[Judge Bean]

23.

The man with the big iron on his hip, big iron on his hip...



Marty Robbins wrote more than 500 songs, including most of his 14 number-one hits. He acted in about 10 movies and was the first country artist to ever win a Grammy. Robbins was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame. (USA Today)

"We'll have one another to remind us," said Winona, taking his hand. "When I met Laury, Laury when I met you, you werent insane. What kept your head above the salad?" They hadnt thought about that— it had somehow slipped by them— so they jumped in with a ready answer. "He had the Nasturtio, all the instruments…" "Nasturtium. Guide books," said Laury; "I dont know, it all sort of like came back to me— what else could all this stuff be in front of me, know what I mean?"

"Well, thats true," said Winona. "If you lack any material referencepoints, you believe or you convince yourself unconsciously that you mustve made all of it up yourself." We believe that there are extrinsic signs of reality; and simple realism looks artificial. "All it means is that we cant come back here," the timetraveler said, perhaps with some rudeness. "I say adidas, good riddance." "Ive never heard you say that." (Winona). "No, I mean I say it now."

"No, it also means you know that you wont be returning even to your own time." (Laury). "Its not even there." (Winona). "Well, somethings there, right?" "Oh, yes," they said. "Lets go back all of us to 1865, and go to California. We'll pack up a bunch of antibiotics and aspirins." Winona rolled her eyes up: "Those dreams." "How do you know you havent already toured the Wild West? Your amnesia and Crackpottery could have like trotted you all over the world, universe. Its very durable forces," said Laury. "All the more reason— lets get going."




Yahoos try out a motorcycle ridden by Timerider. "Time travel" is impossible.


If you can get a life term for leaving the scene of an accident, or crime, you can just imagine what kind of penalty thered be for running away to the past; even though actually the worst they could do would be to let the little band succeed, and plunge it into a gentle nonexistence. Their new future wouldnt know them well enough to punish them. "Then its all settled— we go together, right? If we all become salads, at least we'll have company." "One thing," said Morris; "We have to take separate ships. Gemini…"

"Gemini," she remembered. Laury shrugged. "Thats ancient history," Huck said: Grissom's team. "We cant, because of Gemini," she said; "its a law of probability which holds that more than one experimental subject under the same circumstances will alter the results in an unknown fashion," and result in disaster— especially if we're talking human subjects. "But that was an accident. They sent up lots of space missions with entire crews." "Twin towers," they chanted superstitiously.



"Where does an interested fellow get four hotrods of that character anyhow?" They smirked: there were dozens of the things down in the garage. They werent quite spoonships, though: their design in this future was more along the lines an amorphophallus titanum, or "corpseflower," so named, in the first place, for its Whitmanesque form, and, in the second, because it was not only the worlds largest flower, but also, probably, the worstsmelling.



A blooming corpseflower nearly seven feet tall.


Six feet tall, and only rarely blooming, known as the "holy grail" of botany, native to Sumatra, it is said to have the fragrance of rotting flesh. This was his ticket home. "Whered you get these? I thought you hadnt invented this yet." "Backengineered," Taft revealed. They picked four parked close together in alphabetical order, so they got the Flabbergasket, the Flibbertigibbet, the Flummoxcart, and the Frequentflyer. "Salads for four," said Laury.

Winona stayed after. "Individual vehicles," she said, "I dont know." "Its the only way. If there was another way, itd have different problems, anyway. You have to draw the line somewhere." "You solve problems by maximizing the risk of extreme failure, so that like then you can blow everything up to see it better, and see exactly what youre doing, and if it fails you can blame it all on the problems." She did have a knack for hitting the nail right on his head.

"Oh, I dont do any such thing. If I did anything like that, I wouldnt be still alive." "You want adventures, massacres. Those girls…" "I want you to be with me, back before all this started." "Thats before we started, also." "You dont think we'll pull through." "I dont desire to be a salad." "I dont want to be a salad, either, thats not the only alternative." "Alternative includes only. Thats what the word like means." She had him there. "Well what do you want to do? When you people brought me to…"

"That was not me. That was not me. That was not me." "But youre, youre, youre Socio what was it." "I am not my job." "They told me you had something to do with the, the." "I am not prepared to tell you like the truth right now." "You are nothing but the truth. Thats the trouble with you— you have too much of it. You are made of it." Women, he was saying to himself: they get the truth and whole truth out of you no matter what you do. Especially about the chance of life, which is the future of love.

"You cant help but tell the truth— youre like a compulsive confessor. You apologize for everything whether youve done it or not, and for stuff that hasnt even really been done. And, you know, when you get to that point, youre just making stuff up, you might as well lie about it." "OK. Ill confess. How can I avoid it." She pulled her clothes closer around her body and sat in a way meaning to display simple and direct intent. "Truth, though, is used by some as a medium, you know."

"No, I dont follow that." "A storyteller, or one of your compulsory like truthtellers, uses it as a medium, the way an artist would use a telephone… Im sorry, a set of paints." "What do you mean, telephone?" "I didnt mean to say it." "Does this mean youre telling me very, very good lies, so they dont count as lies?" "No. Its like when they like ask you, in your line do you deal with the truth a lot, capital T truth, or do you know more about it, are you closer to it, that sort of as if."

"I understand, yes. This is what they do ask artists, or used to. At one time they thought that it might make a difference." "Yes. Well. Its the answer to say that the artist uses truth as a medium. Theres no worship or sacrifice involved in it, only appreciation. A feeling of gratitude. They make it female, since it is supposed that from a woman all good things derive." "I agree with that, too, though they get a lot of credit for the halfwaygood things men can do, too." "Such as."

"Well, Im just saying. You can attribute… but really its just the luck of the draw. Its just random." She said nothing. "I dont mean that its necessarily a haphazard…" "Well, that is what I wanted to get from you, the halfwaygood." "What, something halfway decent?" "No, gratitude." "But I thought at first, you came in here for a very specific, um, specific… perishable product…" "That was unexpected." "Yes, it was." "That must be what you keep calling accidental?" "Or miracle."

"Dont flatter the universe that way." "Just be grateful, is what you mean. Or be gracious about my precious bodily…" "That is what it seemed, yes. What I wanted was to watch you flow, and to depend upon me for it, and be thankful. Think of it as a shoppingcar. Cart." He thought of it that way for about half a minute and could do so no longer. Then he realized that he wasnt that important or valuable after all. "You mean you dont really need it for the future of the planet."

She smiled. "It should be like plenty for you to have saved yourself and one woman, the one who saved you and herself. All the cowhands can still have babies if they desire, though they have to buy them like bigtickets." Bigtickets are big ticket items. "I thought the ozone opened up like a pair of longjohns in a Popeye cartoon, and evaporated the posterities." "Well yes and no. At the peak decade, there were 20 billion people. Do you have any concept of like how many people that is?"


In Millennium, they try to control the entire flow of time in the universe along one timeline. Good luck!

"Yes. If you line them up in a row Indian file, they stretch from here to some outlandish hyperbole." "Well, ballpark, there hasnt been 20 billion people, ever, all added together since Australopithecus. If reincarnation, channeling, and Ingod are embraced, the believers believe that the peak decade represented the return of all who'd ever lived, and they did it in order to be gods in the most like modern era." "All right, whatever. Whats this got to do with us?"

"You got that line from Humphrey Bogart, didnt you. All of this has to do with us. It does. It does. With everybody." "Well, let me tell you this— Im here. Ive returned. Im a shade from long ago. And this is the last place I want to be. Make no mistake. The very last place. But how do you expect to like extract us from here— to deduct me from where I am. I wont be the same." "Therell be certain vital resemblances. Arent you the same as from before? But… perhaps youd prefer a vidgirl."

"I dont choose. I didnt sit here and say, Hey, I think I'll take her. Yeah, I like this one. Others are pretty good, but this ones for me." She didnt know what to say to this. "I didnt choose. I dont have any choice. Flesh and blood, Winona— flesh and blood. Ive gone down, down, down…in a burnin ring of far." "What good will it be for us as salads?" "We'll be salads together." "Im trying to explain for you how this, how this happened. All you want to discuss is how you love me. There are more important…"

"No. There arent. Because when we go down the old anachron trail together, all of this here, all this," and he slapped the wall, "will disappear, right?" "Yes." "And, besides, I thought the idea was that we were all gods, every one a god, am I right? Each guy and girl is a fully independent citizen, even so far as to not owe another person a single goddamned thing in the world." "Well. You need like an explanation of some things, as if you dont get it."

Need or owed? Was there a Constitutional right to a clear understanding of everything? Would history make sense to you if a secret account of the world's past appeared on Nightline, and you could subscribe to get it in taped segments, so you could watch it while wearing a bathrobe and sipping coffee? Do you feel rooked, or bamboozled by a scalawag?

This post has been edited by Judge Bean: 20 July 2009 - 07:19 PM

[StarLord]

If Saint Ysidro was Jewish, then the angel plowing his fields had to have been Moshel.

There's speculation that it was Forcas that did all the plowing, but that has to be an heavenly knee slapper cause everybody knows you couldn't see him, so how'd they know it was him doing the plowing.

Rancho San Ysidro

N 37.00053°
W 121.52257°

What I'd like to know is who's idea it was to plant garlic in the first place...

[Judge Bean]

Who knows how these things get started. At first, Christianity was all Jewish, and so all of the first saints were Jews, including Peter and John the Baptist.

Tweed did not claim that Ysidro was the only Jewish saint, only that that's what somebody said. At the time, he (Tweed) thought that it (and almost everything else) was hilarious.

It must have been one of the saint's qualifying miracles to get an angel to do his plowing for him, but why would a story like that get invented? Some things take on a life of their own, and seem to be no more than "urban legends," like the one about the alligators in the sewers. Who would make up something like that? How could it be so vividly unusual if it were not true?


Showing the origin of the urban legend (1938).

[Cmsr. William M. Tweed]

Thank you for your verification of this important detail. You were not at the reunion, but your nametag was there with the wrong class picture on it.

There was another one with a similar name, and he took your nametag; and so for some period of time, I thought that you had come after all. I'm not sure of the significance of this, but I should note that nametag is gateman backwards, and gateman's nametag is therefore a palindrome.



