A Thousand Stories : Volume 4 : Stories 0301-0400 : Yellow

a thousand stories

j. blasso-gieseke

a thousand stories volume 4 : stories 0301-0400 : yellow

j. blasso-gieseke

Books in the Series A Thousand Stories volume 1 : stories 0001-0100 : black volume 2 : stories 0101-0200 : gray volume 3 : stories 0201-0300 : white volume 4 : stories 0301-0400 : yellow volume 5 : stories 0401-0500 : orange volume 6 : stories 0501-0600 : red volume 7 : stories 0601-0700 : purple volume 8 : stories 0701-0800 : blue volume 9 : stories 0801-0900 : green volume 0 : stories 0901-1000 : brown

a thousand stories

Published by Charybdis Press charybdispress.com © 2021 Charybdis Press All rights reserved First Edition No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner without written permission from the publisher, except in the context of reviews.

Many stories in this book are fiction. Any characters resembling actual persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.

Cover: 16 point Meridien Title: 14 point Futura Text: 10.5 point Caslon Layout & Design: J. Blasso-Gieseke ISBN 978-1-957399-03-4

For You and Baba, and the Muse too, and Hermes three

The author would like to thank Niall Twohig, Francesca Ferranti, and Josephine Blasso for their editorial aid, and Matthew A. Brown for his suggestions on the Preface. The book was made better by their time and attention. Still, any faults found in the stories are wholly my own.

Contents 0301. M for Messiah 0302. Anima Animal 0303. Motes Suspended in Light 0304. Ships in the Night 0305. Wishing for an Ebenezer Scrooge Moment 0306. Your Philip K 0307. Harpocrates Marx 0308. The Greenman 0309. The Aphorism 0310. Sisyphitness 0311. John Silence, Metaphysician Extraordinary 0312. The Jay and the Bee 0313. Create Your Own Tiny Picture Gallery 0314. Eternal Knight 0315. Seal 0316. Dirty Water 0317. Biting Ourselves in the Ass 0318. Blackstar 0319. The Technomagus 0320. Reading Time 0321. Planet Villi 0322. The 3½ Pillar 0323. Light Bulbs 0324. Doppelgänger 0325. The Abyssinian 0326. We Need a New Uniform 0327. The Moon on Mushrooms 0328. The Monastics 0329. I’m Not an Alpha 0330. A Cosmogony 0331. Death by Boredom 0332. The Werebears 0333. And a Third 0334. Discommode 0335. Disco Duck 0336. Everyone Wins a Trophy 0337. Aunt Joann’s Big Heart 0338. The Initiation of Dieter Leng, Xmyc 0339. The Ministration of Dieter Leng, Xmyc

0340. The Holy Mountain 0341. The Five C’s 0342. Hammocks 0343. The Great Democrats 0344. That’s What Words Are 0345. Eureka!

0346. Jekyll Is Just as Scary as Hyde 0347. Matty 0348. Solitaire 0349. It’s an Elementary, My Dear Watson 0350. Agent of Change 0351. These Are a Few of My Favorite Things 0352. Conflicting Cosmologies: The First Conflict 0353. Conflicting Cosmologies: The Final Conflict 0354. On the Nature of Empaths 0355. The Needles 0356. A Manner of Speaking Crossly 0357. Ragnarok Armageddon 0358. My Autozoëography 0359. In Case My Mind Goes First 0360. 360 Degrees 0361. Notes on Narrative Perspective 0362. Buffalo 0363. Homecoming 0364. Ghost World 0365. 24219 0366. Miracle of Love 0367. Charybdis Press 0368. Tarkovsky and Memory 0369. Sagittarius A* 0370. Paul Bunyan, Oxherder 0371. Flowers Are the Genitals of Plants 0372. Spy Report on the Morning Routine of an MI-6 Agent 0373. Three Letter Words A - K 0374. Three Letter Words L - Z 0375. El Dorado 0376. M.C.E.coli – Verbal Diarrhea 0377. Rip Awake 0378. Rip Asleep 0379. Sudden Death Overtime 0380. A Permutation of the Multiverse 0381. Ass Pirates 0382. The Unfairy

0383. Jason, Jason, and the Argonauts 0384. Oubliette 0385. Multi-Dimensional People 0386. Talk Show Learn 0387. End Transmission 0388. Scarehouse 0389. World News Watch 0390. Intruder 0391. Enter the Dragon 0392. I Should've Been There for Her 0393. Curators 0394. The Gilmour Boys 0395. Tip Tissues 0396. The Correct Order of Death 0397. What My Dog Hears 0398. September 2019 Climate Strikes 0399. The Karma of Production and Possession 0400. Halcyon

a thousand stories

0301. M for Messiah

In Fritz Lang’s movie M, a child killer is loose in Berlin, stirring up the cops, and disturbing the criminal organizations operating there. To return to the status quo, the criminals work together to capture and extrajudicially kill the killer.

In the Gospels, Jesus is loose in Jerusalem, stirring up the people, and disturbing the Sanhedrin operating there. To return to the status quo, the Sanhedrin work together to capture and intrajudicially kill Jesus.

And it worked. Both groups got what they wanted. The criminals caught and killed the child killer and the Sanhedrin caught and had Jesus killed.

At Jesus's trial, Pilate took pity on Jesus. To test the Sanhedrin, he invented the Paschal Pardon. Pilate asked who should be pardoned by the state: Barabbas, the revolutionary of the world of the body, a killer of the Roman occupiers, or Jesus, the revolutionary of the world of the spirit, a preacher of peace to all people. Both were revolutionaries, but one was a killer, the other a saint.

The Sanhedrin, unable to accept a revolution of the spirit that would upend their power, unanimously chose Barabbas. Pilate tried convincing them that Jesus was innocent, but the Sanhedrin wanted an external revolution, not an internal one. They wanted Jerusalem back in their hands. And if they couldn’t have that, then they wanted the status quo they knew. What they didn’t want was a revolutionary democratizing force. The Sanhedrin demanded Pilate release Barabbas and punish Jesus with death.

This is a strange juxtaposition, for sure. Take from it what you wish.

0302. Anima Animal

A little known fact about souls is that they’re always evolving. The souls of lower mammals evolve into higher mammals and the souls of higher mammals evolve into humans. Every time we kill higher mammals through habitat destruction or slaughter them for food, more humans are born on Earth.

Driven by our insatiable hunger and fueled by mechanistic violence, humans continue to murder higher mammals. This crowds the Earth with more human bodies and crowds heaven with more human souls. Were this left unchecked, there would be a Crisis of Souls on Earth as it is in heaven.

Luckily, God in His omniscience saw this coming and averted disaster by instilling all souls with the Anima Animal to balance this imbalance.

The Anima Animal ensures that all the souls of higher mammals reborn as humans retain trace memories of their past lives as higher mammals.

Since many of these higher mammals have been slaughtered by habitat destruction each year, their ascended souls retain a natural repugnance to habitat destruction and environmental degradation. Likewise, since many are slaughtered for food each year, their ascended souls retain a natural repugnance to eating animals as food.

As the rate of habitat destruction and animal slaughter increases, a rapid upward evolution of souls is occurring. The ranks of humans now born into the global population are becoming more sensitive to the human-caused misery of higher mammal populations, and are beginning to act collectively to create an ethical society that will stop the mindless destruction of previous generations and help restore the planet’s lost equilibrium.

0303. Motes Suspended in Light

You’ve probably had a moment when you’ve stopped in your tracks because you’re seeing something so beautiful and otherworldly that you’re not sure if what you’re seeing is real, and you think that if you stand there long enough, you’ll maybe snap out of it, and say, “Wow, what a beautiful vision,” and then continue on your way, but as you’re standing there, it turns out that what you’re seeing isn’t a vision, but reality, and you don’t know what to do, except to keep very still in fear of it going away.

Let me explain what happened to me: One day when I was a kid, I was walking to the bathroom to take a leak and came upon a bar of yellow light slanting in through my back window. The bar was thick and viscous, as if made out of honey, and inside this honey-light, motes were suspended motionlessly as if time had stopped. I was free to move, but didn’t, because I was transfixed in wonder at the magic of this curious scene.

However, the moment didn’t last long. I still had to pee. So, I respectfully edged around the honey-light and ran to the bathroom and went as quickly as I could.

Of course, when I got back, the light lacked viscosity, the motes were moving, and the magic was gone. Still, I couldn’t shake the memory of motes suspended in light, and my mind began making up metaphors of insects in amber and ink on old paper. And that’s when I started writing in earnest.

0304. Ships in the Night

It was both a beacon of guiding light and a signal of our co-being in the limitless darkness of space. It was all we might see of each other for millennia as we wandered self-contained in the cosmos. Two ships, each the size of planets, which could never approach the other, because their gravity would pull each into the other’s orbit to the mutual destruction of both.

With no point of physical contact between the ships, there was only the flashing light across the void, the rapid pulses that spoke volumes about the health of life and stage of evolution onboard each vessel. Often the ships abstained from any exchange, though the light allowed the ships to plan future rendezvous as it shared potential flight paths and synced coordinates.

Occasionally, these meetings offered the opportunity for some to leave their ship. These were often families of artists and troupes of performers who wanted to bring their craft to a new audience, or covens of researchers and cabals of scientists who wished to expand their studies or share their technological or genetic advancements. This exchange was often seen as a necessary breeding program whose cross-fertilization of genetic and epigenetic material improved the health and integrity of both ships.

The decision to leave, however, was never made by any official planetary body, but by the individuals themselves, and their families and colleagues, cohorts and communities. Few denizens ever chose this option, though. Almost all stayed onboard to live out their long, busy lives, never knowing or caring that another ship was near.

0305. Wishing for an Ebenezer Scrooge Moment David Koch died a few days ago at the age of 79. A month before he died, the Earth endured its hottest month on record. And as he died, the Amazon rainforest burned.

We’ll never know if the billionaire knew in his heart of hearts that these horrible events were caused by climate change. What we do know is that David and his brother Charles have worked tirelessly to fund climate change denialism by disseminating doubt on this critical existential matter.

They did this to limit government regulation of the oil and gas industry, which continues to pollute our planet and profit them immensely.

Their decisions, like many of those among the aging neoliberal elites, have sentenced us to death for their bottom line. And while they live and die in the lap of luxury, they leave us to live and die in poverty on a planet they helped destroy. This is an injustice we see all around the world: fabulously wealthy men using their power, money, and influence to extract wealth today at the expense of life tomorrow.

I know it’s naive, but a part of me wishes that David and Charles and all the Kochs of the world could’ve had an Ebenezer Scrooge moment decades ago. I imagine them visited by the Ghost of Earth’s Future, who shows them our planet devoid of human life then spirits them to the empty, David Koch funded Hall of Human Origins at the Smithsonian and has them trace the timeline of our species from our Holocene beginning to our Anthropocene ending.

0306. Your Philip K

Roger came to the city from out of town. He was nervous about his lecture at the convention tomorrow and wanted to sit somewhere and have a drink and review his notes and not be bothered.

Roger grabbed his bag and took the elevator down to the lobby. As he entered the hotel bar, he saw several people he knew and did an about face.

Joining the crowds on the sidewalk, Roger searched for a quiet bar, passing several that were thick with people and loud with music.

A few side streets away, he found one that seemed to suit his purpose.

Roger entered, stepped up to the bar, and ordered a Scotch neat.

He paid for the drink, found a seat, and pulled out his books and notes.

As he read over his lecture, he heard a man say, “I see you’ve got Ballard there.”

Roger looked up at the man.

“My favorite of his is Manhole 69,” the man said and winked.

Roger looked around the man to the other patrons and realized where he was.

“I’m into S.F. myself, ” the man said, sipping his drink. “Amongst other things.”

Roger looked for a way out.

“May I?” the man asked, signaling to the seat next to Roger.

As the man sat, Robert grabbed his things and pushed passed him.

“That was rude!” the man said.

As Roger hit the door, he heard the man yell after him, “Hey, buddy, if you stick around, I’ll suck your Philip K.” Outside, Roger could hear everyone in the bar laughing.

0307. Harpocrates Marx

Harpocrates was the child god, Horus, imported from Egypt by the Greeks to be their god of silence.

Harpo Marx was one of the Marx Brothers, famous for movies like Animal Crackers, Monkey Business, Horse Feathers, and Duck Soup. And though Harpo played the silent brother, his name didn’t come from Harpocrates, but from the harp he played, though there was probably a sly allusion to the god, as a staple of the Brother’s comedy was always double-entendre.

Harpo was known for his golden shock of hair. Karl Marx was also known for his shock of hair and beard, a style that was de rigeur in the late 1800s. Both Marxes were German Jews, but Harpo, who was born Adolph, and who, for obvious reasons, later changed his name to Arthur, was born in Manhattan in 1888, while Karl was born in Prussia some seventy years earlier. Karl, however, was no comedian; he was a serious social and economic theorist famous for writing Das Kapital, a systemic critique on capitalism.

Karl understood that the ultimate product of capitalism was class division. This class division occurred when the owners of the means of production and coercion, the bourgeoisie, exploited the labor force, the proletariat, by suppressing wages so that they could reap as profit the surplus value produced by their workers. Karl couldn’t keep silent about the horrors of the capitalist system and wrote three dense volumes criticizing it. And capitalists have been doing everything in their power to suppress and silence this critique for over a century and a half.

0308. The Greenman

My hair stood up on the back of my neck. I could feel I was being followed.

I stopped and looked behind me down the path. Seeing no one, I searched the woods on either side. But there was nothing save the trees and their litter of leaves.

I was scaring myself again. It was the story grandmother told me when I was young, the story about the Greenman, who walks unseen between the trees. She said she was one of the few villagers to have seen him in these woods. He just appeared out of nowhere, standing before her, smiling. She said no harm had come to her. But the meeting had impressed upon her mind the power of the forest and its guardian. That’s why she left small gifts for him at the forest’s edge.

I knew I shouldn’t be thinking these thoughts. I had an urgent errand to run. I had to call on the medicine woman in the village beyond the forest for a balm to ease grandmother’s pain, and mustn’t linger here.

I clutched my talisman and ran. The trees blurred, and the noise of the leaves crunching under each step became the whole of my world. The forest will end and I will get safely to the village and back again to mine.

Then, a man made of leaves blocked my path, forcing me to freeze.

His acorn eyes regarded me kindly as he smiled. My heart was racing. I held my breath and closed my eyes, until his laughter disappeared in the susurrus.

0309. The Aphorism

If I had to trace the origins of these super-short stories, I believe one source would be Nietzsche’s aphorisms. I wasn’t aware of Nietzshe’s aphoristic style while reading him. I only learned about it after reading the commentaries of his English translators, Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale. It was they who pointed out the pithy compactness of his writing. And once I was aware of it, I understood why he was such a pleasure to read.

His aphorisms allowed me to digest the complexities of his thought with greater ease, as they could be read and reread without much trouble.

And though all his thoughts were connected, each aphorism could be read independently. This format allowed for his thoughts to be collected by the reader and understood as a composite whole. And even if the composite whole couldn’t wholly be understood by a reader like me, at least I could understand it in part.

If I contrast this with my reading of say, Heidegger, especially his Being and Time, whose density loses me a hundred pages in, I know that not only do I not understand the whole of his thought, I don’t even understand the part. My mind works atomistically and that’s why I’m attracted to the aphorism, as its format stands directly opposed to thick volumes of philosophy, epic poetry, and prose.

Kaufmann and Hollingdale also pointed out that Nietzsche is considered to be one of the greatest prose stylists in the German language.

I know my prose “style,” unlike his, is nothing to write home about.

0310. Sisyphitness

Legions are abandoning Crossfit for the newest fitness craze: Sisyphitness.

I spoke to inventor and trainer Yanoush Bagadoush about his creation.

“It’s so simple,” he said, flexing. “All you need is a round ball and a slanted hill.”

Yanoush might employ pleonasms, but he’s got a bod like a god, or maybe not a god, but a suffering mortal doomed to endless repetitive tasks in hell, I mean, the gym.

“But is that really all there is to it? Rolling a weighted ball up a hill?”

I asked.

“It really works your core, you know. It’s a total body workout. You work every muscle,” Yanoush said, flexing again.

“But don’t you think people will get bored of it? It seems a bit — limited.”

“That’s why we have plans for future expansion.”

“What plans?”

