The Margin of Error

In the quest for scientific truth, there is little mention of the fact that during the course of controlled experiment or the gathering of data that the failure of the soda pop machine to dispense the right change to the research scientists altered the outcome of the research to a statistically significant degree. That explains why the space capsule landed in another hemisphere, upside down. Not only did the soda pop machine have such an effect, but so did the bacterially-active bologna and mayonnaise sandwich prepared by the kitchen staff. And the brittle cataracts in the researcher's eyes. And the phone call in the afternoon from the cousin in jail asking for bail money. This is the Wonderful World of Science. Ignore the convict behind the curtain, you are looking at Great Truths.

I think a lot about that phone call from the incarcerated relative, begging for lunch money and a pie with metal-file filling, as I walk about the boreal forest in northern Minnesota in search of things that in all probability do not exist but cannot be excluded without an all-knowing frame of reference, which frame of reference can be approximated through statistically significant sample sizes, generally numbering well less than infinity, which, doggonnit, invariably fail to consider that one sample that contains that which you, in the end, had assumed not to exist. Maybe if we maintain the sample size but enlarge the number of identical studies we can exclude the possibility. Or maybe if we have a massive amount of people say the same thing we can make it come true. Why, the sheer force of my personality might do it. But I am on a tangent and I am struggling to stay on point, as are the rest of my colleagues.
It was a lazy day about the woods and I thought it fine to engage in some informal postulations, perhaps stumbling upon some Higher Truth along the way. Make haste, I said, for a moment you can imagine that the cause of humanity rests on your shoulders. I observed: 1) I am a carbohydrate burning vessel. 2) I exude carbon dioxide 3) I attract carbon dioxide seeking organisms. Perhaps, I surmised, I can determine my "Carbon Footprint" by measuring exactly how many of such organisms were attracted to my person. Determining the total surface area I occupied at that moment, I arrived at 1.94 square meters, a figure, I discovered, that was identical to the amount of surface area occupied by the eleven heavily carbonated feral cats that lived behind our house in South Dakota in 1991 or the eight bottles of Fonseca Vintage Port 1970 in the wine rack. The wine caught the attention of a group of my colleagues, and all at once they set upon a rigorous regression analysis. For two hours, they carried out 16 repeated measurements involving eight independent variables. They found that after each measurement, the dependent variable approached zero. They were on to something. The unknown parameter appeared to be within grasp. They thought it might have something to do with the pizza delivery boy appearing seven times, clearly a random variable, but the exact function wasn't known. But they abandoned the study at the last measure; for all the while they had been carrying on they had found that their own surface area had expanded to a shocking degree, well beyond what anyone would have predicted. The phone rang and it was my cousin again.
Anyhow, a census of the black fly population that taxied about my surface area revealed 6,432 flies. This is some 3000 flies per square meter. Now to be useful, one might say that I need to measure my carbon output and I need to compare this to other carbon producers. But I have already determined that these are 6,432 random variables at any given moment in an environment where I, of 2 square meters, am in search of a species which depends upon my observation for its survival. This search is through third-growth recovering forest, stripped of old growth characteristics, choked with aspen clones and hazelnut thickets and mountain maple and balsam fir deadfall, all observed through the matrix of mosquito netting and the haze of fogged prescription glasses, beaded with rain and perspiration, while an electrolyte-depleted circulatory system produces leg cramps and heat exhaustion and iron streaked rocks send the compass spinning like a roulette wheel and the black flies sound like rain as they bombard my clothing and this is supposed to determine the nonexistence of an object in a 50-acre patch of forest.
The formula should read something like:



Where Y is the rare plant frequency and X represents independent variables including survey intensity, stand potential, phenological stage, light intensity, deadfall proliferation, drought index, spruce budworm kill factor, seral stage, deer density, slope, soil moisture, wind speed, surveyor education, surveyor experience, surveyor organizational skill, surveyor lactate levels, electrolyte imbalance, neurotransmittor depletion, excess body temperature, eyeglass opacity, cornea deterioration, cognitive disassembly, caffeine-induced confidence, memory loss, methamphetamine lab density, mosquito netting shear strength, boot porosity, pencil loss, blister quotient, degree of disorientation, fungal growth rate, bone fracture, anxiety level, battery failure, life insurance dollar amount, declining profit margins, and bitter regret. Each E represents one of 6,432 black flies.
I think I am on to something. Here we begin to figure out the value of B. The dependent variable Y is inversely proportional to the value of the independent variable X and the error factor E. As X and E increase, Y decreases. So let me get this straight: This is to say, as the probability of the existence of a rare species approaches zero, so do I.

Anytown, ND

As I walk, I feel the need to run.
Children used to skip along on the sidewalks in this town. There were twelve blocks here, each ringed by sidewalks that passed tall homes with porches, whitewashed churches, a high school, a courthouse, and a business district with the glass storefronts and two story facades and stamped metal siding and bald men in aprons standing behind counters. People watched parades from these sidewalks, and weddings and funerals and political speeches and auctions. They waved to neighbors here. They raised families.
The children would race along these sidewalks, breathless, until they came upon crude squares drawn on the sidewalk with stolen chalk. They would skid to a stop, piling up behind the leader like cattle loading into stock cars. These were the hopscotch squares. They would appear each afternoon at a different location along the sidewalk corridor. Nobody seemed to know who drew them. The children would fall into line, silently arranging their clothes. Then, one by one, each would balance himself, measure his step and hop along in sequences of one or two feet, counting aloud to the last square. Then they would run along. Think of it. A few minutes balancing over distorted geometric figures etched by unseen hands accomplished more than nine months staring at a shock-haired teacher scribbling circular madness on slate.
Seventy years later, the sidewalks are overgrown with caragana and lilac bushes. The town has been stripped of population by war, drought, dust, accident, debt, boredom, and disillusionment. The chalk is gone. The school was struck by lightning and burned down. The last mayor died decades ago. The church buried its last parishioner. The children stopped counting.
Now it is night. It is winter, January, deep in January, when the sun cannot bear to watch. When winter charges out of the boreal forests of Saskatchewan, raging and slicing, and slays everything in its path. When clouds race in front of the moon as fast as movie frames, piling up on the southeastern horizon. The alcohol in the thermometer freezes. Windmills shatter and send wooden slats into the air. Cattle stagger blindly into ravines and are buried by drifting snow. My eyelids stick together, tears freeze on my face, frost forms on my hood. I cannot feel my feet. The drifts harden like concrete. I grope along one flat snowdune like an old man on the way to the saloon. I lose track. I feel the stinging insult, I hear the barking order to leave right now.
There is a grain elevator towering above me. Augers dangle from the walls probing for spilled grain. Broken windows sound a toothless whistle. A mercury vapor light washes away color. The wind runs across the corrugated steel like a child with a stick running along a picket fence. The panels rattle and shudder and peel away. The entire elevator sways. Snow drifts accumulate on the south side of the elevator, forming a dune across the railroad tracks, tracks abandoned thirty years ago.
I can see in the moonlight the steeple of the old church, two blocks to the south, standing above the 100 year old elms. It is no longer white. Decades of wind, hail, rain, snow, dust and neglect have stripped it, revealing the raw ashen wood returning to the dust from which it came. The church bell rings in the wind, steadily, unwaveringly, like a ship's bell sounding distress. And it rings in time with the swaying of the grain elevator. I look up and now the power lines and phone lines have the same rhythm. And the road signs. And the courthouse flagpole. It's harmony. The entire town sways.
I hear it, I get the message. I run.

Miss Myrna Douglas

I don't know what to say.
There is a mirror by the ceiling in the corner of a hallway in a public building in our town. I walk past it every time I come to town to pay my bills. I never really paid much attention to it until yesterday.
There are times when I look at something I have seen for years and it looks like I had never seen it before. That happens a lot when I look at my wife; there are moments that she changes appearance, as if somebody who wants to be her has broken into the house and set in her chair. I look up and think, there is something different about the hair, the eyes, the shadows on her cheek. Have I seen this woman before? Should I ask her out on a date? But if I did, would she say, "Do I know you?" Yet, she sits there quietly stabbing carrots with her fork and she does not fawn, she does not gush. No expectations, no desperation. So I look down and just stare at the dinner plate with the seven peas rolling around the rim and pretend I have been in this house all along and wait. She will eventually throw down her fork and burst out the door and run down the lane in a way that I do not recognize. In will walk my wife and she will say, "What was that?" Fortunately, I do not know.
Sometimes it happens with places I have been; I see something I have seen for years and it looks like I had never seen it before. This is what I call Negative Deja Vu. The Already Not Seen. I have not been here before. And the more I am here, the more I have not been here.
So, I paid my electric bill, handing it to the teller with black hair and a veil, her torso hidden by a black shawl. She didn't even look up, she never does, she sat there in the booth breathing heavily, moving the bills to and fro with her white hands, sweeping them across the tabletop, swirling them in patterns, matching one bill to another, turning them over one by one. I stepped backwards and walked away and the lights flickered. Must be their business model. Anyhow, I passed by the mirror, the one I have seen for years, and something was different. The curvature? The placement? The color? Today it seemed altogether new. In the mirror I saw my image, distorted, oblique, spherical, like a tulip bulb, my helium-filled head and shrinking voice, the little man slipping away like an astronaut who lost his tether, receding into the black distance, hands fitfully grasping at the vacuum. I did not recognize myself. And then, I realize, maybe I am new.
Somewhere, there is a person on the other side of the mirror watching my movements on a television screen. Shiny eyes, like a housefly, watching multiple images, this person eats a ham sandwich, drinks a soda, studies the screen. I would not know this unless I thought about it and I might have no idea if this is true if I hadn't thought about it. I think I saw it blink.
At least one time it is true. I have been on the other side enough to know. I have met thousands of people, probably hundreds of thousands of people in my life, even if for a moment, and there may be thousands that I remember meeting whom I have not seen or heard from since. A man in physics class, a woman at the laundromat, a woman on the bus, a child in a hospital, an old man behind a screen door, a man in the wilderness. I can still see them.
I forgot that you can see both ways. And for this, I am grateful. I got a letter in February from my third grade schoolteacher, Miss Myrna Douglas. Red hair, green shoes, 21 years old, fresh out of college, wooden birds in her hair, loved to dance. It was 1965. She got my address from a former classmate and dropped me a line, 'out of the blue'. She asked if it was really me, recalled how much trouble I was, how she lay awake at nights wondering how to handle me, yet how she enjoyed me as a student - I made her 'laugh until she cried' - and how she wondered what had happened to me. She apologized if she made me fall out of my chair.
I fell out. I had no idea there was someone on the other side. This was my favorite teacher in grade school, the only one who was not an adversary, a creative, patient, young teacher who figured out how to channel me rather than sanction me, to whom I was grateful as long as I was able to maintain. At the end of the third grade, I told her that, once I realized she would not make me sit in the hallway, she was 'OK.' Was that a thank-you? Leaving the third grade, I carried the experience for the next three or four years. It gave me a sense that somewhere in this world I could fit in and be understood. I tried to find her again. I rode my bike to her house a couple times that fall, I found her once, we chatted. I stopped in her classroom. We chatted. One moment in fourth grade she appeared at the end of the hallway - I had been banished from the class and was sitting in the hall - and I jumped up when I saw her, but she turned around and walked away. Now she tells me that she was choked up, seeing me banished to the hallway. She moved on by the time I got to sixth grade, and then I walked into the fog of adolescence and the tar pit of moral revolution and that haunted mansion they call high school and forgot everything. I had no idea that I had been on her mind for 44 years. Where was I?
We were able to correspond for about six weeks. We wrote back and forth about six or seven times. She took a while to reply, and I figured it was due to a busy life. I didn't want to be a bore. But I had to admit it was thrilling to read her observations, her recollections. It filled in a lot of the gaps in the puzzle of my life, gaps I would never expect to fill, gaps normally filled with imagination. I imagine that I graduated from college. I imagine that I learned to read and write. I imagine that I was a child. Too much of my life is imaginary as is. It explained why I had a hard time reading in first grade, the social damage from my classroom exiles, the disrespect I had for teachers. But in her fourth letter, on March 10, she mentioned a battle with cancer, and that is the last I heard from her. I worried that my letters were taking something out of her. I talked about winning the battle. I told her stories. Her daughter sent me the next letter: Myrna died on March 28.
Now, the light flickers and the hallway grows dark. The curtains close.
It gets so quiet out here sometimes. Nobody comes by. Nothing moves. Not even the breeze. Everything looks the same, nothing is new.
I am growing old again. I have been exiled.
Come this way, please.

