School Days

When I was in the second grade, my reading teacher allowed a few of us to do a self-paced series of workbooks. She promised me a better life if I learned to read well. I looked at her hard, and she nodded her over-bright face vigorously. I can’t tell you how much this motivated me. My home life was wretched and hopeless, and this woman was so very sweet. Coming to school for the allowed 180 days of the year was a fantasy theme-park of nice ladies, age-appropriate activities, other children, close to my own age, that I was not responsible for tending, rationality, rules-before-punishments, my own desk, and plentiful supplies.
In a matter of weeks, I completed the workbook series, through the fifth-grade level, and awaited my prize. That welching bitch just smiled and praised my amazing accomplishment, and not a thing changed in my shitty life.
In the third grade, I ran through my "language arts" stuff, faked my math homework, and sat in a corner reading "Where the Wild Things Are" every day. Knowing, I suppose, that I was smart enough to recover from a motivational setback, that I had already proven that I was “good for it,” the teacher ignored my strike, even when a chorus of tattlers tried to make her acknowledge my open cheating on math homework. Nah, I think after all she just avoided the issue for her own sake.
In the fourth grade, they demoted me to the bottom track, where I made a nuisance of myself, to the dumb bewilderment of that class' inhabitants. Enraged by the school’s tactic to humiliate me, I found motivation: I put my hand up immediately to answer every question, finally deciding to keep my hand up through the entire class, ready to answer whatever it was the teacher would choose to ask next. After a few weeks, the teachers informed me at the end of recess that I was being retracked, and that also, I would go to counseling instead of language arts, one morning a week.
By then I was deeply suspicious of authority, and my mother let on that she was in on this, so I knew it pretty much stank – she told me the teachers and the principal and herself had got together to discuss me – it was an immense conspiracy against me now -- a game that I could not win, with no one I could trust, and I should not let on to anything, just do whatever it was they wanted. But now they wanted in my head, to fix me. Now I see Mother was just pulling rank and blowing smoke, but I wasn’t going to say anything. I guessed I just had to “buckle down;” as my father would say; concede that they had won, keep looking forward, and try to perform above reproach, and without any showy-ness, such that they would leave me be.
In the fifth grade, I was one of the top three girls in my class, and then Diana was promoted straight to the sixth grade. We talked at recess. I told her I was hoping to get a promotion, too, so I could get out as soon as possible. I asked around about it, and eventually learned it was unlikely; I was the youngest person in my class since the beginning, and I was always considered “socially unready,” whatever that meant. I would do whatever it took to get over that, short of bringing someone to my house – but then there were other things I wasn’t allowed by mother to do, and even if she did let me go to a sleepover or something, she would be unbearably sad over me leaving her, and I would resist doing it again.
In the sixth grade, the school instituted a “gifted” program. I can’t remember whether I was informed that I would be in it, but no one explained it to me. I stayed in my seat when it was time for it to start. Karenthea and Vince went. Both of them came back and told me I was supposed to be in it with them. “Why are they sending you to get me? Let them come and tell me that themselves,” I said. Both of them looked at me with wide eyes. And they left me alone.

Dreams of a Mare

Patient forbearance only goes so far, but at a point one really has to act. The Pilgrims set out hoping to find more agreeable company in the New World Savages than they did their English brethren. In appreciation of the new feeling of trust they found, they invented a holiday where they incapacitated themselves with dolorous-making New World foods that left them defenselessly listless for days, where they could languidly relish the relative safety of abiding by their new friends.
I had lost my bid to get away with the handsome and crafty vagrant. The worst happened when he decided to enlist both of us in his quest to find a man who might be any kind of animal, who was perhaps miniaturized or perhaps a giant, and who may or may not want to be found, but was last seen running away. What this man had that Mustafio wanted was still a mystery to me, as much as in my travels before coming to this place, I had heard random tales of Mustafio's associates, always unsatisfactorily incomplete.
Well, hey, at least we'd get out of this barn and this ridiculous stand-off where somehow circumstances had appointed this wanderer as "judge," by dint, I suppose, of him being the closest to enjoying true freedom.
I was rethinking my idea of finding a "new best friend," somehow it just doesn't ever work out. I was still stuck with that controlling harridan who kept me penned until such time as she had tasks for me, and did not allow me even a few kite-building materials and a little time in the meadow to try out recreations of the flying contraptions I remembered and dreamt of in my days as a foal. Why don't grown horses play with kites? It's a sad question to contemplate. I longed for the day to make it untrue. Certainly, I would cooperate once again with the vagrant.
"Sssst! … Frau Staupitz!"
I saw my agent, whom I had long thought gone, appear in a chink in the siding. There were so many things I wanted to say, starting with "Where the hell have you been?" But instead I just stamped a hoof and snorted recognition. He left a package for me and retreated.
Mister Atomic was keeping Mustafio fully engaged in a real or mock hysteria of epic drama, on his favorite subject, so no one noticed me sidle over to the bundle and put it in my pocket, very much looking forward to hitting the road.