“You know, we want to incorporate stretching.”

“Like the rack?”

“Rack? No, stretching, like Tantalus. We want to put a plate of fatty fast food just out of their reach and have them stretch to try and grab it.

You know, just like Tantalus. Here’s food, but you can’t have it.”

“But what if a person, especially a fit person like yourself, doesn’t eat fast food?”

“Then healthy food, like a protein bar. We’ll hold it just out of reach and they’ll have to try and get it, but we’ll pull it away.”

“Sounds torturous.”

“It is. We’ll even do that with their water too.”

“Sounds like a bit of a stretch.”

“They’ll feel the burn.”

“Any future plans of burning them on Ixion’s wheel?”

“Ixion’s what?”

0311. John Silence, Metaphysician Extraordinary John Silence walked to where the man stood, shaking with fear, at the edge of the abyss.

“Is this it?” he asked the man.

The man turned to him and nodded.

John Silence stared into the darkness. It was impossible to tell how far or deep it went. “And what is it you’re scared of?”

“It,” the man said, taking a step back.

“Yet, you’re compelled to leap into it?”

“I don’t want to, but —” “But?” “But, I need to know what’s beyond it.”

“And what do you believe is beyond it?”

“I don’t know. I can’t be sure.”

“What do you want there to be?”

“Light. I want there to be light.”

“Do you believe there’s light beyond the darkness?”

“I don’t know. How can I know?”

“Do you believe darkness always ends in light?”

“Yes. — I mean, I want to; but maybe it doesn’t, not here.”

“If one is in darkness then there is more than darkness. Darkness cannot be added to darkness, just as zero cannot be added to zero. The state of darkness is nothing; the state of light is everything. Therefore, darkness cannever be a state of hopelessness and despair because you are there and you are something. And if you are something, then you are light. And light always draws unto it the light. This must be your sole conviction and absolute faith when you are surrounded by darkness. Now, give me your hand.”

The man reached out a trembling hand.

John Silence grabbed it firmly and smiled, “Now, let’s take the leap together.”

0312. The Jay and the Bee

The Jay and the Bee is a farm that grows, dries, and packages fruits, nuts, and herbal teas, makes nut flours and milks, jams, honeys, and hemp products.

The farm is 100+ acres of open field on a south-facing slope. A willow wall perimeter is planted to control deer pressure. Hazelnut interior walls section off one acre parcels of swaled terraces. Solar powered shed-gates stand between each parcel to hold equipment for mowing, trimming, and harvesting.

On each acre parcel there are intermixed sections of fruit and nut trees each with a hive of bees: Apple, peach, pear, cherry, persimmon, and pawpaw. Chestnut, hickory, white oak, and beech. These will take several years to mature and develop into productive stands, but once established they will yield for many decades to come.

On other acre parcels there are intermixed sections of berry trees, bushes, and vines: Mulberries. Elderberries, raspberries, blackberries, and goldenberries. Currants and grapes.

On eight acres there is a black locust stand. One acre will be harvested for wood per year on an eight-year rotation after established.

On twelve acres hemp is grown for harvesting fiber for rope, clothes, shoes, and paper, and seeds for hemp milk.

An herbal tea garden interspersed with birch and linden will include stinging nettle, lemon balm, lemon verbena, hibiscus, and others.

The main dwelling is an earth-sheltered, passive solar house with roof plantings.

Close by is a teaching barn and kitchen with a solar-powered drying, processing, and storage room, along with a woodshop.

Outside there’s a shrine to give thanks for the bounty.

0313. Create Your Own Tiny Picture Gallery

We all know how snooty gallerists can be. We all know how they hold their noses high up in the air so they can sniff the arse of the next fat cat millionaire collector who walks through their doors. We all know that many of them smell money and curate accordingly.

But as artists, we don’t have to be suppressed by their system of greed.

We can create art and own our own gallery. We can, really. But only if we’re willing to think on a different scale: the scale of a book.

Imagine that a blank book represents the white walls of your very own gallery where you’ll display your art. Imagine your artwork at book scale, then create tiny pictures and “hang” them on your white gallery walls. Imagine moving through the pages of the book like you’re moving through your gallery and curate accordingly. And finally, imagine and design an attractive cover and name your show and gallery.

Now you’ve become both artist and gallerist and have cut out the middleman or woman. Now scan the cover and pages of your physical book if it’s physical and digitize them and put them online. Now anyone can see your art at your book-gallery anytime.

Due to the disastrously impoverished funding of arts and artists in this country, the artist has to play many roles and wear many hats. Embrace it until we can figure a way out of this capitalist nightmare. And let’s fight together to get over, under, or around the system, if we can’t get through.

0314. Eternal Knight

The Red Knight, in his red armor of iron and brass, returns with his Black Riders once every generation to descend on the Seven Kingdoms, killing and burning everything in their path until their might is spent and they return to their infernal home, leaving no trace of themselves behind save the savage destruction of their passing.

And though the Red Knight has brought havoc and ruin for untold centuries, no one knows who or what he is, though some speculate that he may be the incarnation of the god of blood and war, while others maintain that he is the devil himself riding out from hell to slay the righteous, and there are others still who believe that he is an undead lord summoned by the arcane magics of the desert death cults. And though many bands of knights-errant seeking their spurs have left on quests in search of his origins, none have returned alive to tell from whence he came, though there is often heard a rumor of a Dark Tower hidden in a dread valley beyond the wastes deep in southern lands.

And it was towards this mysterious tower that Roland and his band traveled in search of the Red Knight. And after years of bitter struggle, Roland, the last survivor of the band, finally found the Dark Tower and entered its gate. Inside, on a dais, he discovered the red armor of iron and brass and exchanged it for his own, and after mounting his demon steed, called forth his Black Riders and rode for home.

0315. Seal

Seal was a golden Labrador retriever we raised for the Guide Dog Foundation. She was incredibly smart and passed all the tests to become a Guide Dog. Seal served Shirley, a blind woman from Kansas, until Shirley was hospitalized with terminal cancer and Seal was returned to us.

Seal was my best friend and companion. When the weather was nice, we used to lie on the back deck or in the grass together. I would rest my head on her side as she slept, feeling the rise and fall of her chest and the beating of her heart as I read.

When she was much older, we noticed she was favoring her rear leg.

Our vet x-rayed it and found a malignant osteosarcoma in her femur. My friend Matt, also a vet, warned us that we had to help her up and down the stairs because the bone would grow weaker until it broke.

Coincidentally, Matt was staying over when it did. Sunday morning he went to retrieve something from his car, opened the front door, and set off the alarm. As my father came running out of his bedroom and down the stairs to shut it off, Seal followed him, and in her rapid descent, broke her leg.

Matt examined her and told us that she was too old for surgery and that nothing could be done. Since it was Sunday and our regular vet office was closed and Matt was just visiting, we had to call in a mobile vet, who put her to sleep in my arms.

0316. Dirty Water

One day, my brother and I made up the song Dirty Water as we crossed the Kosciuszko Bridge. We “sang” the song by elongating the first vowel of each word and repeating it for the length of the bridge. We would begin singing when we saw the two large oil tanks nestled on the shore of Newtown Creek, the dirty water of our song, and heard the sound of the tires change from the regular pavement of the road to the corrugated metal of the bridge. As soon as we cleared the bridge and the tires stopped humming, we’d stop singing. When my father turned off the first exit after the bridge, the oil tanks disappeared, and we’d head down Meeker, turn a slight right onto Driggs, and head to Russell, Newel, or Nassau, or we’d follow Meeker to Union and then on to Ainslie.

The Kosciuszko Bridge was a familiar reference point for us on the drive to Brooklyn from our home on Long Island. Everyone in our family is from Brooklyn and we always pronounced Kosciuszko Koz-key-osko. I never heard it pronounced another way until a friend told me the proper pronunciation was Koz-chew-sko.

There’s a new Kosciuszko Bridge under construction now. It looks vastly different from the old steel turtle shell we used to pass though.

The oil tanks are gone too. And no one in our family lives in Brooklyn anymore. And my brother and I no longer sing our song. That time of our lives has passed beneath us like dirty water under the bridge.

0317. Biting Ourselves in the Ass

Imagine if you will, the Ouroboros, the snake that eats its own tail, not as a symbol of eternity but as a symbol of our self-consumption. Imagine the Ouroboros as a neoliberal symbol of our capitalist collective of selfconsumed consumers consuming ourselves. Imagine the Ouroboros as planet Earth.

Now, let’s imagine that we are the Ouroboros. To do this, let’s put ourselves in the skin of this giant serpent. Let’s merge with its mind and see from its perspective. Looking out of its eyes, what do we see?

We see something before us. But since we don’t know ourselves properly and lack cosmic perspective, we don’t know that what we’re seeing is our own tail. And because we’re hungry, we don’t take the time to inspect it. We don’t take the time to study it. We don’t take the time to know it. We only want to eat it. So we bite our tail and begin to eat and eat. Our jaws work mechanically, swallowing ourselves in great gulps.

And as we work our way around, eating more and more of our own body, we sense that maybe we’ve bitten off more than we can chew. And as this thought hits us, so does the pain. Remember, our serpent body is so long that it has taken a century plus for the pain to reach our brain. And it’s then that we realize that we’re eating ourselves alive. And though we may have mortally wounded ourselves, and our brain screams at our jaw to stop chewing, we reflexively keep swallowing.

0318. Blackstar

On the day David Bowie died, I was telling my family that I didn’t get a chance to listen to his latest album yet. This bothered me. I was never good at staying current with music, but with his death coming on the heels of the album’s release, it made me want to catch up quickly.

I knew I couldn’t give it my full attention at work, so I waited until I got home to listen to it. And as I listened, the whole album felt saturated with death. It had this weight that I’ve never heard or felt before in another album. It was tangible. I imagined Bowie standing alone on a stage, waving goodbye to the audience, then exiting, never to be seen again.

This is what gave it its gorgeous gravity, its heartbreaking bittersweetness. And it was then that I understood with absolute certainty that Bowie knew this was going to happen. This album was his farewell performance, his parting gift to us, where he says goodbye the only way he knew how. “This is my final show,” I hear him say. “A requiem I orchestrated for you to listen to on the day of my death. If you do this, you’ll understand it in your bones.”

It was a one-time event where the death of an artist coincided with the birth of their album. The album can, of course, be listened to anytime, but on that day, it would have its greatest and most lasting effect, because it became a part of the ritual of mourning.

0319. The Technomagus

The Technomagus is an author capable of using both technology and magic. The Technomagus explores the problems of the present in fiction by projecting into the future and using the science fiction genre and its tropes of technology. The Technomagus also explores problems of the present in fiction by projecting into the past and using the fantasy genre and its tropes of magic.

The Technomagus almost always uses technology in the future except when the Technomagus uses the technology to go to the past to bring technology to a world without technology, or when the Technomagus uses the technology of the future to go to the past to bring technology to a world with technology, or when the Technomagus uses the technology of the future to go to the past to bring technology to a world without magic, or when the Technomagus uses the technology of the future to go to the past to bring technology to a world with magic.

The Technomagus, likewise, almost always uses magic in the past except when the Technomagus uses the magic to go to the future to bring magic to a world without magic, or when the Technomagus uses the magic of the past to go to the future to bring magic to a world with magic, or when the Technomagus uses the magic of the past to go to the future to bring magic to a world without technology, or when the Technomagus uses the magic of the past to go to the future to bring magic to a world with technology.

0320. Reading Time

As I edit, I’m noticing it takes me, on average, around two to three minutes to read and, if necessary, fix each story. This means, dear reader, it will probably take you less time to read each story. If you’re a speed-reader, and read each of these stories in 1 minute, it’ll take you 1,000 minutes to read the whole book. 1,000 minutes is a little under 17 hours, or 2 full days of work. But, if it takes you 2 minutes to read each story, it’ll take you 2,000 minutes to read the whole book. 2,000 minutes is just over 33 hours.

I think we can agree that 17 to 33 hours is definitely a healthy amount of time to spend together. A lot can be learned about a person in that time, and I think you’ll find you know me pretty well by the end of the book.

Or, if you really read like me, you’ll start the book and read it for awhile before getting bored, then you’ll put it down, and move onto another book or books, then remember it again weeks, months, or years later, and pick it back up and continue to read until you’re bored again. If you keep up this cycle of reading, maybe you’ll finally finish the book several months or years after starting it. Unless, of course, you forget about it completely; or lose your memory; or your mind; or die. Or maybe, like me, you buy books and keep them on your shelves and never read them at all.

0321. Planet Villi

Skimming above the surface of the planet, I lowered the landing sled and touched down, pulling on the brake and firing the reverse thrusters until the ship came to a stop.

Opening the hatch, I unbuckled my harness, and stood to survey the area. There was nothing to see except the orange polyps covering the ground from horizon to horizon.

Stepping over the side, I carefully placed my boot between the peduncules. But before I could get my footing, the polyps swelled and closed around my ankle.

I tried pulling my leg free, but it wouldn’t budge. So, I unbuckled my boot and slid my foot out.

The planet clearly wasn’t safe. The polyps appear to be one organism covering the entire surface of the planet. It was best to head back to base.

That is, if the ship could be freed from their grip.

As I settled back into the cockpit, the polyps heaved up under the ship, tossing me out of it.

I landed on my back and tried to stand, but the polyps held me fast.

Several began to swell around me, stretching to a thin balloon-like membrane before bursting and showering the air with spores.

They glittered beautifully as they drifted down. But when they reached the exposed skin of my foot, I began to scream.

A scream that ended in a gurgle as his genes were rapidly reprogrammed, causing his flesh, fat, bones, and organs to liquefy, and ooze out of the leg of his spacesuit where it was absorbed into the planet’s patient surface.

0322. The 3½ Pillar

I entered a celestial temple and was told to worship the 3½ Pillar. My unseen guide brought me first to see three half-pillars before bringing me to the 3½ Pillar, which was located in a corner of the temple with only a quarter of its face visible. My unseen guide pressed a hidden mechanism to release the outside of the pillar, pulling it away to reveal a wooden sculpture of Christ with his arms open wide.

As I studied the details, I noticed that there was a visible gap in the wood under his hairline and that the lines at the corner of his left eye seemed to stretch around above his ear to connect with something beneath the hair on the back of his head.

My unseen guide pressed another hidden mechanism and turned the statue. Then they flipped Christ's hair so that it covered his face and revealed the face of Mary. Her head was the back of her son's head and her hands the back of his hands. They were back-to-back, not as two separate people, but as one conjoined.

I laughed out loud in joy. Tears welled up, as I understood the profound meaning of the 3½ Pillar: That Mary is Jesus and Jesus is Mary.

That all births are the Virgin birth, all children Christ, and all mothers Mary. But beyond that, I understood that Jesus and Mary were the divine couple, and that Mary was not just his mother, but also Mary Magdalene his wife, and daughter, and Jesus her son, husband, and father.

0323. Light Bulbs

He heard several pops before being punched to the ground.

He felt a searing pain in his chest.

People were running and screaming above him, stepping over him and on him.

Disoriented, he pulled himself into himself and started to crawl, but collapsed.

The pain.

He touched his chest at its source and pulled away a hand covered in blood and felt his shirt dampening.

Then, he became aware of the silence and the popping sounds again, like someone rapidly dropping light bulbs from a height.

What the hell was going on?

He fought the pain and sat up to look around.

Everything was chaos.

Then, he saw the bodies and heard the light bulbs again and understood.

In slow motion, the gunman stalked out of the shadows, an automatic rifle held high on his shoulder.

Plink. Plink. Plink.

He unconsciously began crawling towards the killer, who was stepping cautiously over and around the bodies.

Why? Why? Why? The assault rifle responded in its cold language.

Plink. Plink. Plink was all it could say. Plink. Plink. Plink.

He was near the killer now, could make out his features.

He was a young man like himself, but that’s where the similarity ended. The killer was no longer human; he was a machine. The killer had lost his tongue and could only communicate his frustrations through his weapon, which spoke mechanically and killed indiscriminately.

The killer turned on him.

Why? Why? Why? he tried to ask him with his eyes.

The assault rifle responded. Plink. Plink. Plink.

And the lights went out.

0324. My Doppelgänger

I shook my head to clear it and found myself inside what felt like a seamless metal sphere.

Where the hell am I? A door opened and a man’s face appeared.

