The Tracey Museum

 

 

"SIMPATICO TO THE END"

 

"I never really thought of him as rich-rich. I knew he was rich, ordinary rich, but never rich-rich. I remember him as the friend I had when I was eight, when I peed on his head from a dock when he was swimming in a lake," said Steve Callighen laughing as he lit another cigarette and took a swallow. We were in St. Thomas Park, Boise, not a mile away from the Tracey Museum. Callighen was telling me about his suburban childhood, about his fears of everything, and about his precocious gang of pals known as the Diamonds.

"Leadership. There was no permanent leader of the group. Drifted from one to the other. Whoever had the better idea at the time. Go into a farmer's field, play baseball, sleepovers where permitted‑Sandy and June being girls were out of the picture on that score‑chewing-gum, baseball cards. Today I talk to kids that are how old we were then, and I'm surprised at how stupid they are. Maybe we were stupid back then, I don't know. But we felt special."

I asked if Sandy Nickels (née Maddix) and June Tompson were anyone's girlfriends.

"There was some action there, some doctor playing, you know. I had something for ... one of them. But it never got messy. We were all simpatico to the end ... to the end of high school. Then the drift-away happened slowly, you know. I moved, Sandy and Pete who had gotten serious in high school got married, and stayed living there, in that suburbia; Dan moved to Chicago for economics; I think June went off too, you can ask her about that. Mike stayed in town for a while, drifting around."

I wanted to know how Dan Tracey had contacted him five years ago. Did it come as a surprise?

"Started on Facebook, of course. Well, I knew about him before then. His name would show up in the news every once in a while, how he'd bought this company, how he was at Davos, always getting richer and richer. And I friended him, and as it turned out he'd already contacted Sandy and Pete. That's how it began, at least for me. We were all forty I think."

St. Thomas Park got its name from St. Thomas Aquinas, the 13th-century patron saint of academics and philosophers. The park's land was given to the city by Mary Magdalene College, a seminary that still occupies one corner of its seventy-five acres. In the distance we could see the monks reading, praying, and arguing. I wondered what they would have to say about what had happened to the museum a mile distant four years ago. Did they cheer it on?

I asked Callighen about the parents of the sextet known as the Diamonds. Was this the something that drew them together?

"I can't say. Our parents were like all the other parents. You know, our fathers would get drunk only on weekends usually. Sometimes they'd beat us, and we hated them. But we had to love them of course. It wasn't until much later that we realized what a rotten lot they all were. We all agreed to that, much later. Four yeats, I mean years ago."

Callighen remembers the invitation he'd received, for a special party at the Tracey Museum. He'd been living three states away at the time, but Dan Tracey offered to pay for the whole shebang. It was a group email, sent to Sandy Nickels, June Tompson, Pete Nickels, Mike Ouros, and himself. The email read, "I want you to come to a kind of a party I'm hosting at my new museum, now called (since last week) The Tracey Museum, in Boise, Idaho. I'll pay for everything. Please come! in the next two weeks. I want to have the party on Friday the eighteenth."

"I had nothing to do. Plus: getting the gang together again? Why not."

 

 

THE BANNER

 

Callighen remembers vividly his flight to Boise. "I'd never been on a plane before. Dan had insisted that I fly even though I would have just taken a Greyhound. This was early June, and he wanted us all to get there are quickly as we could. So the plane, on the plane.... I looked around me at all the passengers and I loathed them, one and all. If I hadn't been on it, I would have wished it would crash. They didn't have enough booze for me there. I knew the history of flight, and I knew exactly how they'd all come to be able to be on an airplane. I knew what airplanes do. I'd ground them all if I could: that's what I thought at the time. Fuckin' airplanes."

Dan Tracey had sent a car to the Boise Airport and Callighen found the driver in the terminal, with a whiteboard with STEVE CALLIGHEN held up high. The driver drove him up into the Boise foothills, to Tracey's mansion. He'd never seen anything like it before. The mansion had seventeen rooms and twelve bathrooms. Two saunas (indoors and out), two swimming pools (indoors and out), a bowling alley, a grand ballroom and a grand diningroom, and much more that Callighen was to discover over the following weeks, including the banner in the lower level.

A voice called as if through time: Dan Tracey's voice echoing off the Italian marble of the rounded staircase: "Steve Callighen! Well, I'll be!"

Callighen turned and looked up. Someone stood there who bore some resemblance to Dan Tracey's father, and Callighen told me, "I flinched at that moment. It was like the whole horribleness of childhood had come back to me. Dan Tracey's father was a brutal guy. He beat Dan and he hated the rest of us for liking him, really. So we all hated him, and there he was, on the stairs kinda. That's what I thought, looking up those stairs. I'm not at all expressing this right, I'm a bit stream-of-consciousness here. Then I came back to myself, saw that it was Dan up there, and I wondered, just for a moment, if I looked like my father, and if I scared Dan too in the same way. What is it, colloquially like."

Callighen told me that Tracey came down the stairs. He was dressed in a light blue summer suit, all clean cotton and silk, with a purple cravat at his throat and blindingly white tennis shoes down below. Callighen felt out-of-place, dressed as he was in blue jeans and t-shirt, and carrying a duffel bag with his few real possessions in it.

Tracey said to him, "I'm glad to see you," or words to that effect. "Sandy and Pete are already here, they're in the back swimming, you can see them in a bit, I want to show you to your room, come on."