No Man's Land

"Duck."

Another bottle sailed over my head. Two mobs threw bottles and rocks at each other in the street outside the legislature. We slipped into the lobby of a tall building. "What's the dispute?"
Sergei scratched his head. "It started a long time ago. Somebody wanted to pass a public works bill authorizing a four-lane bypass for MacArthur Avenue. But there was a dispute about the dimensions. And then more dispute about the wording. Some said there is a technical difference between a pedestrian and a civilian. So they got some experts to come in from the University and they testified. But that only muddied the waters."
"Really? How could they muddy it. I mean -" Twenty men overturned a bus. Twenty other men turned the bus back on it's wheels.
"Well, at first, they found out the units of measurement were flawed, shaved a centimeter or two, like a butcher's thumb on the scale. So they found a fall guy and fired him. He got a job working for the treasury. Somebody threw him out a window. Engineers said that the flawed units meant the bypass would end up at the foot of the Forgotten War Memorial. It would be a nice view. But some asked, 'where do we go to from here?'" He pressed his nose against the glass. "I can't see." He looked down the road at the plumes of teargas and the riot police that emerged from the cloud. His breath fogged the glass as he spoke. "Then somebody forged the data. Some lady took the blame for this one. She was transferred to a research lab somewhere. So that meant the bypass would run beneath the city, buried in the Ordovician strata - where we find trilobites and primitive sharks and evolutionary dead ends." He flinched as a man hit a woman with a placard that read "Save Our Data". "Hey, isn't she your aunt?" Another man arrived and swatted at the man with a placard that read, "Safety In Numbers." Then the woman picked up a placard and began hitting the man in the back. Placards waved in the air like street signs in a hurricane.
I reached into my pocket for a handkerchief. "I wouldn't recognize her anymore."
Sergei squinted. "Well, somebody loaded the data search with rhetorical queries and false dilemmas and cyclical logic and the data was completely skewed. At that point we began to doubt if anyone had actually proposed the bypass in the first place. And whether it was worth it. Maybe nobody needed it. And that's when they realized the bypass would be nearly six-dimensional. That's one huge public works project. Probably keep us all employed until, well, until the end of time. That's when the Army Corps of Engineers got involved."
The mobs were in hand to hand combat now, ripping, kicking, pulling, while riot police arrived and swirled in their midst, clubbing hairy men with truncheons.
Sergei looked at me, pulling his glasses down his nose. "So which are you, a pedestrian or a civilian?"
"Huh?"
"Well, which are you, a pedestrian or a civilian?"
"Well, I don't know. Both, I suppose."
"There you go, you might as well be out there throwing gasoline bottles around like the rest of them, swinging from lampposts, grinding your teeth."
"Wait - I mean, how do you mean?"
"Well, thousands are pouring in from across the country, to support one group or the other. This is who they are. They live for this. Look at the crowd." He pointed to the mobs. One side, ragged and frothy, the other side, ragged and frothy, each with posters and bottles and rocks and slogans and chants. One side beat the pavement with their fists. The other side jumped up and down shouting angry slogans. The other side replied with chants. They traded insults. They threw dust and stones at each other. Then they traded sides and then they merged, shredding each other with bare arms and slaps and fists and fingernails and loud voices, swinging with each other round and round, marching arm in arm, slugging, spinning, hollering.
I stood transfixed. "It's like they are living out a man's last request, like a square dance before an execution."
He nodded. "They said a pedestrian walks upright and a civilian walks orderly. That's just what they said. And then this." He gazed through the window. A mob pulled at the arms of a man while another mob pulled at his legs. Around the corner, a group of protesters squatted on the sidewalk, tending to their wounded, picking glass from their hair. Men scaled the side of buildings, throwing shoes and belts. Women ripped children from the arms of other women. And then, paramilitary soldiers descended from ropes from above and swung into the crowd, flailing.
I looked at my hands. "Is there a third option?"

"To this?"
"No, to us."

March of Science

A car passes in front of us and slips onto the shoulder and sends gravel flying into the ditch.
"That was close." Hargrave stumbles backwards into the ditch.

"He didn't know." I dust off my jeans.
Hargrave laughs, "Man, your mind has as many holes as an empty schoolhouse. The guy could have killed us." He looks at the leafless trees sagging on the edge of the field. I step to the left and wonder why I stood where I stood. "Nothing left for me to say," he says and struggles to his feet and waddles up the ditch. I think of offering a hand but this is one thing I know; I keep them in my pockets. "Hey, thanks," he grunts and summits alongside the pavement and steadies himself.
I look at him huffing for air. "Maybe he didn't see us."
"But I saw him and that is enough for me." He swallows air.
"If you don't know what you are looking for, how do you know what to look for?"
Hargrave's brow furrows. Sweat is forming. "But I know. And that's good enough." He pauses for breath.
"Look at you. You didn't see him either."
"Look, it doesn't matter, it just doesn't matter." He pauses for breath. "And eventually you find out. That's good enough."

"Unfortunately, I often find myself at the end of eventually." And I looked away. Across the field I can see a fog forming in the swale that leads to the river. The sun is setting and the cold air in the woods turns grey like campfire smoke and curls into the fields, settling into pockets and swales and drainages. It follows the ravine downslope and accumulates at the river's edge where it thickens like a down comforter, so thick that you wouldn't know there is a river down there if you hadn't been in this place before. A man could easily walk into that fog and stumble into the water and disappear. The current carries him downstream. Thirty days later his swollen remains are found washed up on a sand beach and everybody is shocked. They come up with stories about a suspicious character seen in the vicinity at the hour of his disappearance. He just stood and stared at the fog filling the ravine. Police sketches are distributed. Merchants keep a wary eye. Children stay indoors. Clerics intone. The stories grow; now there are three suspicious characters. Then twenty. Then a community of suspicious characters. They are kidnapping the womenfolk. They come at night and raid the barns. They eat the dogs. They can see in the dark. They can see through walls. They read minds. The stories are published in the newspapers. Talk spreads. Festivals are cancelled. Tall fences are built. Windows boarded. Then the harvest fails. Mobs appear in the square with flaming torches. The sound of breaking glass. A rope appears on a telephone pole. If only the poor fellow knew what was in front of him, the fog wouldn't have mattered much. He could have walked home and taken supper with his family, singing the children to sleep in front of the fire. I shake my head.
"Just what are you talking about?" Hargrave demands, his face pale and sweaty.
"You think it makes a difference?" I tilt my head.
He furrows his brow again, "It doesn't matter, it just doesn't matter. I always figure it out eventually. Ouch." He winces.
"Nasty fall?"
"Yeah. Shouldn't have been so close to the road." He bends over and props his arms on his knees, laboring for air.
"Now you say it."
"And I lived to tell." He wipes his forehead with his forearm.
"Hey, the river isn't there anymore. I can't see it." The fog blends into the sky.
"What river?" He lifts his head up and looks across the field.
"That one down there." I point to the fog bank.
"I don't see any river. There's no river down there." He shakes his right arm. "Man, this hurts."
"It's down there somewhere."
"I still don't see any river."
"It's down there somewhere."
"You can't see a thing. There isn't any river; there isn't anything to know."
"Yes there is."
"No. Nothing is there. I'll prove it."
"You don't know what you are looking for."
"I know, but it doesn't matter." He straightens up and shuffles across the road into the field, shaking his right arm the entire way, pausing for air. It took him about five minutes to stumble across the field before he disappeared into the fog.

Trophic Cascade

There are thirty-seven steps to the attic in my uncle's house. Every step counts.
Ninety million miles away, at a spot in the sky that I never see, there is an explosion on the surface of the sun. The corona twists like a towel and plasma jumps like water in an deep fryer, sending loops and arcs dancing across the surface. Within minutes, eight billion tons of ionized iron is ejected into space and heads toward the earth at speeds reaching four million miles an hour.
Eight minutes later, a teakettle whistles in the kitchen. Steam fogs the window. A cat stands up, stretches, then walks onto the landing below the steps. Outside, sunlight drops through the leaves of an oak, and lands on a windowpane. Half of the light rebounds into space and the other half slips through the glass and falls upon the landing, spattering it with yellow. The spots move around with the wind, and the cat stabs at them with his paw. He circles and pounces. His paws never get yellow. He never eats. He wanders off, walks down the stairs and calls out at the kitchen door. He steps out into a larger world, where the leaves whir and the sun hides behind big thick trunks, and throws more yellow spots at the ground, but the cat doesn't notice. There are birds about and he has had his fill of light. Every day he crouches beneath a chokeberry bush and watches a fox sparrow land on a branch nearby. He tenses, then explodes.
The lights in the parlor flicker, the radio goes silent, engines stall, people shout.
That was the day that I walked up those stairs into the attic. Thirty-seven steps. The door was unlatched. Sunlight was smudged on the attic window. It looked like a museum. There were seven throw blankets, two chests, three dressers, hundreds of photographs of deceased relatives, a baby crib, several hat boxes filled with jewelry and gloves and more photographs of the dead and stationery, a rocking horse, a copy of Pilgrim's Pride, three badly worn dolls, newspapers, dishes, two bed frames, five lampshades, and a painting of an American Indian standing on a cliff overlooking a mountain valley. The frame was red. Somebody left their gloves on a table, as if to stay the night. I looked down at the painting and picked it up, angling it in the sunlight. As I turned it in my hands, just then, I looked up and I saw through the attic window a plane fluttering from the sky like a leaf.
I know it hit the ground - it sent up a ball of fire - the flames spread into five counties, burning six towns to the ground. But every day, that cat deposited a bird on the doorstep. Every day. For fifteen years. Today, I buried him in the backyard, next to five other cats and near the remains of 32,868 sparrows. There is barely enough room for me.