“Sir, you did it! You actually did it,” his voice echoed inside the sphere.

Did what? Who the hell are you?

“Take my hand,” the man said.

I don’t know why, but I trusted him.

He helped me out of the sphere and into enthusiastic applause.

The lights were bright. I shielded my eyes.

“Incredible, sir. Just incredible,” I heard the man say proudly.

When my vision returned, I lowered my hands and was able to see the crowd surrounding me. Everyone was looking at me in awe and applauding warmly.

A man in a lab coat stepped up and grabbed my hand and shook it vigorously. Then, everyone crowded around: men in uniforms, men in suits, and more men in lab coats.

Then, I saw my wife, Agnes, and it all came back to me: Teleportation.

As we embraced, I looked over her head and saw someone stumble out of Sphere 1.

I slid out of her arms and began pushing my way through the crowd.

Everyone turned to see where I was going and gave a collective gasp when the man lowered his hands from his face to reveal — me.

Upon seeing me, his eyes went wide in horror.

“Don’t touch me!” he screamed, trying to back away.

But it was too late. My hand was already on his arm and the spacetime continuum collapsed around us.

0325. The Abyssinian

Menelik climbed over the gate and ran quickly across the courtyard.

Flattening himself against the wall of the church, he listened to hear if his trespass had raised any alarms.

It hadn’t.

Sliding around to the front doors, he quietly pushed them open and slipped inside.

The Kohanim turned from his prayers, but before he could scream, Menelik leapt on him and choked him to death.

Alone in the inner sanctum, Menelik opened the doors of the shrine and smiled: The Ark of the Covenant!

Lifting the lid, Menelik reached inside and pulled out a closed fist.

He opened his hand, revealing a ring and a small bundle of wool.

He quickly slid the ring over his finger and held it up to examine it.

It was Solomon’s Seal, the ring that held dominion over demons.

Menelik laughed triumphantly as he opened the bundle of wool, revealing a small, green stone. It was the Shamir, the stone that cuts stone; the stone that built Solomon’s Temple.

Menelik tried to pick it up, but his fingers passed right through it.

Confused, he looked at the tips of his fingers and saw they were gone.

Then, the pain hit him, and he closed both fists and screamed.

But when Menelik did this, the Shamir cut through the ring and his finger, falling to the floor and through it, like a stone dropped on water.

And somewhere deep beneath the sea, under centuries of silt, a brass vessel cracked open, releasing seventy-two demons, who rose up rapidly from the depths of the abyss.

0326. We Need a New Uniform

The hegemony of the business suit has to go. Nothing says capitalism, imperialism, and colonialism more than the business suit. Even business casual has to go. Ditching your three-piece for a polo shirt and chinos with colored socks and boat shoes, or for a blazer and button down with jeans and slick shoes, still screams I’m a privileged pawn of the capitalist state.

No, the business suit should be completely condemned. Its homogenizing force roundly rejected. Its conformity unanimously unaccepted. But what should we replace this universal uniform of the evil empire, this starched containment unit of undemocratic principles, this lingua franca of the business world with?

For starters, it shouldn’t be a uniform, but a polyform. It should be whatever dress the individual and their culture have organically discovered to be the expression of their selves and their region. It should be allowed to remain fixed for the person’s entire life or change over time. It should be gaudy and glitzy or simple and plain. It should be something that draws attention or repels it. In short, the polyform should be whatever the wearer wishes it to be. And yes, this means that it can still be the vile business suit.

For myself, depending on the weather, I love wearing heavy or light hoodies, long- or short-sleeved henleys, and/or V-neck t-shirts with lightweight denim blue jeans, belt, black socks, and a comfortable shoe or boot. I prefer all of these to be well-worn and broken in to the point of fraying and fading. I call my polyform: hobo chic.

0327. The Moon on Mushrooms

“Let’s go to Montauk,” Jeff said. “It’s cheap this time of year and I had an incredible time there earlier this summer.”

The three of us, Jeff, Niall, and I, drove out to the end of the Island, checked into our room, then hit the town to buy some food.

We returned to the hotel and fired up the grill and Jeff began cooking.

After we ate, I brought out the mushrooms and we ate again.

As night fell, we carried wood down to the beach and I started a fire.

The three of us sat around it, each in our own headspace.

I watched the fire intently, feeding it and stoking it. The flames were bright orange. I watched them dance.

Then, I heard Jeff scream. “Oh my god, you guys!”

Thinking there was some emergency, I quickly looked at Jeff, but he was gone, sprinting barefoot across the sand.

Then, I saw it.

It was enormous. I’d never seen the moon like this before, huge and orange like a pumpkin, rising over the horizon like the god of gourds.

Jeff was on his knees, both hands out, stretching towards the moon in awe and supplication.

Niall stood behind him, looking on in wonder.

I looked down at the fire.

At first, I didn’t want to leave. I was its keeper. But as the moon rose rapidly, and grew inexplicably larger, I wanted to be with my friends and feel what they were feeling. I excused myself to the fire and walked quickly across the sand to join them.

0328. The Monastics

One symptom of our civilization is that wherever its vertical hierarchies of control and its corruptive influence of oppression have spread, a group of men and women have always withdrawn from it after discovering they weren’t a part of the age and times in which they lived. These men and women would leave to find the contemplative space of agelessness and timelessness, the remote world of the spirit. To find this sacred site, they gave up everything they had and left the world behind, going into the wild places without and within, to be alone on their quest for silence and stillness. They gave up their self-obsessions and denied their corporeal supremacy in favor of that most elusive goal of God. And wherever these men and women settled beyond the pale, other seekers would seek them out in their deserts, forests, and caves, to learn from them and be blessed by them. And some of the more serious seekers stayed with them to be accepted as students. And those students would attract other students to gather around their master. And the site itself would become a holy site where the students would build a shelter, shrine, and school. And over time, the place would grow into an ashram, temple, or monastery, and the master’s teaching would be passed down from generation to generation in an unbroken lineage into the present. And these places would call to the men and women of every future age to withdraw from civilization in silence and stillness to pray for the soul of the world.

0329. I’m Not an Alpha

I’m not an alpha male, never been one. If I’m anything, I’m an omega male.

Let me explain: Where the alpha male thrives on competitiveness, I thrive on co-operation. Where the alpha male wants to be first, I don’t mind being last. Where the alpha male puts his needs before everyone else’s, I’m okay with putting the needs of others before mine. Where the alpha male lives for the approval of others, I live for my approval alone.

Where the alpha male seeks out conquests, I prefer to take what’s in reach.

Where the alpha male defines himself by his effort, I define myself by my effortlessness. Where the alpha male looks to dominate, I look to live and let live. Where the alpha male demands attention, I prefer to repel it. Where the alpha male is drawn to excitement, I’m drawn to quiet and solitude. Where the alpha male seeks the spotlight, I seek the shade and the shadows. Where the alpha male is positive, I’m negative. Where the alpha male loves to puff himself up, I prefer honest and sober selfappraisals. Where the alpha male is confident of his success, I’m equally confident of mine.

There’s nothing wrong with alpha males if they’re kept in check. When they’re not, and their alpha maleness takes over the world eliminating all other forms of maleness, toxic masculinity spreads like an epidemic.

That’s why we need omega males and other forms of maleness to balance them out, because as William Blake writes: One Law for the Lion & Ox is Oppression.

0330. A Cosmogony

In the beginning, the Aperture opened in the Void.

All was perfect until both sides began speaking at the same time.

After an incalculable number of Pardons and No, you firsts and But, I insists, one side finally digressed, allowing the other side to speak.

The speaking side thanked the silent side and said: What I was going to ask was: Who should be Front and who should be Back? But, since you nobly backed down, the matter has clearly been decided; and so, I shall be Front.

But Back became upset, because it too had the same question. But no matter how much it demanded to be called Front by arguing that it was more of a Front than Front because it had allowed Front to speak first, Front would not yield.

So, Back brooded until an Idea struck.

Back gave of itself to form the universe. And as the universe formed, Back, with its last words, said: Alas, now I too am Front.

Front, upset at having lost Back, tried to see Back’s new creation, but no matter how Front turned, Front could not face it.

So, Front brooded until an Idea struck.

Front stretched forward and began turning as it grew.

Before Front completed its circle, it stopped to behold Back’s creation and said: Here before me in this speck of light is great potential. Within it, Back is contained. We must never live apart. Let us return Back to us and make all opposites equal.

And as Front became one with Back, the light exploded inside.

0331. Death by Boredom

Ravel had us cornered. And when he knew he had us cornered, he confirmed he had us cornered by telling us he had us cornered and that there was no hope of escape.

He was bristling with power; evil energy danced over his body. One blast from his fingers would instantly fry the five of us to a crisp. There was no defense against it. We knew it was the end and waited for him to strike — but he didn’t.

Instead, he began laughing a maniacal laugh that bent him backwards and seemed to go on forever.

Why wasn’t he killing us? I asked myself. We tried to kill him and failed.

Now, we’re cornered with no hope of escape, and instead of killing us, he’s laughing.

But, in my confusion and fear, I had asked the question I was thinking out loud.

Ravel stopped laughing, looked at me, and assumed an air of seriousness.

“Why?” he began. “Why is a question of causality. And to tell you why, I must begin at the beginning.”

I think we sighed collectively. He was waiting for this moment — to explain himself.

Shepherd and the others stared daggers at me. They’d rather be blasted to death than listen to this.

And so Ravel began his autobiographical monologue wherein he detailed every major and minor wrong done to him over the course of his long life.

It was exhausting and sadly unoriginal.

Didn’t he know that he was telling the story of everyone’s life?

We all took a seat and eventually died of boredom.

0332. The Werebears

Goldilocks was a juvenile delinquent who liked breaking into houses because she came from a terrible home.

One day, while walking through the forest, she came upon a cozy little house. Seeing no one around, she tested the windows and doors.

Finding one unlocked, she let herself in.

On the kitchen table were three bowls of porridge. And since her wicked parents never fed her, she was starving. So, she gobbled up the first bowl of cold porridge. Then, she gobbled up the second bowl of warm porridge. Then, she gobbled up the third bowl of hot porridge and burned the roof of her mouth.

With her belly full, she became sleepy and found three beds. The first bed was hard, so she moved to the second one, which was softer. Then, she tried the third one, which was the smallest and softest, and fell asleep.

It was then that the werebear family returned home.

Seeing their porridge eaten, they looked around the little house and found Goldilocks asleep in the smallest bed.

The father and mother roared with anger.

Goldilocks awoke with a scream.

The cub jumped between his parents and Goldilocks, and reminded them that they were outcasts like her too.

The father and mother, touched by their son’s concern, turned back into humans and apologized to Goldilocks and invited her to stay.

The father and mother raised Goldilocks as their daughter and the young boy looked up to her as his older sister and best friend. And Goldilocks stopped acting out and never broke into houses again.

0333. And a Third

Reader, I thought that we should slow down here and catch our breath, because once we hit the 87th word in this story, we’ll have travelled a third of the way through this book. I’m proud of what I’ve written so far and hope you’ve been enjoying our time together. I know I’ve been enjoying the journey of its creation. So, let’s advance slowly until we arrive at the exact point in the story where we cross into the final two thirds of the book. Right. Here.

And just like that, we’ve crossed into another phase of the book. I know this seems like an arbitrary stopping point. All supposed milestones in our lives feel like that after awhile, don’t they? Birthdays, anniversaries, and holidays might appear meaningless and unnecessary, but they aren’t.

They are meaningful and necessary. That is, if we use them for what they are: stopping points for reflection.

These are of critical importance in this fast-paced world of ours because they allow us to reorient ourselves to the people of critical importance in our lives. On our birthdays, we can reflect about aging and who we are and where we are. On the birthdays of our family and friends, we can reflect on them and their age and who they are and where they are. Same thing with anniversaries and holidays. These stopping points, arbitrary as they are, should give us time to reflect. And if you need to stop somewhere between fixed birthdays, anniversaries, and holidays, make up your own milestone, like I did here.

0334. Discommode

Clutching my cheeks, I waddled down the interminably long hallway to the door of her apartment and waited beside her in a cold sweat as she opened wide her enormous purse and pulled out a key ring that would have embarrassed a medieval gaoler.

She examined each key looking for the one to her door.

“Quick! I must use your accommodations,” I blurted out.

She looked at me puzzled.

“Your bathroom!” I shouted.

She hurriedly found the key, opened the door, and entered.

I followed fast, but not too fast.

She stood by an open door.

Her hand disappeared inside and turned on the light.

I stripped off my jacket and folded it across her extended arm. She retracted it and held it to her bosom.

I nodded to her with the greatest solemnity.

She crossed herself and nodded back.

I slipped in and locked the door behind me as another fierce spasm racked my stomach.

But I made it to the toilet in the time to release my insides with a sweet sigh of relief before doubling over with cramps.

I wasn’t embarrassed by the sounds I made. The hollow of the toilet amplified my noises, which were, in turn, amplified by the small, marbleclad bathroom.

The echo was astonishing, offering depth, breadth, and vibrato to the baritone of my bowels.

A bang on the door followed by a muffled inquiry as to my status interrupted the symphony I was creating.

Angry, I could only shout over the noise: “Madam, I will not be discommoded whilst on the commode!”

0335. Disco Duck

Larry and I went to Thailand to train in muay thai at Camp Sityodtong in Pattaya, where our mentor, Chuck, trained in his youth.

Towards the end of our stay, we went to Rajadamnern Stadium to watch a match with Louie, Larry’s trainer and one of Sityodtong’s premier fighters.

After Louie won the fight, we asked him if we could take him out to celebrate his victory. He agreed and said to meet him later at Disco Duck.

Louie showed up at the nightclub with his girlfriend on his arm and we all proceeded to get drunk.

Sometime during the night, Louie and his girlfriend disappeared.

As Larry and I were leaving, Louie’s girlfriend reappeared, asking if we had seen Louie.

I told her I hadn’t, and looked around the bar and dance floor. Not seeing him, I turned to point out where I last saw him and poked her in the eye.

She screamed, covered her eye, and ran out of the club.

Larry looked at me and said, “Oh man, Louie’s gonna kill you.”

The next morning, I told Larry to go to practice and scope the place out for me and meet me in the street before our afternoon session.

When I arrived, Larry was there waiting for me. When he saw me, he ran towards me, yelling, “Go! Go! Go! You have to get out of here, Louie’s looking for you.”

I froze and my heart stopped. Where could I possibly run to get away?

Then Larry started laughing. “Oh man, the look on your face!”

0336. Everyone Wins a Trophy

Everyone should win a trophy. The reason for this is simple: Not every kid who plays a sport is playing because they want a career in sports. They’re playing sports because they like the sport and like being on a team with their friends. And even though they might not be good at this sport, it’s still healthy for them to participate and collaborate with others as a team.

These are good skills, especially for kids who aren’t hypercompetitive. For kids who are and who want a career playing the sport they love, there are leagues designed specifically for them. Those who want to excel at that sport can try out for these leagues and continue to refine their skills by playing that sport, leaving the less competitive leagues, and the kids in them, behind. The idea isn’t to eliminate competition but to provide hypercompetitive teams for hypercompetitive players. The rest of the less skilled but highly enthused players, who make up the majority of players, can still play without bringing better players down. For them, it doesn’t have to be about winning, but spending time with your friends playing a sport you truly love.

Now, imagine if we did this with the stock market. You take the sociopathically competitive capitalists and give them a free market arena to compete against each other to see who comes out on top. Containing them in their own major league would protect the assets and social safety nets of average citizens from their predation and speculation and prevent major bubbles, recessions, and bailouts.

0337. Aunt Joann’s Big Heart

My Aunt Joann was like a second mother to me. She was the third oldest of my mother’s seven sisters and was one of the kindest, strongest women I ever knew.

Whenever I visited her, we’d sit at her kitchen table, drink tea, and talk about life like we were old friends. She always asked genuine and direct questions and I always gave genuine and direct answers. I loved this about her. She was always deeply interested in what was going in my life and the lives of others.

She was tough as nails too. You never wanted to piss her off. One time, a woman at work was trying to get her fired. She got back at her by pouring a pound of sugar into her gas tank.

In her late thirties, my aunt was diagnosed with breast cancer, which required a mastectomy and ongoing chemotherapy after surgery. My mother spent a lot of time with her then and I visited her as often as I could. She always told us not to worry about her because cancer wouldn’t kill her.