He was led up the stairs as Tracey chattered on vaguely about what the party at the museum would be like. "We'll all be there, like old times, the Diamonds, shining like we couldn't do back then. And we'll have a purpose. Not that we didn't have a purpose back then, but now we can act on it."

Callighen's room was a well-lit room under the roof, not big but bigger than he'd lived in in quite some time. He put down his bag; "I hadn't said much;" and Tracey said, "I have to show you our motto. It's on a banner on the lower level, come see, come see."

They went to the lower level, below ground, and there, cut into crystal, each letter five inches tall, was what Tracey called his motto, and his banner.

The banner read, It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.

 

 

GET-RICH-QUICK

 

After he'd graduated from the University of Chicago with a degree in economics, Dan Tracey took a position at an investment firm located in one of seedier buildings on North Magnolia Avenue, not far from Wrigley Field. On summer days he could have undoubtedly heard the sound of ash striking leather and cork, and the roar of the crowd as another Cub made an all-bases-loaded run. The office manager of the company took him under his wing and taught him some of the counterintuitive fundamentals of making a killing in the stock market‑advice which the office manager was afraid to take himself, being as he had several dependents and that the get-rich-quick programme would require a person to go bankrupt precisely three times; it was a young man's gambit, and he thought Tracey could do with a youthful adventure. Tracey put the programme to effect, even cutting in the office manager for one percent. That office manager, so they say, is now living in the Bahamas, in great comfort, so it seems.

I have found it impossible to untangle all the machinations of the fifteen years that followed; safe to say that, yes, Tracey went bankrupt three times over, but every time he emerged from bankruptcy, strangely enough, he had more capital than before. By the time he was thirty-five he was the seventh-richest man in America, and the first-most eligible bachelor in same country. Yet it appears he stayed in a probable state of celibacy: in all my researches I could find no-one with whom he had formed any intimate relationship.

In the crash of '02 he managed to apparently play short all the fungible assets of Denmark and Austria, and emerged stronger than ever. How had he done it? The analysts and experts were stumped. But they were not too stumped to see he had become the richest man in America through hard work and raw cunning.

He never did anything but work, all sources say. He never took a holiday; he rarely left the continent. Everyone wondered what was the source of the flame that made him run; it seemed impossible that anyone could be so greedy as to amass wealth simply for the sake of amassing wealth. And yet that's exactly what Tracey did: he used his capital to create more capital, again and again and again.

Where was it all to go, and to what purpose? No-one knew; and when he bought Boise's Prickett Museum of Ancient and Modern Artefacts and Antiquities, noöne from Business Daily to the Idaho Statesman batted an eye. It should have looked unusual, in retrospect, since the rated capital gain on his net worth (available for estimation to all) was well below the purchase price of the museum, meaning his assets were taking a significant charge to the belly in purchasing it. Callighen, for example, was completely ignorant of the significance of his childhood friend's purchase.

"What did I know about buying museums? I didn't know he'd even done anything of the sort until I got there. Even when I understood that the guy I pissed on once upon a time had bought a whole friggin museum I didn't think it was anything. All along the way I thought everything he was doing made sense, mainly because everything a Diamond ever did made perfect sense."

 

 

FROZEN IN TIME

 

Callighen, as he told me, didn't know what to make of the engraved-in-glass motto. He told me that he said to his host Tracey, "That's interesting. Can we go outside?"

Tracey smiled, struck his friend on his shoulder, and said, "Sure thing. Nothing's going to happen till Mike and June gets here anyway. What do you think of June?"

Callighen asked, "What, what do you mean?"

Tracey said, "I mean do you have the hots for her?"

"What are you in, suspended animation, man? I don't even know what she looks like anymore."

As Tracey walked ahead to lead Callighen up and out he was saying, "You must have thought she was beautiful, right? She was back then, and now she'll be here soon. You could get together with her if you wanted to. It wouldn't matter to me in the least."

"I think you're the one who's got the obsession," said Callighen reportedly. "You have it bad?"

Tracey closed his eyes like he was deeply smelling something. "I've worked so hard for what's coming. My goal, my goal. Maybe." He changed track then, Callighen told me; like he was shifting into another register. Tracey said, "I've got to tell you about the prison we're all in. You probably don't know you're in a prison, but you are. We're all trapped by everything, especially by our own histories. Pasts, I should say. All that junk‑you remember‑is killing us. It's killing us. You pissed on me not because of anything other than your history.

"I haven't seen her for so long. I don't think she will have changed."

Tracey took Callighen out to the back, to where Sandy and Pete were. He hadn't seen them in fifteen years and he was relieved to see they looked very much the same. However that relief wore off slowly and by the time they were sitting down to dinner he was disappointed they were the same. "It was like they'd been frozen in time, just the same as they had been in high school. Shouldn't they have developed somehow? But nope, they hadn't matured. They had no kids, and I didn't ask why."

Callighen told me the other two‑Mike and June‑arrived the next day, and finally the Diamonds were all together again. After some time going over old stuff, Tracey clapped his hands and said, "Okay, let's go downstairs. There's some matters I have to tell you about."

They all went downstairs where he showed them the motto once again. "See? Does anyone disagree with what's written there? 'It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.' Does everyone understand this?"

Nods were general, and June said, "I've heard it before."

Tracey said, "It's one of the most famous quote from Jiddu Krishnamurti. He was a very wise man who rejected our conventional views of reality. Are we agreed that we are in a sick society?"

Nods were general.

"Well, let me tell you, we're going to do something very soon that will start a revolution. We, here, are going to change and heal the world. Us six.