I think you said you won't be at next year's reunion, and neither will I, which is a shame in a way since it would be interesting to see whether variations of either the Schrõdinger's coffee-cup-in-the-tower con or the nametag shell-game are waiting for you. But going would not be safe, of course—you certainly don't want to get tangled up in any additional time-spacelines. And who knows whether this is being perpetrated intentionally—some evildoer trying to take you out, maybe. Maybe you should send a ringer to pose as you and initiate your own road not taken—brane your enemy by disunifying HIS field. Maybe you could talk one of your brothers into going as you. THAT should proliferate some continua.

This post has been edited by Cmsr. William M. Tweed: 22 July 2009 - 11:36 AM

[Judge Bean]

I called the brothers. One is in Texas and one is in Hawaii. The one in Hawaii is ten years younger than me, is a surfer and artist, and has already had a bad tangle with the spacetime razzmatazz when he made his book Jaws Maui and was ripped off by the photographer Blue Max and the National Geographic. The other one would put himself in mortal danger of chronological catastrophe, since he is only a year younger and we shared some friends and acquaintances at Verdugo and up at Sonoma and Reno.

The father of one of his good friends had a bazooka in his basement in Tujunga; a V8 engine in the livingroom. I don't know if these objects were part of some sort of project. That shows you what we're dealing with here, and it isn't pretty.


Guns of Tujunga.

Another one of his friends (Dammit Hughes) had an organization called the Ootist monks, the only bona fide order recognized by Group One. Group One formed itself around Morgan of the Iron Toad in the early 1970s, I am not too modest to notice. Group One was in Reno, and the Ootist monks were in Sonoma County. The Tujunga contingent consisted of a few people living at addresses with 9, 6, 1, and/or 0 in them. Tweed was regarded as the main member, because of the Gospel of St. Vitus' Dance.

The Ootists chanted slogans from the Flogg. The Flogg was a spontaneous Mardi Gras-type celebration at Cotati in 1972, led by the author and his brother who is now in Texas, who wore hooded robes and carried an enormous flexible dryer hose, through which the slogans were shouted at the crowd, which was banging on trashcan lids and twirling in place around a plaza fountain. The slogans were passages from Morgan, such as "There was a giant flea who had a king," and "Thou shalt not speak Belgian," along with the constant "Oot, oot," the meaning of which is unclear.

One man dressed all in leather threatened the author with physical violence if he would not immediately and clearly explain the Flogg to him. All that he was able to do was to show him the text of Morgan and hope for compassion and understanding. There was some scuffling, but no serious injury.

Up until around 1976, there was an attempt to sustain the Morganic movement with a gigantic chainletter operation, in which some of the original members wrote long incomprehensible passages about world history, shampoo, the Pyramid Lake Indian War, etc. The "chainmail" was presumably lost, and, at first, Dammit Hughes was accused of having lost it, because he was ordinarily blamed for all misfortune (i.e., "Damn it, Hughes...").

All of this information can be verified by recourse to the internet and such things as the November backissue of National Geographic that has "Jaws Maui" on the cover. One can also try to contact original members of Group One (good luck with this):

Paul Wilford
Roger "Crinkle Cut" Bolstad
"Cant Count Nickels Bill" Bostic
Louie Ash
Dave Montgomery


The Mapes Hotel at the time the author worked the graveyard keno game there.

Interestingly, the author, Bolstad, Montgomery, and Bostic all worked at Harrahs in Reno at different times. Montgomery was a pitboss there the last time I saw him, and he gave me free drink tickets. The author also worked at these other casinos: the CalNeva, Mapes, Ponderosa, Money Tree, Eldorado, Comstock, and the Monte Carlo in Reno, and the Sahara in Las Vegas, mostly at all of these joints at the Keno game.


Reno, Nevada, around the time of the author's presence there. Population ca. 50,000.

On July 4th, 1976, the author hit 7 of 8 on a keno ticket and won a thousand dollars. He used the money to publish Whispering Beans, for All Boys, Limp Leather Edition, which shows him on the back cover holding a giant scythe. This book is available at Amazon, signed by the author, for ten bucks.

[Judge Bean]

24.

Windchimes flash, in a distant afternoon...


The schoolhouse in The Birds, located in Bodega, California, not Bodega Bay, California, 2 miles away.



The man who co-wrote the song "Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini" had the unsettling experience this week of reading his own obituary —… a 68-year-old man named Paul Van Valkenburgh of Ormond Beach, Fla. … claimed to have written the song under the name Paul Vance.

But the music industry's real Paul Vance, a 76-year-old man from Coral Springs … has made several million dollars from the song, which was recorded by 16-year-old teen idol Brian Hyland, surged to No. 1 on the Billboard charts in August 1960 and has been pop culture staple ever since.

… Vance said his first hit was "Catch a Falling Star," recorded by Perry Como, and he went on to write numerous million-sellers for Como, Johnny Mathis and others.

… Vance's songwriting partner, Lee Pockriss, who shares credit on "Itsy Bitsy ...", lives in Bridgewater, Conn., and is recovering from a stroke. (AP)



About 20 longterm space missions went up, like the lunar colonists, as the birthrate dropped lower than that among retired Republicans. The law required the missions to be racially and sexually mixed. NASA, Trashmasters of the Galaxy, had expended monumental PR budgets to retain dignity by recruiting sleeper troops. The halfdozen longest voyages in progress were on cruisecontrol for 10,000 lightyears; the pilots honorstudents sedated and saranwrapped at age 12.

The ships were on "gravigation" tracks, designed to pull them into awakening orbit around planets or moons if and when they crossed the path. Rubbing sleep from their eyes, the wayward children go to the consoles and examine atmosphere. Devices are dropped to see if sentient beings have progressed to the high level of development at which they might attack humans, or if feral predators are present who wouldnt be constrained by malice.

Sometimes the exploratory observation of a planet goes on for a couple three years, and they decide to pass on it— the place is overrun with salacious methane-based gas-bats; theres not enough oxygen or water; the locals practice capital punishment, congratulatory flatulence, and wear shoes made of their enemies faces— that kind of thing. So the astronauts take pills and hit the glass pillow for another few centuries until gently pulled awake by another homeworld.

The desirable planet was one as similar to ours as possible. When the place was hospitable, they descended and imparted valuable information in trade for other valuable information. Then theyd take off once again after a few years, hunting the universe of data. They mined everything they stumbled across for what they didnt have any idea about. Thus, as is also true of sports, the essential value of the spectacle was the unending increase of information

Statistics, comparative quantities, measured distances, broken records, challenged limits, the receding shadow of the unknown wed to the desire to do the asyet undone. Boy, how Huck envied these Rocket Rangers! They were in a suspensive solution on the back shelf of existence, soaking up whatever they touched. No responsibilities, no one watching, nothing to do but roll around heaven all day. The Day of Reckoning for them would simply never come: they were postmoral.




The interior of the "It's the end of the world!" restaurant in The Birds, located in Bodega Bay. The actual interior of the restaurant, here shown as presently renovated, was never used in the movie.

The little band of runaways felt like these permanent astronauts. "So theres nothing more important than you or than me… under the circumstances. Together we hook elbows and take the biggest Lovers Leap of all time." She obviously didnt have even the slightest idea of what Lovers Leap was— and you know come to think of it, we dont either, not really. We really like the legend, but are hardpressed to identify the actual location of the precipice or characters.

This is however unfortunately not completely true about Bodega Bay, where Alfred Hitchcock made The Birds, the movie about the End of the World, this time by birds. Its interesting how the film portrays the destruction of civilization, in the form of gaspump explosions and eyeless farmers and schoolteachers, at the talons of unruly flocks of ravens and seagulls. The town is on the map and you can go there, justified in expecting to see the village, schoolhouse, and rustic postoffice/baitshop.

Understandably excited to see the personal island of the hero (played by Rod, star of The Time Machine), and the café where they hole up to escape the flocks. But wait—whats this—theres a signpost up ahead: it lists Bodega, and, a couple miles away, Bodega Bay. You have the same question that no doubt occurred to the screenwriter: Why would you name two little adjacent towns in California the same, in Spanish Grocerystore, when each has vital components of one picturesque movieset?

Then the horror sets in: the schoolhouse is in Bodega, the café in Bodega Bay. The kids are beset by crows in Bodega, the gasstation and island in Bodega Bay. Adding to your growing anger, none of the original buildings in the village proper remain, and the island was an utter fabrication. Not only are there two Bodegas, the one in the movie features places that either never existed or have been demolished. This outrage has become so familiar to us by now that we no longer rant and rave about it.





Top to bottom: the schoolhouse in Bodega; the fake restaurant interior at the studio in Hollywood; the actual restaurant in Bodega Bay; the fake village of Bodega Bay, a studio set.

Oh, somewhere in the United States, or possibly somewhere in Canada, theres the original, genuine cliff, and maybe it once had a wooden sign saying LOVERS LEAP— I think a white sign— and kids would park up near there and neck. But the idea of Lovers Leap had long, long ago overtaken the actual place, or the possibility of it even existing— thats how corrosive a magical notion can be. And that is how we are forced to regard the past and our history in general.

You know that there are actual places, and they are probably the original sites, called Robbers Roost, Treasure Island, SelfServ— these would be a cave in a cliff unknown to all but criminals, a remote desert island bulging with buried pirate loot, and a gasstation that uses the idea of convenience to get free labor from its customers. But these dont have the same punch as the notion of suicidal lovers, falling away together from all this world, plunging into their own all-answering one.

What she was trying to tell him was that the sheer volume of persons on earth strained all systems until nature began to downsize and outsource. If it needed fewer bodies, it meant that the fresh ideas and cruelty always abundantly on hand from a great many people would have to come from other places. Humanity just wasnt doing enough murdering and neglecting of weaker members of the race. We had become too civilized: as a result, there was a baby boom of unimaginable proportions.



The only way to go was natural disaster, plague, and ozone hole. All things were interrelated in fact and in function. The result was an overall lessening of both the desire and the ability to have a bunch of babies, and the flat reduction, by disaster, of the number of living souls. He had been translocated to a Munchkinland full of neutered and spayed and docile and wealthy living dolls. It wasnt that they couldnt get up the enthusiasm to go exploring and a-conquering anymore; they just didnt care.

This must stop, he said to himself. For one thing, if this got out (which, you know, it probably will, since it isnt all that hard to foresee), it would spell the end of Science Fiction. You may not think that thats such a dreadful thing to have happen, but you have to remember that you arent simply a passive observer of life and the world, but you actually participate in the shape it takes and the way it smells, and one of the main ways you do that is by imagining the future.