After her recovery, they gave her a prosthetic boob. She used to take it out and fling it at her sons to warn them that they were pissing her off.

Whenever a prosthetic boob went flying, they knew to cut it out — or else.

Two years later, my aunt died peacefully in her sleep. As she predicted, cancer didn’t kill her, but megacardia did. Megacardia means ‘big heart.’

So my Aunt Joann died with what she always had.

0338. The Initiation of Dieter Leng, Xmyc

Xenomycologist Dieter Leng sat expectantly in front of the fire under the canopy of the raincloudforest. He had passed the trials and would enter the fraternity of the cult after eating the sacred flesh of the Ur-Father with the tribe.

Grandfather took mushrooms from the bowl, ate them, and passed the bowl to Dieter. Dieter took some, ate, and passed the bowl back to Grandfather.

The mushrooms tasted like dried wood and stuck in the valleys of his gums and teeth. Dieter sipped some rainwater from a gourd, swished thoroughly and swallowed.

As the Fathers surrounding him began drumming, Dieter closed his eyes and got lost in the rhythm.

Soon he felt invisible hands touching him. Then he felt hot then cold, dry then wet. As the sensations rippled over and through him, Dieter felt like he was entering hyperspace.

When he opened his eyes, he saw Grandfather become one with the fire.

Dieter stared into the flashing tongues of orange and gold, until he too became one with it, and his entire vision was flooded with its color.

Then, he went beyond its color to a place-time that had neither description nor duration nor dimension, but was, Dieter understood intuitively, the collective consciousness of all mushrooms, the Ur-mushroom mind itself.

And as Dieter completely merged his consciousness with the Urmushroom mind, he understood that every mushroom in the universe was connected together, and that the mushrooms didn’t need a separate system and pathway to keep them connected, because they themselves were that system and pathway. They were communication itself.

0339. The Ministration of Dieter Leng, Xmyc

As Dieter re-emerged from the fire and became aware of himself again, he looked at Grandfather smiling at him and heard him speak without moving his lips: Think of home. Think of home. Think of home.

Dieter thought about his home and the people there, about their inability to connect with each other personally, locally, nationally, internationally, as well as across vast interplanetary and intergalactic distances, until Dieter realized that he had the answer to communication within him, that when he returned to his home planet and entered the crowded spaceport, he would reveal himself as host and agent of the UrFather, and a third-eye stalk would grow from his pineal gland and out through his forehead in a unicorn-like protuberance that would open like an umbrella, releasing spores from the gills of its fruiting body into the densely packed city to be breathed in by the populous where it would take root in the moist tissue of their sinuses, growing rapidly into mycelium that would symbiotically mesh with their arterioles and venules, releasing low levels of psilocybin into their bloodstream, allowing them to see their interconnectivity with one another and the world around them, and begin speaking to each other heart-to-heart, mind-to-mind, soul-to-soul, in person, and across space and time.

This vision stayed with Dieter until the end of his trip.

And when the suns rose the next day, Grandfather called Dieter to him, and with his blowpipe, impregnated Dieter’s sinuses with more spores of the Ur-Father.

Then, Dieter left the raincloudforest, boarded his ship, and embarked for home.

0340. The Holy Mountain

You wake buried alive and naked.

In a panic, you push against the earth.

A section gives way above you and you claw your way through the loose dirt until you can pull yourself free.

You can’t see, but you can hear that you’re in a small cave with water echoing nearby.

You crawl to it carefully, feeling blindly before you with your hands.

When you find the water, you slip in, and wash yourself clean.

Swimming around, you find no exit.

Then, you take a deep breath and dive and discover a passage.

You surface, gulp air, and dive again, swimming through the passage and out into another pool.

Breaking the surface, you find the cave is a raging inferno.

You shield your eyes and notice an opening in the wall beyond the flames.

You walk out of the water and pass through the fire unscathed.

Entering the chamber, you find light streaming down from above and a howling wind whipping fiercely around.

Along the wall are steps in the rock spiraling upwards toward the light.

You place a foot on the stone and begin to ascend, hugging close to the wall.

As you reach the summit, the light becomes unbearably bright, and you have to shield your eyes.

Each step brings you further into the blinding light until you’re absorbed by it.

Then, the light quits, and you find yourself standing in a cloud at the top of a mountain.

With nowhere else to go, you walk to the edge, look down into the darkness below, and jump.

0341. The Five C’s

In order to begin preparing for the effects of climate catastrophe and the coming environmental collapse, we’ll have to start working together in a new way. One way to do this is to use the Five C’s formula.

Context When opening discussions on how to best prepare for the future, it is necessary that the context of the climate catastrophe always be kept in mind. All choices of where, how, and with whom to live must originate from this starting point.

Capabilities Since the climate catastrophe is going to smash every identity and paradigm of society, government, economics, families, friends, and self, it is important not to hold fast to your previous capabilities. Instead, one needs to become flexible when survival is at stake.

Communication The most critical factor that binds people together during catastrophe is communication. There should be constant communication and expression of ideas, feelings, and instincts, because all of these are essential to the survival of the collective.

Consensus Under the stress of the catastrophe, it is important that the collective not collapse into authoritarianism. To prevent this, equal weight must be given to all voices by allowing everyone to have their say. Once everyone has spoken, all major decisions regarding the collective should be voted on by consensus.

Collaboration Once a decision has been made by the majority and accepted, then it is time to apportion duties to each member. This is easy if everyone in the collective has already come to terms with their capabilities and are willing to take on and execute their responsibilities.

0342. Hammocks

I love hammocks. I love reading in hammocks. I love lying in hammocks, swaying back and forth with my hands folded under my head. I love being rocked to sleep in hammocks and napping like a swaddled baby in a cradle.

Growing up, we had a hammock strung between two oaks a few steps from our back deck. The hammock was there for over a decade until my mother, Aunt Ann, Aunt Marie, and Nan decided to sit in it at the same time. Their combined weight pulled the eyebolts out of the trees and they landed on their asses, drinks in hand, laughing like I’ve never heard them laugh before. Watching the hammock collapse under them was funny, but their laughter made it hysterical. I can still see them holding their wineglasses and dusting themselves off, red in the face from wine and laughter.

After that incident, we strung the hammock up between two birches at the back of the backyard. It was my favorite place to go in all seasons.

I’d lie out there in the spring and read, and watch the buds break into hand-like leaves that grew over me to block out the sky. I’d lie out there in the summer, enjoying the shade and the cool, light breeze generated by swinging. I’d lie out there in the fall and watch the leaves change color and drop down in a striptease to slowly expose the sky. I’d lie out there in the winter too, looking up through the skeletal branches to watch the clouds drift by.

0343. The Great Democrats

Death is called the Great Democrat because it comes for rich and poor, young and old, good and bad, alike. Death doesn’t discriminate. Death is the Great Leveler.

But I would argue that death is a Great Democrat, not the Great Democrat, because in order to have death, we must have life. We can all say equally: I am alive, and because I am alive, I will die. So, we should all agree that life is also a Great Democrat.

Further, there can be no life without breath. Since there’s nobody among us I know who can live without breathing, we must conclude that breathing is also a Great Democrat.

In order to maintain life, we must eat and drink. There is no one among us who can live without eating or drinking. Therefore, I think we can all agree that both eating and drinking are Great Democrats too.

And if we can’t live without eating and drinking, then we definitely can’t live without shitting and pissing. Each and every one of us must shit and piss. So we can say with confidence that shitting and pissing are also Great Democrats.

So too with sleep. There’s not a person among us who can live without sleeping. If each and every one of us must sleep, then it holds that sleep is another Great Democrat.

We should acknowledge the Great Democrats of living, breathing, eating and drinking, shitting and pissing, and sleeping and dying in all of us. If we do, we’ll see we share the most basic things in common.

0344. That’s What Words Are

“It’s not working,” he said.

I shrugged.

“But somewhere in you, you thought it would; you thought your spell would work. Right?” he asked.

“Maybe,” I said.

“No, not maybe. You did.”

“Maybe.”

“No. You really believed it. You really believed that if you said your spell, I’d be changed somehow. But it didn’t work, see?”

“I don’t know about that.”

“But it hasn’t. You know that, right? Just look: I’m still the same.”

“It wasn’t about the outcome. No one ever knows the outcome. The only thing I could do was try — regardless of the outcome.”

“That’s crazy. Why do something you know will fail?”

“Because you never know the outcome.”

“But I’m telling you the outcome. I remain unchanged.”

“Right now you are. But later, who knows?”

“I know.”

“No, you don’t. Nobody knows. The words I speak and the actions I take, or the words you speak and the actions you take, nobody knows where they lead. Nobody knows what becomes of them, but we put them into the world regardless.”

“As a spell?”

“As a spell.”

“But magic doesn’t exist.”

“Maybe.”

“But it doesn’t. You spoke your spell and nothing happened, because magic isn’t real.”

“Maybe.”

“So, you think magic’s real?”

“Maybe.”

“And you think I’ve changed?”

“I don’t know. Maybe.”

“You’re a strange man, you know that, believing in these things.”

“Maybe you’re the one who’s strange.”

“Me? Am I the one going around chanting spells?”

“Chanting?”

“You know what I mean.”

“And you know what I mean. Everyone chants spells. That’s what words are.”

0345. Eureka!

“No, no, no, no, no. That won’t work.” God said, looking over the design of the universe in front of Him. “It’s going to collapse in on itself again.”

He examined the universe closely. “Shit, I really thought I had it this time. What do I keep missing?”

Not finding an answer, He shook his head in defeat, crumpled up the universe, and tossed it into the wastebasket.

“I can do this,” He said to himself before starting again from scratch.

“I know where I went wrong with all the other ones. So, if I just avoid those mistakes, this time, hopefully, I’ll get it to work.”

But as God got the universe to the step right after His last failure, He saw that it too would collapse.

Defeated, He leaned forward until His head hit the drawing board.

“Will. I. Ever. Get. This. Right?” He asked, banging His head in time with His words.

He sighed and rested His head on the board.

Then, a noise caught His ear.

In the wastebasket, on top of the other crumpled universes, the last crumpled universe unfolded and began to expand with a crackling sound.

God lifted His head and looked at the crumpled universe.

“Eureka!” He said, leaping from his chair to the wastebasket.

He grabbed the crumpled universe and examined it.

“Well, I’ll be! Would you look at that!” he said, smiling. “I don’t have to build it from the outside in, I just have to give it everything it needs and let it build itself from the inside out.”

0346. Jekyll Is Just as Scary as Hyde

I knew saying it would anger him. It seemed everything I said to him these days set him off. Now, I found it hard to breathe. I could feel him slowly sucking the air out of the room. He was fighting it, holding it back, which meant it would come later, heavier, like a delayed storm. I could already feel the rain of blows, the blood vessels breaking beneath my skin, the bruises blooming like gruesome violets. I was paralyzed. I kept my eyes down and my body still. Any movement could trigger his rage. I shrank as he sucked in my air and his fire grew. It was terrifying.

I knew I had given him this power over me. I knew I enabled this response. But I didn’t deserve it. Nobody did. He always took more than he was given. He always took like he deserved it, like he was owed. And he never gave anything in return except terror, violence, and pain. I knew he had no control over himself anymore, that he’d keep taking more and more, going further and further until, one day, he would go too far and kill me. That’s where all of this ended: My death at his hands. I was his punching bag so he could hide the shame of his impotence from himself.

But this abuse had gone on long enough. If I was the one who gave him this power over me, then I was the only one who could take it away, to save myself, to save us both.

0347. Matty

Matty was my best friend Ter’s older brother. I want to tell you about Matty, but to tell you about him, I have to tell you about Ter too.

When my family moved to Commack, Ter, who lived up the block, came by to find out who moved into the neighborhood. Since Ter and I were the same age and in the same grade, we became fast friends, and spent much of our time, like many kids in the suburbs, hanging out, talking shit, exploring the park and neighborhood, playing hockey, watching T.V. and movies, listening to music, and collecting comic books.

Ter shared a room with Matty, and whenever Matty was home, he would always introduce me to new things. Matty seemed to know everything that was outré and avant-garde. He spent a lot of time in the city after school and on weekends, and brought back many tapes, records, videos, magazines, and books. And like a good teacher, he always shared with me what he had collected and learned. But most importantly, Matty spoke to me as an equal and fellow journeyman, and I looked up to him for that.

For a long time, Ter had denied his brother’s influence. Being an older brother with an uncertain relationship to my brother, I understood why Ter would play this down, especially later, when Matty lost himself and his life to drugs. But Matty was very special to me, and to honor him, I held his funeral service in my home, to thank him for being my older brother too.

0348. Solitaire

When I graduated college I didn’t know what to do with myself. I had a bachelor’s in Animal Science from Cornell University but no intention of going on to become a veterinarian. I regretted the decision I made at the end of high school when I stood at a crossroads: To the left was art school at Pratt or S.V.A. To the right was veterinary science at S.U.N.Y. Delhi and Cornell. My practical side won out and I took the right-hand path.

But after four years of college and a sizeable debt, I wish I had trusted my gut and took the left-hand path. But there I was, after college was over, with a worthless diploma and no career I wanted to pursue, asking myself the heavy question: Who do you want to become now?

Having left art behind, I thought I should start there and pick up where I left off. I looked into going back to college, but the obnoxious amount of time, money, and paperwork required to do so turned me off.

Besides, I knew no school was necessary. I was already listening, watching, and reading everything I could. I didn’t need a teacher or an institution when I had music, movies, and books. I would have to become my own teacher and institution and follow my own head and heart to find out who I wanted to become. I knew this wasn’t going to be an easy path. The future was unknown. So, when I agreed to walk this path, I knew I’d walk it alone.

0349. It’s an Elementary, My Dear Watson

Watson entered carrying a small wooden crate.

“Something’s arrived, Holmes,” Watson said.

“Very good. Set it down here, will you,” Holmes said, tapping at the table in front of him.

Watson laid the box before him.

“Fetch some more light for me, please,” Holmes said, pointing to a lamp across the study. “And the hammer and wedge.”

Watson brought the lamp and lit it. Then, he returned with the hammer and wedge, handed them to Holmes, and held the box.

Holmes fit the wedge into the gap between the cover and the lip and gave it a couple of taps with the hammer. As he pried open each side, Watson turned the box until the cover was free.

Holmes set the hammer and wedge aside as Watson lifted the cover off and laid it nailside up on the table.

Holmes brushed away the straw to reveal a wooden box.

“Pull the crate away,” he said to Watson, lifting the box out of the crate.

Watson moved the crate aside as Holmes placed the box on the table and opened the hinged lid.

“More light,” Holmes said.

Watson raised the lamp.

Holmes lifted the object out of the box and turned it in his hands to inspect it.

“What is it?” Watson asked, leaning in closer to look.

It was made of fused gold wires and had four glass chambers, the first of which was empty, the second of which was aflame, the third of which held water, and the fourth of which held earth.

“It’s an elementary, my dear Watson.”

0350. Agent of Change

Politics is a game most of us don’t want to play, because its rules are complex, its operations opaque, and its players largely unknown. Our detachment from the process means that politicians can operate in relative obscurity, faraway from our everyday lives to do the bidding of the nefarious powers that fill the coffers of their campaigns.

As citizens, the only thing we’re asked to do is to show up every four years to vote. This is why when politicians are campaigning they speak open lies to the poor masses to get their votes and speak closed truths to the rich capitalists to get their money. Today, though, many politicians are just as happy if we stayed at home. This open contempt for voters and the democratic process makes many politicians appear slimy, because they cozy up to special interests to enrich themselves and their family and friends at the expense of the people they were elected to represent.

This is why politics is a game most of us don’t want to play, because we’re not slimy individuals out to better ourselves. But this is precisely the reason why we need to be involved and take an interest, because we have to protect what little democracy is left. We have to realize that government is a place of power and money, and any place of power and money has to be protected from slimy individuals by people who aren’t slimy. This is why Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez ran and won. And this is why she has become a progressive Agent of Change.

0351. These Are a Few of My Favorite Things

The smell of pipe tobacco and patchouli. Drinking pu-erh tea. Lazing in hammocks. Moss. Blustery days. The green intensity of foliage after it rains. Copper. Puppy breath. Wood grain. Libraries. Old book smell. The word crepuscule. Apples. Melons. The angle of light through the blinds of my windows at sunset. Patterns of rust. Dreaming. Shadows. The word susurrus. Bird and squirrel nests. Overcast days. Wind chimes. Wells.