"We have to start with breathing exercises. Everyone sit down, in a lotus position."

Callighen says he shrugged, willing to go along. "I was in a house of a very rich man, and I had nothing. I knew I could give him time to reveal what he was up to. We all sat down, and there was music, or more like sound effects playing, of the sounds of the sea. Maybe there was something else in it too. I thought I could hear someone whispering."

 

 

DUSTY BONES

 

Callighen gave me descriptions of the Diamonds (and I'll provide a description of Callighen); he told me,

"Sandy Nickels, or as I called her and as I think of her Sandy Maddix, had short-cropped yellow hair, very yellow hair. She hated it. She acted like a boy for the longest time, up till the twelfth grade, which is when she took Pete for a boyfriend. Then she became the most female thing in the world.

"But that maybe had something to do with Pete. Pete was big, hewas strong. He hadn't fatted out like me. As I said, we didn't have a leader really, but he might have been slightly more of a leader than the rest of us.

"Mike Ouros got good grades, probably because of the glasses he wore in school. His father beat him up all the time it seemed. Short and thin. He became an engineer, don't you know. Got married, had a couple kids he was afraid of.

"Now June, June Tompson, she was always hot. Aloof though. Even when she was, like, eleven, she was sexy. We all wanted her, but she was fragile. Bad home life of course.

"Then there was Tracey. I guess you've got an idea of him already. I wonder a lot about where he ended up."

(Steve Callighen is so scruffy you're surprised he's so literate. He looks like he just got off a boxcar. He smokes too much and says he drinks too much.)

"So it was us six, the Diamonds as we called ourselves, there at Tracey's mansion, doing what Tracey called preparations."

The preparations as they were called consisted of morning, afternoon, and evening sessions.

In the mornings, they'd meditate on cushions out at the pool, with the strange 'music' playing.

In the afternoons, Tracey would tell them about the nature of the world, about how everything was terrible and that only a revolution could solve it. "It's rotten to the core," he'd gently say (reportedly), "and there's nothing worth saving of it. Look at us, just look at us. What do we have to hope for in this world? A slow and steady decay, and the winds will wash our bones. Just another brick in the wall, just another number and name on a stone or an urn. This is not some metaphysical trick I'm going on about because what we're talking about here is about the real world here, not some kind of Utopia we've got to create. Leave the utopias for another time because you can't build them on the past, you can't build them on the present, but you can build them on the future but the problem is we're not in the future now are we?" Everyone was listening intently, nodding, and taking it in. "A church built on sand cannot last. That's scripture for you, and it may sound wise and everything, but we don't know if it's part of the problem, now do we? What if it's wrong? What if a church can be built upon sand? However, these aren't questions we have to concern ourselves about; the question can be answered tomorrow, or the day after tomorrow. It's not up to us because we're, as we've agreed, just dusty bones. We've got to have a sale, an Everything Must Go sale, to clear out our dusty tabulas and let other writings, new unforeseen writings, be inscribed there. This is the programme!"

In the evenings, they would play drinking games. Callighen always won.

 

 

IN THE MUSEUM

 

All this time, during our discussion, Callighen and I were walking, slowly, towards the museum itself, and as it came into view he said, "There it is."

I could not see that had very much altered. It was still the same squat square I had come across in photographs in my research, in all the newspaper and magazine articles that had been published five years ago, under sensational headlines that might as well have been printed in purple ink. Callighen said again, with something of a sigh, "There it is."

"Should we go in?" I queried.

"I don't see what the point would be. It's not the same any more. It can never be the same."

After their two weeks of psychological preparation, the Diamonds (reconstituted) set out for the museum. Tracey made sure none of them needed anything; "I've prepared the place. Everything we need is already there."

Callighen walked alongside a calm Tracey at the approach. Everyone was calm, at least on the surface. No-one said, "Party!" No-one was thinking of getting 'real drunk.' They felt like they had a job to do.

In the Etruscan room they took their sledgehammers and methodically, calmly, smashed all the terra cotta sculptures to bits....

There is no need to recount here the so-called 'blow-by-blow' of the complete destruction of the museum's artefacts. Other reports, I find, have covered it completely, and to them I direct the interested reader's attention, in the appendix. Suffice it to say that the destruction was a lengthy affair lasting until noon the day after the next day when they lay down their sledges one by one and surveyed the damage, looking for anything that escaped their methodical wrath. After a few more clashes and batterings, Tracey called a halt and made the group whole once again.

Tracey told them they had done as much as one group could hope to do, and that the next step was to promulgate their deeds to all and sundry. Each of them could contact whomever they thought fit to blazon their revolutionary acts to the skies, using print, Internet, television, radio, whatever it took. That was next.

They left the museum, filthy as they'd never been before, like they'd been little kids again but filthier this time for they cared not about any parental beating to come. Callighen told me, "Yes, we felt freer than we'd been in our lives. At least I did. It was an orgy of destruction, and we were all exhausted. We went back to Tracey's place to get some rest, clean ourselves up if we wanted to. Three days later we assisted Tracey at a press conference. The press was at his beck and call."

This reporter was at that conference when Tracey and his Diamonds explained what they had done and why they had done it.

It didn't go over well.

Tracey harangued away, and we were all puzzled about how it could have taken place. "The museum is simply ... gone," and the reporters gasped. "How could you destroy priceless works?" "Perhaps that they had no prices was part of the problem."

Clearly he was insane.