You think of yourself and what youd like to be doing in a few years, you think of what your children will turn into and try to squelch that, your hopes and dreams are all predictions. You are all wrapped up with the future and with telling your own story. You are, in fact, a writer of Science Fiction. Even if youre merely a religious fanatic or worthless scholar. If the world should go dark or cold, it means that dark and cold dreams will have prevailed, and this we must not allow.

We must see our future as one that would welcome us, one that we might want to welcome as home. Its not a tomb or prison, or a hell. In a quiet moment, its possible to hear it a bit, even glimpse it, and when you do youll be overcome with a kind of ultimate moral peace. This is the perception to seize and repeat: the one in which windchimes flash, in a distant afternoon, in a Mediterranean garden. You have to hold to the future where everythings going to be OK.



Winona and Huck were lost souls— they were cast off from their homes, and no idea how to return. He had anyway been coasting for two or three years without a steady job or consistent mailing address, and it kind of figures he'd stumble into a science fiction. She had been slowly ostracized at work for her daring original ideas, which she'd innocently launched as a means of connecting to the interior selves of others, and had contributed to the verymeans used by others to keep at bay all but oneself.

He had fallen in love with someone who had accidentally demonstrated the uselessness of love. All the more reason. Nowadays he believed that, without saying more, there were two irreconcilable factions in human affairs. One demands pleasure as its ruling principle, the other its suppression. Winona was of the faction that regarded life a system of pleasure— delight, curiosity satisfied, excitement answered and life overall full of the unexpected, enjoyable with some tinkering, a few insistences.

Increase in awareness or knowledge only made things better— enhanced the sense of possibility, wonder, and happy risks. This was OK by him; and it certainly did not preclude a God. It might even be a fine miracle-premise for proof in its own right. Eventually, he found himself happy, unwilling to badger life for a secret system of meaning any further. But he still kept collecting evidence of one— it was everywhere. He asked himself: Why would all this proof be left in plain sight if nothing was behind it?

This was before he understood that nature used an alien system of logic— an inhuman code— in which everything referred back to a few, seminal surprises, or lesser bangs. Every plant and organism was the offspring of all creatures' procreative exuberance. We were the spawn of inhuman life. The point was to achieve minute symmetry and lust, by the looks of things. To casually spin in tiny, lubricious ecstasy above stagnant water for ten minutes. But also to hum a tune and write home.

To produce an identical intricate mirror image of a set of wings in a thousand hatching offspring, but also to remember how much money was in your wallet, and the color of her eyes. To prepare for what was certainly coming— to get ready all day to die all night. To adapt to what might lie in store for us in the future, we had been inspired to predict gods whod once abandoned us for an unknown reason and who'd return unexpectedly at an unknown date. They had stepped out of time; we were stuck in it.

[Judge Bean]

25. The Peril from Planet Mongo...


In 2002, after analyzing the light from 200,000 galaxies… American scientists… concluded that the universe was pale green.
…A few weeks after the announcement… they had to admit they'd made a mistake in their calculations, and that the universe was, in fact, more a sort of dreary shade of taupe.

--The Book of General Ignorance




Here and there, this and that and the other thing were showing up missing. He couldnt tell you exactly, but he had this feeling that something wasnt quite right. He couldnt say just what they were, but it seemed a number of objects and documents were missing from inventory. All these people in and out, couldve been anybody; but he had his suspicions, say what you will. Couldnt put his finger on it. He was being afflicted by a bogey, a mischievous spirit that liked to move tools out of your reach.

Nobodys going to make a big stink about Twinkies and Duracells, or even basketballs and Chicken of the Sea Chunk Light Tuna in Water, so he didnt make a formal complaint: theyve got to live with their consciences. But he really couldnt say what was missing. Huck was a helpless collector, a hoarder, and she misread him in conjunction with her modern prejudices about materialistic antique Americans, and had overstocked him, so he got it from both ends.

By being a compulsive packrat, he was trying to encompass and acquire the unexplained part of the world. He'd tried to save excellent clippings— lore and unconscious literature: for example, from 1949 until 2054, a man dressed in black with a white scarf visited Edgar Allan Poe's grave on the writer's birthday every year at the Westminster Presbyterian Church graveyard in Baltimore. He left three red roses and a bottle of cognac at each visit, and embraced the headstone before leaving.

And for example in Octobers from 1946 until around 2020 or 25, the Turkey Trot Festival was held at Yellville, Arkansas: the highlight each year was when a live turkey was dropped from a plane over a crowd. And for example there are these towns with these names: Hamilton!, Ohio, and Eighty-Eight, Kentucky. But these are only some of the things he learned: many more were swiped. He can only speculate as to why anyone wouldnt want these facts more generally known. Takes all kinds.

Morris and Laury showed up one day at his pad, and said that Winona was on the way over. He'd been in the future a couple of weeks by then, and understood that he'd seen just about all he was ever going to see of the wondrous world of whats to be; rather, of what would have been if what had been hadnt been. There was plenty new under the sun, but he was pretty well caught up on it all by then. There werent to be too many more surprises— not much more to get excited about.

He didnt think that he'd learned anything noteworthy— by way of news at least— in the past week; she was tired and distracted, and he was afraid that, once again, he'd failed to improve the world by making a woman happy. When you set about to totally satisfy a person, you deprive her of the pleasure of uncertainty, try to comfort her in the absence of soothing novelty, pretend to mystery by mere concealment, deny her dissatisfaction, and thereby fail, finally, to satisfy her at all.

He was pretty excited to see his pals here, and, talking for everyone all at once, foolishly interrupted himself. He couldn't wait to fill them in on the secret history of Congress, the plot to make us hate pancakes, and so on. He toured them through the most recent baubles, lecturing giddily on the uses of various shampoos and shoptools; he invited them to take a turn on the virtual jollies Nautilus-Nintendo chamber and, simultaneously, peel open a couple of Lean Cuisine Alfredos with him.

But here they were, down in the mouth and also acting nervous, continuing a conversation obviously begun on the way over with glances and frowns. Once again, the kind of conduct weve all seen too much of on network TV— nothing wrong with it on the surface, having for its model folk behavior of the acceptable kind; but damnable for its electronic severance from the original. Will Matlock, MacGyver, or Mary Tyler Moore waltz in and wrap things up? Mork and Mindy; My Favorite Martian.

In fact, every noteworthy incident or interaction he'd experienced in the future was packaged to burst open after half an hour: no one could pay attention to have a discussion, story, boardgame, or kiss lasting longer. If you went past the allotted time, you got blank stares (of the type displayed in, for instance, LA Law or Family Matters, or a government press conference); if you habitually exceeded the period available for a casual disputation, you were judged obsessive.

Rather, you were obsessing. Not to say that you were obsessed with something, you understand: only that youre acting as though you were. He ran out of suggestions, and they wouldnt sit down. "OK, OK— look: Ive got some genuine Gallo." He held up white in one hand, red in the other, the two flavors, jugs the size of our thought balloons. "What do you say? Kickass bouquet." "Get dressed," Laury said, looking at Morris, which made no sense. "We're going for the ride."

Theyd been pacing around, looking at their watches— rather, at their bare wrists as though they wore watches— tugging at their waists: all the mannerisms of newborn fathers. Laury was no longer silly or garrulous, and Morris had become quite cogent. "Now, when you say ride, you mean it in the regular sense, or do you mean ride ride?" Morris chuckled a bit, believing that this was a joke. "I mean, if we're going to go on our Peril From Planet Mongo trip now, I'll skip the manmade fibers."

At the time, Huck was sporting a yellow vinyl raincoat (the kind with the soft teapot helmet), Jan & Dean shorts, and authentic Florsheim wingtips with waxed laces— no socks. Laury, no longer happygolucky, said "Its Paraffin Planet Mongo." And Morris nodded. "No kidding." Laury's sullenness: you have to understand that the last conversation theyd had, Laury ended up rolling on the floor laughing. Huck had been trying to define old slang terms by aping the accents like he was barking mad.





"Give me a, give me a, give me a smell the coffeebreak!" He drawled, choking on his laughter. "Homeboy!" Fact is, Huck was very happy that the future didnt turn out to have leathermasked soldiers of fortune scrambling over piles of microwaved skulls, or anything of that nature. He was happy for everybody; and now, if it was all the same to them, he'd as soon be back where he was meant to be. Its enough to have been there to see it; now he was looking forward to going back to his own time.

It was good luck knowing whats more or less in store: the same old thing thank God. Even with the risk of things turning out badly once we'd given the future another shot by traveling back to the past, odds are humanity would pull through with its precious cargo of meretricious dreams, celebrated beauties, slick finance, humane grace, cheap thrills, uplifting stories, flybynight ethics, instant affection, ubiquitous machinery, difficult thoughts, and gratuitous chatting. Safe and sound when all is said and done.

If the future life appeared excessive, its because excess is that which exceeds, and naturally, the future exceeds the past— exaggerates it. This goes on all the time. But in back of excess, and extension and exaggeration, is desire. We want more, and we get some of what we want. This is why the world isnt going to come to an End. Nobody ever wanted hell on earth, because it destroys desire and its objects. The basis of desire is survival; the instincts go hand in hand.

The thrill of imagining eschatological scenarios, and even fiddling a little with the trigger, was small potatoes weighed against the perpetual pleasures of, e.g., watching members of your family eat, feeling the vibrations of a guitar in your lap, raising your arms to catch a crowds applause, fingerboxing a kitten, passing a logging truck at 75 mph, prying a dayold fragment of popcorn armor from way back behind a molar, putting your tongue for some reason into somebodys ear— that sort of thing. You name it.

Nobody wanted a replay of the 20th Century, the world become a combination Beirut, Birkenau, and Bosch spectacle. Taft must have become afraid that the timetraveler would be made an example, and resolved to thwart the project of bringing males to the future to anonymously impregnate Our Wives and Daughters-- artificial insemination by abduction. He wanted to draw the line just before virtual fertility. Or so it seemed. Not a day too soon, if you asked Huck.



Now that the bureaucrats had been alerted, the band of friends couldnt stick around. This was the story as they gave it to him, of course, and bore only a similarity to the actual course of events. No matter. Morris briefed them once more on the nuclear metaphysics and psychosomatic pratfalls of transposition: the agony, the ecstasy, the loss of memory; the involuntary ralphing. There was also the chance of the traveler being rendered what Morris called a "nonrecurring entity."

