Futnuckery. A Helluva Vision. The Film-Flam Man. Conjugates of the Infinite.

We all hate Nicky just enough.  You know, enough to make it interesting. Wayne Ye Ray and Magus Simpson had bumped into him at Popeye's, at the Travel Plaza, and they were cajoling, taking a table to watch the Tuscaloosa at Conway game, you know, Chanticleers and all, the whole thing a bramble bush of absurd sh*t talk. Wayne was gonna make an NFT of a candid shot of Nicky's penis, and Nicky had made an agreement to purchase it in Cardano altcoin. If many of us ever caught Nicky in a dark coroner, I tell you, it would be unmentionable, the desolation. They were also on about Neil Armstrong omitting a word from his transmission from the moon.  They wanted, "A magnificent desolation", but got "screw the Erf, meesh negroes." "But Jews are white, too" Nicky said, and all the while Magus was uncomfortable as hell, like he had pebbles in his shoes or something, something he needed to tampa down, ya know? There were a few times there where I would imagine

Lysander and Cleanthes were walking, as it were, on their way to the Great Capitol on the Delta.  Each had his cloak, his stick, and his pack, while Lysander also carried a great number of scrolls.  They were on their way to the Prefecture which was somewhere therein, somewhere near the northern quarter of the city, along the wide way of cobbles. They happened upon K. T. Baer, a European barbarian of merit, a barbarian, no less, but renown too for his assured merit of finally learning a few words in the language of the natives.  K. T. wore a cloak colored like donkey feces, and had a face-full of hair, but a smile, toothey, which looked like a smile of course, but recalled to some of the natives of angry dogs baring their teeth to ward off pray. "Could you, do you, edify, my outlander friend?" asked Cleanthes. "As in how, friends?  Both of you at the same time?" said Baer. "Something of the Way Of Heaven, if such is not too great a burden upon that Ethno-Caucas

"Such was the way, gratitude was expensive, and revenge cheap."  -paraphrase of Edward Gibbon I was sitting there with my Beech Nut and Miller sawing over a ream of turkey.  I had been accosted by street toughs earlier, beaters and coffee can exhaust, coffee can speakers and such, accosted, left for dead, left to put my shirt back on with one hand while holding my dignity, forever, in the other hand. There he was, the Cheever, and sometimes when one is in mind he brings his s elf to pure physical presence. "WELCOME TO FOOT-" and there it was. "BALL!" In the course of human events, time and circumstance stand still for no man, posterity only smiles upon the most fortunate usually, and a desultory character grows its own tree of shames and woes. The first dark skin off the boat it was, some five hundred years ago, some Pilgrims, and some Injuns, red skins, darkies and chalky.  Good old irrepressible Chalky, churning that butter into cream, Horatio Alger. Wha

The fastidious trappings, trimmings and downright dirty traps of any epoch of the last so many thousand years:  not that you wanted, but were convinced you needed.  As a media man said a few days ago, "his cellphone costs more than a refrigerator".  Nothing prevented me from tai chi and a walk, a blessed tonic of silence, and then a blessed tonic of music. The walk costed nothing but calories, of which i had a few to spare, i attest. I was being asked what i liked; in lifetimes worth of advertising data harvested from my activities, they decided on a more low tech, far less subliminal or sublingual: just pose the question to me outright.  I could but give them my opinion, it shapes what little experience i have with meta platforms, so i gave of that infinite supply of coin; the question itself as much an overt concessation to the necessity of my presence in front of their advertisements. Far more important people in my sphere more often took my opinion in a leaf of their opin

Good ole cuz. It was a legendary story, and usually, our sensibilities keep us from sharing it to too many outsiders, but there was a cousin. Let's call him Boo Jack, or Grape Nut or Apple Jack.  Names aren't that important, yer know, yarblockos. He had won the princely sum of 10 million in one of the lottery pools.  And back in the day when this happened, they did indeed publish the names of all the winners, just know. On Thursday, he claimed his winnings then drove away in the afternoon. Monday morning, there he was, overdrafted in his bank account, same clothes, same truck, same old stupid Grape Nut of a cousin he was. In fact, he hadn't even changed his underwear, but came back from the weekend broke, and less than broke, because remember he's overdrafted at the bank. He's in the hole, is this Grape Nut, Honey O, Sugar Smack. The thing was, we could but wonder what in the heck happened to his 10 million in just a few days. We never knew, and he never told.  Thes