Letter from Home

A man picked up a stick and threw it in the direction of a dog who then ran in the direction of a man feeding squirrels who then ran in the direction of a woman with a large purse who then ran in the direction of a mail carrier, all the while running in the shadow of a hawk that flapped twenty yards above her. For a moment it appeared as if the hawk were on her shoulder. Then it disappeared. The man looked up just as the hawk collided with its reflection in the sixth floor window and plunged to the sidewalk below, directly in front of the mail carrier. He jumped and letters burst from his mailbag and fluttered away in the breeze.

Lars shook his head. "I wouldn't have known it if I hadn't been thinking about it. And then, I couldn't believe what I knew." He takes a sip of his coffee. The waitress walks by, looking the other way, heading to the cash register. She stumbles on the edge of the carpet and drops her tray. Somewhere, a dog barks.
I ask him what he is talking about.

"You didn't hear? There is an archaeological dig next to our apartment building. They want to build another high-rise on the site."
"I haven't heard."

"I can hear the hammers all day, pounding on the rocks, chipping at the clay. I can't sleep. They split open another boulder and out waft the prehistoric molecules, the cholera and plague and decadence and it makes its way up the ventilation shafts into my room. My eyes water."

I look at his tired, sad eyes, drooping like a basset hound, the membranes below the eyes thick and red, like a second set of lids. His face melts down from his eyes like a candle, the fat accumulating like wax on a deepening frown. I look out the window and everyone looks tired. "Yes."

"At first it was random, aimless hammering. It blended in with the street noise, the rapid fire of doors and truck concussions that shake the windows, trains rocketing past, the horn blasts, bursts of raging wheels and distress calls, whistles and cat-calls and yelps. The war of sound." He rubs his eyes. "And it blended in with the apartment noise. The hundreds of television sets tuned to hundreds of disparate stations yammering simultaneously in a random, purposeless way. No selection. Nothing to hear." He looked out the window at a loud truck that had passed by the window several times in the past hour. "Do I make sense?"
"I couldn't hear you - the truck -"
"Exactly." He rubs his forehead. "Well, now it doesn't sound the same."
"It sounds the same to me."
"No, I mean the hammering - "
"Too loud." The truck idles at the stoplight.
"Right. About two months ago I noticed that each hammer had a distinct sound. Then I noticed that each hammer would take its turn pounding. Then I noticed that they seemed to be hammering in response to each other, like Morse Code. Then, about three weeks ago, they developed a rhythm, a sort of samba, at times even a bossa nova. This has gone on ever since. Today, I swear, they were playing 'Chega de Saudade'."
His face brightens and he begins to hum the tune. I look out the window and see a man pounding on his car horn. Lars stops singing and the man stops honking. He looks at the man in the car and the man in the car looks in the direction of a police car which slides into a telephone pole, setting off its siren. Lars mutters the last lines:

I do not want this thing anymore
Of you living without me
Let us quit this thing
Of you living without me

His face begins to sag again. I ask, "So have they found anything?"
"Have you heard a word I have been saying? They found samba, music, harmony."
"But have you been down to see them?"
"Sure."
"And what do they say?"
"Not much, just a lot of talk about the landscape before the city came along."
"What have they found?"
His face darkens. "They say this was once a savanna - open woodlands with oak, ash, juniper and elm and interspersed prairie with lazy creeks beneath big cottonwood trees. They found lots of bison bones, plano and folsom points, tipi rings, bison wallows. They say the land swarmed with antelope, mule deer, elk, wolves, coyotes, bighorn sheep, prairie dogs, black and grizzly bear, bobcat, prairie chickens, ferruginous hawks, sage grouse, snow geese." He puts his head in his hands. "I don't know what it means, but it sounds beautiful."
"What happened?"
"This." He gestured with his hand across the urban skyline.
"And what about their singing?"
"Ah, the fools, they deny the whole thing - they say I am hearing things."

What Was

I wish all this heat in my head was generated by great ideas. I wish this pounding was something trying to break out into the open, wide, free, blue sky, fresh air, running across open prairie, wet with spring rains, winds sweeping across the grasses like a woman's skirt swirling at the square dance. She waves as she crosses the crest of the hill then passes out of sight. Such it is. Another idea slips from my grasp. I feel myself slumping in a rocking chair. Let me tell you about. When I was your age. Years ago. I remember I had something to say but I can't recall what it was. There were thousands of thoughts rattling about in my head, like a toybox shaken by two angry brothers. I had them all there in this very hand. I can feel them now.

I look down and my hand is not where I thought it was. I slap it with the other hand but it wont move. Two toy tractors sit on the windowsill, engines running. A man works under the hood of one while the other sends up blue exhaust.
One winter day I followed the wind to the top of the ridge where the woman had passed out of view. On the other side was a barbed wire fence strung with thousands of tumbleweeds, bumping and jostling, struggling to cross over into the next pasture, much like salmon hurdling a waterfall. The few that broke free rushed out into the open pasture and somersaulted and frolicked along, carefree and oblivious, tossing off bits of leaf and stem, until they were snared by the next fenceline a quarter mile away. Like holiday shoppers, they fought and clawed, rolling over each other, a suffocating mass. A few broke free from the line and charged with glee across the freeway only to be crushed by the wheels of tractor-trailer trucks. In the spring the thistles that remain trapped along the fencelines are set afire by ranchers.
There is a rancher out in that field now, setting fires. He has been doing this ever since I could remember. He smiles as the flames crack and arc across the thatch of thistles, blue smoke rising like a cobra. He has burned miles of fenceline by now and he has many miles to go. In the distance, through the haze, he can make out the grassy hill to the north of the ranch. He squints and sees the form of a woman, running across the crest of the hill, toward the fires he set in the north pasture. Flames can be seen above the hilltop, consuming ash and junipers. She passes out of view. He laughs, knowing that he will never see her again.
I feel a jolt again - what was I thinking?

Last Gasp

Charlie sat on the bench, looking up at the sky. He muttered something.

"Huh?"
"What?"
I drifted off into my thoughts. I was thinking about an abandoned farm house before he spoke.
"What is there to know? What is said often passes by the mind like the breeze that swirls in the streets below an apartment window. Go ahead, try looking out the window sometime. The papers move silently, swirling like marionettes, don't they? Chasing each other in circles, turning a corner and passing out of view. The next block gets a show. The casual observer wonders if these are the very papers that are eventually caught and trapped in the bundles stacked up at the stationary store on the corner. A man follows this paper parade with a broom and a shovel. At a few cents a pound, he makes enough to purchase bread for his family on the way home. He steps on more paper on the way, crushing it beneath the heel of his boot. He refuses to take his work home." He folds his hands on his lap and looks at his shoes. "They say the horrors of the paper mills can only be imagined. One can picture the bespectacled shopkeeper, suspenders and a white shirt with sleeves rolled up to the elbows, subduing the rustling papers in a dark, poorly ventilated room. Swinging around, he grabs the bundle with both arms and turns, plunging it into a vat of ice cold water, pressing it down, straining to hold it below the surface. Bubbles rise around his arms. Sweat drips from his brow. The room falls silent, the waters still. A smile reaches up into his face, gripping it tightly. He cannot look away. " He shook his head. "The horrors, the inhumanity." He loosened his tie. "In the meantime, the wind has passed along, and he has no idea. I have no idea. You have no idea."
I think the parlor had an old couch. A bird's nest lay on the floor. Now it is empty again.
"This is what we want. We would rather populate our world with litter that speaks than another one of us." He watches a woman running down the sidewalk, followed by a small dog in a sweater. "Now it chases us down alleys at night and we are terrified. It frightens little children when you draw a mask on it. Older people recoil at the sight of red words. Even small print causes night sweats."
I think I see the couch again. "You know, I was thinking -"
"So-" he looks at my face. "So we remain one step behind those who speak. Yet we insist that the papers move on their own accord. Wind - who knows it? Abrading rocks, dehydrating souls, skeletonizing forests, blowing out the sun. Who wants to know it?" He combs his hair with his fingers. "Is this what you want?"
"Huh?"
"What?"
"You know, I was thinking -"
"- I knew an old woman who thought that if she listened closely, she could hear voices on the wind from far away lands. She grew up in the plains, on a farmstead. One year, the wind blew out the windows in her house. Took the doors off the hinges. Filled the house with dust. Pulled the corn out of the ground, roots and all. Turned her bread to toast. So hot it melted the shingles on the roof. Turned her father's face to leather. Mother's hair to straw. Then one day it picked her up and carried her to Washington. Her parents were left behind. That is what she said - that is what she said she heard years later. She doesn't remember a thing herself; she doesn't think anyone said anything. She was only nine at the time." He looks into the distance. "To this day she stands at her window overlooking the apple orchards in the Willamette valley waiting for a windy, spring day, hoping that she will hear the voices of her mother and father." He pauses and looks at my face again.

"What did you say?"
"Never mind."
He gets up and walks away.
I shout, "Say, there used to be a man in that couch!"

Bigger Than Life

June 5, 2008 - (UPI) Chicago

"Technology is the shadow cast by the future. We see our future shape in the present darkness that surrounds us." So said Princeton sociologist Leer McFlem in a recent interview in Vale Grain magazine. "Every indication is that fundamentally, this fact has not changed. Our future is presently known. And all I see is big."

A former self-styled "sociological hedonist", McFlem denounces extrapolations as 'mere wishful thinking' and trends as 'whistling in the dark.' He prefers to describe the future condition as a derivation of present condition devoid of trend. Thereby, he asserts, he dwells in the future as he is now.