The Diamonds went back to his house, expecting at least some sympathy, but none came. They were condemned from all sides. Tracey explained it was all as Krishnamurti had argued, that no-one is a prophet in his home town.

"But," he reportedly said, "Maybe there's still something we can do."

Callighen tells that somewhere around that point he decided to leave. "I couldn't see anything else. Plus I wanted to get drunk."

Later, when the bodies of the five were found, Callighen was far away, on the other side of town, lying in a gutter, seeing nothing and hearing nothing; not even the sounds of the sirens.

"Donald Trump is stoking political violence!" said the man in the Che t-shirt

For Philly Who Unfortunately Already Had A Boyfriend When I Met Her

 

In 1983, Roger Waters took a look at Pete Townshend, saw a musician who left a band and went on to a hit-making solo career, and thought, "I can do that." He couldn't, and he's still not forgiven the world.

 

The Germans killed Roger Waters' father during the 2nd World War; this is the most important aspect of that particular conflict. In certain non-Euclidean geometries, it is a fact that 1 > 6,000,000.

 

Syd Barrett and Roger Waters: Invention, creativity, toxicity, domination, eccentricity, intelligence: The first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.

 

In January 1985, Bob Geldof called Roger Waters to see if Pink Floyd could perform at a summer event to be called 'Live Aid' that concerned Ethiopian famine. Waters said, "I'm all in favour of famines, but unfortunately David Gilmour is dead to me," and hung up before Geldof could explain the concert would be against famine. Only later did Waters discover that the money raised went to none other than the famed genocidal communist famine-author Mengistu Haile Mariam. Oh, how Waters kicked himself for putting his personal opinions ahead of the good of the Party!

 

***********

 

There it was again, that certain slant of light.

Ellie Greenwich sat in her kitchen--her parent's kitchen, as she'd started to call it--in May of 1958. The light cut across her parent's Formica table diagonally. She was looking at the light before she turned her attention to the source of the light--which was not the sun, but the boy next door.

There had to be a song in it somewhere.

Her sister was out there weeding the garden, turning the soil, and wetting the seedlings. Her shorts were short and her blouse was obviously too thin for the cold.

The boy next door came out of the house next door. Ellie focussed jetly upon him, but it had no effect. He went to the fence, and called to Ellie's sister, who also went to the fence. Ellie was invisible and mute.

A couple hours later, Ellie's sister returned from her visit next door. She was energetic, happy, flush. Ellie herself was quiet all that evening and all next day.

Seven years later, Ellie was introduced in New York City to a song called 'You Don't Know.' She liked it, and she sang it. She sang it well.

 

***********

 

One day, he'll come knocking on my door. He'll knock and knock until I answer. He may knock for a week, a month, a year or more. Still the knocking will be happening, and I'll be hearing the knocking even if I go to the other side of the apartment. Knock, knock, knock, sometimes as fast as my beating heart, or sometimes as slow as a clock's tick. All I know is the knocking won't stop until I answer the door.

He'll say, "It's time. You have to come with me."

"How much time do I have?"

"You time is up. Come along."

"There's just something I have to do."

"You have to leave it behind. Everyone has to leave things behind."

"What about Yukio Mishima?"

"That was drama."

"What about Sylvia Plath?"

"That was an accident."

"Was it?"

"That's what Alvarez thinks. Look, you're stalling. Come on. I've got a lot to do today."

"There's something not quite fair about all this."

"You seem to have mistaken me for a judge. I am no judge."

"There's got to be a loophole somewhere. I can't-"

"Come ON!"

.......On the other hand, I may answer the door as quickly as possible.......

 

***********

 

It was a fine afternoon at the Arecibo Observatory. Doctors Smith and Jones were looking for anomalies as outside the sweet birds sang. The 'scope had expanded its reception to the very limits of the spectrum, way out there--swimming in the delta waves--and let me tell you there's a lot of clutter to cut through. So there we are.

Smith threw down his pencil. "I can't get rid of all these anomalies!"

Jones came over handwringingly. "Perhaps it's nonanomalous. It could be ... systemic."

"All this weirdo data are coming from ... our own planet."

"That makes no sense. The big dish is s'posed to miss all our junk."

Smith picked up his pencil so he could throw it down again, twice. "Lemme holoscolapitulitize the data. Perhaps we can get an idea where all this power is coming from."

Smith holoscolapitulitized the data and created a map of the sources. They clustered oddly in two dimensions.

Jones said, "A hunch. Overlay this on a map of the western hemisphere."

Thus was done; the clusters corresponded to populous areas.

"It looks like ... humans create the most distillate energy ever known."

"That can't be true.... We are but ashes!"

 

***********

 

As a respite, Reginald and Geoffrey enjoyed a 'breather' in one of the saunas. They were at the Oasis Lounge, on Mutual Street, in good old Toronto, and they were discussing domestic œconomies.

Reginald said, "I must say I am abhorred by the commonplace referent 'wife-swapping' when it is used to speak of our present exchange."

"Hear, hear! Defensible self-interest means a benefit to both parties, both you and me. This became clear to me in the minutes after my John-Thomas exploded in your wife's mouth."

"Indeed, I know precisely how it works. Recall Bastiat's elaboration of Smith. Wealth, created solely through exchange, to have any moral basis must involve.... Sorry, lost my train of thought, thinking as I am of your wife's soft vulva and its taste on my tongue."

"Do you recall how our eyes met beneficially, with low deficit and great asset, in that sublime moment when all were engaged in coitus more ferarum?"