On the mountain top, there is nowhere to go  but down. From the bottom, spiritually, physically, the world is opened-up and even the least little thing is suddenly become a probability: even spitting on one's on shirt. Confuseus came upon Hepzibah, who was downcast, thoughts elsewhere.  Hepzibah told Confuseus at length that he had been at the top of the mountain, but was finding now that all else seemed so insignificant in the offing. Confuseus wrote in his scroll, "After the mountain top, all else is failure and despair." But Confuseus had known days of want and worry, and new the endless trail of possibilities afforded to people that were on the bottom in so many ways. In other words, when the container is empty, even the least bit is gain.

Along November-not in December-came the fireflies glowing and floating through the air, and for a moment, a delicate beautiful amber moment, I forgot almost what and who I was. Be it for an evening, an hour, between selling breaks, I forsook all that I was and was as something new entirely, a member of the FBI, or the only white in a community of negroes, I was. Along the evening, the things took to the air and whispering amongst themselves, danced to some music that was fit and set for them and them alone; I could but watch, and in my forgetfulness, smile, a sort of ghost aphasia that would overtake me in certain periods. There were time theories, political rhetoricians, and essayists on history and a myriad of other subjects, between bleatings and theory, the would pee off the end of the porch, all over chicken feathers. What could I say, but the past was an argument, less settled than set, and the future was some sort of vaguery that was setting like gelatin as we ourselves sat and

"--Nay, Traveller! rest.  This lonely yew-tree stands far from all human dwelling: what if here no sparkling rivulet spread the verdant herb; what if these barren boughs the bee not loves; yet, if the wind breathe soft, the curling waves, that break against the short, shall lull thy mind by one soft impulse saved from vacancy."   - William Wordsworth (Lines left upon a seat in a yew tree...)

How quickly all things disappear, in the universe the bodies themselves, but in time the remembrance of them; what is the nature of all sensible things, and particularly those which attract with the bait of pleasure or terrify by pain, or are noised abroad by vapoury fame; how worthless, and contemptible, and sordid, and perishable and dead they are-all this it is the part of the intellectual faculty to observe.  To observe too who these are whose opinions and voices give reputation; what death is, and the fact that, if a man looks at in itself, and by the abstractive power of reflective resolves into their parts all the things which present themselves to the imagination in it, he will then consider it to be nothing else than an operation of nature; and if any one is afraid of an operation of nature he is a child.  This however, is not only an operation of nature, but it is also a thing which conduces to the purposes of nature.  To observe too how man comes near to the deity, and by wh

In what deeps, little stormcloud? hissing and losing substance,  should I still,  ignoring the kicks, call you Kaitlyn? Don said, like Chris had said, "We're all gay until its our turn." Ching Wua news reporting went level W and the little men, the little men from the Pleidaes. Those pulled at Caitlin's toes, even as she kicked against the pricks and the pounded the posts, still there were, on these serene streets, a cadre of restless ghosts. It was from the Don, the sancten'onus on Ron, and the reporter's hair, fear-bleached white, heard some from Mike. Mike Jay Pence. That is. Traffic lights and girls scouts on bikes. I said "Caitrin" again, and away my troubles went.

  "do not go gentle into that Good Night, rage, rage against the dying of the light..." Frankie Goodnight was a vicious bastard, hosting and dictating to the local AM.  He had a playlist and they were forbidden from deviating from his chosen works as Program Director. They noticed they would get dollars from Terry's Notions, but not Brady's Radials and Oil-Up.  They hired a 75/hr consultant to work on the problem, but all the time held Frankie's playlist as a sacred writ. They were playing too much 1979-1985. Everybody knew it. Even Frankie, but truth was, Frankie liked it. They would play deep cuts of a few 80s people, like Digger Jackson, and Dirt Road Joe, but not things like King Biscuit Talent Hour and others. So many others under the sun. Meanwhile, listening to that station, I wrote my first book, a lot during the hours of the one-legged DJ. I had dozens of dollars coming to me for that nine weeks of writing work. And one review, that bad, saying basically,