"This takes a real load off my mind," he says. "If somebody comes up to me and says, 'Hey, you're in big trouble now', I can say, 'Leave me alone, I am what I was, man.'"
As a son of a Baptist preacher, McFlem knows the distortions that verb tense can inflict upon one's consciousness. "Look at what St. Gregory said: 'There is therefore nothing created, nothing subject to another in the Trinity: nor is there anything that has been added as though it once existed, but had entered afterwards.' I mean, that is pure genius. It's reverb consciousness, like the sound Hendrix got with his guitar when it got too close to the amplifier. 'I am what I was, I am not what I will be, I am not yet I am.' Think of the possibilities! Think of the freedom!"
While McFlem is the rage on college lecture tours, he has been in and out of bankruptcy court and has trouble paying travel costs. He laughs. "I can't seem to get a handle on this addition thing. The ones and threes get all mixed up. I leave it to my accountant."
So McFlem spends his nights sleeping in the car, scribbling notes by flashlight, always adding something new to his lectures. His current tour is devoted to the exposition of the influence of technology on the human evolutionary process. "It is a catalyst for accelerated evolutionary advancement. We are the fastest evolving creatures in history. Our future shadow is very large and very dark. We will be very big. I mean, we are very big."
He pulls a pencil out of his hair. "You see, the fundamentals that spawn our increase are in place. The mounting technological advances - you see them every day - these stand as bulwarks beneath the concomitant advance of organized civil institutions. The shiny stone buildings with technocrats and think tanks and speech writers and orators and doctoral candidates. I see ideas and programs pouring out onto the steps, flooding the landscape below, swallowing up everything, people, homes, lives. And in the flooded fields sprouts technology, thousands of acres of it. Hybrids, clones, mutations, synthetics, the genetically modified. It just keeps coming!" He throws his head back and lets out a howl. "It's beautiful. It has a life of its own. It's beyond us now."
At a recent lecture, several in the audience pressed him about the carrying capacity of the global ecosystem. McFlem still bristles at the memory. "I am glad I am not then now. Intrinsic to technology and advancement are solutions. Technology will remain in advance of advancement and advancement will remain in advance of technology. The two are superior to each other."
His confidence is unwavering. "I base this on eons of successful evolutionary advancement. Look at the track record. Why would it fail now? I mean, if it did, everything we know would be wrong." He ferrets a small piece of lunch meat out of his beard. "Just look at how far we have come."
He turns on the dome light and looks at the meat. He turns it over then puts it into his mouth. The light shows his face, freckled with reddish eruptions. A vanilla air freshener hangs from the rear-view mirror. "I got this acne from sleeping near the tire factory."
He turns off the light. "People ask me to describe the relationship between technology and human advancement." He bows his head. "It's sort of like the Conquistadors and the Native Americans. Each had their own virus. Each gave their virus to the other. Each virus exploded in the defenseless population and swept unchecked across the continent, consuming lives and homes and communities along the way, growing ever larger, becoming pandemic. It's the same with technology and advancement. Each infects the other and it consumes the host, invading homes, sweeping across communities; a pandemic of technology and advancement, an accelerating technology-advancement spiral in which technology and advancement feed upon each other for as long as we can know. This has no end. There are no inherent upper physical limits to what we can become. The spiral pulls us along, marching us forward, ever forward, onward into oblivion."
McFlem looks out the window of his car into the cold, dark night. "I shudder when I think of it. Such excitement!" He rubs his hands together. "All is see is an unfathomable expanse. The ever-expanding shadow. An infinite void. Forward! To the cosmos!"
He turns the key to the ignition. The engine grinds. He looks at the instrument panel. "Great. Out of gas."

My Fantasy, Right or Wrong

Eddie stood at the intersection, bathed in white sunlight. He looked at the melting snow. "Sure glad winter is over with."
I looked at him. "Don't like cold weather?"
"No, I don't mind the snow. It's something else." He swigged the last of his coffee. "Every winter it's the same thing. No matter how hard I try not to look, I see Santa Claus. There he is. I turn to look away. There he is again. I see him hundreds, maybe thousands of times. He is at the grocery store. Then he is at the bank. Look there! he is at the tavern. Lo! he is in the taxi."
I watched a cab slowly round the corner. "So what are you saying?"
Eddie fumbled with a pen in his pocket. He motioned his hand at the people walking on the opposite side of the street. "Pretend you are from another country. As an uninformed visitor, repeated observations of this phenomenon would lead you to the conclusion that Santa's existence is incontrovertible and that we must introduce the children to this widespread, magnanimous, and most influential man."
"Sounds convincing, but his beard is usually false."
"But you call him Santa, don't you?" He squinted and looked at a housing development on the hillside. A house tilted slightly, listing toward the river. "And, I might add, he is prolific. There was only one at the start, holed up in a castle somewhere in the middle ages, but the fellow replicated, spread, and soon, the Santa population exceeded the carrying capacity of Europe. Competition with rats, I suppose. It jumped into the ocean and swam to the Americas. Now, there are so many that they are invading new territories in Asia, Africa, and the far East. No natural enemies there. It spreads like cholera, gangrene, fire ants, divorce lawyers. They are overrunning the place. We went to visit friends in Taiwan and I found one on the front porch in the morning. Then my wife hit one with the car. Another got stuck in the ventilation duct. Restraining orders won't work. Clubbing is senseless. Tear gas is ineffective. We don't know how to stop them." He looked down and stepped on a trail of ants on the sidewalk.
I watched ants writhing. I asked why he picks on such a merry soul.
He looked at the ants scurrying to bury their dead. "I can hear people crying when I say this, but I think I know why it is. It's like when a child is raised in an abusive household, when the father is a drunk and beats them each night. The kid is scared, insecure, full of self doubt and blame. He looks at his stuffed animals and imagines that they can speak and hear. Soon, he is carrying on conversations with them throughout the day, and he has his little sanctuary from the insanity of the world around him. While everybody could see the animals, nobody except the child knows that they can talk."
I looked at his face. The lines crossed above his eyebrows. He clutched a paper in his hand. I protested. "But Santa really talks."
"There you go again. So does my radio. But in an adult world, where citizens are isolated from their neighbors, oppressed by their governments, and exploited by commerce, once again they become immersed in fear, insecurity, and self-doubt. As he did when he was a child, he seeks a sanctuary. And the world is full of people willing to provide it - for a fee, of course."
"Of course?"
"You have seen it yourself. No sooner does one express fear, insecurity, or doubt, he is swarmed by men offering courage, certainty, and security. Like a bleeding man in the deep sea who is hacked to bits by sharks, schools of mystics, clergy, and spiritualists mob the flailing man, chomping off chunks of his life, parsing his soul, bleeding his vitality, until he is delirious and delusional, in a stupor, in that netherworld at the edge of consciousness decorated with white staircases, bright lights, dark tunnels, old friends, and beatific smiles. The drug users see it every day." He pointed at a man passed out on a bench.
"You don't mean..."
"What is ignored is that the clerics and the frightened man are equally desperate, the former for security, and the latter for a soul to drain of life then disgorge onto the sidewalk. When you were a child, your parents bought you a toy gun. When you were older, they bought you a twelve gauge shotgun. Similarly, to capture the attention of the frightened adult, clerics offer the adult version of Santa; a magical world of bliss and sensation, indulged with fantasies, populated by imaginary beings: three-headed gods, legions of virginal women, swollen, porcine men in red fur bearing bottomless sacs full of riches, scorched freaks stoking eternal fires, and mute ancestors in the clouds who bewilder them with cryptic messages: a world of puzzles, clues, coincidences, and conundrums. A world of shadows, mist, and the sound of wind whistling in bare trees. The stuffed toys are alive again, but this time, nobody can see or hear them. This world is no more real or sane than the other."
I nodded my head. "I get it. What then?"
He looked down at the ants and shook his head. "In the end, probably a little white staircase, a little white light, then what is real, which is nothing, which is nothing what they believed."
I nodded again. I looked at his clenched fist. "Say, what's that in your hand?"
Eddie looked up, smiling broadly. "A ballot! My man's going to change the world!"

Paradise Lost

At night, the air moves slowly, like a dying breath, faint, humid, and voiceless. It creeps down the screen and rolls across the windowsill and sinks into the pillow. A gentle sigh, then stillness. There is no distinction between forest and sky at this latitude. Water blends with the air and you swim through your sleep. Then there is a cry in the distance, a faint scream desperate for a reply, so clear it is almost visible, like a point of light in the swirling mass of black leaves. I am startled from my sleep. It is a nightbird, a falcon. As if it were the last one on earth, its grief-stricken cry is a distress call, urgent, frantic, probing the wilderness for a response. Each time it pauses, only echoes return, mocking its call. Hours later, its isolation complete, it falls silent and stands still, a brittle black taxidermy wired to a dry limb, beak swinging in the wind.
This happens every night.
If I didn't know where I was I wouldn't know less than I do now.
My mouth stretches open like a Howler monkey. It is daybreak, market day for the birds. Thousands flock to openings in the woods and trade insults in thousands of foreign tongues. On the forest edge, tiny clapboard shacks with floppy tin roofs are perched on stilts like birdcages. Plastic bottles breed in the pools of black water beneath. I lean onto the windowsill and look toward the sunrise and see the marijuana smoke creeping down the valleys like a white anaconda, coiling down streets, creeping down alleys, entering backyards, and slithering over clusters of sleeping dogs, and passing by the drunks that huddle for warmth. Black mold smears the walls of every house, like the hand stains of a man struggling for his life. An automobile rumbles in the distance, like gunfire. A grown man wobbles down the road on a small bicycle, swerving to miss a skeletal dog rummaging through the ditches filled with burning rubbish. A small, diaperless child stands on the doorstep watching his mother's boyfriend drink and strut. He falls onto a bench seat by the papaya tree that was scavenged from some abandoned mini van that was set afire by young boys the other night. A tired woman sweeps tangles of small children off of the front porch. Electricity came here four years ago. It was followed by stereos, television, hepatitis, then tainted city water. Birds break from the trees. Music rises from the village. Seven punta songs compete for dominance.
There is no revolution. Disillusion is in the air.

Save The Economies!

In today's paper.