"How much richer we are now! If only there was some GDP-type quantifiable for this evening."

Their wives, looking lovely as naiads, came in to the sauna. "Fellows," greeted Beatrice.

"To what do we owe this pleasure?" inquired Geoffrey.

Imogene chuckled. "Husband-swapping œconomics!"

 

***********

 

I to this day do not know if only I heard it or if we all heard it or if I did not hear it at all or if we all did not hear it at all. Out on a road near a pond we all went, in our cars, late at night, to hear the sound. Free of moms and dads and in our teens we were, and there we stood as mute as we could so we could hear the strange hum on the road. We all thought it came from the south, and yet if one of us walked south the noise would leave. It was as if the sound came from a place that was not any where; this is why we were all sure it was a ghost that hummed the sound. What else if not a ghost? The sound was like a wire pierced by wind; we tried to say what it was but we all failed to a man. And yet since we got away from moms and dads we said we heard it free. This took place long in the past. To this day I do not know I heard the thing.

 

***********

 

Θεαίτητος: I just don't understand why Bernie Sanders is so popular!

Σωκράτης: It appears you believe your ignorance is proof of something.

Θεαίτητος: I am a reasonable man, ignoring your veiled insult. What I am saying is that I, as a reasonable man, cannot believe other minds have cogent arguments supporting Sanders.

Σωκράτης: I don't think your fallacy has been accounted for in the rubric of logical error. You have just created the "Argument from Ignorance."

Θεαίτητος: I am an artist!

Σωκράτης: Not so fast, Silky-Loins. Your argument is the worst of the worst. O, how the world has fallen! I suppose we are in the Pressboard Age.

Θεαίτητος: Wait, wait, wait. Does it not matter that I, reasonable man that I am, cannot understand something?

Σωκράτης: The result would be to discount to nullity the knowledge of others. The result would be a pure power struggle, beyond philosophy.

Θεαίτητος: What if I am not interested in philosophy?

Σωκράτης: Then I suppose you've stepped into the wrong dialogue. Go discourse with a Tyrant of Syracuse.

Θεαίτητος: I don't understand why you're being so hostile.

Σωκράτης: There you go again.

Θεαίτητος: This is not one of your better dialogues.

Σωκράτης: GIGO.

 

***********

 

3 X 17 = 51 (Dave Bartholomew and Jewel King, Thirty Years On)

 

Yes I'm three times seventeen, just made fifty-one

Now I'm three times seventeen, just made fifty-one

I'm staying at home to have myself some fun

 

Come on baby, let's watch some TV please

Come on baby, let's watch some TV please

Now that I'm an elder I just got to rest my knees

 

[scat: of mumbling, drooling, non sequiturs, half-remembered names, regrets brought up at the most inappropriate times, impotent rages, I forget the rest]

 

[tenor saxophone solo, during which I think how I complain vividly about the tedium of my life while at the same time lament that it will end soon, during which I think about all the opportunities I completely blew, irrevocably ruined, or arrogantly pissed away]

 

If I have to look way back to see when I did done, ain't nobody's business 'case I just made fifty-one

I'm three times seventeen just made fifty-one

Staying in baby to have myself some fun

 

If I fall asleep baby don't be mad at me

well now fall asleep baby don't be mad at me

'Cause I failed to launch, I'm a lazy and a used-to-be

 

***********

 

Today I read a monograph, 'twas called "The Conscious Mind"

'Twas all about how language rose from out primordy slime

And made us think we all had selves (illusiorily)

And shaped ourselves to falsely think we had autonomy

The book itself was written in a language clear and fine

It answered many questions, but none of them was mine

Was mine

None of them was mine

 

A television flick I saw about two lovers true

Escaping from the villains ('xactly why I never knew)

Until upon a beach in California of all places

They fell upon the sand and then intently pressed their faces;

The flick itself was pretty with a mise-en-scène so fine

It answered many questions, but none of them was mine

Was mine

None of them was mine

 

I went to hear a bishop preach about the worldly ways

And he explained it plainly how we're at the end-of-days

He told us of our origins, and how we came to be

And told us 'bout that blessed thing they call autonomy

The pontiff thus enlightened us with rhetoric so fine

He answered many questions, but none of them was mine

Was mine

None of them was mine

 

***********

 

¶You recall, truthfully, the beginning, when one of your father's sperm merged with one of your mother's ova ¶You were there, weren't you, when the matrix opened and you had your first good cry ¶Recall now your first step, with your hands away from any support, one foot lifted then the other foot lifted ¶Recall now the pride you felt having conquered spelling, the times table, clocks, maps, fire and water ¶Remember it, the time you almost went mad with desire for another person, cursing that you couldn't think of anything else and felt about to die ¶And you're certain to recall when you were forced to make a choice for no good reason, when A equalled B but you couldn't have both, forever and ever and ever ¶There you were when that pain in your side you expected to go away did not go away ¶Remember the day you no longer knew who the people winning popularity contests (Emmys, Grammys, Oscars) were ¶And there was a time, some time ago, when you noticed that everyone older than you was gone ¶And there you were, at the moment of your death, alone ¶remember remember when ¶You were there, always there

 

***********

 

‑What else has to be packed, Mother? We got most of the stuff.

‑Oh Father, I've barely started the bathrooms.

‑We can get all that along the way or when we get there. It's just toothpaste, bandages. Fifty bucks tops.

‑I'm sure there's something of value in there. Come along.