 Emotional Perspective(The Reasoned Life Chapter Two) “When in disgust with fortune and men’s eyes, I alone beweep my outcast state…” -William Shakespeare “After eating my cookie, I could cry because the cookie is gone.   Instead, I can be happy that I had the cookie at all.” -Cookie Monster     One could be sad for any number of reasons.  Every few minutes, somewhere in the world, a newborn baby dies.  A mother weeps.  We too could unfurl our sensitivities and wail constantly for those and any number of harsh aspects of existence, and thousands more injustices that occur all the time.     There is ample reason to despair.     However, the fact is that despair is hard on a person, it taxes the body and mind unduly, and many times, needlessly.  The blood pressure is made erratic, the countenance dour, downcast, and the general outlook, bad.  There are rumblings in the scientific distance of bad mindset destroying health in a general sense, nothing specific.  It reeks of the old medicine

"The present is an age of talkers, and not doers; and the reason is, that the world is growing old.  We are so advanced in the arts and sciences, that we live in retrospect and dote on past achievements." "...a mind reflecting ages past, a voice like the echo of the congregated roar of the dark rearward abyss of thought.  He who has seen a mouldering tower by the side of a crystal lake, hidden in the mist, but glittering in the wave below may concieve the dim, gleaming, uncertain intelligence of his eye: he who has marked the evening clouds unrolled(a world of vapours) has seen seen the picture of his mind, unearthly, unsubstantial, with gorgeous tints and ever-varying forms.... " William Hazlitt, defining his own age while being seemingly bedraggled and jaded against future advancements in the arts and sciences....

They were saying our thoughts are part of God, the fringe of the body, and the mainstream agreed so far that God knew all the thoughts of meager old man. They were saying our thoughts were light, and had been said by Christ himself not to hide the light. They were saying we were and are birds, grass and flowers, and so much we see not so much of that in the interim, but its there, lingering, like a rush of blood at a certain smell, or so forth, something of the old natural. Of the natural, I was one time fortunate enough, a cheap analog watch had kerflopped on my wrist while I worked, and I, looking up at the sun, and guessing on how much of the work was done at that time, was able to set the watch within ten minutes of the real Eastern Standard Time(New York, Sao Paulo). Meanwhile, my more financially successful betters have people calling them and telling them what to say. Of filth, there is some on my socks, and much less filth collected in my mind, not a venture capitalist unction

She might be wondering today, despondently, whether her cheekbones are broad enough to bestride the divide between what remains of the mainstream GOP and the "nutcase caucus" that sustained losses in the mid-terms. David said we're trees, and the Golfer "destroy the media and the Justice Department" Cabal are but chaff, carried on a spit of wind, when they really "losed" instead of "wind". Guess OJ Cinnamon got tripped-up on his own lips. I could set all that aside, yer know, and turn to some Bible teaching or some other, and meanwhile, other things on the boil and so forth, such as wanting all votes to be done and paper, then bitching because they didn't get counted, all the millions of some votes, in one night. Too indignant perhaps, brain defunct from toxic hair products, to realize that the gift of storyline for a week of shows is really a gift, where some recycle the narrative, and not a cause to scream for the manager.  

They were calling for an Atlantic tidal wave in the colder gray water, a sea of red crustaceans, migrating that season would come colliding with the coastal areas. But red wave collide into blue wall. Noddington Bear meditated and mediated on the Way of Heaven, stuck to Weather Channel in his arm chair.  "Its like the makings of my Saturday evening meal, prior to taking to the shows" he was saying to himself, jubilantly in his own downcast way. Along the shoreline, there was so much crimson watched up, some of the locals had tried the phrase Blood Tide, in the County Colossus newspaper. There was a boy walking along the shoreline that actually got washed into the ocean, a lone fatality, and you know, somebody had to be a witness, or its like, it didn't happen, or they don't acknowledge it.  Jim Cantore had stood further inland at a strip mall, then later sauntered down to the seafront to look at all the washed-up dead and dying crustaceans. Somewhere around Kill Satan

I had some cigars and stuff, and it was all Plato and heaven, and I was rather off in a eyes-open dream.  There was talking of genital torture to promote nervous sensitivity, or as it were, capitalize on it, and I kind of cringed remembering old degenerate pirate porn from much older times, vast stockpiles of various styles and genres, whatever would spin the Barbour pole, and all that, whatever they just thought was funny, or hot, or funny while being incidentally hot, and the whole thing ironically, was in its irony a kind of taboo titillation of really doing something somebody is not supposed to do. Reasoning all this, blood glucose taking a quick dip, cigar in the fingertips, kind of shooting my self in the head rhetorically for the sake of just feeling something in that kind of flat valley blood glucose flatline numbness that could just come over you. Someone was saying Honore d'Balzac covers everything, and I thought that was that kind of stupid Nazi engineering optimism, jus