Unknown History

Yes, of course, it’s the easy push and pull of things, if not accelerated into calamity that makes the world go around, for the most part; the driving of the hammer stroke, the drawing of the rake; whether to rise up to meet or to flee.
Some people can do the same thing forever, and not feel they have missed the other, their natural inclination is fixed; while others might have a broader repertoire, or simply, at one time or always, an inclination to change. But how much to follow these inclinations, and could they, through some persuasions, become falsified, deluded as to their value, or unduly influenced by the ordinary coercions well known to all? Could they be made wicked by over-ruling expectations, alone?
Thing is, I come from raking. “Live to rake, rake to live” never made a whole lot of sense to me until external forces tried to curb my raking to shape their own agenda. But now here I was making massive profits for the order, and they really couldn’t deny me a cut in it.
With the fortune I accrued promoting the hammering of sand, I went back to the art of raking, the development of a school for the enhancement of its practice as a language. In my lifetime, I came to see contracts of both worldly and sacred nature raked out in courts and temples well beyond all the lands I had ever travelled in that jibbering caravan of hammer-swingers.
And sometimes, when challenges were made to such contracts, I, or other interpreters were called to make sense of the rakings; the crossings, the curve patterns, where here lines flowed together and there they repelled one another, the methods of mirroring and whether the line of delineation, the slice point, had been properly determined. I much enjoyed debating with colleagues, whether we were in agreement or opposed, the constructions of those pronouncements, much respecting a sturdy position in opposition to my own.
If still a solution could not be found, the raking would be crated out for winnowing, for all to know what holds weight and what flies away on the wind.
But the better rakings stood. Eons from now, they will find fossil record of those rakings, and eventually decode the language anew, perhaps to resurrect the practice.

Hammer Train

I hadn’t realized in the pre-dawn the impact my sudden decision to change the method of preparing the court would have, not having foreknowledge of the Dauphin’s arrival. Although I felt a bit of fear at the time, and the air was strange, all things considered, if I had known the Dauphin was coming, I would have stuck to the usual, maybe going over the rakelines double, fussing to make it the best raking ever.
I was heartened by the Dauphin’s approval and Master’s comment. My uneasiness was gone. But suddenly Kotto-Re’s emblem was changed to that of a mallet, and the whole monastery and region was elevated in the status of the order. We made up little mallets to sell to the pilgrims who came, where only vagrants came before, and the pilgrims bought the little mallets and replicas of sand courts, in which they could hammer out sand hammerings in their free hours.
As for me, the monastery booked me on sand-hammering demonstrations throughout the countryside, and a grand assembly of carriages were commissioned to carry me and my entourage. The carriages walked on a system of crawling hammers, and had swinging hammer whirlygigs on the top. Precious tool-quality hickory was used throughout the carriages’ construction. We carried temporary sand courtyards which could be reconstructed anywhere there was room, and always, hammers. I was given charge of numerous young apprentices, especially bright, strong, and resourceful, and I was no longer ever alone, unless I ran into the woods to find aloneness, and even then, I was spied on to see if I would reveal the secret of that was manifest that early morning. As much as I needed this time, I had to learn to have a light hand with curious and audacious young interlopers, especially when they approached at the wrong times.
Several other hammering troupes sprung up, and all manner of other daily ceremonial court preparation methods were tried. Proposals were made to write sand hammering into the canon. Alternate sand hammering canons, none by me, were put before the Dauphin, who requested my review of them. My life had altered considerably, from quiet contemplation to the center of hubbub. Sometimes I felt I’d never want to see another hammer again, nor the road, or the coterie of companions. I practiced raking to relax. I could never let anyone catch me doing this; they would think me a hypocrite. In fact, my road manager didn’t allow rakes on the procession, but I had my own compartment where only I was allowed to store things.