Global Effort to Save The Economies
Sheel Mollungfin, senior economic correspondent
Newfall Times
March 3, 2008

Economies across the globe are in steep decline, and without immediate action may disappear altogether, say economists gathered in New York for a world banking conference. "Unless we intervene soon, we might as well call ourselves economic historians," said Loef Treeweld, of the World Fiduciary Institute. "We will only see them in museums."
In Third World countries, economies are disappearing at an alarming rate, and this has begun to spread to developing lands. Economists fear that it threatens the developed world. Treeweld warns, "Western lands may be the last sanctuary of the economy. It may be their last stand. We need to do something now."
A momentum builds when economies start disappearing, a phenomenon economists call "fiscal cascade." When one economy disappears, it removes a source of raw materials, wealth, goods, and services for other economies. This starves the other economies, restricting their resources, taxing their local environments beyond their ability to sustain. The neighboring economies weaken without these resources, and without alternatives, they are pushed toward stagnation, recession, depression, and death. This, in turn, pressures their neighboring economies to collapse. "It is a cascade," says Treeweld. "It is like the shock wave of an atomic blast, taking down buildings in ever-widening concentric rings."
For economic populations to thrive there must be sufficient numbers to maintain the viability of the populations. "You cannot sustain vigorous economies without sheer numbers. Drop them below a threshold, and the economies cannot interact, they become isolated, and there are no spin-offs, no further generations, no new-and-exciting products. They start to tumble like dominoes. In the end, the economy resorts to auto-cannibalization. You get salesmen selling to salesmen. Grocers eating their own grocery. Auto mechanics slashing brake lines, doctors infecting patients. It gets ugly. You don't want to watch."
What has happened in the Third World may portend what happens in developed lands. Treeweld continues, "The economy in those regions gobbled up all of its resources. The land is stripped bare, and all you have left are empty markets and mobs of hungry people raiding empty stalls. Soon they will be raiding each other. 'I will take your watch if you take my hat.' That sort of thing. This is our future."
Inflation, says Treeweld, is often misinterpreted. "We usually think in terms of supply and demand, but that is only true in a whole environment. But in a degraded, disassembled, or decomposed environment, such as we have designed in modern times, supply and demand are overwhelmed by resource scarcity. This leads to inflationary pressures. I liken it to the swelling of limbs you see in congestive heart failure. This doesn't mean that the person is increasing in stature, he is not becoming larger than life, no, it means his heart is dying."
The size of economies today has increased, placing greater pressure on raw materials and finished goods. Helmik Dred, of the Brainbinge Fund, observes, "We used to have these little, village-based economies where a collapse wouldn't be noted outside of the local barbershop or mercantile. Villages over the range or across the river carried along as if nothing was amiss. 'I hear the village over the hill burned down,' they would say, and shuffle another deck of cards. Today, the economies are so large, so integrated, and so voracious that feeding them the resources necessary to keep them alive is daunting. Our grandparents had no idea that their grandchildren would be shoveling billions of their quaint little inventions - the locomotive, the horseless carriage, the moving picture show, the flying machine, the television set - into the mouth of an insatiable colossus, our modern economy. When we run out of those, we start shoveling our children into its mouth."
And then there is the need for corridors. Dred states, "The modern economy is so large and singular within a given land mass, that it has far fewer economies with which to interact than in the past. This requires large-scale corridors over which the economy can traverse and contact others of its kind. Sadly, many of these avenues are blocked by fears, superstitions, prejudices, greed, deception, and self-interest. This is a quandary; while preventing economic interrelationships, they are in fact, the very conditions upon which the individual economy thrives. We are looking into that right now."
Solutions
And that they are. Economists are looking for answers wherever they can be found. Some are probing the underpinnings of the modern economy for an answer. Amler Schintz, chief strategist for Tricycle Investment Group looks to the 18th century. "Adam Smith, in his work, The Wealth of Nations, gave us the guiding principle," he contends. "He spoke of the 'invisible hand' of self-interest, the profit motive, if you will, that unintentionally produces a collective good for society. This was sheer genius. Like the man who builds a tower for his grain that happens to give shade to the homeless people. So what if they are homeless because he took over their land? Or they can't afford the grain? They still benefit, don't they? It's like burning down a village to save it. We can all sleep with a good conscience, knowing the homeless people are sleeping in the shadow of what used to be their homes." He closes his eyes. "We need to return to this simple stratagem."
Schintz continues, "But we need to invoke the invisible hand with more vigor than promoting self-interest. We need to create consumer confidence. Confidence in what? Not in resources, corridors, interactions. No, we must recreate the belief in the economy, the belief that the economy continues to thrive for the economy to continue to thrive."
He shifts his weight and adjusts his suspenders. "Wealth is largely the conviction of wealth - and it is relative at that. Picture the wealthy man in Borneo and compare him to the wealthy man in Lichtenstein. There is no comparison, yet each parts crowds of patrons at the best restaurant in town with a flip of his wrist. The man in Borneo imagines himself wealthy although he possesses a few stone wheels and seashells. We need to convince people that they are prosperous, regardless of their prosperity. Children are enamored with plastic jewelry. People are the same; lavish them with real wealth or imitation wealth, whatever works. The death of the economy will go unnoticed."
He pauses to light up a cigar. "Besides, the only thing that works in a depleted environment is something akin to catch-and-release fishing; you don't consume anything, just pretend you are, then step aside, and let the next fellow do the same. And, if you are next fellow in line and you are under the influence of the invisible hand, why, you just take that fish right out of the water and fry it up! 'For humanity!' you say. Well done! You have done your civic duty, you have produced the collective good. The economy will live to see another day."

Don't Ask Me What Time It Is

Another news item

Don't Ask Me What Time It Is
- Go Ahead, Punch The Clock
By Melanchia Faust, New Delhi Times
February 15, 2008

Four hundred and fifty years ago, after suffering a series of imprisonments for remarks against the King of France, Justin Henri, the radical polemist declared, "Time punishes all fools who don't watch it and defeats all fools who do." Shortly thereafter, on September 12, 1553, at the stroke of noon, he was beheaded, and silence filled his void.
Four hundred and fifty years later, his words come alive. Researchers in England, after an exhaustive study on happiness, have concluded that time is the source of human misery. "It’s not your parents," says anthropologist Andrew Ahismelting of the University of Warlock, Coven, England, and co-author of the study. "And it’s not your classmates, nor your pets, your status, your boss, your childhood, your neighborhood, your bank account, your teachers, your education, your race, your nationality, your war experience, your disability, your brain chemistry, your genetics, your religion, your water, your diet, your weather, your housing, your social programs, your politicians, your...well, I can't think of anything else."
The study, appearing in the February edition of Apanthropica showed that when considering data on depression, anxiety, fatigue, loneliness, happiness, and enthusiasm, people who were aware of their age were more likely to be less happy than those whose age was impossible to determine. The wide ranging survey was conducted over the course of 7 years, and amassed volumes of testimony from nearly 7 million people in 50 nations. Co-author David Blurryflower of Claymouth College in Hangoer, N.H. observed, "We found that measurable time is such an inhibitor of well-being that life functions begin a near death-spiral once time enters the consciousness, indicating a hemorrhagic loss of happiness among those who tell time."
"In essence, it is existence," says Ahismelting. "This notion of measurable time eats into the self and the identity, outreaching the modalities of science and the probing of our research staff, devouring confidence, self-awareness, and cognition. It is a dank, airless dwelling in the lower reaches of the consciousness, it is purposelessness, it is all pervasive, it is shameful, it is an anti-revelation. It is terrifying. Its weight, throughout all time, is on the minds of those who keep it. It happens every moment, for those who discern the moment, and it will not go away until we escape it. And at that point, my friend, you yourself are immeasurable."
This deterioration begins as soon as we gain the notion of time, "when mommy and daddy tell us what the big hand and the little hand mean," says Ahismelting. "From that point onward those two black metal armatures sweep around again and again, slicing off pieces of our life, spinning and whirling, dismembering it until they have shredded it beyond recognition, until nobody knows us, until we lay alone, until there is nothing left of us." He runs his hand through his thinning hair. "It really accelerates when we put children in the classroom environment with the bells and buzzers and the clock on the wall and nap time and play time and time-out time and bathroom time and disaster time and a-man-has-a-gun time. Then it get really bad when the kids start making the connection between these clocks, calendars, and ticking noises with test scores, bullying, weight gain, acne, visitation rights, birthdays. There is no end to it." He shakes his head. "If you are finding life tough when you are an infant, then watch out! Wait until you are late for the bus."
He continues, "It really peaks in adulthood, where we are submerged in a network of temporal activities that fail to transcend our existence. There it completes its grim task as it shatters, frays, and abrades our mind. I mean, how many millions of adults are unable to stop their facial muscles from twitching?"
He looks down at the desk calendar. "This slow steady decline into malaise is accomplished through simple, daily time-based routines such as breakfast, lunch, and supper, and punching the clock at work. Also running late for work, sitting at the dentist's office, breathing on life support, boarding a plane, shopping, when mowing the lawn, when planning for dinner guests, when drying one's clothes, at a stoplight, watching a passing train, playing video games, balancing the checkbook, at the barbershop, at the beauty salon, at the pub, waiting for the bus, riding in a cab, cooking a turkey, taking an exam, playing bridge, adjusting a picture frame, thinking about retirement, shaving, using the phone, on vacation, and so forth." He takes off his glasses. "But we found that it doesn't happen when you are rubbing your eyes," says Ashismelting. "Not then. Unless you are taking an exam or explaining something you just said, then it counts."
"The effect is devastating," he contends. "It doesn't take long for a person to realize that this patterned fabric, this web of measured events that composes our life has infiltrated our being and gives it a definition. We cannot exist beyond it." He looks at his reflection in his Rolex. "We say to ourselves, 'These are my limits and I cannot escape.' At that point, the spiral is out of control."
He taps his finger on the desk. "No matter where you live, someday, at some age, you will probably run into time. It will lay you out flat like a right-cross. It will make you dizzy, you will see stars, your life will flash before your eyes. It is like destiny."
Ahismelting doesn't have any concrete answers on how some combat this malady. "My suggestion is that people need to learn to diminish their super-inflated anxiety over unfulfilled and preposterously unrealistic ambitions in the face of the manifestly depleted options in an antisocial, competitive environment that is clearly on the brink of collapse from failed communities and resource exhaustion. They can do so by exercising extraordinary denial and suppression. Only then might they expunge their fairy-tale aspirations and their nursery-rhyme notions of connected identity and existence and fabricate what may resemble genuine happiness," he says, glancing at the clock. "In other words, they need to get their confounded expectations beneath what they cannot actually achieve - the sum of which is astonishingly immeasurable."
Some anomalies plagued the researchers. Blurryflower cites the trend for developing countries to experience greater happiness. But dismissing the data, he says, "They don't know how to tell time down there. Where in the Sam Hill are all the clocks? Try to make an appointment. It's always, "no problem, mon' or 'take it easy, mon.' I get tired of hearing it. But then..." He looked off into the distance. "Many of the researchers just couldn't stay away. We had to fire them."
And then there are the detractors. Research by Anthrus Bison, a sociologist at Sharecropper University in Oklahoma, has found similar connections between the notion of time and unhappiness in some countries, but he says he doesn't care what it means. "Some people are happier and they know what day it is, some people are not happy if they forget to set the alarm. And then, in some countries the only people who are happy are in some late stage of dementia. And then sometimes the opposite is true. Or nothing is true at all, or we have no idea what is going on, or forgot to ask the right questions or didn’t bother to write anything down because we had to quit for the day. I don’t know. I just don't care anymore. I have been studying this all my life and I can't make heads or tails about it and I am just about ready for retirement. Another six weeks and I am on social security. I don't care what country I am in, and I sure don’t care if I can’t remember my own name." He closes a book in his hands. "In my life I have found that if I don't know something, it isn’t going to stop me from living."
Larry Deuxfine, a psychologist at the University of Flegmeux, France, who has struggled to understand happiness for 34 years, also disputes the claims. "In order to prove that, you must have rigorous parameters, and then you must follow discreet methods, and then you can't just prove this or that or other things or say that this is wrong or right. This study has design flaws. You have to identify limits to your inquiry then contain your conclusions within these limits. How can you make sweeping statements about undetermined age? And if you cannot measure someone, or their existence cannot be framed within the parameters, how do you know if they are happy or not? Show me the data. This study is biased toward the happy." He slumps in his chair. "Why didn’t they ask me anything?” He drops his pencil. “This thing, whatever it is, has eluded me like a rainbow on summer day. But I'm not saying it's impossible to find. Just give me seven more years to study it, just seven more years, and I will find the answer." His head sinks into his chest. "I must go now. I have another appointment."
Ahismelting responds to his critics this way: "We're correlating unhappiness with perception of time, and our science is rigorous, our methods are sound, even our researchers are unhappy. Why the dour remarks? We are confident that we can be satisfied with the unhappiness that we found." He rubs his eyes. "And we are pleased to say that, at this time, we can't be any happier.”