Sergio Donati.  Gave us a new vision of a clownish kind of impotent man, one who was so cynical as to burst in the laughter, the post-John Ford version of the Joker, in it for not his own end, but finding a slot for himself near the pocket, in the grand design, and flapping his butterfly things towards that. Meanwhile, quick-drawing people. Bored, he would toy with them, like a bored cat playing with specks of fuzz and lint. He had an ascension, or an assention, as it were, one or the other, something of a woman with lawnmower oil in her hair, and what we would all give to be part of that American Graffiti just one more time, where every night is Saturday night. There was no love interest.  Wha--?  It was too busy being silly, I suppose to give time to the energized toil of tilling the millage, tiling the mileage, slipping the footage, and the laying or rail, with the laying of rail set aside in conversations in some street side cafe, set aside for other works. Sergio "Fern"

He was standing there, thumb up his butt, other hand pawing around stupidly.... "I know what you need." The line between perception, reality and thought was quite clear, despite the givens, and I shook my head in the negative, unwilling to brook quite a dispatch from his stable of ineptitudes and fancies. I had drawn the Queen of Pentacles in my deck, and was bidden to take to my arm chair for a dedicated preamble of musing to the fates, of them and for them, pondering their horizon line, among other things, my own horizon line, left for another day. I watched a student of John Ford, the applecart he was toting, jostling and jiggling on cobblestones in a foreign land, and fountains and such, statuary and stuff like that, angels pissing into pools for people to drink.  The tarmac was in a changeable type of condition, with fartings of weather, that clamoring and cajunking in our ears as we walked along the way, and I was guessing my heart rate, looking for that "fat burni

Not all to that bright station dared to climb; And happier they their happiness knew, Whose tapers yet burn through the night of time In which suns perished: others more sublime, Struck by the envious wrath of man or God, Have sunk, extinct in their refulgent prime; And some yet live, treading the thorny road, Which leads through toil and hate, to Fame's serene abode.

In the desert I saw a creature, naked, bestial, Who, squatting upon the ground, Held his heart in his hands, And ate of it. I said, “Is it good, friend?” “ It is bitter—bitter,” he answered; “ But I like it “ Because it is bitter, “ And because it is my heart.” -Stephen Crane There I was at the end of my rope, thinking I would pray for deliverance, something unique and beneficial for just me. I could use some help, feeling long on truth and short on providence. We’ve all hit that low-water mark at some point in our lives, when providence seems far away and no solution seems probably. I wanted some kind of divine intervention in my life, something of a surprise, and I thought, like some say, that I might use my force of will to precipitate something of a miracle in my life. But I remembered others who had suffered through unemployment, eviction, car repossessed by the bank, and other maladies. I thought to myself, “am I any

Frankie "Taco Stand" Williams? Is not a problem, I tell you. Nothing a two-hour faceplant can't cure. I don't get to catch-up on some of these undesirables as much as I might like.  "Disposables" as the militia call their titular figureheads, but pasties they send to sit through the "procedurals". I had a predeliction that I'd care less and less, participate less and less, and be misinterpreted more and more. I was in town at the craft store, just getting some good Uniballs and sketch paper, and there were a couple of farmhands hauling stuff to the stables.  I'd wave and keep going, you know, doing the old Dr Pepper Communion between puffs a White Owl.  If that country preacher could have communion with a Sniggers bar, then I could probably do that with Reese's seasonal stuff, even if it was foreboding and marginally Satanic: to repurpose the evil unto the cause of the just. I was thinking of O'Shaughnessy, kinda tickled about it, h

Mark "O.J." Peters was lounging at the vegetable stand, bored, twiddling his thumbs.  I was wondering, but didnt care enough to ask, whether he had big ideas about other people's money. Arent choo even interested in that? Ask the advertisers.  His butt-f*cking nonsense is popular, to an extent.  Thats their only metric:what sells, that is. Orange joo even worried about knocking that stupid little ball in the hole, having time for that, lawn hockey?