The Mallet of Kotto-Re

At the monastery of Kotto-Re, Master advocated raking the sand in the courtyard, but I wasn't aware that it was a hard-and-fast rule. There was not a single word in the canon of scripture about the necessity of raking sand, in any particular way, but only of preparing the court to be a delight to those who come upon it. I was a raker, the most highly ranked in my raking ability, and I was roused in the pre-dawn to do the honor of raking twice as often as any other raker. While I performed my work, I reflected on the concept of delight.
One week, Master appeared distracted and unhappy. As far as the raking went, it seemed far from his mind; he neglected to remark upon the disposition of the courtyard at all. The raking squad was deflated. Then things got worse. An order came that next morning, the most highly ranked raker was to prepare the court. There was no word on why, but a strange excitement was in the air.
I roused in the pre-dawn and went out to the shed. It was not a normal morning at all. The sky was evenly distributed with stratus fractus, and the air was filled with a nearly acoustic thrumming. The moon was near setting. Instead of the rake, I picked up a large wooden mallet, and walked with resolution to the courtyard.
There, I hammered all the sand throughout the courtyard with a consistent moon edge facing the West. I can't remember each mallet strike, but sometimes as I wended around the perimeter of a rock or celebrated a chapparal bush with a radiating, rather than a concentric pattern, I was struck with a feeling of the correctness of it. Excited but still anxious, as I had not seen the court prepared this way before, I returned the mallet to the shed, and returned to rest until the others stirred.
In some aspects when official morning starts, it is as if the day before never happened. Some discussions that were settled the day before come unsettled, some open issues are discarded, their importance evaporated.
On the matter of the appearance of the courtyard, Master blanched and nodded.
The Dauphin Emperor arrived at noon. The first thing he did, upon riding to the center of the court, is look around in a wide sweep from right to left, and smiled.
"I have never before been honored with the likes of hammered sand!"
"Ah yes," Master said, "Hammering sand is very much the specialty of Kotto-Re! We wished to honor you especially, Dear Dauphin, with this hammering!"

Vantage and Expectations

I had odds on him being gone by first light, and really, given the high probability he’d turn out to be incompetent with a shovel, I wouldn’t count it as any big deal.
If he were gone, I could make an easy summation of what it meant; one really bad day: Torn up flower bed, broken down barn, worn-out tractor clutch, ruined tablecloth, broken plate, sore feelings, one pair of cover-alls, a whole lot of wasted scrambling around. And I would be able to tell the story of that feckless, block-headed gypsy. As they say, “a stitch in time saves nine.”
If he were still there, well, what then would it mean? I took a shotgun with me in case he was there and I realized for certain I didn’t want him to be. I kind of relished the idea of seeing his backside running away down the drive, moving unencumbered by the damped flywheel choke that kicked in right before the yoke is placed on such a beast.
So I waited until after sunrise to venture out to the barn.
What made me think he’d be gone? I had detected a sullen, nervous, unhappiness in him toward the end of dinner which I found uncharacteristic in the type of pontificating boor I had earlier decided he was. And I couldn’t make him talk about his friends, and how he had come to be chasing a tiny man down the alley.
I threw the door open, and the first thing I saw was his hand up, holding off that crazy mare, who was flaring her nostrils at him.
“Morelle! Get off of him! – Don’t mind that crazy-ass horse; she’s been in heat ever since I got her back to health! … Gee, I’m sorry, I would have warned you …” I put the gun at my side. “I bought her at auction … the NYC Pound said she was meandering through the tunnel traffic at Varick Street, out of her mind; she raves like a madwoman to anyone who looks at her. She’s filled out and glossed up and got her sass back, but there’s no accounting for her manners.”
I patted her withers and she pulled away.
“Bitch.”
“Now, Morelle, that’s a fine ‘Thanks for the oats!’ – You, you all right there?”
He nodded, still bleary and confused.
“You must be sore, after yesterday. Well, have I got a job for you lovebirds! I’ve staked out a section of meadow behind the springhouse – gonna extend the cold cellar! I figure the best way to do it is plow off the top with a small plow ‘til we can’t any more, then switch to shoveling. I brought you a bucket of biscuit-n-eggs, and I’ll get Missy there hooked up to the plow. – I spent half the night tinkering in the shed, and I’m on to something, so I’ll get back to it and check on you at noon.”