"Call me whatever you want, just dont call me late for dinner," which caused them all to take on striking looks of appalled hilarity. Theyre going to let Huck take a bunch of his notes and journals— everything he could get into the one box. Maybe they could change history and reality by sending him back. Moreover, since they didnt want to go bonkers, without a clue in the mists of ex post facto subconsciousness, they took a cargo of information.

They didnt want to join the hundreds of displaced persons, refugees of the tyrant Chronos, in a limbo of non sequitur, stuck bewildered between invention and memory, enthralled to eventuality. It was God's own nightmare to retrieve these errant knights, wandering Jews, and prodigal sons— sent to "seed" history and improve fate, nunc pro tunc, unable then to recall instructions or read directions, they went about rapping on doors at all hours with oddball messages.

Leaving mad notes on lawyers doors, diatribes Xeroxed and pasted to lampposts, and, more than anything else, in struggling to break through to strangers in their rightful time, writing Letters to the Editor. Well, they wrote them, but they didnt know the real reason they wrote them. If theyd had their wits about them, theyd instead go out into the plaza and yell "Deedle deedle dumpling!" "We dont want you wired like this one," said Morris, handing Huck todays newspaper— well, one of the newspapers from the 1980s.






"Dear Editor: Hey there, all you liberals, social sophists and smartaleck educators: Are you now willing to acknowledge in the face of educational AIDS that you have been wrong… dead wrong? Will you now denounce your situational immorality and admit that all your boastful pronouncements and intellectual pornographies have not been innovative and liberating, but are stupid, diseased and destructive? Will you abort your foolosophies and your sextbooks from your uninspired, state-supported classrooms?

"Will you acknowledge our sterile women who have been raped by VD and women's liberation? Will you see the mindless and insane victims of drugs and syphilis? Will you cringe at the pitiful festering gayless homosexuals ravaged by 'gay' murders, torture and AIDS? Will you stop plundering the taxpayer to finance your 'education' that spawns this epidemic and your never-ending 'research' of devices and gadgets and potions to escape the consequences of your irresponsible behavior?

"Do you really believe that some super penicillin, condoms or your style of amoral sex education will pull you safely out of your self-induced cesspool? How many must die before you stop this carnage? The foundations of family, finance and nationhood are jeopardized by your diseased revolution. Will you ask that God is not dead and return him to the classroom, and subject your evolved theories to his revealed word, or will you return like a dog to his vomit…"


"I dont get it. You get AIDS if you go back in time?" AIDS (which became known as Plague I when once the hundred-times worse Plague II came along) was a sexuallytransmitted, incurable viral affliction which erased the bodys immune system. It started in homosexuals, hemophiliacs, and Haitians, and spread to movie stars, sports heroes, and heroinaddicts. It killed off Liberace and Rock Hudson; it resulted in condoms being dispensed to highschool students.

It was supposedly called HIV because the highest risk groups were the four ("IV") H's— homosexuals, hemophiliacs, Haitians, heroinaddicts— and not as an abbreviation of Human Immunodeficiency Virus. Whatever you called it, when it began to infect cheerleaders, beautyqueens, and conservatives, it soon petered out. The Crackpot reaction to AIDS, of course, centered on the claim that the disease was a punishment from God for having sex. Many people believed as much who werent religiousminded.

About a half hour after the guys arrived, the front door opened. They all had their faces pointed at the March, 1979 Playmate of the Month, who had managed to clamp her ribcabinet closed like a big clamshell in order to make her breasts hump up like toad throats while she was resting on her back on a fur by the fire; it must have been about midnight in centerfold time, in its hushed and solemn universe. None of them moved until the noise, so they didnt know it was Taft

until he'd fired the Smith & Wesson .38 federal through the roof, like the cost of a new jet bomber, of his mouth and into the Cyrillic alphabet of synapse, vein, and node forming the fragile net supporting his memories and desire. The slug bored hastily through the preliminary tissues assigned to speech and taste, and laid waste to Tafts hippocampus and pendent amygdala, exiting at the temporal lobe, thus entirely destroying the memorys mainlines, depots, and railheads. That day a giant fell.

His lips flabbed heartlessly in his final exhalations, pushing his last words out in a collapsed heap, the sentiment rendered gibberish on account of the blood and speed. It sounded like nothing so much as a balloon relieving itself, and you half expected to see his depleting body dart around the splattered room. The gun went off a second time, due to his finger reflex, and the shot went through his foot, counting for nothing but a barking taunt to onlookers, kind of a dare.

Everyone was stunned. Laury got busy picking up a chair Taft had taken down with him, and tried to replace it into exactly the same place itd been before the crash. He moved it backandforth, as though a bell might go off when the four legs touched the precise points on the floor. Morris started to daub up gore, stopped, started again, stopped. They all got sympathetic headaches, moved stupidly, lost sensation and balance. To fire a gun works as a sedative for everyone at whom its not aimed.

Huck went rummaging through the stuff once more, convinced that he'd seen some first-aid materials. But even the bandaids were missing. It was stupid behavior, but you cant stand by and do nothing. Couldnt remember where he'd put that darned mop. The other two automatically pulled out their bancards and placed them conspicuously on the bureau by the Sea Monkey colony; the incubating brine-shrimp jerked, according to the aimless patterns of their futile motility, in the red reflection.

Huck picked the cards up and motioned them to put them back in their pockets; all they could think of at the time was to jot down one anothers ID number and nod before putting them away. Nobody said anything for a long time, until theyd pulled Taft away from the door, locked up, and were on their way out with knapsacks. "He just had to like keep it all too quiet, I guess," whispered Morris. But why whisper?

This post has been edited by Judge Bean: 27 July 2009 - 06:53 PM

[Judge Bean]

26.

Viva, viva... Las Vegas...





Bob Merrill, composer and lyricist who penned such musicals as "Carnival" and "Funny Girl" and such popular songs as "(How Much Is) That Doggie in the Window," has died. He was 74…
…25 popular songs that were in the top 10… "Love Makes the World Go Round"… "People"… (AP)

Harry Warren (with Mack Gordon) wrote more than 800 songs … "I've Got A Gal In Kalamazoo" … "Lullaby of Broadway," "Jeepers Creepers," "You Must Have Been A Beautiful Baby" and "Chattanooga Choo Choo."
… three Oscars for best song. He wrote more than 500 songs for 115 different movies … "Shuffle Off to Buffalo," "I Only Have Eyes For You," and, in 1953, "That's Amore." (AP)

… "Animal crackers in my soup, monkeys and rabbits loop the loop!" the 91-yrar-old (Broadway lyricist Irving) Caesar sang …
… "Tea For Two"… "Swanee," co-written in 1918 with George Gershwin and made famous by Al Jolson; and "Just a Gigolo," written in 1930.
The lyricist has at least 2,000 songs to his credit and still is writing. (AP)

Al Sherman, composer of such 1930s hits as "Potatoes Are Cheaper," "You've Got to Be a Football Hero," and "No, No, A Thousand Times No," has died at the age of 76… wrote more than 500 songs during his professional career… (UPI)

Things appeared to be gone, like laundry socks. They were in a big hurry— even though made dopey by the suicide, they knew that they had to get the hell out of there right away— there wasnt time to search highandlow for what seemed at the time to be trifles. Somebody would have a lot of explaining to do. They all did have the quiet suspicion, though, that Taft had been the one to squirrel away Huck's stuff, and that it was probably hoarded in his office.

Hucks extensive notes were vandalized and reduced, he knew that much. Photos, journals, diagrams, poems, sketches, letters, cartoons and doodles— all the ephemerae that, for him anyway, record the important moments of life — raided, rummaged through, unaccounted for. Its plain that the culprit had had contempt for the supplemental memorial powers of paper, and, aware of Hucks sensitivity on that score, went right for the jugular. So it might have been Winona.

But thered be a way anyhow to prove that a time machine could be built; to prove that humanity can survive for at least another century; to verify the wild story of his experiences in the then and there. Where were those valuable snapshots, especially the ones in which Laury was trying to open a Sprite? The look of childlike savagery in his face had been precious. He had carefully hidden the film when he began to notice missing items, and Morris had found them accidentally.

Later, Huck found a couple of rolls of film in the raincoat pockets— he thought they were left in there because he was outside one day soon after his arrival, trying to photograph aircraft. He meant to get them developed eventually, and there might be a couple of portraits of the bunch of them. He'd have to rely on flimsy memory for almost everything of emotional import. "Its too bad— too bad," Morris kept saying. "Its best this way, really," said Laury. So both of them were also suspects.





"Well," said Morris, "we'd best be on our way." Huck lifted by its tuckaway handles the cardboard manuscript box containing movie scripts, novelizations, and anything literary that hadnt been swiped. Well, he left out that crated Michener opus about J.C. Penney. Enough is enough. "Cant do it, bro," said Laury. "Just take one out and tuck her under your wing. Youre going to be dragging worldly ass through a quantum universe."

Hem drove getaway ambulance; we'd soon get him another hotrod— maybe the Flimflamman. It was night. They pretended to be a crew rushing to the scene of a traffax. Hem said that theyd have to "go town" to sneak across it with confidence— he meant that theyd have to pass through the roughest neighborhoods. The "Hoods." There were plenty of traffaxes to pretend to be rushing to, and you could see that Hem's conscience almost didnt permit him to ignore the billows of black automotive smoke here and there, the thumping fuel explosions.

He was torn: part of him wanted to go over and try to run over referees. There were some lighted windows in the wasted buildings, but none above the second floors. On the outskirts of "Town," very small children— some of them had just started walking— mobbed around your vehicle: half of them poured mud, excrement, and garbage over it, the other half wiped it off and washed it with dark, cold water. Emergency vehicles enjoyed no special privileges.

You took a particulary dilapidated bridge, over a big filthy canal, to the Strip, the worst part of Town. He wouldnt have been surprised to see a corpse down in the moat, but the light was getting bad and all you could make out were discarded pieces of heavy equipment. A stench out of Dante, or one of his works. The Strip looked its old self in places. Many of the clubs still stood, although most of the lighting had rotted away and the clientele had gone to seed.

Zombie gamblers shuffled about in the ruined palaces, maintaining the eternal vigil for the pot of jack. Thieves had decapitated all of the parkingmeters and all of the manholecovers were missing their lids. Cement cairns sporting rusted, twisted rebar stood where thered been busstop benches. Herds of small, dark animals— no, large bugs of some kind, probably roaches— rustled nearer rubble or around corners in the ambulance headlights, flashing their shielded backs.