Millions Still Report Seeing Illusion of Chicago

News item from a far, far away land:

Millions Still Report Seeing Illusion of Chicago
- Too Bad to be Not True
By Lech Welpheppian, Special Correspondent
February 4, 2008

New York (AP) - Reports tallied by researchers in Helsinki find that over 3 million people claim to have seen the mythical City of Chicago within the past four years. The claims startled many scientists who had assumed that the legend would expire once the untenability of the phantom city became apparent.
"This was not the case at all," said lead researcher Thisand Forbuthen. "And quite the opposite was true. Despite the inherent flaws, debilitating inconsistencies, insurmountable irrationality, and galling absurdity, the ghost town appears to be thriving in the minds of many."
The images described a demography that approximated the distribution seen in actual cities in the northeastern United States. "For years we have been hearing the reports. When we finally put the data together, it was really amazing," stated Forbuthen. "The ethnic proportions were what we see in reality. About half were Hispanic, just like Detroit and Milwaukee. The rest divided between black and white. And half claimed to be Republican, half Democrat. Everything is split down the middle. Just like real life. And none of the Republicans admitted to voting for Nixon. It's uncanny."
The visions entertained every aspect of a real city. "But, what thrilled most of us, particularly those of us who were spawned in an urban environment," continued Forbuthen, "is how complex and true-to-life these dreamscapes were. People envisioned traffic jams, sewage treatment ponds, crumbling edifices, pickpockets, disease-carrying pigeons, rusting bridges, jet-engine noise, twelve car pile-ups, children with assault rifles, shanties, ethnic enclaves, cronyism, pit bulls, abandoned factories, skies webbed with jet contrails, smokestacks, marauding bands of truant schoolchildren, convenience store robberies, emphysema wards, jackknifed semis, car trunks stuffed with recreational drugs, babies locked in hot cars, bodies floating in sanitary canals, a dark brown film on every door handle, stone facade, railing, and sidewalk, and - get this - even the odor of burning rubber. All the things you find in a real, thriving, vibrant American city today!"
Forbuthen looked down and shook his head. "Then it took a turn for the absurd. Many reported seeing professional sports teams. One recurrent image was that of a ball team that never won a significant game, yet remained wildly popular. Some hapless, shiftless collection of rag-tag, ne'er-do-wells, with rosy-cheeked rookies, hands full of buttery thumbs, signed for a few precious dimes, and sleepy veterans, disposed of by superior sports franchises like a worn-out pair of sneakers, in the twilight of their careers, exhausted of ability but fully inflated with ego, jostling for the best lockers, most interviews, newest shoes, biggest contract. And multi-tiered management, flush with dollars, lavishing themselves with Lear Jets, condominiums in the Caribbean, concubines, larders full of coca, awards dinners, White House photo-ops, rare-breed dogs, cosmetic surgery, and fresh lobster all the while the stadium remains a relic from a bygone age - rickety, flaking, confined, overgrown, and windswept - and the patrons, marching toward the stadium like indentured labor to the coal mines, swell the stands without any real possibility of seeing a bona fide professional sports team. The cynicism of the owners is unconscionable, assuaging patrons with cheap watered-down beer, an organ grinder, wrinkled circus animals dressed in sports uniforms, game-time tricks, merriment, and amusements, and a loyal army of team-owned journalists at the ready, able to quell any outbreak of reality with baseless optimism, false hope, scapegoating, blackballing, rumormongering, and denial."
Forbuthen looked off into the distance. "And to believe that they are walking the streets, like ordinary people...it's simply unimaginable."

Television Bites Man

As I lean forward in my armchair, straining to filter the truth about some swollen, beer-gorged cinematic celebrity from the composite wisdom of six psychotherapists, one journalism major, and the obligatory, disbarred legal counsel, all expressed in manifold, high-rise discord, I am struck by the fact that this person has made a career out of convincing observers that he is someone other than he really is.

Now this has great implications, only one of which I am aware of. So long as I am convinced he is actually someone else, I would never really meet him, or her for that matter, despite having spoken to and glad-handed with his closest companion, who, sad to say, doesn't know the first thing about this person behind him making him do all of this prattle. Wait a second, aren't you taller in real life? Who speaks to me?

I will continue to bark at the television screen hoping for answers.

Well, then, the television screen barks back, and it is an argument again. Then I see this statement appear on the screen in front of me: 'Elevated levels of atmospheric CO2 are a boon to the biosphere and will bring forth bounteous growth and prosperity to both man and nature.' I fall back into my chair. Wow. Who said that? I think I get it: we are steadily improving our lot in life through the production of unique polymers, odorless gases, and inorganic wastes. Yes! The best is yet ahead! Wait until you see what we wheel out of our laboratory tomorrow!
Why, look, it's more of us!
I think we have been here before. This reminds me of the words of H. W. Campbell in his landmark work, "Campbell's 1907 Soil Culture Manual - A Complete Guide To Scientific Agriculture as Adapted to the Semi-Arid Region." This was a book that inspired thousands of people in the early 20th century to migrate to the western Great Plains in the United States to farm the land. It gave detailed instructions on dryland farming technique. If one followed his instructions closely, Mr. Campbell claimed:
"Science in soil culture and the more perfect adaptation of scientific methods to farming would result in doubling the crops in the great semi-arid belt of America. In later years I have made the statement still stronger and have declared, to the amazement of some of the doubting ones, that crops have not been one-fourth of what they should have been in this region."
This sounds familiar. But there is more - his book is 320 pages long.
"God speed the day when the people will realize that these vast plains were not intended to be mere grazing lands for the few cattle companies, but that they will give support to many small herds and flock cared for by many men, and that all the grass and cereals of the best agricultural regions of the earth will be grown here in abundance."
Somewhere on earth, an alarm goes off. Wait, does he mean to say that this scientific method only works with the assistance of God? Was he ex-cathedra when he said this? I need to know.
"A few years hence and the so called 'plains' or 'Great American desert' of the map makers will be dotted with splendid farm houses and great red barns. There will be rows of trees for wind-breaks and shade. There will be orchards and gardens...Looking far into the future one may see this region dotted with fine farms, with countless herds of blooded animals grazing, with school houses in every township, with branch lines of railroads, with electric interurban trolley lines running in a thousand directions, with telephone systems innumerable, with rural mail routes reaching to every door. It is coming just as sure as the coming of another century. The key has been found and the door to riches has been unlocked. How many millions will be supported upon this region? Nobody knows. But the day will come when those who tell of the hesitancy of their forefathers about trying to subdue this region will have to modify the truth if they are to be believed."
Exhibit A:













I like to imagine that Mr. Campbell was never seen again. But if I were to meet him, I wouldn't recognize him anyway.

Theologians Warm to Climate Change

I saw this in the paper the other day:

Theologians Warm to Climate Change
'Earth Must Be Born Again to be Saved'
By Lumo Bundilli
April 4, 2007

BARMECIDE, Greece (API) - Religious scholars representing many of the world's major religions convened today in the coastal city of Barmecide to contemplate the mystic significance of a warming planet. Called the "2007 Heat Hath Risen!" ecumenical conference, it attracted over 1500 religionists from 46 nations and islands of the seas, making it the largest and most diverse religious assembly since the "1947 Evolving Face of God" conclave held in Nairobi, Kenya. While all subsequent ecumenical conferences fell short of the impact of the 1947 conclave, often referred to as the "Faceless Revolution", anticipation was high that the mingling of ideologies and the exchange of ideas at the 2007 conclave would generate theological offspring of a higher order. As expressed by Msgr. Haggid Sheath of the Byzantium archdiocese in the keynote address, "Through the transfer of ideas, we bring the synthesis of a new truth by which it is our eternal hope to unalterably reshape the planet on which we live to a one more to our liking."

I put the paper down and my thoughts drifted back to 1947. I shook my head. It would be a tough act to follow.
While the 1947 convention laid the foundation for the Simian Redemption Creed drafted in 1948 and presented novel ideas that were adopted in the language of the 1949 International Charter of Primate Freedom of Conscience (also known as the Chimp Choice Charter) and were responsible for the development of anthropologically inclusive nativity displays throughout the western world, it will best be remembered for the presentation of the nature of God as a variable heritage passed on through generations of competing clerical interests. The delegates released a joint statement, indeed, a creed, that stated, in part:

"We believe that,
"When heresy is introduced into deistic doctrinal structure, by necessity, doctrinal failure will result, culling out the weaker concepts while simultaneously retaining the fitter concepts, all of which leads to an improved image of God. It is in fact, ever-changing. This heresy was often the result of copying error during the division of sacred writings during besiegements, crusades, invasions, and inquisitions, but a significant number of heresies were the result of cognitive decay brought on by viral and bacterial plague and medieval herbal intoxication. More often, however, the heresy was introduced into the lexicon by immigrants carrying unfamiliar God-concepts.
"Fitness of a doctrine is demonstrated by its ability to survive these doctrinal onslaughts as well as naturally occurring events such as Tribunals, Mock Trials, Auto de fe, Flailings, Knee Screws, and Slow Public Burnings - helpful mechanisms instigated by the pious that select the doctrine best suited to the religious environment of the time. The emerging doctrine, having survived, is replicated throughout its niche, eventually expanding the document population into new environments, whereupon it encounters and is subjected to a new set of doctrines and naturally occurring forces - be it Flaying, Strappado, The Spanish Boot, Branks, The Heretic's Fork, or The Bilboes - thus repeating the selection process. Ultimately, a new radiant truth is born and we can behold the face of God!
"The lineage of God can be observed in relict God concepts, enabling the theologian to reconstruct the development of the God-face over time. Patterns of God can be arranged into hierarchically nested groups, often correlating with geographic provinces defined by mountain ranges, deserts, oceans, and tribal boundaries, often patrolled by bands of fearsome warriors ready to defend their ancestral lands. Isolation of divine concepts by these natural boundaries, and the reinforcement of this effect by Mystic Nationalism, eventually led to two distinct divergences in the identity of God that resulted in two new species of God. This indisputable truth of a triad of Gods has stood for nearly 1650 years. While originally unified, the distance and time between the God doctrines has become so great that any attempt at hybridization has resulted in inviable beliefs. It is no longer possible to co-mingle the concepts. It is a theological dead end.
"At this time, the correlation of this identity of God with nature is so complete that the present three-part image of God is considered unalterable, unassailable, indelible, a fact, a doctrine of the highest order, the supreme establishment of divine truth, yea, one yet three, unified yet divided, known yet unknown, seen but unidentifiable. No intelligent, rational person would contend with this and should seek immediate penance. Therefore, preservation of the existing three phases of the God-head is vital for the survival of the species.
"Accordingly, we urge all humanity to vigorously and passionately reject all relict and immigrant God concepts to retain the purity of the triad of Gods for all posterity. We must preserve the identity of God for our children. Yes, we must preserve the identity of our children for God. Help the Gods survive! Amen!"