Solitude. Mountain air. Mammoths. Yellowed paper. Sleeping. Waking.

Coffee. Warm bread. Friends arriving. Friends leaving. Whiskey. The moon in all her phases. Spider webs. Gossamer. Dew. The hazy, fuzzy look of budding trees in spring. The smell of the sun on grass. The contours of a woman’s body. Heavy blankets. Soft pillows. Clouds. Drinking oolong tea. Well-made movies. Sitting. Watching birds. Watching people.

Helping others. Cooking food. Walking barefoot in the grass. Having pets around. Prose, poetry, and prose poetry. Rainy days. Thinking. Discovering kindred spirits. Laughing. Making others laugh. Quiet. Old tombstones.

Ruins. Raindrops in puddles. Sad, soulful music. Honesty. Humility.

Self-awareness. Growth. Change. Death. Boredom. Honey. Emptiness.

Struggle. Snow. Fire and fireplaces. Tending fires. Breath. Mountains.

Valleys. Writing and editing. Art. Kindness. Moths. Mothers. Minor key melodies. Mildly scented soaps. Showering, bathing, especially with lovers. Babies. Gardens. Dried fruits and nuts. Bark. Lichen. Imagination.

Listening. Being present. Grainy film stock. Old photos and books. Amber.

Texture. Ink. Incense. Hoodies. Napping. Forgetting. Remembering.

Candles. Skulls. Stone. Bridges. Drums. Pottery. Baskets. Lighthouses.

The beach in winter. Tides. Horizons. Autumn leaves. Maple syrup. A clear night sky with stars. Eclipses. The word syzygy. Darkness.

0352. Conflicting Cosmologies: The First Conflict Conflicting Cosmologies was the name of my first art show and art book that I put together in 2012. The abstract paintings and accompanying poems told the story of Earth’s creation. I described the first conflict in the foreword titled Gnostic Science: Science, from the Latin scientia, means knowledge; through it, we are perpetually discovering, developing, and rewriting our own cosmogony.

With an elegant method that tests its hypotheses, Science remains under pressure to prove itself empirically. This creates a secular and dynamic environment of exchange and growth that unites man across borders to all things and deepens and enriches our understanding of ourselves, our environment, and our origins.

Gnosis also means knowledge in unanglified Greek and differs principally from its sister, Science, in that it is spiritual knowledge or insight. It is the intimate and personal experience of gleaning something unknowable, mysterious, and other behind the fabric of reality. Gnosis, when directly perceived, is often unspeakable, and when and where it is spoken, it is always tied to the tradition of storytelling and the magic of our earliest creation myths.

These two seemingly conflicting knowledges have set the stage of battle within the body between the mind and spirit. Science is coolly rational, logical, objective, and centered in the head, and Gnosis is heatedly irrational, faith-based, subjective, and centered in the heart. However, what we perceive as an opposition between the great exterior discipline and the great interior discipline is, in fact, inseparable correlatives. They are two sides of the same coin, leading us to greater insights and awe.

0353. Conflicting Cosmologies: The Final Conflict Continuing on: There is no doubt that Science has trumped Gnosis through its exponential growth in understanding, endless revisionism, and technological inventiveness. It has developed our most plausible creation myth by parting the very fabric of matter and space to peer deep into our past to find our origin in an explosive singularity. It has shown our cosmic smallness while simultaneously connecting us to totality. Through it, we have overthrown our geo- and anthropocentrism and have learned of our spectacular and felicitous place in our far corner of the universe. […]

The knowledge of beauty and art move the spirit to dance with its music. To be moved thus, is to be moved within, transported, lifted up through the soul of language, color, form, and sound. It is our human voice telling our human story, connecting us back to the ur-voice of our collective unconsciousness when we were apes, reptiles, trees, rocks, and stars. It is the myth and magic of an intelligent biped struggling to understand itself and its origins in the dawn of self-awareness.

It was the goal of many of the early Abstract Expressionists to recreate this mythology with paint. They wanted to bring us back to the unspoken realms through color and form. Standing before many of their canvases one can feel that they were approaching the very threshold of that hidden world. It is in their spirit that I approached these paintings.

The final conflict was “these paintings” that I had created, and was then compelled to show and sell as commodities in a marketplace.

0354. On the Nature of Empaths

Empaths feel what other people feel. They are open to the psychic and emotional states of others and can sense subtle shifts in their spirit and mood. This sense allows empaths to understand the internal world of others through direct experience.

Many empaths, who are parents and lovers, become deeply attuned both psychically and emotionally to their children and partners. Empath parents and lovers have an almost supernatural ability to sense what their children and partners are feeling. Sometimes this connection is so acute that these empaths can feel what their children and lovers are feeling across great distances.

This ability is quite powerful, but the empaths’ openness to the psychic and emotional states of others can easily lead to exhaustion, burnout, and illness. And because empaths are psychic and emotional sinks for others, they can easily be abused. This may not be done out of malice, but it saps the strength of empaths just the same.

This is why it is critical for empaths to 1) realize that they are empaths, and 2) train others in empathic techniques. Otherwise, they can easily become enablers of the worst toxic excesses of others to the detriment of their own health and the health of their relationships.

Empathy is a reflexive phenomenon for natural empaths. But anyone who wants to learn how to be receptive to the psychic and emotional states of others can do so. Like any skill, it takes willingness, time, patience, and practice to learn. The longer one engages with empathic techniques, the easier and more intuitive they become.

0355. The Needles

A thought slipped in between her counting and jarred her rhythm.

She stopped and dropped her hands and looked at the scarf she was knitting and repeated the number twenty-three three times to remember her place.

She grasped for the thought again, but it evaded her.

She looked over her glasses at her husband reclining on the couch in the blue glow of the television, which seemed to flicker to the stentorian play-by-play commentary of the sports announcer.

And it was then that it rushed back to her: that this was their life, this was the extent of their evenings, and would be for all evenings to come, until they shuffled off to bed, or, eventually, the grave.

She grimaced.

The thought made her sad.

Why was she thinking about this now? She’d had a nice life and still did. It had been fulfilling. She’d had a good career, a nice house, raised two beautiful children, and now played grandma to four beautiful grandchildren. She was retired. She was knitting. She was comfortable.

What more could she want?

She didn’t know. But something had inserted itself between her and her world, it had entered her perception and made her question it.

She set down her needles and took a sip of cold, weak tea.

She grimaced again and set the cup back down in its saucer.

She couldn’t shake the question.

Then, she remembered herself years ago with Betty, kissing her and saying goodbye, and wondering.

She shook her head, took up her needles, and began to count again.

0356. A Manner of Speaking Crossly

“Take this letter to the manor house of Lord Lordly and see that he gets it.”

“And what street is it on, sir?”

“It’s on Hamberry Street.”

“Lord Lordly on Hamberry Street. Very good, sir.”

“Make sure it gets there, post haste.”

“Post haste, sir. Of course, sir.”

“Very good.”

“Oh, sir. Before I leave, would you mind telling me what’s the cross street?”

“Cross Street.”

“Yes, the cross street, sir.”

“Cross Street!”

“I’m sorry, sir. Is this some sort of joke?”

“Excuse me?”

“A joke, sir. You keep repeating cross street whenever I ask you for the cross street.”

“That’s because the name of the cross street is Cross Street, you idiot!”

“Please don’t get cross, sir. I thought perhaps it was your manner to echo my last words.”

“Echo your last words? Why those’ll be your last words if you don’t get going immediately.”

“I will, sir. Post haste, sir. But what manner of house is Lord Lordly’s manner house?”

“My god, man, you test me. What on earth are you asking me now?”

“Given the importance of this letter, I’m asking you the manner of his manner house, I wouldn’t want to miss it. What does it look like?”

“What does it look like? It looks like Lord Lordly’s manor house on Hamberry Street. Do you really need me to describe it to you?”

“No need to get upset, sir. I’ll know it by everyone behaving well.”

“Behaving well? I — No — Give me that letter back this instant. I’ll take it there myself.”

“As you wish, sir.”

0357. Ragnarok Armageddon

When Odin arrived to where Loki was held in captivity, Loki excitedly asked Odin if Ragnarok had finally arrived.

As Odin freed Loki, he lamented that Ragnarok would never happen because of the ascendency of the God of Midgard.

Loki asked Odin about the God of Midgard.

Odin told him what he knew.

Loki pressed Odin about the Book of Revelations.

Odin explained it in detail.

After listening, Loki said he had a plan to bring about Ragnarok but it required Fenris, Jormungand, and all the Asgardians to travel to Midgard.

Odin agreed.

Before leaving, Loki revealed to the Asgardians that Hermod was known as Hermes to the Greeks and Hermanubis to the Egyptians.

Hermod laughed at being exposed and asked Loki what he intended to do. Loki told Hermod to gather Cerberus and the Greek gods, and Ammit, Apophis, and the Egyptian gods, and meet him on the plains of Megiddo for an epic Battle of the Beasts.

When Hermod arrived at Megiddo with the gods and monsters Loki requested, Loki called the first battle between Fenris and Cerberus.

After a vicious fight, Fenris bested Cerberus.

The gods, excited for the first time in centuries, demanded more.

Loki called the next battle between Jormungand and Apophis.

After another vicious fight, Jormungand bested Apophis.

The gods demanded more.

Loki called the final battle between Fenris and Ammit.

After Fenris won, Loki spotted the God of Midgard in the crowd and asked him if he had a beast of the earth or sea to fight the winners.

God said he did.

0358. My Autozoëography

My autozoëography begins when the universe begins, in an expanding point of light and heat in which the first subatomic particles were created, and which later formed into the atomic particles of primary gases that gathered into clouds and were compressed by gravity into stars, in whose furnaces heavier elements were formed, and whose supernovas scattered these elements across time and space to eventually be pulled into the gravity of our sun and whirled in its orbit to accrete more matter into a stable planet, whose surface of seething magma would cool over millions of years to allow oceans to form and the first unicellular organisms to emerge and evolve into more complex, multicellular plants and animals, which would in time evolve into more complex animals, growing backbones that allowed them to leave the sea for the land, going from fish to amphibian to reptile to mammals that managed to survive an extinction event to emerge as the dominant life on land that grew and thrived and evolved into apes then early hominids, who took their first bipedal steps out of forests and across the plains creating language and tools, and learning to master fire and their environment to spread across the world as hunter-gatherers before settling down and developing herding and agriculture, and writing and culture, and civilization and war, which shaped our history for the past four thousand years to bring us to our present moment when, using finer language and finer tools, we can look into our common origins to see that my autozoëography is your autozoëography.

0359. In Case My Mind Goes First

All of my grandparents had their minds until their bodies broke down.

They remained relatively sharp and in relatively good humor up to the end. With their minds active, they knew they were going to die, and all of them seemed to accept it, and, at the end, seemed to welcome it.

In my opinion, this is the best way to go, because it taxes everyone around you less. When the mind goes before the body, it becomes everyone’s problem because you’re not present to take care of yourself.

If the body goes before the mind, you’re still present and can remain independent longer.

Watching my parents age, I think that their minds might go before their bodies. Taking care of them will always be my and my brother’s responsibility, but it will be harder if their minds go before their bodies.

It’s my hope that, for all of our sakes, they age like their parents.

Watching them age makes me wonder how I’m going to age. I fear that if their minds go before their bodies, mine might too. If it does, at least I’ll have this book to read to remember my favorite memories, people, and stories.

I hope this book will keep my mind intact by acting as a written record of my life and thought. As I age, I might have to read and reread it to keep remembering who I am. This may help to keep my mind sharp and help me remain independent from all my dependents for as long as I possibly can.

0360. 360 Degrees

Today is September 8th 2019. I want to use this story to do a 180-degree look back at my 180th story to see how I’ve failed to keep to the writing schedule I had outlined there.

It was an achievable plan at 20 stories per week. However, when spring came, I wanted to be outdoors visiting friends instead of indoors writing on my computer. I stopped on March 16th at my 243rd story The Four Brothers and didn’t return until July 13th when I added the older, unfinished story Seeding and the new story Casualties.

This gap of almost four months has obviously set me behind schedule.

Had I kept to it, I’d now be well over 720 stories. As it stands, I’m at 360 stories, a full 360 stories behind where I would have been. In the past eight weeks since I started writing again, I’ve completed 117 stories. This averages out to a little over 14 stories per week, well under the 20 stories per week goal I originally set for myself.

I’m uncertain now when this book will be finished, but it will be finished. I’m currently strapped for time because we’re selling the family business and I’m selling my house. There’s a lot of work that needs to be done to both places prior to sale. This work requires a lot of mental and physical energy, which will, of course, take away from the writing.

But once free from both of these pressures, I’ll be able to concentrate on writing full-time and finally complete this project.

0361. Notes on Narrative Perspective

Narrative perspective is primarily given to a character that perceives external stimuli outside of themselves in their immediate physical environment and internal stimuli inside of themselves in their immediate psychic environment. This perceiving character metaconciously, consciously, or subconsciously reacts to these perceptions through their thought, speech, and action.

By remaining within the perspective of the perceiving character, the reader can only perceive what the perceiving character is aware of. This allows the reader to experience the world of the perceiving character with all the limitations of their perception. This way of writing comes closest to our own subjective awareness. But by staying within the point of view of the perceiving character, the reader can feel trapped within the perceiving character's point of view. Eliminating narratorial intrusion for the entire story creates a claustrophobic effect for the reader.

The narrator, who is not the perceiving character, is not limited to the point of view of the perceiving character's subjective perspective, but has an objective perspective that can either be limited or unlimited. If limited, the narrator, who may be another character in the story and may be unreliable and subject to their own peculiar biases, will open up and offer a broader view of the world. If unlimited, the narrator is free to travel wherever it will in space and time to bring the reader into space-times inaccessible to the story's characters. The function of the narrator, then, is to break the claustrophobic subjective perspective of the perceiving character to create more movement and space in the story called narratorial liberation.

0362. Buffalo

Steam rises off the back of a lone bull buffalo like the mist rising off the low grassy hills behind him, both glittering with jewels of dew in the early morning light.

The bull stands unmoving amidst the bodies of his dead kin, looking at nothing with his unblinking black eyes.

The hunter, Bill Thompson, levels his Springfield 50-70 rifle and exhales.

The gun explodes loudly and the bull drops dead where it stands as the report dissipates across the rolling plains without an echo.

Bill Thompson lowers his rifle slowly.

Stewart Collins, the lean man standing next to him chewing on a blade of gamba grass says, “Strange. Never saw one of them stand still like that.”

Bill Thompson shrugs. “Just get’im skinned. I’ll send for the team.”

Stewart Collins salutes him with a knife in his gore-stained hand and saunters off, boots skimming the prairie grass.

Bill Thompson shoulders his Springfield and walks to Jedediah Hawkins holding his horse.

Jedediah Hawkins, bearded and in a coonskin cap, grins toothlessly.

“Ten already and the sun’s just risin’. S’gonna be a good haul today, Lawd!” he croons and laughs.

Bill Thompson pays him no mind as he mounts his horse and runs the numbers in his head again. Fifty-five. He had fifty-five robes and tongues. In a few months, he’d have the money he needed to buy his stake in Dodge City. It would be a small shop, but guaranteed success.

Bill Thompson spurred his horse. The day was young, the buffalo were plenty, and he was just getting started.

0363. Homecoming

Charlie leaves prison carrying only a small bag of his belongings. He stands outside in the cold waiting for Tommy to pick him up.

When his brother doesn’t show, he heads to the depot and catches a bus to the Port Authority. As the bus travels along the highway and the train travels through the subway, he stares into his enraged reflection.

Walking home, he notices how the neighborhood has changed. He feels strange, out of sorts and time. But, buoyed by his anger, he doesn’t sink into nostalgia and sadness as he turns down his street and heads towards his house.

When he sees it, he doesn’t recognize it. A lot has changed. His brother must be doing well. It has a new roof and siding.

He suppresses his rage and walks to the front door.

Banging on it loudly. He waits impatiently. When no one answers, he bangs again, peers through the window, tries the handle, finds it locked.

He heads around back and tries the door there. It’s locked too. He punches a hole through the glass with his bag, opens the lock, and lets himself in.

