Saul, dear, lend me your ear, nu..”
This from Epiffany, who’d sat patiently through the last paragraph.
“And that leaves me with only a ‘D’, now, doesn’t it?” Was I guilty of Selfishness? 
“Like I really need to bomb outa Holy Cross… now, after it’s like totally too late to transfer to Holy Electric Chair, even as an EE major..”
” A man of letters like you, Saul, you will always find The Word..” Piffy was trying to cheer me up, but I must avoid her alluring advances now, hearing only the moaning pleas of the Jees-ians on the distant shore:
“Come on across, come on a-cross” they croon in four-part harmony.
“Been there, done that” I confess, dying inside. Came on a cross hanging from Piffy’s neck just an hour ago, being fruitful but choosing not to multiply, although Piffy is literate, in a gentile sort of way; she listens without interrupting:
“My sweet Piffy-le, see, I’ve left that Self behind, in Zion; the huddled masses in their huddles, the yearning in their ‘yearns’, those make-do levantine ‘yurts’, sufficient unto the local natives till they earn the mammon for a proper urn. I take leave of the spiteful, and keeping the ‘E’, leave them ‘spitful’, the whole bloody salivating lot of ’em. *spits* Salivation, if ‘I’ be removed, becometh, Bless His Holy Sieve, “Salvation!”, and knowing The Blood as I now do, the rh negative becomes H-, a strong ion for the Ionians, and with the ‘I’ and ‘R’ I change ‘Spit’ into ‘Spirit’. That’s water into wine, honey, I’m a fast learner. Bottoms up and L’chaim, sweetheart. (You followed that, Epiphany?)”

---

You have been listening to Blinding Light®, gritty, sweaty and inspirational words by the Revered J.’Saul’ Burg, M.Div.com “We put the ‘purse’ in perspiration!” Won’t you send me some money now, (Pay-Paul Ok) I don’t want to have to reconvert.

Looking west

The Trip was supposed to have been in May. Turned into October, sue me. Better late than never. I’m reminded of that classic flick, “April in Paris”, where Mae West and June Lockhart try in vain to convince Frederick March to take care of Lassie© while they do a quick cross-country girls-trip. The look on Lassie’s face when they sail over the cliff in that VW ™ van.. (Ok, Lassie jumps out at the last minute, sorry, if you haven’t seen it.)

  I should have jumped too, but we’d ‘bonded’, the three of us. Way back in April, Mae and June and me’d become a mini-item, you know; ‘The Four Seasons minus One’, a true one-hit wonder.. (anyone remember “Would Ju-ly to Me?”?) I had to go back to construction when the royalties ran out. Now where were I?

---

    Dead. Yeah, as usual I was dreaming I was.. deceased. Sleep, somebody once called it “Practicing being dead.”
And in this Dream there did come unto me Three Sisters, dressed in Crimson-white robes,(?) {ed-that’d be like, a gestalt pink.. Dream-Hues#2007A}, and the First One asked of me:
“ID please.”
“What for?”
“We like to keep on top of things”
“I’m sure you do”.

I opened a sort of satchel and paged through the documents, finding a crisp new Passport, inscribed in gold letters which appeared to be some ancient Hebrew script. Opening it I noticed the stack of green ‘pictures of presidents past’ someone had tucked away. Dollars? I hadn’t seen that currency in eons, not since the “Little Appalachia of the Cascades” episode, when me and Mortimer,’ the ex-con who made the pecan an icon of the Yukon’ had had to jump out the second-story window hand-in-hand. Yeah there was green on the lawn that night… Hundreds of hundreds, fluttering down while we waited; the sirens growing more insistent by the second…
   “Johnny Walker, is it?”
“Um.. yes please, Ma’am”
Sister Two, at the mention of commerce,( her bailiwick, I presume), took the baton on cue, and asked, with a knowing nod toward Predestination:
“That would be Red Label then, sir?”
“Why yes of course, and a fine choice, if I must say..
“I believe that’s my line”, she glanced at the script, and not immediately finding her place, flipped the page left, then right, and finally turned the well-worn booklet upside down, giving me a tired ‘whatever’ look, somewhat out of character.
“I don’t suppose one could purchase a novel here; I’m a passionate..”
Sister Three’s yellow eco-bag was quickly emptied of its contents: an attractive and eye-grabbing assortment of books, several of which I’d read, but luckily I spotted Ira Socol’s “The Drool Room”, which I’d been dying to read, guessing it might shed some light, or alternatively, throw a well-placed towel over the puddles of drool I’d had to navigate in my own youth..
“A fine choice” This from Sister Three, whose line, as it turned out, it, in fact, was. I quickly stowed the prize in my satchel, and returned to my Interrogation:
“Which leaves only The Three Questions..”
It was amusing to hear them speak in unison; and I replied, in as unequivocal a tone as I could manage:
“Shoot, ye weirdies”
“You’ve turned off the gas?” Sister One, back to the clipped manner she’d started with..
“Dutifully; but how did you know?” I hadn’t seen any ‘cooks-with’ category on the passport.
“It’s on the sign!” I’d caught the ear of a young asian girl, the next-in-line, in a line I hadn’t noticed forming behind me. I started to look around a second… for some sign, I guess, but the Second Question was posed before I had much of a chance:
“And you have finished your homework, haven’t you?
I knew what she was talking about. Jobs, obligations, bills, feed the cats.. I thought a second, remembering the endless lists, demands, lists of demands, and demands for lists..
“Yes Ma’am, to the best of my recollection.. up to the point where I was.. where I fell.. I mean, where it happened..”
“Then you’re not sure?” Spoken like Dershowitz on cruise-control.
Of course I wasn’t sure. All of a sudden I was mad.. well, disappointed. Sad; dying, one of the most important experiences in life, and I’d missed it.
“I don’t know how it happened, Sister. I wasn’t there.. I mean, one minute I was driving back from work, a car was coming, I tried to turn.. or did I just dream that… maybe I fell off a roof, I blacked out and that was it..”
Sister Two looked at One and Three:
 “Four”, she said, sotto voce, “Remind me to bring up going to Four Questions”
“And you cancelled the newspaper?”  Sister Three, looking watch-ward, but tactfully.
“That’s the third question?” I asked, disappointed again. Just when I was trying to turn the conversation to meatier issues.
“I thought they cancel you.. you know, like.. automatically… um.. when you ‘get dead'”, I continued.
“Who’s dead?” All three in unison again.
“Then why am I here?” I needed information fast. I gazed down at my hands while I waited for a long answer. No holes? Rules out one possibility, I guess..
“This is heaven, right?” I asked. Might as well find out, otherwise I’ll die stupid.
Sister two, my favorite for her Sandy Bullock eyes, smiled a smile so heavenly that I wasn’t prepared for the answer:
“Close, but no , Johnny, It’s the DUTY-FREE ™. Now get outa here, before you miss your flight!”