I remember having to recite those words in church for the next six years.
This declaration was released to the media and was relayed around the globe and the impact was immediate. Rallied by the clerics, a great worldwide crusade was launched, hailed as the Thirteenth Crusade, or the Failure to Thrive Crusade. The rallying cry was "Praise the Lords!" The objective was to stamp out all doctrine that might be deleterious to the God-head. It was a smashing success. All aberrant theology was eliminated. Conceptual boundaries were policed, a large wall of documents was constructed that prevented the transfer of ideas, and doctrinal identification was required prior to publication. A concordat with the state was inked. The competition was crushed.
And now I am reading that they want to outdo the 1947 conference with one about a warming planet? How could they? This could not possibly have the same impact. I read on:

The conference in Greece was arranged with the stated intent to exceed the impact of the 1947 conference. This was outlined in the opening remarks, given by The Most Right Reverend Hoeller Spelunk, when he stated, "We are here to change history."
The conference lasted five days. Prominent scholars lectured during the morning and conducted open discussions with delegates during the afternoons. Media sessions were held during the evenings. Lecture topics included "The Myth of Scientific Proof", "The Subjective Relevance of a Burning Sensation", "Heat Accelerates the Cycle of Death and Rebirth", "Cremation and Your Carbon Footprint", "Oil Drilling Leads to Religious Conversion", "Fundraising During Power Outages", and "Sunspots and Your Prayer".
Considerable debate was held over the origins and causes of the increased global temperatures. Various theories were expounded, including the common assault on carbon emissions and other anthropogenic factors. But the audience was brought to silence as the renowned Jesuit, Jose Helios Poinsetta Agrandiza, a visionary theologian acclaimed for his theories on the thermal image of auras, came to the podium and delivered the address, "Realization of Peace through Suppression of Consciousness".
He elaborated: "History is long gone, what remains are stacks of book at libraries around the world, a few moldering statues in European cities, and spools of magnetic tape. So when we look at history, we are really looking at a present reality that may or may not represent that which occurred before, assuming that something has actually occurred before what is occurring now. What can really be learned if it is no longer real and its prior existence is in question?
"We are here and now.
"What we need is now.
"Hence, our objective is to pull the entire human race into the immediate moment and free ourselves of the burden of posturing about this or that which may or may not have occurred in times past and fretting about the future which may or may not occur at all. The only way to accomplish this is to disperse the immediate consciousness in the vacuum of space, dissolving it like a grain of salt in the ocean of being, dispelling immediate concerns, disassembling all conception of past or future, expelling the mind like a rogue, a vagrant indigent, slovenly and boorish, that occupies every spare space, at last, evicting hunger and at once, blurring the vision of the desperate condition at hand, rendering peace. It is for this that we have gathered."
Waving a bottle of wine he shouted, "God burn us if we are not here!" The audience roared.

Wait a second. I paused and thought again about the 1947 conference. I recalled a quote that issued from the highest scientific body within the theological community. It claimed that “the lineages leading to man, chimpanzee and gorilla seem to have diverged from their common ancestor . . . 5 to 7 million years ago. This is a sobering thought. Bravely, we venture into the darkness carrying the torch of faith held high by generations of stooped, howling men that have gone before us.” I remember the photograph accompanying the article. It showed a group of primates in east Asia, huddled before a statue of some war hero in a park. Some covered their ears, others their eyes, others their mouths. The caption read, "Anthropologists and clerics agree: This is a display of primitive worship of one of the God-heads."
And now, this. I read on.

As the choir, singing Nearer My God to Thee, raised their voices to a crescendo, Frelth Gaballic, Doctor of Divinity at Horsemoss University in Antwerp, rose to the podium. His face, garnished with sweat, appeared on the giant video screen behind him. The audience, clearly enjoying the festivities, swaying from side to side, joined their voices with the choir. He raised his hands upward and turned his eyes toward the sky. Tears ran down his face. His bottom lip quivered. Then he opened his mouth. "Forgive me Lord for I have not sinned." The giant video flickered.
The crowd sang louder. Some shouted, "More! We want more!"
Gaballic continued. "From this day forward, do not think anything else. It is irretrievable fact that passes along behind us. There is nothing to see to the front or to the back. Stop looking. Stop asking, Why doth the earth blaze?"
Some in the audience swooned.
"Don't listen to those reports. The reality, my friends, is that Hell is rising from the center of the earth. Yea! Verily! This is not our doing. It is divine wrath rising from below, like lava rising from the ocean floor, soon to engulf us in the Inferno."
More swooning.
"Let go. Let it go, people. Find your peace. Yes! The communion line is now open!"
Immediately, thousands of the faithful broke toward the stage, trampling Professor Gaballic underfoot, and, according to police reports, looting several thousand cases of wine behind the stage before burning the auditorium down. They spilled into the streets. Soon, the rioting spread to other cities, mobs of the faithful storming liquor stores across the world. And across the globe, in dozens of languages, could be heard the rallying cry, "Quell the Hell! Drinks for humanity!"

This could be big.

Fear of Fishing

Sometimes it's what you don't know that will kill you.
It was late afternoon and the sun zeroed in on me like an arc welder and I needed relief. The air was still. Birds sprawled in the shade of shrubs. The leaves on the trees were panting like dogs. The fields of white grass were hissing, like the sound of water simmering on the stove. I avoid travel into the village on days like this. The asphalt roofs and roads act as solar collectors and send up heat in silvery billows that can be seen for miles. When one looks into the distance, the air above the village is bent like a circus mirror and it magnifies and distorts and shrinks various objects, depending upon the temperature gradients, wind strength and particular swirl. At times this effect can be quite severe. In fact, this is not limited to the summertime. I have seen this phenomenon in the Great Plains in midwinter, when there is a temperature inversion. When looking in the direction of the Black Hills or Badlands of South Dakota I have seen it create phantom hills, disconnected from earth, like castles in the sky, a home in the clouds.
So, I went to the lake. When I stepped onto the beach, there, offshore, was a man in a rowboat, flopping about like a tarpon. He was fishing. I knew this man; it was Chauncey, the retired attorney who lived on the north shore. Over the years, I had learned to avoid all conversation and contact with this man. He considered himself a great outdoorsman, a master fisherman, but was known to all who met him as a badly inflamed windbag, a self-inflated dolt, puffy like a sail on a ship, a distended sausage of a man, the moral equivalent of a weather balloon. Locals called him “Fat Chauncey.” I watched him thrash his bait upon the waters and nothing was coming back.
This was late summer, a time when the sun is well along its course to the southern hemisphere, a weary bleached traveler with bowed head, like a white hearse slipping silently over a hilltop, like a defeated army on its retreat that pillages the northern landscape, burning the foliage and raiding nearly every color until, at last, in the month of November, everything is stripped away, everything except the glacial blue of the sky. A time of the year when fish begin to gorge themselves in preparation for months chambered in darkness and cold, amidst a diminishing supply of oxygen. A time to fish.
Chauncey was an outstandingly incapable fisherman, and this was well known. As I watched him toss the anchor into the water and follow it overboard, I recalled the degree of arrogance he displayed. It was his custom to hire local fishing guides with the sole intent of showing them just how fishing was to be done. When they broke from shore, he would announce to the guide, “You might be paid, but you are being paid to watch the best.” Then he would drop his sunglasses over his eyes and pull mightily on the oars. When he used up the guides in one community, he would move on to the next. Yet, in 35 years of fishing he had never caught a fish! His excuse?
“There is a simple rational explanation,” he would bluster. “There are no fish in this lake. In fact, there are no fish in any of the waters we can know.”
Once, I prodded him for an explanation. He said, “I can disprove the improbability of what is not unproven. What does not exist is unknown. I know of no evidence of fish, I do not know of it, therefore it does not exist. Hence, the fish do not exist in these waters, and all other waters that I do not know of, or of what is in them. You should know that by now.”
One could only shake one’s head and I felt the one in my possession shaking uncontrollably. Some guides reasoned that the man, being so repellent to those above water must have the same effect upon those below water. Apparently, the word got around, for he was no longer able to keep a pet. “My parrot ran off”, he once said. The story was, if he had an aquarium, the goldfish would run away too.
As the years passed and his creel remained vacant, it became apparent that he used the idle time in his boat to enlarge and multiply his explanations. I chanced upon him one day while he was unloading his boat and pressed him for an answer:
“So, why the empty stringer?”
“You again. I’ll tell you what – the fact is, the opposite or sub-opposite has and has not been true or false nearly so often as not. And that is my final word.”
“What?”
“That’s right.”
“But say it again.”
“It has never been the same twice, you know the odds.”
“So why do you fish?”
“To show it cannot be done.”
An image flashed before my eyes, that of myself throwing my fishing gear into a fire, but I dismissed it. It wasn’t the fishing, it was the failure to catch fish.
On another occasion, as we sat in the diner in town, he offered further explanation. He patted his ample belly. “I would not disallow for unknown uncontrollable factors were I not to know what I do. But I do not profess to not know what I do. But I know there are no fish. Beyond that is mere hyperbole, fantasy. You can label it winterkill, cold fronts, inbreeding, predation. Primitive tribes believed it was the action of comets. How do you differ?”
“I ate walleye once.”
“You see fairies with gilded wings!”
“They tasted good, too.”
Then I suggested to him that there might be an information hole in the bottom of the lake that consumes all facts and renders them imaginary. For a moment it appeared that we might agree on something.
But then he turned his head away. “You have much to learn about that vacuum in your head.”
“Thanks for the inspiration.”
Eventually, his diatribes in the cafes, bars, and diners led to exile. As he broadcast his beliefs, those unfamiliar with his disposition spread the word back home: “The lakes are all fished out.” “There were never any fish up there to start with.” “No wonder why we can’t catch anything.” “Maybe the whole thing is a hoax.” “Who have we been kidding?” As a result, tourists avoided the area and vacationed further north. Profits declined. Shops closed their doors. At the urging of businesses throughout the region, he was blacklisted by the guiding community, evicted from fishing tournaments, barred from bait shops, and, by the time I watched him from the shore that afternoon - wrestling with the oars and spinning the boat in circles – he was denied fishing licenses in twenty-seven states and provinces. But this did not steer him off course. Here he was in front of me, at it again, offshore, hoisting another tree branch up from the bottom of the lake and easing it into the net. One for the mantle, I thought.
His notoriety increased. His image was posted at boat landings, with a fair warning. News media interviewed him. Parents warned their children. Schoolteachers told cautionary tales. The Legend of the Sea Lout. The Epic of the Perilously Listing Nanoid. Captain Bombast, Where Have You Been? Flotsam Meets Jetsom. The Man Drifts. Fables of a seaman just slightly more advanced than the crustaceans he impaled on the hook. A man repeatedly outwitted by wooden lures. This only served to intensify his determination to prove that the fish did not exist.
What drove him to this? I have often thought that it may have been something as simple as a lack of patience. No matter how much effort he infused into the art of fishing, he could not find it within himself to sit motionless in a boat, holding his arms out stiffly, waiting for hours, even days, until that moment when he sensed the slightest twinge in the line, at which moment his mind estimated the mass, depth, and species of the fish, calculated the time necessary for ingestion, the arc of the pole, torque of the hookset, tension of the drag, and length of play. No. He would stir, rise, fold his seat cushion, grab an oar, change a lure, move from seat to seat, lift anchor, drop anchor, change hats, whistle, sing, remove his shirt, fiddle with the oarlocks, tap his feet, inspect his fingernails, write in a notebook, read a book, wave at other boats, and, in the end, stumble over something in the bottom of the boat and end up flailing about in the water.
So this afternoon, I decided I had seen enough. I was about to give a little advice. I called out to him.
“Chauncey!”
“Go away.”
“No, listen to me.”
“What is it now?”
“Try live bait, a sucker on a number-six hook.”
“What for?”
“It increases the odds. Especially under these conditions.”
He responded with the usual dogma, there aint no fish in the lake, fish are a figment of the imagination, mystic blips on the mind, vestiges of primordial man that well up in the senses when under stress, a child’s slimy toy stuffed with ignorance, fear, and insecurity, swirling images produced by oxygen deprivation and most certainly, the sunstroke suffered by all fishermen, and so forth and so on. I waited until he lost his breath and I said it again.
“Been in the sun too long today?”
“Shut up.”
“I mean it, try live bait; a sucker on a number-six hook.”
“What is your problem?”
“Scared to try?”
“Look, little man, I will do it just to prove to you it cannot be done.“
“You can tell everyone it was your idea if it works.”
“Then will you go on your way and keep your ghosts to yourself?”
“Nobody else can see them anyhow.”
And he opened his tackle box, removed the plug from his line, and baited it with a sucker. Then, after glaring at me for a moment, he tossed it out into the open water.
“I got a big one out there once,” I said.
He didn’t say anything.
Suddenly, his rod bent double.
“What the…”
The rod was trembling, the tip touched the water. The boat tilted. The rod tip plunged under water and he nearly lost his grip.
“This can’t be!”
“Don’t horse it.”
He didn’t say anything. Now the fish was heading under the boat. He leaned over the side of the boat to look.
“My god…”
All at once, he threw his rod overboard and waved his arms.
“No, no - I can’t bear to look.”
He fell into the water and disappeared from sight.
And he was gone.