On the kitchen table is a cake that reads “Welcome Home.” He picks it up and drops it in the trash.

Seething with fury, he washes his hands and face in the sink. As he dries himself with a dishtowel, he hears the phone ring in the other room.

On the answering machine, his mother’s voice says, “Charlie, if you’re there, pick up. It’s your brother. He’s in the hospital.”

0364. Ghost World

They followed our radio waves back to Earth, knowing it would bring them to a civilization younger and less advanced than theirs.

As they approached, they pieced together our history, which told them the sad story of our fate. When they neared Earth, they confirmed what they had learned by measuring the elemental composition and atmospheric conditions of our planet. We were, of course, not the first planet they had visited where the population had destroyed itself from its own excesses.

They had seen the ruins of many civilizations gutted by the reckless abuse and hubris of its leaders and the distracted apathy of its masses.

They mapped our planet and cities and landed outside a submerged coastal metropolis. They rode the tide into its center, navigating between the wreckage of tall buildings standing above the waves before diving beneath the waters and traveling along the silted streets.

And though they were alien to our planet, they were still filled with the melancholy that all ruins inspire. They imagined us alive in the past, before the catastrophe that destroyed us, quick with life and intelligence. To this, they added humility to our psychology, and then projected us into a future where our two civilizations met and exchanged greetings and thanks.

Overwhelmed, they stopped their tour and settled onto the seabed where they meditated to clear their minds before opening themselves up to the psychic imprints we left behind. As they slowly filtered through the cacophony of our collective suffering, they tuned the noise into the cries of our individual souls.

0365. 24219

Whenever we try to wrap our minds around something complex and define it, we’ll find, if we’re paying attention, that the mental construct we’ve made for that thing is more perfect than the thing itself.

For instance, when we think about a year, we always think of it as a singular thing that arbitrarily ends on 11:59:59 December 31st and begins again on 12:00:00 January 1st. The December 31st end of the year date is roughly ten days off from the December 20th or 21st winter solstice, which is a relatively fixed solar event and the shortest day of the year in the northern hemisphere and the longest day in the southern hemisphere.

The December 31st end of the year date isn’t even connected to the lunar cycle. Months, read: moon-ths, correspond loosely to lunar cycles.

There are 12.381 lunar cycles in a year as opposed to the 12 months given.

If you divide 365 days by 12 months, you get 30.41666, but our months contain between 28 and 31 days.

Looking at the number of days in a year, we find there are actually 365.24219 days. This number is rounded up to 365.25 and an extra day is added every four years on a leap year to balance this overage. So, our mental construct of a year imperfectly divides both the lunar and solar cycles. In our minds, a year is a single perfect thing, a whole number 1, but in reality, it’s sloppy and imperfect. We should remember that this holds true for all of our mental constructs.

0366. Miracle of Love

When the plastic dry cleaning bag lifted up off the bench and drifted back down, I knew it was you. The bag had lain there undisturbed for weeks despite the ceiling fan being on and the a.c. running and me walking past it several times a day. That’s why I knew it was you. Who else could it be? I smiled and thanked you for visiting and returned to reading; I was almost finished.

When I closed the book, I wanted to meditate immediately. I swaddled you, laid you aside with care, and kissed your image on the cover.

Sliding out of bed, I knelt in the corner of the room and began meditating and repeating your names and thanking you for your grace.

And then something broke open inside me. The flower of my heart, the flower of love, blossomed in my chest, and I wept in joy and thanks.

I was so much lighter now.

Repeating your names, the carpet began to shimmer and the room dimmed and grew cool and thin wisps of mist began to wrap around me.

Though cool, I thought the mist was smoke from fire and I broke the trance.

When I did, the room returned.

Taking up your names again, the coolness and the mist returned. But again, sensing fire, I broke the trance, and the room returned.

When I took up your names again, it was too late. The state had passed. I pranamed and thanked you for touching me so.

I stood, wiped my eyes, and sat back in bed.

0367. Charybdis Press

I remember lying in my hammock and looking at the publisher’s logo on the spine of a book I had just finished reading and thinking, Why couldn’t I have my own publishing company?

You can have your own publishing company, I answered.

The thought excited me. I could be a publisher. I could publish my own books or the books of others. I could publish a book like the one I was holding. I could be holding a book that I had written and published.

It was a profound and empowering moment. The power was in my hands.

Then, the questions flooded in: What’s it like to be a publisher? Do I really want the responsibility? Or, do I really only want to write books?

Or, do I really want both? Let’s say I want both. What would it take to start a publishing company and where would I get the money to start it?

Would I run it out of my house or would I need an office? Could I run it myself or would I need to hire people? Would I also become a printer and print the books or would I outsource the printing?

Then, I swept all of the questions aside and thought: None of this matters if I don’t have a name. I need a name. What’s the name of my publishing company?

And it came to me in a flash: Charybdis Press. And then I saw the logo, a whirling C. And then I leapt out of the hammock and ran to draw it.

0368. Tarkovsky and Memory

Your experience of a shared experience will never be identical to the other person’s experience of that shared experience. Likewise, your memory of your shared experience will never be identical to the other person’s memory of it. Experience and memory are wholly personal events that will never truly be shared.

You can share your memories by speaking or writing about them, but that speaking and writing will only ever be a copy of the original experience, which lacks fidelity. If we understand that our experiences and memories will never truly be replicated, then we’re free to use them to infuse and enhance the fictions we create.

To convey the feelings of an experience that has strongly imprinted itself on us, we can build a fiction around that memory to amplify it and project it through a medium and into the experience and memories of another person experiencing that medium.

I believe this is what Andrei Tarkovsky has done in his films. If we begin with Solaris, we see the theme of memories returning to haunt investigative psychologist, Kris Kelvin. In Stalker, when Red reaches the center of the Zone, we follow the timestream of consciousness back through collected and submerged memories. This sets the stage for Mirror, in which we not only see and hear Tarkovsy’s own memories of his childhood; we feel and are haunted by them. For me, the image of his mother lifting her wet hair out of the washbasin has become my memory of his mother lifting her wet hair out of the washbasin twice removed.

0369. Sagittarius A*

Scientists have recently captured and computed the sound emanating from a newly formed black hole, proving correct Einstein's prediction that the pitch and decay of a black hole's gravitational waves are a direct product of its mass and spin. The scientists also used the pitch and decay of this particular black hole to calculate its mass and spin, which matched previously taken measurements, proving Einstein's theory of relativity correct in a novel way.

Black holes have been popularized through the writings of Steven Hawking, who proved that when you add quantum mechanics to the equations where the theory of relativity breaks down and collapses into the singularity of a black hole, black holes prove not to be completely black, but emit some radiation. And over an unimaginably vast period of time, the black hole will shrink away to nothingness as all the matter it absorbed is re-radiated.

It’s generally accepted by scientists that supermassive black holes exist at the centers of almost every elliptical galaxy in the universe. Last year, in 2018, scientists concluded that the object at the center of our galaxy is a black hole, which they named Sagittarius A* (pronounced A-Star).

Scientists have also recently discovered enormous balloon-like structures near Sagittarius A*, attributing their creation to massive energy bursts emitted by the dying star millions of years ago.

Recently, another scientist has postulated that our universe might be inside a black hole. And it may be that this black hole is itself inside a universe that is itself inside a black hole and so on ad infinitum.

0370. Paul Bunyan, Oxherder

Paul Bunyan walked across a devastated world, his head high in the smog, sweating from the heat, agitated that his industry left no further wealth to extract from the Earth. Not knowing what to do with himself, he sat on the flat of a mountaintop and held his head in his hands.

Then, Paul heard the voice of the Mother for the first time, “My child, you’ve pushed us both to the point of death. We’re polluted and denuded, hollowed out and empty. It’s time for both of us to heal. To do this, I have a challenge for you. Find the Bull of Heaven, the Mighty Ox, and tame Him.” “But how will I find this Bull?” Paul asked.

“You will know the Bull by its size and color, which is as giant and blue as the sky beyond the smog.”

Paul thanked her for the challenge and started his quest.

Without discipline, Paul crisscrossed continents and oceans, but never found the Bull. Defeated, he gave up and wandered without thought until he stumbled upon traces of the Bull’s passing. Becoming more focused, Paul followed the trail until he spotted, pursued, and cornered the Bull.

He struggled long to capture it and worked tirelessly to master it, until, at last, he subdued the powerful animal. When the Bull answered only to him, he rode it back home and offered the Bull and himself as a gift to the Mother. She told Paul that it was his to keep and that he must return to the marketplace to teach others.

0371. Flowers Are the Genitals of Plants

“You’re the apple of my eye,” she said holding the apple out to me.

I bit it and chewed. “You’re the apple of my Eve,” I said, swallowing.

“The apple of your eve? How about the apple of your morn?” she asked.

“That too. Your daily apples keep the doctors away.”

“Do they?”

“They do.”

“Did you know apples are in the rose family?”

“I did not.”

“Eating apples are like eating roses, the babies of roses.”

“The babies of roses?”

“The babies of roses are apples. The fertilized flower produces fruit, usually with the help of a bee. Pollen, pistil, stamen, and bee.”

“That’s a sexing bee, right? The erotic cousin of the spelling bee.”

She smirked. “That makes flowers the genitals of plants.”

“So, when I bring you flowers, I’m bringing you the sex of a plant?”

“Yes.” “I can see now why they’re a symbol of love and desire. It’s like saying: From my genitals to yours.”

“Exactly! And they’re beautiful, aren’t they?”

“My genitals?”

She laughed. “Your genitals are beautiful.”

“It’s congenital,” I added quickly.

“They’re quite congenial.”

“Thank you.”

“You’re welcome. But, listen: All genitals are beautiful. But flowers, and I’m talking just about flowers here,” she said, shooting me a mockserious look. “Flowers are the most beautiful genitals in the world.”

“I couldn’t agree more.”

“Such good wordplay today.”

“I expect flowers. Or should I say, a flower.”

“What kind?”

“You know, that one-of-a-kind kind.”

“M-hm. I know just the one.” She said straddling me. “There’s one blooming in my garden as we speak.”

0372. Spy Report on the Morning Routine of an MI-6 Agent He wakes before dawn and heads to the bathroom for his morning piss.

After washing his hands, he changes into workout clothes and runs on the treadmill, rows on the rowing machine, and bikes on the stationary bike.

With his cardio complete, he does squats, pushups, and lifts light weights at high reps. He ends his workout with stretching and yoga before taking a hot shower that he ends with a cold rinse. Drying himself off, he puts on his boxer briefs and dons a robe, which he set out the night before. In the kitchen, he pours himself coffee and prepares a little brekkie consisting of bacon, bangers, beans, fried eggs, tomatoes, and toast. He eats at a small kitchen table, while listening to the morning news on the telly and checking emails on his computer. When he’s done, he washes and dries everything and returns them to their proper places in the cupboard. He then prepares the coffee pot for the next morning. Back in the bathroom, he flosses and brushes his teeth, combs his hair, shaves, puts on aftershave, deodorant, and cologne, then dresses in a pressed shirt, dress socks, leather shoes, and a three–piece suit. He puts on his watch then rechecks his gun before securing it in his shoulder holster. On his way out, he grabs his dry cleaning, briefcase, wallet, phone, and keys. On the way to work, he drops off his dry cleaning, and sits in the usual morning traffic on the roads and the usual morning briefings and debriefings at work.

0373. Three Letter Words A - K

abs, ace, act, add, ado, adz, aft, age, ago, aid, ail, aim, air, alb, ale, all, amp, and, ant, any, ape, app, apt, arc, are, ark, arm, art, ash, ask, asp, ass, ate, aye, auk, awe, awl, axe, aye, bad, bag, ban, bar, bat, bay, bed, bee, beg, bet, bib, bid, big, bin, bit, boa, bob, bog, boo, bop, bot, bow, box, boy, bra, bud, bug, bum, bun, bus, but, buy, bye, cab, cad, cam, can, cap, car, cat, caw, cay, chi, cob, cod, cog, con, coo, cop, cot, cow, cox, coy, cry, cub, cud, cue, cum, cup, cur, cut, dab, dad, dal, dam, daw, day, del, den, dew, did, die, dig, dim, din, dip, doe, dog, don, dot, dry, dub, dud, due, dug, dun, duo, dye, ear, eat, ebb, eek, eel, egg, ego, elf, elk, ell, elm, emu, end, eon, era, ere, err, eve, ewe, eye, fab, fad, fan, far, fat, fax, fay, fed, fee, fen, few, fey, fib, fie, fig, fin, fir, fit, fix, flu, fly, fob, foe, fog, fop, for, fox, fry, fun, fur, gab, gad, gag, gal, gap, gas, gay, gel, gem, get, gig, gin, gnu, gob, god, goo, got, gum, gun, gut, guy, gym, had, hag, ham, has, hat, hay, hem, hen, her, hew, hey, hid, him, hip, his, hit, hob, hoe, hog, hop, hot, how, hub, hue, hug, hum, hut, ice, icy, ilk, ill, imp, ink, inn, ion, ire, irk, its, ivy, jab, jag, jam, jar, jaw, jay, jet, jib, jig, job, jog, jot, joy, jug, jut, keg, ken, key, kid, kin, kir, kit,

0374. Three Letter Words L - Z

lab, lad, lag, lam, lap, law, lax, lay, led, lee, leg, lek, let, ley, lid, lie, lip, lit, lob, log, lop, lot, low, lox, lug, lye, mad, man, map, mar, mat, maw, may, men, met, mew, mid, mix, moa, mob, mom, mop, mow, mud, mug, nab, nag, nan, nap, nay, net, new, nib, nil, nip, nod, not, now, nub, nun, nut, oaf, oak, oar, oat, odd, ode, off, oft, ohm, oil, old, ole, one, opt, orb, ore, our, out, owe, owl, own, pad, pal, pan, pap, par, pat, paw, pay, pea, pee, peg, pen, pep, per, pet, pew, pie, pig, pin, pip, pit, ply, pod, poo, pop, pot, pox, pro, pry, pub, pug, pun, pup, pus, put, qua, rad, rag, raj, ram, ran, rap, rat, raw, ray, red, rep, res, rev, rib, rid, rig, rim, rip, rob, rod, roe, rot, row, rub, rue, rug, rum, run, rut, rye, sac, sad, sag, sap, sat, saw, say, sea, see, set, sew, sex, she, shy, sic, sin, sip, sir, sit, six, ska, ski, sky, sly, sob, sod, son, sot, sow, soy, spa, spy, sty, sub, sue, sum, sun, sup, tab, tad, tag, tan, tap, tar, tau, tax, tea, tee, ten, the, thy, tic, tie, tin, tip, tit, toe, tom, ton, too, top, tor, tot, tow, toy, try, tub, tug, two, urn, use, van, vat, vet, via, vie, vim, vow, wad, wag, wan, war, was, wax, way, web, wed, wee, wet, who, why, wig, win, wit, woe, wok, won, woo, wry, yak, yam, yaw, yen, yes, yet, yew, you, zap, zed, zip, zit, zoo

0375. El Dorado

G is for GOLD, the GOD with an L for lucre, and O is for ore at the core of Lord whose L has led them to a load of lead that deals the D of destruction, dearth, and death.

The conquistadors dreamt of gold. As they planned their trip, they dreamt of gold. As they boarded their ship, they dreamt of gold. As they raised their anchor, they dreamt of gold. As they unfurled their sails, they dreamt of gold. As they crossed the ocean, they dreamt of gold. As they dropped anchor, they dreamt of gold. As they rowed ashore, they dreamt of gold.

As they raped and pillaged, they dreamt of gold. As they destroyed a people, they dreamt of gold.

Always before the conquistadors was gold, a Spanish real as bright and real as the sun, a bright golden god, the one-eyed moneyed Mammon, seducing them to seek out splendorous El Dorado.

Their lives became one of search and slaughter, a mission to establish missions for one god when they served another on their way to wondrous El Dorado.

Gold wasn’t about the alchemical purification of the soul, it was the means to power, and to power’s end, control, on the their march to fabulous El Dorado.

For queen and country. For god and glory. Their gory trail told another story. But to the dreamers from faraway Spain, gold grew there in thick glimmering veins to enrich their noble blood by spilling the blood of heathens in floods to conclude their quest in conquered El Dorado.