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New Xanga Feature: “Drag and Drop Comments” saves time, offers a wide variety of lifelike ‘reactions’, and include e-props, for greater realism. Try them now!

1) This is about baseball, right?
2) How can you pack if you’re writing dumb stuff like this instead?
3) Can you furnish a link to that movie? I must have missed it.
4) So where are you going, if anywhere?
5) Bon Voyage!
6) Good Riddance!
7) I read this listening to my I-pod™, powered by long-lasting Eveready™ Batteries
8) Line 40 contains a punctuation error; kinda ruins the whole post, no?

9) What’s ‘Little Appalachia’?
10) How come the girl behind you in line was asian?
11) Maybe it’s Chutzpah, but who the hell’s Dershowitz? Never heard of him.

Argumentum Ad Homonym

    Ok, I can’t do more than one cute bunny-rabbit post a month, so I guess it’s Brutus’ turn again.
I might have mentioned that I search Xanga. Usually the keywords are ‘Hebrew’,to find anyone to whom I can give free help with the language, or “Israeli”, just to keep up with the prevailing folklore, the love and the hate, the rumors of our demise or omnipotence. In this latter category I found a site whose owner had written a letter to the editor of her local paper, accusing one of its writers of engaging in ‘ad homonym’ arguments. The reporter had questioned her college president’s self-declared ‘prudent’ stance on not condemming Iran’s Nut-case-with-a-bomb, and also, if I read correctly, her refusal to condemn a petition to avoid contact with Israeli universities, (a boycott justified by our obstinate refusal to lay down and wait to be nuked, this time, into the sea). I gathered that the esteemed President considers the Holocaust a subject of continuing debate. Who knows what may turn up after all the archives have been made public; there may be dozens of duplicates in there, and while 6 million is admittedly a substantial body-count, 5,999,823 is quite a different number. So yes, prudence….
    And of course I happen to have received an exclusive copy of the Xangan’s letter charging ‘ad homonym’ and readers are welcome to judge it on its merits, both ideological and linguistic:

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Deer Missed-her Hack Rider!
 Yore a tack on pour Missus Williams misses the Point, sir. Yew think those Isrealis our just sitting over they’re, in there okupied lens, but I no better. Their hear, ewe know. I here them every knight, in they’re rose of tense, weaping end whaling about Pete- a-Pan… ore pan-pitsa, hoo cares, there back-words.
Anyweigh, Precedent Williams is a suite lady, sew let her a loan, end talk about the fax necks thyme, ass-whole! Shooting errors just hertz your sighed. I no Latin, (I was in Chilly, but peruse the same only diffront). Sew what your dune is ‘ad homonym’.Cut it out, dum jerk. Lern too right write, mebbe gogh two skewl like eye did. Its knot fare what yew dew, sew lever a loan,
Peggie from xanga

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I would like to believe that she received in reply a courteous letter like the following. Public opinion is important, but like respecting and healing the environment, the motto: “Think globally, but act locally” applies here, too.

My Dear Peggy:
Thank you for your heartfelt response to my recent article. I was moved by its abundance of alternate takes on this difficult issue, and expect to pass it on to my editor. Writing to a deadline can be a demanding business, and a letter such as yours provides a needed break from the tension. Please accept with our regards a copy of my recent light-hearted book, “ESL: English as a Silly Language”, and do continue in your studies, dear.
J. Greblos, Staff writer, Ithaca Times-Herald

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Notus Publicus ex Extremis: (‘A short statement, required in an emergency’), …(although elgan’s told me I daresn’t like, explain stuff):
‘Argumentum ad hominem’ is a Latin term (“arguing ‘against the man’“) for a spurious disallowed tactic, where the debater focuses on some supposed defect in his opponent’s character, instead of addressing the issue on its own merits. “You’re wrong cuz like, you’re an asshole and yer mama dresses you funny!”
‘Ad homonym’ is simply a confusion, which I caught in the letter-writer’s post: ‘hominem’ became ‘homonym’, a perfectly respectable name for words which ‘sound alike’ but have different meanings. We all make mistakes, and my spoofed ‘letter’ contains lots of them, plus engages in precisely the tactic she claims to be accusing the reporter of. And that’s why it’s funny… or was(?) …..try to disregard this if it was ‘superfluous’.. (whatever that means?)