They rolled gently past the Dunes, Sahara, and Desert Inn. In one of these places, there was a fracas between an elderly cocktail waitress and a wino: she was turning in place, holding her round, black tray out of his reach. A security guard hobbled over and began to beat her with a big stick. People were calling hoarsely to one another outside, and staggering over on walkers to watch; one tried to pull another up by his lapel, the lapel came off in his hand.

Though nobody in the district looked to be younger than retirement age, there were gigantic billboards displaying reclining young nudes with breasts the size of oilstorage tanks. At first you didnt notice, but hundreds of people were stretched out or sitting up along the sidewalks. They hardly moved— nothing much was going on around there. On almost every corner, there was a steaming cauldron on a tripod, which seemed to be their foodsource.

Hem had to go way out of his way a couple times to drive around shabby lumps of sleeping transients. It was customary for them to take up quarters within the faded old crosswalk lines. Safety first. "Thats a real shame," Huck said, as a whole family of them trudged in front of the ambulance. Morris agreed. "Worst of it is, theyre all nameless." "I'll bet they call that one something," Huck said, pointing at a kid who laughed at them and who was apparently eating his own arm.

The scariest section was the old downtown, familiar as the site of the cowboy sign. Reno had boasted that it had the largest illuminated clown in the hemisphere, but the clown didnt move the way the eternally hitchhiking, leering Vegas cowboy did. The cowboy was one of the Seven Wonders of the Neo-wild American West. The others were Hoover Dam, the Watts Towers; the Golden Gate Bridge; Mount Rushmore; the Temple at Salt Lake; and the fact that Michael Jackson lived next door to Fess Parker.

Jackson was a pipsqueak popstar wholl pay millions to get his face carved up like a pumpkin: his nostrils will be perfect jackolantern triangles. You remember Fess Parker: he played Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett. He was Disneys Crockett— King of the Wild Frontier— whose sidekick was Buddy Ebsen, patriarch of The Beverly Hillbillies. For some reason, Crockett is thought of as having been a young man at the Alamo, around Fess Parker's age in 1955. He was actually 50.

In the old downtown district, everything was boarded up, no lights, nobody sleeping on the sidewalks, and nothing left of the thumbing cowboy. Occasionally youd see a greasy glow from a window in a caved-in motel. Sorry, no vacancy. Huck looked for signs that Vegas had somehow survived; it had always somehow held the promise of immortality, by means of immortal chance and evasion of cause and effect. The bad odds convinced gamblers that they could win.

But there was little left, only bleak references to passing glory. Then again, it had been a horrible place of dashed dreams and hopeless addictions, a place where it was 115 degrees Fahrenheit at 2:00 a.m. Hotter than hell. When the fire blew through the MGM in 1980, guards were turned to black stickfigures pushing big cashcarts, and patrons were fried to their slotmachine handles. A hundred people died in the fire because they didnt speak English and didnt get the evacuation instructions.





[/size]

You might take a dinghy, using big pizzapaddles row yourself over to a warehouse; somebodyd pulled some strings and heres a key and the password for the computer generator. You also needed fresh text— kindling for the power source. They had a way of turning information into energy— kind of a long story, maybe we can put it all into an Appendix you can skip. But you feed raw text into the computer and it converts the "information" into energy.

First the boat had to be towed across town. There wasn't much planning, though, because everyone was still stunned by the suicide. If you were able to get a response from him at this point, even Taft would probably admit that it made no sense (although he would have to put it in allegorical terms anyway, in which terms almost anything can sound OK), or that it was impractical— just a gesture, a symbolic act. If you've come to the fatal conclusion that existence is pointless, the points you make carry less force.

What did it symbolize? A puzzle for the living—Taft was free, beyond interpretive riddles. It remained for the others, now bound in ridiculous friendship, to forge on ahead and try another, fresher universe. "I have in mind some place," said Huck, "a fellow can, I don't know, start over, make a whole new life." Winona gave him a look, either the look of a restaurant guest finding a long blonde hair in her gravy, or of a mother finding a cigarette in her daughter's purse.

Either way. In order to backpedal away from the faux pas, he had to figure out what was wrong with it first. "Well, not a whole new one, really, just start everything over and…" This wasn't helping, either. "Just start over and do it right— no sense in doing it at all if you don't do it right, all the way." "You haven't done a single thing, right or wrong," said Winona. "Why change now?" Then she gazed out coldly to what was left of the old hot world.

The shell of the old Sahara reared up from a sump, a zombie casino with a desert oasis motif. The top half of the building was dark and trailing thick yellow POLICE LINE DO NOT CROSS POLICE LINE DO NO ribbons. A line of dirty smoke worked its way out of the ground floor, and someone screamed inside. "Listen, I once worked in that place," he told her, hoping to make her understand. "I used to write keno tickets in there for Redd Foxx, thousands of dollars a night, he had big stacks of them."

She did not change her expression, though she was now curious how he would work the thing together so as it would make some sense and approximate contrition. "I guess my point is, you never know. You never, just never know." He thought itd be best to leave it about there like that. But she shot back at him. "You certainly do too. You know very well." He thought the best thing to do at this point was to give it a rest and change the subject somehow.



[size="3"]

Laury had heard the old stories. "Ha! Viva Las Vegas! Viva, viva… Las Vegas!" Huck needed him to shut up, he wasn't helping him. The Luxor was gone, and there were a lot of buildings that had been thrown up in the interim since he'd lived there, and which had since decayed into dark cliffs. "If you were to become like a new man, what would you have to say about this city then? That you should never have come here?" She was hurt and upset.

"No, no, see, that's just what Im trying to say. Had to do over, Id… Id do it the right way, try to get here now, not then. I should never have come to Vegas then, shouldn't have worked there or lived here then. It was a gigantic mistake—a waste of a couple of years. I only did it to pay off a loan. Living here was hell on Earth. Everything was for rent and there were actually newspapers that were nothing but ads for prostitutes." This was going nowhere.

This post has been edited by Judge Bean: 28 July 2009 - 08:17 PM

[Judge Bean]

27.

Cabdriver on the trombone...



…a particular inspector was appointed for the statues; the guardian, as it were, of that inanimate people … scarcely inferior in number to the living inhabitants of Rome. --Gibbon, 17





At the intersection of Flamingo and Circus Circus, or some such imaginary place, it was a rustbelt panorama of dented fueltanks, boarded warehouses, crumbled chainlink choked by brown grass, ponds of spilled oil, piles of shredded railroadties, nibbled cardboard, stripped cars, scrawny dogs trying to walk, a couple of unidentifiable birds with syringes stuck in their wings, a pile of wrecked slotmachines, and a dense, lungwilting, eyeshriveling, rancid smog.

The smog reduced visibility to just a few yards, so every block you traveled was a new place, another universe, and opened up new vistas of exhausted, encrusted, busted turbines, cranes, tractors, and demolished neon. The only entertainment he saw billed consisted of a hologram Wayne Newton accompanied by a syphilitic cabdriver on the trombone. Few great empires in history ended on such a bad note. All of the senses wanted to shut down and start over.







They say that Bugsy Siegel, "the gangster who founded Las Vegas," was shot in the face by an M1 Garand for failing to account for the mob skim in the first casino on the Strip. If so, and seeing as how the whole place turned out in the end, he'd probably wish to have a second chance, too. It was the universal desire of morally-corrupt men— that is, the desire of all men. They also said that Vegas was a Disneyland for adults, but this is a stupid thing to say.

It's like saying "Mercedes is the Cadillac of cars." Disneyland is the Disneyland for adults—most of it is wasted on kids. It's also a huge monument to benign, idiotic good nature, which is why criminals shy away from the place. You can park a stroller with a purse and $500 in souvenirs for an hour while you wait in line for the Dumbo ride, and no one will touch the rig. Criminals in Huck's day flocked to Las Vegas, though. Ordinary people could turn into crooks at the drop of a hat.

And when government or military officials wanted to do sneaky underhanded stuff, they naturally gravitated to this desert. Just under the surface, tens of thousands of illegal migrant laborers washed the dishes and bedclothes of all imprudent stains and traces; the mob bussed them north in windowless vans. If for only an hour the managers of the clubs were forced to obey the simplest laws, the whole place would fold up and blow away without an inch of harm to Western Civilization.







28.

Buck Owens and His Buckaroos Boulevard...



I have got so used to writing in bed that I think I prefer it, though of course it's awkward to type there. I am just struggling with the last stages of this bloody book about the possible state of affairs if the atomic war isn't conclusive.

--George Orwell, imagining the future while suffering from TB in a remote Scottish tower



Heres where the gangs ruled. They stopped the vehicle and pulled everybody out, and ransacked the ambulance looking for narcotics. They were all smoking marijuana, powerful cigars about a foot long. They wore metal boxes, which were ashtrays as well as purses, roaches being good currency: it made them look orthodox. These seemed more like Hucks own kind than anyone else in the future— until they opened their mouths. When they spoke, they sounded like they were from the paraffin planet Mongo.

Nothing human could make a sound like that. Their teeth were unbelievably bad— as bad as The Black Dahlia's— the kind of dental problems that make you wonder how or why the few surviving teeth even hang around as long as they do. Every so often while we were standing around, one of the gang would whip out a short sword with a movable handlegrip, and perform a deft, lovely drummingnunchuck Mongolianbarbeque thing on his forearm, padded by a black leather sleeve, already decoratively ribboned.

The gangs lived in an atmosphere of complete and completely hideous symbolism. In the first place, their chief delight was got by causing a scene and not remaining to identify themselves. What theyd really wanted to do was cause the squad to wreck, but Hem had foiled them by going real slow. Advancement in the gang could hang on how many severe traffaxes youd caused; they tattooed little cars on their arms, after the fashion of dogfighter aces.

After causing a traffax, theyd commit an even more heinous crime by loitering around right up until the last possible minute, taunting the victims with a wordgame involving miserable, indecipherable, excruciatingly lunatic puns, palindromes, piglatin, and portmanteau coinages, set to a grating switchblade-on-the-sleeve rhythm and the dumbest kinds of rhyming. The highest form of the art happened beyond anyones ability to control it when two groups of gangsters collided.