0376. M.C.E.coli – Verbal Diarrhea

After a long absence, underground shithop legend, M.C.E.coli, dropped his new number two this morning and it’s a floater! Like Eric B. and Rakim’s second Follow the Leader, Verbal Diarrhea starts off with three instant classics.

Take the first track Escatology about how M.C.E. handled the success of his first album and the trouble that came with his fame, label, and manager: “I played host to parasites to get into Paradise.” But after finding himself in the “bowels of Hell,” he realizes that he has to use his daimon against the demons to escape. And like Theseus, he does this by following the “intestinal labyrinth helminth Ariadne string” out of the anus and towards the birth of this album and his own label, Uneasy Listening. Like he says: “Behold the crowning head of a newborn king.”

The next track Excrementum Tremendum is filled with his greatest bombast to date: “When I peer amidst my peers I’m the Pyramid of Kufu, I pile shit so high I’m the Everest of doodoo.” At the end, M.C.E., controlling the sun and the waters of the Nile, regreens the desert back to a lush forest, inviting us all to: “Smoke [his] trees.”

On the third track, Deafification he blows our eardrums out with his hardest hitting song that turns the heaviest beats to 11 before exploding onto it with: “And. Like. Loki I raise Hel Like Norman I Rockwell.”

There’s no end to the lyrical brilliance of this album. Like he says on Shit Talking: “My Energy makes all M.C.’s square.” And it does.

0377. Rip Awake

When most people think of Rip Van Winkle, they think of a guy with a long beard who took a long nap. Run-D.M.C. paraphrases this common sentiment perfectly in their song Peter Piper with the lyrics: “And Rip Van Winkle fell the hell asleep.”

That’s all most people know. If you press them, they’ll never tell you that Rip was a henpecked husband who one day left with his dog, Wolf, to shoot squirrels in the Catskill Mountains of New York where he lived and, tired from hunting, stops to rest and falls asleep, waking up two decades later, a scruffy old man whose slumber took him through the Revolutionary War and the death of his wife.

This is probably because most people haven’t read the story and only know it by oral osmosis. But even those who read the story must read it carefully, because the unwary reader of Mr. Irving’s tale will surely miss the cue of Rip’s actual sleep.

Let me show you what I mean in the text, emphases are mine: “Panting and fatigued, he [Rip] threw himself, late in the afternoon, on a green knoll, covered with mountain herbage.” Seven paragraphs later, we read: “On awaking, he found himself on the green knoll whence he had first seen the old man of the glen.”

Rip never left the green knoll where he fell asleep. He rises, finds Wolf missing, his flintlock rusted, and his beard grown a foot long. Confused, he heads down the mountain to return to civil society after twenty years asleep.

0378. Rip Asleep

We must remember that everything that happens to Rip between the green knolls happens to him while he’s asleep.

Rip is dreaming when he hears his name called like a magical incantation and sees a “strange figure” carrying a “stout keg” up the mountain, and amicably offers the stranger a hand, and follows him to his bizarrely dressed companions, who may be, we later learn, the ghosts of Hendrick Hudson and his crew, playing a game of ninepins, whose sport echoes through the mountains like thunder, as Rip stealthily helps himself to their wine.

Being an archdreamer in the vein of Randolph Carter and familiar with the rules of Dreamland, I know that drinking anything in Dreamland will send you deeper into Dreamland.

And this is precisely what happens to Rip. After drinking in his dream, Rip falls asleep into a deeper dream. We read: Rip, “naturally a thirsty soul,” drank several draughts until “at length his senses were overpowered, his eyes swam in his head, his head gradually declined, and he fell into a deep sleep.”

That did it. Rip got rip roaring drunk while dreaming and went deeper into Dreamland.

It should be obvious, but: The first lesson to all uninitiated dreamers is: Don’t drink anything in Dreamland, unless you want to sleep for several decades.

The second lesson to all uninitiated dreamers is: Don’t eat anything in Dreamland, unless you want to sleep for several hundred years.

And the third and final lesson to all uninitiated dreamers is: Don’t smoke anything in Dreamland — ever.

You’ve been warned.

0379. Sudden Death Overtime

It’s dusk, it’s beginning to snow, and the lamplights in the park just turned on.

We’re in sudden death overtime.

Faceoff. Mikolanda versus Ter. The puck is dropped and Mikolanda swats it to Larson on point.

Larson winds up and lets a slapshot rip.

Rob catches it in his chest.

We cheer and congratulate Rob. Faceoff. Mikolanda wins again and pulls the puck around the back of the net and passes it back up to Larson, who steps into it, unleashing another howler.

But miraculously, Rob’s there to block it again.

We cheer Rob on.

He grins behind his mask, getting cocky.

Faceoff. The puck drops. Mikolanda secures it and snaps it to a determined Larson.

Larson fires hot, but Rob’s there to rob him a third time.

We cheer in disbelief as Ter gets the puck.

Larson barks a short “Fuck” as he backpedals to engage Ter, who’s making an offensive push.

Ter shoots wide.

Someone clears the puck from the corner, and, with a will of its own, rolls right through the clots of players and towards the net.

“Rob, stop the fuckin’ puck!” I yell.

The puck rolls towards Rob in slow motion.

Rob drops on all fours like an animal.

The puck rolls between his hands and legs and into the net.

Rob looks behind him like he just shit something out.

I curse.

The other team lets out a whoop of celebration.

Shaking his head, Ter hunches over, supporting his tired frame with his hockey stick across his knees, forming the letter “A” for astonishment.

0380. A Permutation of the Multiverse

“In this universe, and other universes like it, she dies. And yet, in other universes, she lives. In those universes, you two are still together, unaware that a tragedy has befallen your other selves in other universes. But this universe isn’t those other universes. This universe is where you experience the heartbreak of her death. And this universe may be the universe in which you triumph over your heartbreak, or it may be the universe in which you’re destroyed by it. But there are infinite paths and you’re on all of them and none of them simultaneously. I know all of this is confusing, and saying this won’t bring her back, but it may bring you some comfort knowing that there are other yous who will never know the sorrow of her loss.”

“That doesn’t help me here.”

“No, it doesn’t. But even if you were in a universe where you died before her, another you would still be experiencing this in another universe. Remember, there’s no difference between any of your separate selves. You’re all one. So, there’s no escaping this. Your loss here is your gain somewhere else. Everything is balanced across the multiverse.”

“But how do I know what you’re saying is true? How do I know there’s another me out there with her right now?”

“You can’t, but you can believe that this universe is but one permutation of the infinite permutations of the multiverse. If you believe that, then you can believe she’s both alive and dead, like all of us. Can you believe that?”

0381. Ass Pirates

Adrift on a raft, lost and alone, I was lucky to be found by Ass Pirates on the seventh sea.

They threw down a lifeline of soap-on-a-rope and heave-hoed me up to the deck of their fabulous ship.

“Welcome aboard, castaway. I’m Captain Peleg,” the burly, bearded, bemakeuped man before me said. Noticing that I noticed his large member compensating for a missing leg, he winked. “Aye, I do stump around on me wood. But enough o’ that, ye must be thirsty and famished.

Mama, Los, take him to Chefed.”

Mama and Los led me through the crowd and below deck to the kitchen, where Chefed prepared a moving feast of hearty and flavorful fare, and the four of us set to talking and eating and drinking and smoking.

After we supped, we headed up to the deck where a D.J. was spinning records and the crew was drinking and dancing.

When I heard the leopard-spotted sailor in the crows nest call “Land Ho!” I looked and saw the marina.

Mama, Los, and Chefed took me to see Captain Peleg. I hugged them all and thanked them for their generous hospitality.

“My pleasure, my boy,” Captain Peleg said, squeezing my shoulder.

“All we have is each other in this here world.”

I walked the crooked plank to the dock, turned and tearily waved goodbye to my friends. I watched the sails billow and the rainbow flag snap and flutter as the party boat pulled out from the harbor to fashionably cruise the coastal waters in glorious colors and sumptuous sounds.

0382. The Unfairy

Her phone rang.

She knew it was him and debated if she had the strength to deal with his excuses.

But she had to. He was behind on his payments and she needed the money.

“Hello?” she answered angrily.

And the two began bickering, repeating the patterns of blame and denial that had divided them.

It was an exhausting drama.

When she hung up the phone, she was spent.

She squeezed her temples, shut off the T.V., and went to bed.

The next morning, Jack woke early and excitedly felt under his pillow for money. But finding only his tooth, he became disappointed.

Jack walked to his mother’s room and opened the door.

She was just getting up.

“Mom,” he said sadly, “the Tooth Fairy never came to take my tooth.”

She slapped her head and sat back on the bed.

“I’m sorry, I totally forgot,” she said, shaking her head.

“Forgot what?”

She began tearing up. “This is so unfair. I need help.”

“I’ll help you, mom,” Jack said, hugging her.

“Thanks, buddy. But it’s my fault. I forgot. Me.” “Forgot what?”

“I forgot, uh, to tell you about the — the Unfairy.”

“The Unfairy?”

“He’s the mean fairy that robs the Tooth Fairy of the money she’s supposed to leave behind for children.”

“That’s a very mean fairy,” Jack said, darkening.

“He is,” she said, wiping her eyes. “But don’t worry. We’ll make sure it doesn’t happen again. I know just the thing that keeps him away.”

“You do?” Jack said, brightening.

“Yeah,” she said, rubbing his head. “Responsibility.”

0383. Jason, Jason, and the Argonauts

I found Jason on the shores of Colchis before his departure on the Argo and asked to join the crew as his prophet. He agreed. I told him that my price for guiding him effortlessly to the Golden Fleece was that he must give Medea to me as my bride. He agreed to this too and asked me my name. I told him Jason. He told me to choose another name to avoid confusion. I told him Jay. He shook his head and told me to choose something else. I told him Apollonius.

Since I’ve read Apollonius Rhodius’ book, I knew what was going to happen before it happened and directed Jason, the crew, and the ship away from danger. Realizing the power of my foresight, Jason quickly made me his sole advisor. Luckily, my knowledge of human nature, coupled with my knowledge of the story, allowed me to foresee that I’d gain the enmity of Jason’s two augurs, Mopsus and Idmon. I prevented their mutiny against me by telling them that, with me guiding Jason, the two of them would live long lives instead of dying as they were fated. To confirm this, I told them to read the flight of the circling seabirds overhead. They did this and discovered I was speaking the truth.

And since I’ve also read Euripides, I prevented Medea from living a miserable life in Corinth and taking revenge against Jason by murdering their two children and Jason’s young bride-to-be.

Me, Medea, and our kids now live happily together on the island of Hydra.

0384. Oubliette

My world is small, so small I barely need to move my arms to touch the walls. And though its circumference never changes, the walls are different at different times. Sometimes they’re slick and round like glass.

Other times, they’re smooth and boxy like wood. And at other times, they’re rough and irregular like rock. Still, at other times, it’s like they’re draped in heavy sheets. And yet, at other times, they feel like a mucusy membrane. And the atmosphere, when noticeable, is sometimes dry and sometimes damp. The aridity is preferable to the humidity, which makes the air so thick it’s like breathing underwater. And the smell can range from odorless to the overpowering stench of rot. And the noise is usually nothing, except the barely perceptible sounds of chewing, or burrowing, or the shifting of what I can only presume to be collapsing earth. Though sometimes I can hear what almost sounds like the rhythm of voices or music. But no matter what it is I hear, I hear it muffled as if from a great distance. Unless, of course, it’s the steady pounding, which is both heard and felt. And it’s then that I pull my hands away from the walls and wrap them around myself and feel my body and the rapid beating of my heart.

And I become aware of myself and conceive of myself as my self. And I touch myself all over, feeling my form. But there are many times when I wrap my arms around myself and feel only bone on bone.

0385. Multi-Dimensional People

We can spend all of our lives as One-Dimensional People if we only concentrate on our selves and our problems, believing that we are the center of the universe. Many of us live the narratives fed to us by our desires, anxieties, and insecurities, by our pangs, parents, and peers that play into and reinforce our fears. We all remain under these baleful influences until we look up from ourselves to others around us and see from a new perspective.

We become Two-Dimensional People when we forget about ourselves and focus on the screens around us. Two-dimensional media has existed throughout civilization. We can see this flatness in most of our visual art back across history, from modern to ancient Babylon. We’ve spent two millennia staring at flat surfaces. But when we look up from these screens, the world takes on another new perspective.

We’re always Three-Dimensional People if we let ourselves be. Growing up as children, our one-dimensional personhood must learn to engage with the one-dimensional personhood of others. The two dimensions of media help us make sense of our three-dimensional world until we can navigate it by ourselves. When we’re older and stressed and want a respite from our three-dimensional troubles, we can retreat to the simpler two-dimensional world of media. But when we look up from our threedimensional lives and lift ourselves above ourselves, the world takes on yet another perspective.

To become Four-Dimensional People we have to see the whole panorama of our human tragicomedy in space and time and recognize with humility our individual smallness.

0386. Talk Show Learn

Talk Show Learn is a talk show where the host offers a systemic critique of capitalism and its effects, as opposed to a critique of individual responsibility and personal psychology. Each Talk Show Learn episode will take the traditional topics of tabloid talk shows, like sexuality, infidelity, paternity, obesity, laziness, addiction, and abuse, and show how these problems are linked to the capitalist system.

The host acknowledges that the choices made by the guests are ultimately their own and that the repercussions of their actions are theirs to deal with. But the host understands that their guests’ choices don’t exist in a vacuum. And instead of the host pointing out the failures of their guests and shaming them into change, the host points out the failures of our shameful system by providing a historical and contextual analysis of their guests’ situation. Again, the host understands that this doesn’t excuse their guests’ actions, but shows that all the decisions their guests have made, for better or worse, are affected by forces greater than them.

As the host explains and contextualizes the situation within their guests’ history, and unpacks all the influences their guests are under at home, at work, in their community, in society, in the nation, and in the world, the audience and the viewers at home will begin to see the larger picture of how capitalism has affected the lives of the guests. And by seeing how capitalism negatively impacts the lives and choices of the guests, the audience and viewers at home will learn how it affects them.

0387. End Transmission <<Begin transmission>> “People of Earth, long have our worlds been enemies, but today, I implore you as a friend to take action against the gravest and most immediate threat. I swear by the Sacred Fires and the Imtent Arjent of our race that this concerns the fate of my people as well as your own. Time is short for us and you need to prepare, so I will make this brief.

On mantu ednik jarn, a wide-burst distress transmission was received from the Atolatocs on the planet Harmt in the Vorber Cluster begging for immediate assistance against a creature of unknown provenance that was attacking their planet. Since the Atolatocs are a primitive race, I dismissed the threat, believing it to be a Zrgr raiding ship resource mining their undefended planet.

However, shortly after receiving the transmission, the creature penetrated the outer valance of my empire and landed on Enarrez, where it emptied the oceans of water and vaporadiated all life on the planet.

As we received these reports, the creature had already lifted off and was heading for our hearthworld, Enarrei. Unfortunately, we will not be able to evacuate in time.

Therefore, I beseech you. Please, save my son, your captive, and save yourselves. If you protect him, you will eternally have our imtent and will be as one of us. As Emperor of the Enari, I thank you for being a worthy adversary and now make you Children of the Hearth and Protectors of the Flame.

May your fires always guide you home in the darkness.” <<End transmission>>

0388. Scarehouse

Rick and Terry invited my family to a fair. I never liked fairs because they were crowded and gave off a feeling of poverty and sadness.

Rick wanted to go into the Scarehouse. The attraction didn’t look scary but pathetic. It was an ordinary truck trailer with two sets of steps into and out of it with a ticket booth in between. My brother Sean and I declined, but Rick persisted and our mother made us go.

I led the way in. When the door closed behind my brother, we were in total darkness. I reached out blindly, but felt nothing. Sean panicked and called my name. I reached back and found him and told him to hold onto my shoulder. We walked awkwardly, shuffling through the dark, until I felt a wall in front of me. I followed it to a door, which led into a pitch black corridor. We snaked our way through the guts of the trailer until we passed through another door, where a cheesy, lit up diorama of a skeleton stood next to the exit.

I never learned if the Scarehouse was designed to be one long dark maze or if someone forgot to turn the lights on. I did learn that I didn’t panic and was able to get my brother and myself out of it. I’m not sure I’ve ever been a good older brother to Sean, but I’d like to think that in the Scarehouse of Life, he knows that when the lights go out, I’ll always find him in the darkness.