‑I don't see anything here. Like I said.

‑Look, Father. Look at this comb. This was Mary's comb.

‑We don't have to keep every little memory, do we? I loved the girl too but there has to be limits.

‑How can you be so mean?

‑We have to be going. The 'bus won't wait for us.

‑I want to take this comb.

‑Then take the comb. Anything else?

‑Can't you be patient for once? I have to check the stove. Go away for a while.

‑Why check the stove? It's going to be incinerated like everything else.

‑I'll feel better if I check the stove.

‑In three days it'll be molten elements.

‑That's three whole days, Father. I need peace of mind.

‑All done now?

‑Yes. Lock the door.

‑Why?

‑Just lock the door, Father.

And away they went, looking back at the planet Earth, for the last time, forever.

 

***********

 

There was a strike, and I was on the picket line. Someone said something about needing some goons.

Then I was at a dinner party, me and my shrink. There were three other people there; they had their shrinks there too.

Then I was the King of some place; everyone was trying to poison me. What had I done? Paranoia.

I gave cameras to monkeys and put the pictures on exhibit at the Brackett Gallery. (Why the Brackett Gallery?)

Jean and Joan‑talking to one I remember, while the other stared jealously.

Then I was asking Beatrice Somebody if she wanted to go to bed with me.

I was known as Jones and I crushed a faerie in a garden.

Then I was on a ferry going to Seattle. Wait‑I really did that. Must've been a day residue.

My sister and me wanted to see a movie, but the movie house was being bombed.

I burned a lot of paintings once; I could smell the smoke, three years later.

The federale arrived. They didn't like my tempi, they didn't like my keys.

How can I be remembering all these dreams today of all days? That I can must prove something divine.

 

***********

 

Wealth o' Nations

 

"My son: long ago, your great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather took a notion in his head, and this notion was this: to build an automobile, from scratch.

"He had the notion that some kind of hard material was necessary to make the body that would sit upon the wheels. By chance, someone mentioned metals.

"He died before he got any further, but your great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather continued his work. He searched for metal everywhere, and discovered it was often found in underground rocks. He dug for fifty years, getting nice-looking rocks.

"Your great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather continued the work. He thought: 'Can one melt rock?' It was a chore, but still he managed to concentrate heat to five hundred degrees: but died in the process.

"Let's skip some centuries. Your great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather hammered and beat metal into shapes that looked moderately automobile-like, but the pieces wouldn't stick together. So he, his son, and his son's son worked on making bolts.

"I am called to make a 'wrench.' Fortunately your great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather discovered 'measurements,' God rest his soul.

"And you, my son, will have your own son, and together you will continue the work."

"But dad: I'm gay."

"What?!? Oh well. It was a dumb idea to begin with."

 

***********

 

Prayer for St. Francis of Assisi, as I wait for my amazon.ca delivery of a biography of him

 

St. Francis: do you know how I want to know you?

Mary's aunt‑you know her‑Sister Helen MacDonell,

Of your order, of OSF, St. Elizabeth House,

Allegany, New York, near Olean, said this to me,

Go you John into our library and find a book

About St. Francis. We have plenty to look over.

 

I noted some titles there, and through amazon.ca

I found a book there called Francis of Assisi:

The Life and Afterlife of a Medieval Saint

And I put in the order at the same time

As I sent her Evelyn Waugh's devotional novel Helena

 

Now it is Friday (which is meaningful I think)

And I haven't seen her since Tuesday, in Hamburg, NY,

Where we parted ways, she into the clinic

To see about the thing on her octogenarian nose

And we across Union and Buffalo Sts to eat

 

When we came out her car was gone and later we learned

Whatever it was wasn't nose cancer, God bless.

 

The biography about you, Francis, was supposed to come today:

But it didn't; what are you trying to tell me?

 

***********

 

I'm burning for you tonight, Cheryl Lancastle,

I'm burning to see you as you were,

I burn to see you with these old eyes

As I used to see you when I wanted so much

 

To kiss you, when I said I wanted to kiss you

And you kissed me, right there on the street.

 

Why didn't I; why didn't you?

 

If we hadn't been junkies‑if we'd not been ourselves‑

O your chestnut hair, your pretty face‑

Cheryl Lancastle, I hope you're still alive

Because I have something to tell you

That's not what can be written here

 

This junkie here is melancholy here

Because if I had said clearly that I loved you

Cheryl Lancastle

You would have said yes to me.

 

This is the sense of death, this is the sense that

One's missed something, this is the sense that

She loved me but I didn't do anything about it

That there on Avenue Road when I said I really wanted to kiss you

You kissed me.

 

Cheryl, Oh Cheryl: do you ever think of me?

Do you love me like you did back there on Avenue Road?

This is the sense of death: me here, you where

 

***********

 

Jorge Luis Borges, Author of William Shakespeare

 

While we were wandering through the Plaza San Martin, Bioy Casares made to me an interesting observation. "You have had a hand in the popularization of Shakespeare in the Spanish-speaking world. In a sense, our Spanish-speaking sense of Shakespeare comes from your avant-garde influence; it is no longer possible to see Shakespeare in the Spanish-speaking world; we can see only Luis Borges's Shakespeare."

I thought he was almost certainly exaggerating for a moment, but then I got to considering this almost impossible idea. As with my character Pierre Menard, or perhaps how Kafka created his own predecessors, thereby altering them forever, it is possible to alter the past irrevocably if one is a powerful enough intellect.