Don't Try This At Home

“The absence of anything proves something, but what it is, it is not until I decide.”
So began the treatise entitled "The Sovereignty of Subjective Consciousness" by the eminent Spillford University biologist Marvell Hummelline. This became the rallying cry of hundreds of thousands of his followers during the tyrannical Days of Haze during the early 21st century.
Where I was then, I am not sure. Sometimes I think I was attending the university at the time, other times I don’t know what to believe. I think I learned that in class. Sometimes I think I recall the turbulence of the crowds, the ebullient clouds of dust formed by the stomping masses of believers, the outstretched palms, skyward faces, innumerable men and women weaving to and fro as Dr. Hummelline railed against the immaterial, the immeasurable, and the nonexistent. I can still see him standing on the bed of a pickup truck parked in the square in front of the student union, one hand waving his treatise, the other stiffly outstretched, as if groping for one of these immaterial, nonexistent objects. I can still hear him shout:

They only exist in your head!
What do you see?
Repeat after me!

I do not think I did, but I was starting to feel a little out of place. The crowd chanted his words for a while and, when the police arrived with batons and teargas, they quickly disappeared. Most filtered into the bars and clubs that circled the square, where, I assume, after several hours they began to see the invisible, the immeasurable, and the nonexistent. Dr. Hummelline did not follow them.
I saw an interview of him on the television that night. I happened to be playing poker with my friends and, although I was in the middle of a winning streak that had extended over three decades, I was able to divert my attention from yet another hand full of consecutive spades to listen in on this exchange:

"Dr. Hummelline, it looks like you are in it for the money."
"How can you say that?"
"Well, maybe it’s not the money, maybe it is the random ethics."
"How can you say that? How can you know what I am thinking? Can you read my mind? Go ahead, find my mind! "
"Well, I can surmise – "
"Low blow! Direct observation of me is impossible."
"But you do give evidence –"
"Well, you interpret it badly."
"Maybe you don’t exist."
"Nothing can be disproved if given enough time! I am human!"
"Then disprove it."

The next day was a Sunday, and the faithful were seen in the houses of worship that towered over the city. I wandered by one of these, a squat sandstone block building that spilled onto the sidewalk, pretty as a sow at the county fair. I don’t know which denomination it may have been, but I can say that it was cold outside and several homeless persons were gathered around a display in front of the building entitled “Hellfire.” It featured a large concrete basin that, instead of water, sprayed fire into the sky. A woman threw some coins into the basin. It provided some comfort, I guess.
Inside some cleric was working the crowd. Hands were in the air, arms were reaching high, feet were stomping, voices wailing. The cleric was shouting some words. I strained to hear.

It exists in your head!
What do you see?
Repeat after me!

And they did.

Later that day, these same folks were seen in the bars around the square, casually mingling with the folks who had been listening to Dr. Hummelline on Saturday.
The following weekend the newspaper carried a story. It reported that Dr. Hummelline went home to his wife directly after his interview on the television. She had bought him a new fishing rod for their anniversary. When she presented it to him, he was said to respond, “Ah, another random event.” His body was found five days later, face down in a lagoon outside the biology building. When they pulled his body out of the water, onlookers said that his arm was outstretched.

The Mirror Speaks

Some people look in the mirror and see apes.
Now, I used to find that hard to believe. It was incomprehensible, tomfoolery, puffery, something that I would never understand. A vapid illusion, I reasoned, and I could I pass on in respectful silence, much as I would a street performer singing out of key. So what if he doesn’t know. He is the one who will go without food, leaving more for me.
But then one day, I saw it. I had just finished my daily ritual of grooming - with its mass-shaving, clippage, de-limbing, defoliation, excision, cauterization, unction and penance. When I looked up into the mirror I saw a simian. A primate. The ape-man. Mr. Piltdown, I presume. A man with long arms, protruding jaw, sloped forehead, and crestal ridge. Who was this? Was it a bending mirror? What had I become? It reminded me of the headline in Weekly World News© announcing that Shaved Apes Were Being Sold As Human Babies. Could it be? Would I be kidnapped? Sold as a slave? I saw myself locked in some warehouse along a deepwater dock, rays of the setting sun shining through the gaps in the corrugated steel siding, illuminating dust in the air, casting ribbons of light on my bony figure that sat chained to a desk and slumped over a sewing machine. I began to sweat. But, the notion was short-lived; as soon as the creature in the mirror started to speak, it became man. We carried on a lively, rather reassuring conversation for five minutes and he left as soon as I had talked myself out. Good thing, I had to get to work and so did he.
On the way I was thinking about the effort to teach apes sign language. Stories circulate that the apes are learning well. Some can sign many words. Some even make sentences. So they say. Sure, we all sit on the edge of our seats, breathless, waiting for the uncharted wisdom, radiant truth, profound musing and effulgent insight to slip from their weathered grey lips and redirect our sodden souls. Hark, The Ape Speaks!
But then, I wondered, maybe we don’t know the whole story. You know how it goes: maybe these apes are teaching us how to speak. We laugh when the chimps put on their show, riding tricycles, dressed up as cowboys, mugging for the cameras, but when they go offstage, out of the site of Homo sapiens, they sit down over a glass of wine and discuss theoretical physics, speaking in an ancient tongue they picked up while mimicking an archaeologist they saw on public television the night before. They had a good laugh at the way the fellow tripped over his words, rolled his eyes and moved his mouth.
Nah.
So I swung into our village. A breezy spring day, apple blossoms scattered in the sky, dust devils twisted in the fields, high cumulus moved in from the west. Promise was in the air. As I walked in front of the grocery store I saw two men arguing about a parking space. I watched them for a while. The larger man got his way; he swung his arms a lot and then the smaller man backed away, all the while displaying this big toothy smile. I passed by the beauty salon next door and the billows of perfume rolling out the door made my head turn, and inside I saw a woman picking through another woman’s hair. Other women were lined up, chatting, waiting their turn. I rounded the corner and looked down the alley. I could see several young men relieving themselves against the walls. Nobody would come near. Up ahead, a man walked out of a bar with another man’s wife. She was from a neighboring town. I think he had her by the hair. On the curbside, two women were fighting over a baby carriage. They were screaming with such ferocity that it was impossible to make out what they were saying. One shoved the carriage into the street, just missing an oncoming car. Down the road, by the school, I could see a crowd of adults at the soccer field. Arms were in the air. Children were being gathered up. It looked like a brawl and it was headed my way. Time to go.
I ducked into the café and sat down and ordered a cup of coffee. The news was on. It showed footage of something really big blowing up somewhere; I almost dropped my cup. Then there was a scene of many agitated people at some conference shouting at each other in several different languages simultaneously. Then lots of important people started showing up on the screen and explaining what was going on and then they started shouting at each other and I couldn’t make out what they were saying. Then I saw crowds of angry men clubbing another crowd of angry men who were clubbing another crowd of angry men who were, I think, clubbing another crowd of angry men. I was looking for who started it all but it ended up that the last group was clubbing the first group. I turned it off when I saw thousands of peace marchers set fire to a nursing home.
I called the waitress to me and asked for a newspaper. She brought one over and I paid my bill. I spread the paper on the counter and looked at the headlines.

“Personal Thermonuclear Device Seen As Key to Safe Neighborhoods”
“Hellfire Doctrine Provides Model for Effective Torture Sessions”
“Improving Your Child’s Self-confidence with Anabolic Steroids”
”Science Engineers Completely Disposable Child”
“Study Shows Repeated Political Fallacies Evolve into Truth over Time”

What? What is this? What next, Shaved Apes? The man next to me reached for my paper. I sputtered, lost for words. I jabbed the fork into his hand. He rolled his lips back and gave a big toothy grin.