That infantile rhyming had become popular in the late 1980s— when a folk art practiced by everyone from the Heavyweight Champion of the World to jumproping schoolgirls had become marketable finally— as Rap. Rap grew out of Jive, and Talking Jazz, Scat. The stylized arm movements of late Rap derived from those of Stepin Fetchit. If you got Stepin Fetchit angry, and made him talk as fast as Scatman Carothers— and scratch up a record behind him— youll get some idea about turn-of-the-century Rap.

The only thing is, Carothers and Fetchit are too skinny— many Rappers were pretty obese. (You remember Stepin Fetchit, the one who played the stupid but loveable servant, befuddled beyond hope when he tried to resolve apparently contradictory commands. The idea was, when you order a Black employee to do something, keep it simple, or youll have to endure 15 minutes of headscratching I-dunnos. Buddy Ebsen did this act with Fetchit in an old Shirley Temple movie).

White people used to get a kick out of watching Black people act like absolute morons. It made them feel safer, in spite of the fact that the bumbling makebelieve folks fed and cared after White infants, cooked meals, watched their houses when they were away, were led to hidden corners by their wives, invented modern music, dance, and slang, and, in general, held Caucasian lives in the palms of their hands for a couple of hundred years.

Rap was real mean, real bad, real nasty, and the gangmembers were all dirtpoor immigrant slumdwellers— a section of society notorious for its lack of respect for the wellnamed. All of these Rappers here were newly-arrived from Brazil and Indonesia. They emphasized conspicuous consumption, but underneath it all there was the encouraging thesis in Rap that a statement was profound, a thought true, or a feeling more passionate if expressed in primitive rhymed verse.

Thus, when a Rapper boasted as to how he'd fatally sodomized a virgin, he tried to link the natural ecstasy which overcame him to the general state of society, naturally enough; but his main task was to put it into unvarying couplets. It must have been about the time that a TV evangelist was running for president, and bragging as to how he'd deflected an infamous hurricane just in time for the primaries, that Rap came into vogue; and youd hear little kids in the park singing along to the fourletter odes.

The gangs in the future acted out the Rap— itd taken over their lives, as it had their fathers and grandfathers. It had also taken over the lessimportant arts, including drama, so that each Rap performance, or vid, called for a cast and a hellish crew of kibitzers, as well as a bunch of dry ice. This is why it required an entire gang to put on a show. Far more time, energy, and money went into the performances than into anything like crime or staged fights.







Relaxed Rap or Hip-hop attitudes, worn like coats or jeans, fit into the solid 20th Century rebel fashion tradition: that combination of Hells Angel, Elvis, James Dean, Skinhead, Beatnik, Hippie, and Rockstar involving slouch, denim, boot, and cigarette, which indelibly mark the virtuous revolutionary spirit in our time. Of course, the revolutions guerillas are all male, and their cool manifesto can best be summed up in three words: Dont Bug Me.









During the greatest of the Gang Wars, after 1995, Bloods gangs were primarily Black (true to the original street term blood), and their natural enemies were Vatos (Latin American), Boocoz (Southeast Asian); and the Aryans, the White gangs, who hated everyone equally. The Wars were mostly about integration of the music industry, and the perceived threat of the great Hispanic gangs, who had infiltrated Hip-hop; when they were over, everybody came together in art.

They all also found themselves allied against the authorities in the 2005-2012 War on Drugs: racial boundaries crossed, heads shaved, the illegitimate sons of hostage cops welcomed into the fold without prejudice. The cop sons were all bluecollar Neofascists in paratrooper boots who liked to sniff petroleum products. The War on Drugs of that period was fought mostly in Bakersfield, which has a street named Buck Owens Boulevard. Buck Owens and the Buckaroos Boulevard is too big for a freeway sign.

Huck didnt pay too much attention to what they were saying; he couldnt understand them, and he was distracted by what appeared to be a skeleton over by some trashcans. It was clear, though, that they had to present their ID cards to the street thugs. Talk about your professional criminals! They hacked the cards up with their switchblade-drumsticks and tossed them around like confetti, meanwhile cackling and rapping, making wise.

It would be difficult to reproduce the extremely hostile, rapid, kiddie doggerel we'll come to know as Rap, but you ought to be warned about it ahead of time. Rappers pictured themselves mythically: athletes whod gone bad and turned into vicious criminals. Their clothes were an enormous sardonic reference to the clean, wholesome fate expected by society for them: all the young men were slated to be at least athletes— or nothing. The Rappers defied the prejudice and wore the jerseys as a snub.

Before the 1980s, the chief bard was Muhammad Ali, who was punchdrunk— an athlete gone bad by fighting and being beaten severely. The rhymes were mostly monosyllabic, the meters all screwed up and there was a certain shyness in the elocution, in spite of the noise. Also ironic, given the shyness, was that Rap was of the bragging tradition of popular American art, with the usual overblown braggadocio and unmistakable note of self-delusion.

The usual structure was, e.g., "Smith's the name, plumbings the game." First was the announcement of a nickname; then of an occupation or claim to fame; then the celebration of the amazing suitability of the name to the occupation and vice-versa; then an adventure involving the violent prowess of both. The narrative was the same one used by Davy Crockett and Mike Fink, and by both of them and many others when they fought. The boast itself was a weapon.

The more you went down this narrative line, the heavier and fuller of hot air. The ante went up until the hero of the universe, the boaster, lassoed his coastthreatening pride or greased the improbable lightningbolt of the authorities. Or he might trail off in a thumping lamentation concerning the oppressive demands of society in terms of the shortage of sexual or burglary opportunities. Crockett would demand of a stranger, "Aint I the yaller flower of the forest?"

"You are beautiful, sir, and if you was running for something I'd vote for you." In the early days, the Rappers challenged the authorities to suppress them, Please arrest me for wearing too much jewelry— please stop me from saying "Motherfucker" all the time; the challenge in the end was all that mattered, and an arrest or murder actually interfered with ones career. In place of the towing of canal barges with your teeth or the grinning down of a squirrel, it was sufficient to claim to have slapped a whore.

In truth, however, no one slapped whores anymore— it was enough to look and act as though you just might, if it ever came up. It was enough to cross your arms and glower. As was true of other Crackpot sects, such as California Radical Feminism, Idaho Supremacist Survivalism, and Tabloid Celebrity Spiritism, Rap romantically fused an personal frustrations with universal revolutionary causes, and stomped all over fine distinctions, subtle expression, and commonlyunderstood language.

According to the sects, because some expressions insulted the individual or his totem, all expressions and their neutral linguistic contexts were corrupt. The cure was to "reinvent" language, to deprive your "enemy" of the power to describe or judge you— in words. So Crackpots called themselves, officially (that is to say, in the course of publication) niggahs, NASCAR dads, dogs, wymmin, Wiccans, or defense contractors, instead of men, women, nutcases, and crooks.

Some Rappers did call themselves thugs or gangstas: usually, actual thugs and gangsters do not call themselves that, you know. They had no idea that their playacting put them in the very same boat with Civil War reenactors, highlevel Republican strategists, thinktank scenarists, and Fantasy Football players. Rappers redid the language, but any single voice felt itself both entitled and talented enough to express the most significant stuff in the world in any manner striking its fancy at the moment.

In the Crackpot tradition, in which the Rappers were bards, things werent just what they seemed to be; everything was everything it might be. As Bob Dylan sang, Everythings exactly the way that it seems. You had to broaden the scope of available proof of the Unseen just because such proof was sparse— was often, indeed, invisible, like the True Church. Lacking acreage, like Manhattan, they built skyscrapers of hard, featureless paranoia.

If you hope to make good in the coming decades of saturationlevel info and mandatory ID, best to learn this way of looking at an increasingly-metaphorical society. Everything was the way it seemed because anything might reform into something other, by vicinity, proximity, intersection of careers, tangential association, semblance, mimic. A chameleon was the tree; synonyms were interchangeable. Nothing had a chance to be left to chance; anything of note was chased down and referred to.

A brand of glue advertised itself with a film of a construction worker stuck under an I-beam, his hardhat glued to steel a hundred levels above— thats just how strong it was, and all you needed to know. It was as though you could glue a guy to a beam; it was like something that strong; no one was ever glued that way— no matter— imagine it to prove it. Stores advertised as providing "self service" as though a recommendation; using drugs was often a crime if you were healthy.



INSTRUCTIONS FOR USE OF WET-NAP.
1. Tear Open Packet.
2. Unfold Wet-Nap.
3. Use.



Bob Dylan, of course, also sang the deplorable lyric The pump dont work cause the vandal took the handle. Lacking the discernment to realize the bathos, gratuitous gabble, and wholly senseless qualities of the verse, youd find nothing in it to make you prefer While the evening is spread out against the sky / like a patient aetherized upon a table. Music was excellent if it sold millions of copies of recordings of it; art was mostly a reference to art, literature a reference to references.

Likewise, a Crackpot views the Washington Monument with the same wry, knowing wink with which she mocks brazen priapic lares; any creative production bears all the potential wishes of its creator, his time and place, his peers, his lessers; and coyly reflects the fears and theories of the observer— this is a religion in which the subjective judgment of every individual prevails, and in which wishing makes it so. Of course then you can no longer see or find the original forms, the ideals.

Crackpots can find the link between the Pentagon funding of the movie Tora! Tora! Tora!, John Ford's docudrama of Pearl Harbor, and his service as an Olympian in 1962. Acting out a story, fighting a war on the screen only, recounting personal experience, and waging real combat are all deeds of the same quality and dimension. The Crackpot who believes that Elvis is alive in Brazil under witnessprotection will as soon make pilgrimage to Graceland as to Monticello. All temples are the same height.

An Elvis cultist considers The King's dispensation of Cadillacs the same as the thing with the loaves and fishes— the reason they weigh the same is that everything for a Crackpot is drained of measurable substance; bereft, he is left with glass balls, which he juggles. But heres the basic, ineradicable sign of Crackpottery: smoldering ire. Youll notice this when Rap takes off— humorless, bone-dry, frantic, furious as a jerking skeleton. Its anger is suffocating.

Madness is mad as hell— remember that. Youll be able to keep your head above the swamp if you keep a sense of humor. Theres nobody out to do you in. The troops seemingly massed against you are no more than figures of empty armor mounted on wooden hobbyhorses. You can knock them over with a bawdy joke. Crackpottery, on the other hand, with its repetitious mottoes, sharp tongue, and pitiless formulaic canons, once it gets hold of a gun or some cash, watch out: youre either for us or against us.