I said, "Here in the Plaza, we are seeing plants unknown in the old world. These plants, no doubt, have influenced my ideas about William Shakespeare. Perhaps we are living in Caliban's Savage-speaking translation of The Tempest."

We then went on to consider a Spanish-language translation of Tobias Smollet's English-language translation of Miguel de Cervantes's Don Quixote; it would be a very different, and longer, book; we furthermore wondered how the Don's surname would be properly pronounced.

 

***********

 

Voiceovers for Terrence Malick to use MUST GIVE CREDIT

 

 

God. How did you get to be so big? What were you like as a little baby? Did you cry a lot?

 

This path I'm on, it's in the dark woods, and it doesn't seem like a path. I should drop some scat.

 

Do you remember the child you once were? Do you wish you could punch him in the head?

 

Why do we capitalize proper names? I think we should capitalize everything other than proper names sometimes.

 

This consciousness we have is sized as the head of a pin. We have to contract.

 

Where did all this dirt come from? I remember once hearing that soap does nothing but get dirty. Why not ... get rid of the soap then?

 

Hello mother. Hello father. Here I am in. A Guadalcanal of the mind.

 

Walmart. Aren't there enough walls in the world already? Seriously.

 

I don't observe the sky as often as I should, even though I know it's like chewing on only one side of one's mouth.

 

The world keeps getting bigger and bigger, and it scares me to death. Oh look. Electric disco roller skates.*

 

*MUST CREDIT SHARY FLENNIKEN

 

***********

 

The problem as I saw it was that whenever you went to the top of a mountain in Bolivia the top of the mountain was also Bolivia.

This logic worked with the lakes too. Whenever you swam to the bottom of a lake in Bolivia the bottom of the lake was also Bolivia.

Naturally for me that mean that I had to take over every single inch of Bolivia. I figured: Why should the Bolivians have all that space they didn't even use that often?

I couldn't stand to see such waste.

It drove me crazy!

My invasion plan was successful. I came into possession of Plurinational State of Bolivia.

The Bolivians didn't know what hit them if they knew what had happened. (Understand that my takeover wasn't announced anywhere in the world.)

It was mine, to the tops of the mountains and to the bottom of the lakes.

I constructed domes at the bottoms of all their lakes which took some time considering they have 9,289 of them.

I built towers at the tops of their mountains which took some time considering they have 122,654 of them.

I did wonders for their country. I'm expecting medals any day now.

 

***********

 

Our House

 

Have you ever heard of "Home Box Office"? It's a cable television station. It's abbreviated as "HBO".

So anyway some people from 'HBO' showed up at our door today. They explained (there were three of them, two women and one man, but they all spoke with the same mind) they were looking for a typical Toronto house in which to shoot an episode of a TV show they were doing. They said they'd pay for us to live in a hotel for the four days it took. A nice hotel.

I was interested. I asked them what they were going to shoot. They said, "It's a murder thing. Story is, chick gets kidnapped by the bad guy. The chick is pretty inconsequential; we're just using her to set up that our bad guy is a bad guy. So in your house he rapes her, tits everywhere, HBO trademark, then he chops her up and puts her in garbage bags."

"In our house?"

"We'll clean up after. There's gonna be lots of blood."

I thought about it; they could see me thinking about it.

"We'll give you $10,000 extra."

"$10,000."

They glared at me. "This isn't soft-core-pornography; this's HBO."

 

***********

 

Elton John - Goodbye Yellow Brick Road

 

What did we call those big things with the big speakers we suburbans played records on in 1972? The word 'console' comes to mind. It sat on four legs in the den proportioned like a coffee-table. A bunch of LPs were leaning against it: old jazz stuff, West Side Story, a Spike Jones record, all of history was there leaning.

Then--I guess my brother David bought Elton John records. They would up there--Honky Chateau, the live record 11-17-70, Tumbleweed Connection--and that console played them all again again.

The old jazz stuff LPs we ran a knife over to see how the needle followed the groove. Kids.

We heard in these Elton John records ideas expansion. I don't want to qualify this unduly. When I was 9, ignorant, I heard an idea that the world was a whole lot bigger than a den with a console.

Now I'm fifty-one--(older than Don Quixote)--listening to this record. I can't judge it because it's been bred-in-my-bones. "I cannot disavow this disk for to do so would be to disavow my whole heritage."

Recordings are situated in retrospect. Records are sweet, and melancholy.

 

***********

 

We now join the short story already in progress.

ditor along with me," he said, "because she knows stuff about publication law."

The officer looked them both over once more. "It's a serious charge, young man. I hope you are taking this ... seriously."

Victoria said, "He is, I know it. He was newsgathering, he didn't know what he was shooting."

The officer looked down at his report. "A topless protest. And you felt all right filming it."

Victoria answered for Bob, "Videotaping to be correct, though I suppose there's not much of a difference."

"Not to the police."

"And how was he to know this woman was only fourteen? It was a public event, and we are allowed to videotape public events."

"None of that matters to The Law. You have been charged with creating child pornography, and the facts are clearly against you."

Victoria put her hands up, partly as a defensive gesture and partly as an offensive gesture. "He was only doing his job."

"Yes, and that's why your television network, that's why we're looking into broader charges. In today's atmosphere, the creation and dissemination of

We interrupt this short story to bring you a special update.

 

***********

 

Trying to catch up with consciousness, I believe I am always behind it.

I am aiming for unmediated immediacy, yet there's a something that holds me back; I do not believe this is not entirely not by choice.