0389. World News Watch

With corporations owning most of the media outlets in the world, it’s almost impossible to find news sources to trust. There are a few that I do and I watch and read them daily to stay on top of events, but it still isn’t enough to get the full picture of what’s happening in other countries around the world.

In order to better keep my finger on the pulse of global events, I’d like there to be an international website with a strong democratic, socialist, and anti-capitalist perspective that reports with rigorous investigative journalism on the environment, people’s movements, politics, labor, economics, science, art, literature, music, movies, and sports from every nation on Earth. It seems absurd to me, given today’s technology and resources, that this hasn’t been effectively organized yet. Imagine journalists from every nation uploading peer reviewed news reports from their respective countries into a single co-operative hub where world citizens can go to stay current on global events while also accessing their national, state, and local news.

It would be incredible to watch, read, and follow my state and local news, along with the top stories of each of the fifty continental and extracontinental states, as well as news from the Native American reservations and the territories of American Samoa, Guam, Northern Mariana Islands, Puerto Rico, and the Virgin Islands, including neighboring countries Canada and Mexico, and expanding out to the countries of the Caribbean, Central, and South America, Africa, Europe, the Middle East, Asia, Oceania, Australia, New Zealand, and Antarctica to gain the most expansive worldview.

0390. Intruder

In the quiet of his house he sits alone. From the chair in his room, he watches the light move across the walls, floor, and furniture. To pass the time, he imagines the layout of his house, its rooms and windows, and determines the position of the sun in the sky.

He has sat watching the patches of light for so long that he can tell the date and time by their position and so knows when to eat his meals and take his meds. On days when there is no light, he can tell the type of cloud blocking the sun and knows whether to expect rain or snow. His entire world is his room in his house and his entire life is the light and its movement.

That’s why he immediately noticed the strange shadow intruding upon a single patch of lozenge-shaped light on the floor, rounding the side that comprised the lower ledge of the window with an unaccountable curvature. He sat very still and watched the shadow slowly invade the light, swelling into the roundness of a head and a length of neck sweeping out into shoulders.

His hair stood on end and his heart fluttered in fear because he knew the shadow was created by someone outside the window. When night came and the shadow could no longer be seen, he gathered the courage to leave his chair and investigate before the moon came out. Thankfully, when he got there, there was no one waiting for him on the other side of his second-story window.

0391. Enter the Dragon

The Great Dragon Greed lives in a cave under a mountain. He sits atop his fortune like a fortress, guarding his treasure, which he knows down to the last penny. The Great Dragon, being a creature of earth, could dig to extract the wealth himself, but being cunning and powerful, he has others do it for him.

After successful raids on kingdoms long ago, the Great Dragon had the conquered kings sign contracts and pledge fealty to him. In exchange for their loyalty and a steady tithe of gold and gems, the Great Dragon let them keep their titles and lands and a portion of their wealth to maintain their power with an army of knights.

As greedy as the Great Dragon himself, the kings tasked their knights to gather the serfs and divide them, leaving half to work the fields and forcing the other half into slavery to work the mines. The knights did as their kings commanded and soon grain and gold flooded their kingdoms.

The knights worked the serfs and slaves to exhaustion. Even with engines of extraction developed by engineers to increase production, the brutal pace could not be sustained, and many died. To replace them, the kings fought wars to capture more slaves, until a plague broke out and the population collapsed.

The slaves that survived the contagion took up arms against the weakened kings and knights and won their freedom. They could have finished the task of killing the kings and the Great Dragon, but instead they settled, leaving the fight for future generations.

0392. I Should Have Been There for Her

“It wasn’t that I didn’t notice; I did. It was just that her decline started the same time everything else was falling apart around me. I saw it; I really did. But I couldn’t help her because I was busy helping others with their problems. The simple fact was that I didn’t prioritize correctly. I was running around putting out all these other fires and because she wasn’t shouting, “Help! Help! I’m on fire! Put me out!” I kept putting her off, convincing myself that she had it all under control. But, in reality, she was a raging inferno. I just didn’t see it. She was quiet and hid it well. But, to be honest, I wasn’t looking too hard. I thought she had it covered. Or rather, I wanted to believe she had it covered. But it’s clear now that she didn’t. It’s clear that she needed my help. She was asking for it, asking for it by not asking for it, because she knew what I was going through. She was always like that: thinking of others, putting other people ahead of herself. She was always very thoughtful; she cared too much, and that’s what got her in the end. The regret I live with is that I kept ignoring the signs. I knew she needed help, but I kept telling myself she was okay, that she’d hold out until I had sorted out all these other people and problems.

It kills me to know she died alone; she shouldn’t have. I should have been there for her.”

0393. Curators

We need curators now more than ever. In our current media glut, most of us don’t have the time to sift through all the new work being published and produced. This is why we need curators willing to dive deeply into every genre, subgenre, and sub-subgenre to nth degree in art, music, poetry, prose, comics, animation, movies, video games, and R.P.G.s and then drag their discoveries up into the light to share with the rest of us surface dwellers. By them doing this, we can come in contact with more media than we otherwise could on our own.

Instead of vetting thousands upon thousands of artists ourselves, we should vet curators, who naturally exist in smaller numbers than the artists themselves, to see if their tastes and aesthetic choices match our own. If they do, and we learn to trust the voices and visions of the curators through the taste of their selections, we will come in contact with new voices and visions of artists we would never have come across given the limited time we often have to devote to diverse media.

If the curators bring us new work that we ourselves wouldn’t be able to find, then they have provided an incredible service by growing our awareness of the breadth, depth, and scope of current artistic production.

By bringing us closer to the cutting edge of art, we approach the creative quick of life, and are exposed to, and immersed in, that energy. Entering into its proximity will undoubtedly challenge and inspire us to become more creative ourselves.

0394. The Gilmour Boys

I don’t share many musical interests with my father. He gave up his classic rock albums, eight tracks, and cassette tapes a long time ago, leaving me to delve further into the genre than he ever did. But, when he bought his first C.D. player back in the late ’80s, the first album he purchased was Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon.

This album is seminal for me. It’s so completely imbedded in my psyche that it still holds the title of greatest album of all time. It’s my desert island album.

What makes Dark Side so incredible is that it covers all of the chaos of modernity within its 43 minute run time. It really says it all. There’s no single song on the album that I prefer to listen to, either. I have to listen to the whole album start to finish.

But the thing I love the most about it, beyond Clare Torry’s singing on The Great Gig in the Sky, is David Gilmour’s guitar playing. I know every note like a song lyric. When I listen to the album, I find myself unconsciously singing the lyrics and the guitar lines. I’ve never done that for any other guitarist before or since.

When my friend Mike was learning to play guitar in college, I lent him all my Floyd albums because, like me, he was struck by Gilmour’s playing. Whenever we speak about the man and his sound, we say, “He emotes.” And I feel it, between two friends, and a father and his son.

0395. Tip Tissues

Since the digital era began, the paper industry has experienced a slow decline in printer and copier paper sales. And now with the recent decriminalization of hemp and the beginning of production of stronger and more durable hemp paper, the paper industry has received yet another blow.

Finding new avenues of growth has been difficult for the industry since 2004, when International Paper lost its blue chip status on the Dow Jones Industrial Average. Turning to their facial and toilet paper lines to look for a boost, they came up with a new idea geared towards men that combines the advantages of both products. Here’s a glimpse at what they’re currently product testing. Note the humorous angle of their dangle: Men, after taking a leak, do you think about wiping yourself, but don’t, because it’s too hard to pull toilet paper off the roll? Men, do you hate having to hear your partner’s constant complaints about the piss stink and stains in your drawers because you use your underwear as toilet paper?

If the answer to either of these questions is “Yes,” then we have we got the product for you! Introducing: Tip Tissues or Penis Tissues, Dick Wipes or Wiener Wipes, Cock Blotters or Rod Blotters, Head Hankies or Helmet Hankies, Schwanz Swabs or Knob Swabs, Dong Towels or Tool Towels, Club Cloths or Prick Cloths, Man Rags or Glans Rags. Call them anything you want, but they’re a boxed toilet tissue that sits on top of the toilet tank for quick dispensing to wipe your pish after peeing.

0396. The Correct Order of Death

Many of my friends are husbands and fathers who love and support their wives and children. I am fortunate to spend time with them and their families. I love them dearly. But the way they interact with their wives and children is quite different from the way our parents interacted together and with us.

Bill Campbell, my professor from Delhi, told this story about the correct order of death: If there was a sinking boat with a father, mother, and child onboard, and the boat could only be saved by one of the three jumping overboard, the father would jump off first. If the boat was still sinking, the mother would jump off next, leaving the baby behind.

I believe a man is someone who recognizes this order and sanctifies it through the acceptance of his own sacrifice. A man is a man who knows to die in the right order. A man is a man who puts women and children before himself. A man cannot be considered a man if he sacrifices others before himself. The man is the sacrifice. This is his strength and courage.

To be put before women and children is not to be placed over and above them hierarchically; it is not to rule them, but to protect them.

If the family is three concentric circles, men occupy the outer circle, women the second circle, and children the innermost circle. If we live in uninteresting times, we may live out our years according to heaven: Grandfather dies, father dies, and son dies. In that order.

0397. What My Dog Hears

According to animal experts, the average dog can learn around 165 words. I think Grace, my below-average dog, knows a little over 10 words and word combinations. Below is a transcript of various “conversations” between us at various times of the day and what I think she hears: Grace!

No. Leave it. Leeeeeave it.

Stop.

Sit. Stay.

Get inside.

Come here.

Rub your belly.

Where’s my good girl? There she is. Who’s my good girl? You are.

Yes, you are.

Do you want to eat?

Do you want to go out?

Do you want a treat? Can you sit?

Good girl. Can you give me paw?

Good girl. Can you give me the other paw? No, the other paw. No, the other paw. No, the other — never mind. You tried.

Stop jumping! Grace, stop jumping.

Stop. Jumping.

Get down.

Did you shit on the carpet again?

Really? Again? Go lay down! Bad dog! Bad!

Grace!

No! Leave it. Leeeeeave it.

Stop.

Sit. Stay.

Get inside.

Come here.

Sound sound belly.

Sound sound good girl? Sound sound sound. Sound sound good girl? Sound sound. Sound, sound sound.

Sound sound sound sound eat?

Sound sound sound sound go out?

Sound sound sound sound treat?

Sound sound sit? Good girl. Sound sound sound sound paw? Good girl. Sound sound sound sound sound sound paw? Sound, sound sound paw. Sound, sound sound paw. Sound, sound sound — sound sound. Sound sound.

Sound sound! Grace, sound sound.

Sound. Sound.

Get down.

Sound sound sound sound sound sound sound? Sound? Sound?

Sound lay down! Bad dog! Bad!

0398. September 2019 Climate Strikes

In the last two weeks, 7.6 million people were out in the streets of cities worldwide to protest the failure of their governments to make any meaningful change to reduce carbon dioxide emissions by collectively and unilaterally moving away from fossil fuel energy sources towards renewable energy sources to keep our planet within the safe and habitable limit of a 1.5º C temperature rise.

The math on this is simple, if we use the rough number of 7.6 billion as the current world population, 1 in every 1,000 people on Earth stepped outside of their comfort zones and into the streets to stand up for their dying planet and demand change. The fact that the strike was inspired by 16 year old Greta Thunberg of Sweden, whose protest started when she left school on Fridays to strike outside the Parliament building of her native country in an attempt to bring awareness of the climate crisis to her government leaders, should show how trapped many adults are within their failing paradigms.

The simple, unarguable fact is that the planet, with all of us on it, is rapidly warming and pushing us, and all plant and animal life, into a sixth mass extinction. The cause of this is simply and inarguably neoliberal capitalism via oil and gas industry money influencing public policy to place private profits over public life.

We as adults must ask ourselves: Can we live, or rather die, with the knowledge, that we’ve sacrificed our children to the fires of Moloch as the price paid for our endless consumption?

0399. The Karma of Production and Possession

I think one of the things we often overlook in our lives is the Karma of Production and Possession. To make or buy something isn’t just to make or buy something. To sell or own something isn’t just to sell or own something. No. To make or buy, sell or own, is to take on the responsibility of that thing. And once one produces or possesses that thing, it cannot be produced or possessed indifferently. The choice to produce or possess something should always be seen as a great undertaking. It should be thought about deeply, and the consequences of its production and possession weighed, because again, to produce or possess that thing is to take on the responsibility of its karma. Its karma becomes an extension of your karma. And how you make or buy it, sell or own it, will affect your collective karmas.

Let’s take a concrete example to show you what I mean. Let’s start with a non-living thing like a book. Anyone can make and sell a book, just as anyone can buy and own a book. But all parties related to that book are responsible for that book. The book’s karma remains with the producer and possessor forever.

Now, let’s take a living example like a dog. The maker of your dog is a dog, the “seller” is the breeder or shelter, and you, the “buyer and owner.”

Everyone linked in this chain shares the dog’s karma. And that karma never goes away.

Let’s take another living example: You decide to have a child.

0400. Halcyon

Then I heard it: the rolling rattle of the belted kingfisher.

I followed her loping flight over the pond to where she alighted on a naked branch above the water.

She was beautiful, blue, and crested, and larger than I imagined. I never saw her up close, only through binoculars from my house.

I approached her to get a better look.

She cocked her head at me and seemed to wink, or blink, and, in a flick of her wings, she was diving. And just as her beak touched the water, a temple bell tolled, and time stood still, and she was there, frozen in her glorious dive, wings widespread like the descending Paraclete Itself.

And I knew she was Alcyone, the mother who guards against evil and pacifies the waters, allowing the solar king to be born anew each year during their halcyon days. And I could see the fish, Ichthys, just below her beak in the water, transform into the ghost of a Man, who rose up to the surface, broke its bounds, and walked across its face like His Father did before Him over the deep. When He disappeared, I knew He was the Fisher of Men, the Fisher King guarding the Grail, which contained the sacred waters of transubstantiation.

And it was then that a poem was heard, and I mouthed its words: Unseemly being Faultless The fissure of man Divided divinity Into Awareness Of a part of From apart from To understand Substance Then the temple bell tolled, and the bird disappeared into the pond.

About A Thousand Stories Reader, I wanted you to know that I started writing this book as a collection of science fiction, slipstream, and fantasy stories with some horror, humor, and romance mixed in. But as the book and I deepened our dialogue, we realized that the format was perfect for pretty much anything. This makes the book impossible to categorize because it now includes: abstracts, acrostics, album reviews, alternative histories, analyses, anatomies, aphorisms, artworks, apotheoses, autobiographies, autozoëographies, biographies, blessings, board games, book reviews, business ideas, calendars, catalogs, chronicles, codes, color themes, comic skits, comics, commentaries, confessions, constrained writings, curses, designs, dialogues, dreams, economic commentaries, etymologies, eulogies, examples, exegeses, experiences, explanations, exposés, fairy tales, fake album reviews, fashion critiques, films, filmographies, forewords, formulas, F.A.Q.s, grammars, guides, hagiographies, histories, instructions, interviews, introductions, inventions, jokes, journal entries, legends, lessons, letters, letters to the editor, lists, lists, and more lists, lyrics, magic spells, mantras, manuals, marquees, maxims, memento moris, memories, menus, messages, metacommentaries, metafictions, metaphysics, monologues, morality tales, mottoes, musings, mysteries, mythologies, notes, oaths, observations, oracles, orders, parables, performances, philosophies, phone calls, pitches, plays, plots, poems, polemics, political commentaries, prayers, predictions, products, product histories, projects, propositions, prose poems, provenances, P.S.A.s, puns, reflections, religious commentaries, reminiscences, reports, requirements, revelations, routines, rubrics, ruminations, rules, sayings, scripts, shows, sketches, social commentaries, songs, strategies, studies, tarot readings, tasting notes, theories, tour guides, transcripts, transmissions, trialogues, trial logs, urban legends, utoposcales, visualizations, websites, westerns, wishes, word plays, and word salads. Essentially, it’s a book that’s a composite of me, and the time and place in which it was written.

Hope you enjoy.

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9 781957 399034

To discover the hidden message on all ten covers, arrange the books as follows: 12345 67890

$6.50 ISBN 978-1-957399-03-4