If you dont look like us, talk like us, or do what we do, you must have a different inner life as well— all belief is contained in outer symbols (particularly clothes and hair); any different heart is an enemy to mine. If you learn that one next to you is interested in something other than himself, he becomes his own enemy, and thus yours. Ultimately, theres no better way to fend off the enemy than to directly assault him, sending the message that youd like him blown off the face of the earth. Rap was like that.

The Rapper was armed, and brooked no nonsense: humor was "bullshit," compassion a lapse of faith, sensitivity or gentleness the traits of a "bitch." The Rapper was male. His signs were sneakers, sports jackets, handsignals, stopwatches, sweatclothes— a demonic athlete. He hates women most of all. Men he "respects" he might call "dogs." Anyone who encroaches on the Rappers sacred selfimportance risks violence; or having his nickname included in a rant set to plagiarized music.

Almost everyone had abbreviated and twisted names, not their own. They also mercilessly assaulted the English language, leaving it bruised and cheapened, in many cases hardly breathing or legible. They doggedly believed, apparently, that every plural ending in z instead of s was an original idea, and that every misspelled nickname set the wearer apart from the herd. The surplus of z and k, of course, is a clear sign of Crackpottery in full bloom.

The Rappers called themselves, one another, and Huck a term deriving from bro but sounding comically close to bub, burp, or bud. The word might have been homes, dog, or what. Morris was able to engage in the slang rumble somewhat, and the gangsters greatly loved it, but Huck didnt know if he scored at all, since he couldnt follow the arcane wit. One person would say "This is Trop 14, bup, what." The other would respond "What, what; what, what."

After this exchange, the actual fight. The best way to imagine the rumble is as a rhymed, vicious repartee slinging cutting remarks, shooting daggers from your eyes, backstabbing, killing with looks, and sending penetrating insights through thin skin— all carried on as though your life depended on it. None of it bears repeating on the printed page.

The group got out of there OK, with most of their stuff, and felt all right, but for Morris' grief about the loss of his IDNA card: he was seriously disturbed, as though in actual physical pain. As they were bouncing along the pothole row, Huck finally released his squeezehold on Winona, and lifted his arm from across her chest like a rollercoaster handlebar: "Gasp," she said, audibly. Its a good thing they werent to travel by spoonship together, or he'd likely injure her with his safety measures.





Leaving town across South Bridge, at Tropicana, Huck heard saxophone music coming across the mighty pollution of the black water. You could tell it wasnt a recording because the player kept tripping over a part he was trying to make up. He'd trip, stop, back up, and try again, over and over, until it came to him. Just about when you could barely hear it anymore, they were smoothly past the vague threat of the presence of a great many of the poor.

[Cmsr. William M. Tweed]

I called the brothers. One is in Texas and one is in Hawaii. The one in Hawaii is ten years younger than me, is a surfer and artist, and has already had a bad tangle with the spacetime razzmatazz when he made his book Jaws Maui and was ripped off by the photographer Blue Max and the National Geographic. The other one would put himself in mortal danger of chronological catastrophe, since he is only a year younger and we shared some friends and acquaintances at Verdugo and up at Sonoma and Reno.

The father of one of his good friends had a bazooka in his basement in Tujunga; a V8 engine in the livingroom. I don't know if these objects were part of some sort of project. That shows you what we're dealing with here, and it isn't pretty.

I hadn't realized that bazookas, Burnside carbines and bootleg sharks were in play here. Definitely don't want to involve the Bean brothers in any of that. Best just stay away—unless of course Hughes is available to go.

Who knows how these things get started. At first, Christianity was all Jewish, and so all of the first saints were Jews, including Peter and John the Baptist.

Tweed did not claim that Ysidro was the only Jewish saint, only that that's what somebody said. At the time, he (Tweed) thought that it (and almost everything else) was hilarious.

According to Wikipedia and other net sources, Ysidro/Isidore was not only non-Jewish but anti-semitic by birth & preference, respectively. I've begun looking through the archival (i.e., radium-proof, gluten-free) crates in which I store news clippings, trying to locate a 1960's Sunland-Tujunga Record Ledger article that described him as the "only Jewish saint," but I have not yet found it. Alas, the clipping may have fallen victim to the Great California Roofleak of the spring of 1990. Even if found, of course, it would only serve to redemonstrate the serial inaccuracy practiced by the Record Ledger (remember the Wrecker Ledger, the single-issue parody written and published by Bill Scott of Rocky & Bullwinkle fame?). Although in fairness the RL did feature an enthusiastic review of Brigadoon.

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This post has been edited by Cmsr. William M. Tweed: 30 July 2009 - 04:37 PM

[Judge Bean]

Tweed,

You may recall that my own dog, Rugthump, was tested and failed, though it was not reported in the same forum. We had to have him, er, amended immediately and painfully, and the skullcap fell before his eyes so that he ran into walls and doors. Religion was at least as regrettable an experience for him as it had been for Isidore, and we postponed the Mitzvah until all of his wounds healed.

Rugthump was released to his natural habitat in Tujunga in 1972. Thank you for dredging up this horrible memory.

Bean


Here is the final chapter of In the Garden of Tomorrow.

[Judge Bean]

29.


Sixtynine suns for each person alive…



Thomas A. Dorsey was the Pilgrim's longtime musical director, dubbed "the godfather of gospel music." … wrote 400 songs by the time he died in 1993 at the age of 93. His choir featured stars such as Mahalia Jackson, James Cleveland and Sally Martin.
… Take My Hand, Precious Lord.
… Dorsey's sheet music was being stored in the church at the time of the fire.
(CBC Arts)




It was nearly midnight when Huck entered psychopannychy, his own mitigated oblivion, the brainless pause before his day in the court of natural destiny. He never felt as though this timetravel routine blasphemed the superhuman order, even if, as many suspected where he came from, the superhuman is still not necessarily the supernatural, and your moral code does no more than prohibit exploitation of Mother Environment. That is only a coinage, of course: the world was now called The Environment.

The natural world was now merely a setting— a background— but the laws still held. Even if violating the laws of physics (enforced by only faith) entailed doing the totally unexpected thing, those laws were no doubt preempted by the supreme natural law against waste. Nature never wastes anything, not even a surplus. Genes hid out far below, no healing hand might eradicate any, and all the odds were against the creation of anyone in particular. If you refused to travel through time, you wasted a chance.

Once in a blue moon, Nature ran out of ideas anyway. For instance the water surplus really put Nature to its trumps, so it came up with the one about the little brown bag of water that pushes its way across the sidewalk— the slug. Some scientists believed that organic life was just a complicated way for oxygen (the most plentiful element) to get itself transformed and transported from one place to another. You cant do much wrong in these kinds of circumstances.

In spite of burgeoning Crackpottery, sin is a crock— which is why crime became less important as Crackpottery's influence increased. To be punished for a mere crime gives no one jurisdiction over your soul, something that as many bureaucrats and policemen as religiousfanatics find vexing. In the same way, being right gives you no legitimate power over another: you might be wrong, or partly wrong. Which part is it? Dont bet on it.

All those whod presume to have jurisdiction over the soul of another, and impose upon him categories of punishment according to indictments of sin, must contend with the fact that, at least as far as concerns Adam and Eve, however onerous the penalty for disobedience in terms of crumbs and bruises, to have obeyed wouldve been the end of the race. One should take this as a precept for his own conduct when he starts to size up the spiritual value of a typical, sadlymistaken fellow humanbeing.

Its probably going to be just this type of attitude of gentle tolerance, if anything, that saves your soul from Crackpottery. Anyway, whats the value of a soul if you cant put it up for trade, put it on the market. If you cant share, it or give it away when you get too old to do much with it anymore. What do you want to hang on to it to the last bitter minute for? Trust me, no one cares. Well, do what you want to do, its yours and you have a right. Youve got to deal with your own children, not me.





Timetravel not contrary to either the laws of God or of Nature, and wanting badly to get back home, in no time at all they were on their way. He'd seen our future, and all of us have seen the past: we're handsome animals, capable of being proud of whats accomplished by others, full of healthy lust, ardently creative and talkative, in the main smart and careful. Usually uneasy with others suffering, we love music, pictures, and stories; we'd rather joke than argue, but do both with gusto.

If theres a policy or regime universally recognized, its the one in which the safety and liberty of the individual is held ideal; if theres a single law desired by all whove not so far enacted it in some way, its that no one should suffer on account of official malice or neglect. This is what we are, regardless of who we may be; this is what we have tried to be in the past, and, as time goes forward, what we'll continue to become. No surprises here; the worst you can expect is more of the same.

Therere no absolute calamities waiting. Civilization will carry on. Miraculous spectacles, imposed by divine will, just wont happen— though angels crowd the streets. Those whove died live again, but have forgotten their names and so disbelieve it. The darkness will soon be over, and wont be as dreadful as the unremembered deaths. We'll conquer time and space, life and death itself, by our own hands, thereby vanquishing the justice or necessity of evil— if there ever really was such an excuse.

And we all share this as well: the knowledge of good and evil, and the freedom to choose between them. When has a mere problem— rough sunlight, say, by shortage of screening gases— ever had a chance to wipe us out? We mustve forgotten ourselves: the creatures whove seen and done it all, including the End of the World shtick, over and over and over again. Now our patience has run out: weve seen just about all the bodies in the street that could possibly be called for under any reading of history or destiny.

What may be troubling is our crazy and gullible propensity for processing everything into a takeoff or a sendup, for fashioning false bottoms, synthetic fabrics, and canned notions— for losing the sight, smell, and feel of real things, and drowning in the teaspoon of superficial values. Folks are trapped miserably in narrow rooms, frowning, clenching fists, and grunting wishes, trying to escape to a meadow this way. Some of us are afraid of things happening which we havent foreseen.

Our pretended mastery of the future… but its not true that we can act absolutely reliably, without mysterious consequences. You cant live planning all important events and facts. When everything is machined, its predicted; the extra dimension and depth added by your own capricious, personalized touch is irrelevant. Your character's taken out with the trash; its inefficient, its inappropriate, its inconvenient. We should adopt as our one of our chief values the preservation of accident.

Watch out for when your heated dreams are labeled superfluous, when your carved toys dont brighten any eyes, when you cant buy actual leather shoes anymore. Time to put your foot down. Some Crackpots want to erase the chances (and hope) of accident. They want nothing to occur which is unexpected or unprescribed— such a thing is tantamount to a crime. To hell with them. To hell with all of the drones and wonks in the Pentagon and skyscrapers and war-rooms.