The Sun's eye had a sickly glare, the Earth with age was wan, the skeletons of nations were around that lonely man! Some had expir'd in fight--the brands still rusted in their bony hands; in plague and famine some! Earth's cities had no sound nor tread; and ships were drifting with dead to shores where all was dumb! Yet, prophet like, that lone one stood, with dauntless words and high, that shook the sere leaves from the wood as if a storm pass'd by, saying, we are twins in death, proud Sun, thy face is cold, they race is run, 'Tis Mercy bids thee go. For thou ten thousand thousand years hast seen the tide of Human tears that no longer shall flow. -Thomas Campbell I beheld a moment, staring into the sun, impertinence, high-cheek bones, a chorus belying the event: a din of demons perhaps, heralding the event. I rolled over and there was my fair one, lovely huge dark eyes and all, empty-headed lover of things mine. And upon the stage, the poor player fretted, making a

The partial becomes complete; the crooked, straight; the empty, full; the worn out, new.  He whose desires are few get them; he whose desires are many, goes astray.   Therefore the sage holds in his embrace the one thing of humility and manifests it to all the world.  He is free from self-display, and therefore he shines; from self-assertation, and therefore he is distinguished;  from self-boasting, and therefore his merit is acknowledged; free from self-complacency, and therefore he acieves superiority.  It is because he is thus free from striving that therefore no on in the world is able to strive with him. That saying of the ancients that the partial becomes complete was not vainly spoken:  all real completion is comprehended under it.

"There is a painful confusion in my brain, which refuses to delineate distinctly succeeding events.  Some the irradiation of my friend's gentle smile comes before me; and methinks its light spans and fills eternity--then, again, I feel the gasping throes--strewed with foam, and our skiff rose and fell in its increasing furrows. Behold us now in our frail tenement, hemmed in by hungry, roaring waves, buffeted by winds.  In the inky east two vast clouds, sailing contrary ways, met; the lightning leapt forth, and the hoarse thunder muttered.  Again the south, the clouds replied, and the forked stream of fire, running along the black sky, showed us the appalling piles of clouds, now met and obliterated by the heaving waves.  Great God! And we alone--we three--alone--alone--sole dwellers on the sea and on the earth, we three must perish!  The vast universe, its myriad worlds, and the plains of boundless earth which we had left--the extent of shoreless sea around--contracted to my v

Thank Christ and thank the world.  They told us He'd come back, and the manifestation is ongoing; we're making it happen, looking for the joy of the world to return. "Not as I would, but as thou would." The clouds this morning parted like a curtain as the sun neared breaching the horizon; it was cosmic, almost miraculous, almost too perfect, and left in the sky after were joyous downy wisps. Christ manifesting as an optimism that cannot be dispelled. "He leadeth me beside the still waters..." Indeed, our peaceful hearts are the still waters, not striving, not jumping over one another for pieces of graft or gristle, but peaceful and still, and we are to be lead, as instinctively as the sheep bee-lines for the shepherd's heel. The men that showed to imprison him at Gethsemane even had to bow to Him, as He told them, "I am".

Prologue: a philosopher’s uncommon experience yields a unique insight. There was a man. “ Who?” A man. Named Marcus. From the beginning, men have indulged seemingly the same delusions, as we will mention Solomon from some 4000 years ago, or the ruler of much of the known world in the form of the philosopher emperor Marcus Aurelius. The delusion of wealth and ease has beguiled man, and certainly gold has beguiled man from its first moment before human eyes: as Solomon reminds us, “there is nothing new under the sun.” All the while, we tread on a never-ending wheel of expenses and income, levels of ease and deprivation coming at us sometimes faster than we can adjust to, and in the end, we are a lot of times all too happy to spend the weekend on the couch with a television in front of us, instead of adding to our life experiences or gathering with friends. There are multiple levels of wealth and ease, and we’re told to buy a new phone at one level, or

I (pointing, hand in front of chest, fingers directed toward face) Used'ta have A chinese plastic office chair Ordered from Target. It had one gimped wheel, and i would slide him across my floor. It eventually put a whole in my carpet. And the leatherette wore into some underlaiment, the fabric colored like cardboard. Tim tim gave me a decent used one that he had discarded. Tossed-off, yer know?  Me lugging between the yards, a droogen lad of decades misspent, empty moments of enjoyment and a kind of frayed cat-hair standing at attention that was not quite regular enough to be called sober. "Pepperoni pizza."

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