At the chronological frontier of my existence (otherwise known as experience) I indisputably am, yet this is merely the raw material from which I create my beliefs and so on.

What can possibly be there, at this α point of being? Can it be that I cannot get there because I am afraid of what I may find there?

And a voice said, You are afraid of what you will find there, and with good reason, for this is what is here, says the immediate; for here, in the immediate and of the immediate, is a horrific nothingness that is the nothingness of the non-conscious; the nothingness which you cannot comprehend no matter how you try; the unnameable horror of the abyss, at the brink of the irrational and chaotic, where all is mute and brutal; stay back, stay away from the ledge; do not fall into madness.

The voice was from the future of my consciousness. (Not from my experience's future.)

 

***********

 

RIGHT-NESS U-NIT

A portable personal apparatus that maintains, monitors, and ensures the bearer's cognitive fitness.

 

Due to circumstances, I could no longer avoid the appointment. So there I was, at my mechanic's office, at 10:30 of a Tuesday.

"I've been avoiding this," I told him, "but there's a lot wrong with it now." I showed him my rightness unit. "Look. This doohickey here, the screw's broken off flush. Can it be gotten out? Do you have some special tool?"

My mechanic looked it over, frowning or maybe disapproving. "Looks pretty bad. There's a back-up, though, over here, if you take off this plate." He brought out some tools and unscrewed the plate. "Oh dear."

"I was going to mention: I'd been getting warnings from the vision part about there being a fail for the back-up some months ago, but I ignored them."

"This is pretty bad. You should have come to me sooner. There's another way, let me see." He attached it to some kind of diagnostic thing and all lights turned up red. "There's no hope. It can't be fixed. You're gonna have to fork out for another one."

I stared at him blankly. "How do I do that?"

 

***********

 

DOES THE INERTIA OF A BODY DEPEND

UPON ITS ENERGY-CONTENT?

 

By A. Einstein

September 27, 1905

 

The results of the previous investigation lead to a very interesting conclusion, which is here to be deduced. I based that investigation on the Maxwell-Hertz equations for empty space [...]

[...] (i.e. E=mc² - ed.) [...]

[...] If the theory corresponds to the facts, radiation conveys inertia between the emitting and absorbing bodies.

 

***

 

223 Comments

 

Pedro Dimaggio 10 minutes ago

LOL.

 

Duke of Prunes 13 minutes ago

F=UC^K

 

Carrie Underpants 18 minute ago

This is garbage. Kids are so stupid these days. FAKE

 

AaaaaartFag 25 minutes ago

I knew about this for a long time cuz Jesus told me

 

IHEARTSCIENCE 28 minutes ago

Doesn't this shithead know that the science is settled? 97% of science agrees with Newton

 

Pontius → IHEART SCIENCE 27 minute ago

Yer an idiot

 

IHEART SCIENCE → Potius 26 minutes ago

Least I can spell

 

Pontius → IHEART SCIENCE 24 minutes ago

Piss off stupid wanker

 

Duke of Prunes 29 minutes ago

F=AR^T

 

Lauren Stevenson 31 minutes ago

My brother-in-law paid off his car loan using one simple trick. See how! http://www.seabluerose.de.pl/

 

Pedro Dimaggio 38 minutes ago

Link broken

 

***********

 

'The Witches' Explainer

 

1st W: Our numbers are down. Way down.

2nd W: Maybe we should move our headquarters to New England.

1st W: The woods? You want us to go live in the fucking woods?

3rd W: Why do you have woods? They're very private.

4th W: Our husband Satan likes the woods.

2nd W: But where can we get new women to join our order? Not even witches live forever.

5th W: It's a wilderness out there. Almost a jungle.

SATAN: Hello, my lovelies. We're all heading to the Americas.

2nd W: We were just talking about that!

6th W: Is this more magick?

SATAN: Not at all, not at all. You see, there's a whole bunch of puritans heading there, and they pretty much don't believe in external evil. They think it mostly only comes from their own souls.

7th W: Arrogance!

8th W: Pride!

SATAN: Rockin'! So we can kill whole families and take their nubile daughters very, very easily.

3rd W: Easy pleasy!

6th W: Cherries for the choker!

SATAN: Get your stuff together, we leave tonight.

1st W: Woo-hoo!

3rd W: The Anabaptists I hear are especially utile.

SATAN: Massachusetts Commonweal, here we come!

 

***********

 

Dénouement

 

I was standing outside my place of work, about three metres from the door, enjoying a cigarette. A security guard came up to me and said, "You can't smoke this close to the door."

I said, "Says who?"

He pointed to a sandwich-board sign. "Says that."

I read the sign out loud. "No smoking within fifteen metres of the entrance for a greener tomorrow."

"See?"

I said, "But that's not why I'm smoking, so I don't see how that applies to me."

"What?"

"I am not smoking within fifteen metres of the entrance for a greener tomorrow. I'm smoking within fifteen metres of the entrance for pure pleasure."

"You know that's not what it means."

"It means what it says. If I saw someone smoking within fifteen metres of the entrance for a greener tomorrow, I'd tell them, 'Hey! No smoking within fifteen metres of the entrance for a greener tomorrow!'"

"You'll get in trouble for this."

I put out the cigarette with my shoe. "Not until the sign is changed."

The security guard stomped off, knowing he'd been thoroughly beaten.

The clouds above parted, and Aristotle looked down. He said, "Good one."

I said to him, "Thanks, Ari!"