Through to the end of the 20th Century, they will continue to predict the eminent End of the World, when CNN can play its stored tape, Jesus will descend and divide the flock, Burgess Meredith can come out of the bank vault and break his spectacles on the ruined library steps, Charlton Heston in a loincloth can pound sand in front of the tilted Statue of Liberty, and chainsmoking Dennis Hopper can rule a drowned world from the hull of a rusted oiltanker.

Teacher Chen Hengming of Taiwan will move his followers to Garland, Texas to await God's appearance, on channel 18 nationwide, on March 24, 1998. He (God) will actually arrive on Earth a week later. But no he wont, right? You know it wont happen: its bullshit. Its Crackpottery. Its a lie— a beautiful lie in a way, but still. Dont fall for that stuff; youre better than that. Someone wants you to hand over all of your money and wear a bedsheet in the airport to sell flowers? Get skeptical, will you?




To leave time, to leave your own time, even if only as a daydreamer, is to pass through the land of the dead, where some yet bargain for relief. Youve temporarily lost the ability to mark or reckon time— youve forgotten the self, yourself. The land is well-lit by fire and coated in ash, and the dead traipse endlessly— toward us. They are coming toward us, for us. When we join them the dead walk past, away— not before. As a timetraveler, youre kin to the dead, youve walked in their shoes.

The long warm march together is our fate, and we welcome it involuntarily. We give up our breath, our will; and thereafter hope for memory in others, having lost our own. The dead have hope without memory— a compassionate final bit of grace. A person who has apparently counted them will say in 1991 that "the dead outnumber the living … as high as 20 to one." He reckoned at up to 100 billion the total number ever born. You maybe hadnt reckoned them to be so many.

Huck retrieved this information from an essay that will be published in Harpers, written by Annie Dillard (The Wreck of Time; Taking our century's measure, Jan. 1998, 51-56). It was part of his research into what Winona had told him about more people being alive in the 21st Century than had ever been born, that in fact it wasnt true. Maybe she only counted the ones with jobs and names. The magazine article seemed to have the last word on the question, and the advantage of a documentary voice.

To make a long story short, he stabbed back into his time and place, or what should have been his time and place, aboard the Flummoxcart. Theyd considerable trouble with the launches, even though the rocketships were handcarried, like grenadelaunchers. All you had to do is lodge the ship into a solid place, wedged against a concrete wall or something. You aim the thing into the winds of gravity, and let fly— the laws of nature do all of the work.

He used the Dillard writing as the source of fuel— the piece had the distinction of being capable of generating the greatest amount of energy from the smallest number of words in any distinct writing— something about the juxtaposition of content, style, and mathematics. The article resonated outside of the timemachine computer array— a device that fit into an 8 X 5 metal pictureframe— and the ideas rang up and down through the ages:


Ted Bundy could not fathom the fuss. What was the big deal? "I mean, there are so many people."

Recently in the Peruvian Amazon a man asked "Isnt it true that the whole population of the United States can be fitted into their cars?"

On April 30, 1991, 138,000 people drowned in Bangladesh.

"A single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic." Joseph Stalin.

There are nine galaxies for each of us. Each galaxy harbors an average of 100 billion suns. In our galaxy, sixtynine suns for each person alive.



Lightning strikes the planet about a hundred times every second.

The insects outweigh us.

One fifth of us are Muslims. One fifth of us live in China. More than 2 percent of us are mentally retarded.

Among us we speak 10,000 languages.

A hundred million of us are children who live on the streets. Twentythree million of us are refugees.

Nearly a thousand of us a day commit suicide.

Two million children die a year from diarrhea, and 800,000 from measles.


He last saw Winona doubling her safetystraps at their connectors, and then patting it as though by doing that you can make yourself safer. Then she looked at him and he said to himself, Remember. "Until tomorrow," they said. Frantic to locate other things to deliberately remember, they darted looks over one another up and down, back and forth. They tried to come up with other remarks that would secure their time together by locking it to this goodbye, but were at a loss. "I'll see you tomorrow."



He landed on a ranch outside of Tularosa, New Mexico Territory, in October of 1859, and concealed the spoonship in a box canyon. A couple of Indians helped him. They had no trouble with the situation at all, found it entirely acceptable that he'd appeared in a ball of noisy fog on a sunny morning. It wasnt childlike innocence that made them easy in the face of unusual phenomena, but calm conviction that the world held far many more important things than were obvious.

After all, according to the fuel, Los Angeles airport had 25,000 parking spaces; if you propped or stacked four bodies to a car, you could fit into the airport parking lot all the corpses from the firestorm bombing of Tokyo in march 1945, or the corpses of Londoners who died in the plague. 11 million children under five who die each year. What do three or four people matter in the great swing of things? Why would any particular couple deserve more? What makes you so important?

Everyone grew up afraid of the nuclear holocaust sure to arrive just after the news at five p.m. with Walter Cronkite. In the movie only three survive in New York City, two men, a woman. The men, Black and White, would fight over her. "The atom bomb is nothing to be afraid of," Mao told Nehru. "China has many people. The deaths of twenty million people is nothing to be afraid of." Later, speaking in Moscow, he boasted that he was willing to lose 300 million people, half of China's population.

A clownish cowboy would ride the warhead down through the atmosphere, reminding us of a demented astronaut. Doomsday had been ordered by a rogue General who had played Jim Bowie at the Alamo in Republic's The Last Command (1955). An English journalist reasoned: "Either life is always and in all circumstances sacred, or intrinsically of no account; it is inconceivable that it should be in some cases the one, and in some the other." Every day 1.4 million board a U.S. passenger plane.




He was pretty sure that the others would be no farther away than a quartermile, but didnt know in which direction, so he kept with the Indians all day and they searched all around the area. Nothing. He even patrolled awhile after dark, hoping to spot a fire. In the morning they had to go, but they told him not to worry, that his family was probably at the ranch, or in the town, which was about ten miles away. One older man in particular was badly worried about him and wished he could do a lot more.

They gave him some dungarees, and they found some old shoes in a dumpsite; and, for some reason, they gave him a hammer, ball peen, maybe for selfdefense. They shared food and names, his getting mangled to "Cracky" or "Crackot," which he adopted as a kind of honorary title as a means of tagging the time and place. For years after, they annoyed the womenfolk with their recollections of when theyd met Crackot. He thought maybe he might be able to backtrack somehow, follow breadcrumbs.

He didnt think at that time that he wouldnt get back to the ship for three years. When he did, it had been ransacked, the papers thrown around inside the capsule and the other stuff in there rifled through, and all in all it looked like a warrant had been served. Some stuff was lost, but the full set of transposition manuals was intact, screwed into the airbag panels. Some rockfall had dented the body below the caber braemer prong, but this wouldnt impede performance.

The reason he came back was that he'd finally given up searching for the others there. It was time to move on— but not to give up. It was all for one, salads or no, and he wasnt going to quit just because theyd apparently landed in the wrong time zone. He was able to compute a retracking and learned that theyd parted ways along some sort of unusual fork in the path, along about 1988, near the Whitman Mission on the Oregon Trail, outside of what later became Walla Walla. This was his next stop.

He found a guy there who said he'd seen the Antichrist, in downtown Walla Walla, the Antichrist had crossed the street and entered the Baker Boyer Bank and then had gone into the Drumheller Building. This looked like a good lead, but it came to nothing. Baker and Boyer, the founders, were depicted on the wall like those coughdrop brothers. The Drumheller Building had a sporting goods store on the ground floor, and its inventory contained a thousand firearms.

The Antichrist, pacing very slowly across the street until the red hand went on, was described as a Black man wearing one glove "like Michael Jackson," popular at that time, "only nothing like him." In the next little town north, a place called Dixon, lived a man who was known for having the longest diary in recorded history— most of which he'd foregone recording to save room for the mundane details of his ordinary life: what he had for breakfast every day, how many times he evacuated his bladder, etc.

On the dry Laetoli plain of northern Tanzania, wrote Dillard, Mary Leakey found a trail of hominid footprints. The three barefoot people— likely a short man and woman and child Australopithecus afarensis— walked closely together. They walked on moist volcanic tuff and ash. We have a record of those few seconds from a day about 3.6 million years ago— before hominids even chipped stone tools. More ash covered their footprints and hardened.

Ash also preserved the pockmarks of the raindrops that fell beside the three who walked; it was a rainy day. We have almost ninety feet of the three's steady footprints intact. We do not know where they were going or why. We do not know why the woman paused and turned left, briefly, before continuing. "A remote ancestor," Leakey said, "experienced a moment of doubt." Possibly they watched the Sadiman volcano erupt, or they took a last look back before they left.

We do know we cannot make anything so lasting as these three barefoot ones did. But we do know where they were going— they were coming here, to us. A breathless walk with us all. All Huck could think was, I hope they took some pictures of it. But what if they hadnt? Would that matter? Would anyone take a lesson to heart from such a quiet artifact? You might make a hundred such basreliefs in a stroll on the beach, and take the same images home with you later, losing as much in either event.

After Walla Walla, he went back again, to 1836. As of this writing, he had been to the following: 1836, 1847, 1859, 1863, 1881, 1901, 1952, 1972, 1976, 1987, 1988, 2002, and 2009. He didnt go to them in that order— these are the years in which he thought he'd found clues or leads. Sometimes he'd stay in a certain era for a few years, but, you know, he never in any of them found a trace of his friends existence, let alone his own. Sometimes he wasnt sure that he'd ever known them.



He didnt know whether they ended up in separate places or times, but he thought that if he could communicate by some device he'd tell them that they should split up and take alternate timepaths, to increase the odds that two will cross. But then again, did he really want to meet up with Morris and grow old with him? After archeologists studied this long strip of record for several years, they buried it again to save it.

Along one preserved portion, however, new tree roots are already cracking the footprints, and in another place winds threaten to sand them flat; the preservers did not cover them deeply enough. Now they are burying them again. He was afraid it was a lost cause, given the sheer math involved— he didnt even want to think about what the odds are really. But he did know she wouldnt just sit down and wait for him to show up. She knows the hard facts. She'd pick up and give it a go, he was sure of it.

This post has been edited by Judge Bean: 31 July 2009 - 03:52 PM