Bagpipe Shadow Puppet

One thing the farm has is space; the farmer can easily store things she has no use for in a loft of attic or in a currently unused chicken coop, as the demand for eggs has been met by other local sources. Like facts and uninterpreted memories stored in the human preconscious, those things are there and available for when need or fancy meet human ingenuity at the crossroads of now, or not.
A jar of twine, bits of cloth, the Studebaker, a single-horse sleigh, an egg basket full of blown light bulbs. Random things come and it is not necessary to wonder whether there is a place to put it. It is quite possible, in the future, that such an item will meet some ultimate, ingenious use, unknown as yet. There isn’t trash pick-up; what is unwanted is dumped in the wooded ravine at the edge of the field. If you change your mind, you can go dig for it, but there’s a chance some other animal has taken a fancy to it. One time I saw an otter in the creek cradling a bottle of Evening in Paris, unscrewing the cap, sniffing, dabbing it on, winking at me, and screwing the cap back on again. Also, the beavers decorated the entry of their dam with bright yellow lawnchair tapes.
Of course there are pressing needs, getting the vegetables in before the frost, canning them before they rot, loading the wagon to be on time for market day. Feeding time. Bolting all the shutters closed with the news of a tornado.
Sometimes you might leave overnight to go to a conference on cow milking, and you grab what you thought was an old suitcase, but upon opening it, find it full of crystals and transmitters and wires and when the light hits the little solar panel, the case turns over, appendages pop out, and it scurries down the road, or stays a while, holding a digit against the base of an incandescent lightbulb, humming.
Some time in the evening when there’s plenty of kerosene, one can indulge in tinkering, sorting out the bounty of randomness and putting it into a new context, coax the meaning out of a thing, or, in some cases, figuring out what its purpose was, finally, after all this time of puzzling.
Some items had a persuasive bent, others, “un truc,” what, what, what, one wants to ask them what they are for, what do they do, what is their plastic and elastic limit, is this agent or reagent, catalytic, stable. If there isn’t too much other stuff tying you down, you have to try a thing, especially if you know you’re not supposed to stay here, see what happens, and have set aside enough to do it again, lest it’s become useful, maybe important, and the material is wasted.
Sometimes in a flash one can make a plan, an assembly, of bunches of those things, hovering between useful and useless, a repurposing to truer purpose; if there was ever a reason those things in particular were chosen to be here, and not passed along merely by the whim of another.

Mister Atomic's Plan

I saw right off how he took to drink, so I had emptied the liquor cabinet and hid all the bottles under my bed. I locked the cabinet again – we'll see just how honest he is. Between spying out the window to see that the fool hadn't lit the hay barn on fire, I hid the silver and stretched a needlepoint over the Bracques that hangs in the mudroom. The needlepoint was a traditional embroidery sampler given for weddings in the region, and was writ, "Women have many faults but men have only two: Everything they say and everything they do!" I don't wish to talk about why I have it now, but with this young man in the house, it cheered me to see it up on the nail.
The acrid smell of burning clutch rubber wafted in by fits. Whatever was I thinking? A performer who makes his bread by defecating on-stage, and expects applause as well as payment for this kind of display. Such a man, as ignorant as he was, has never learned the magic in "How do you want it, Ma'am." If I didn't talk fast and give him some idea of expectations, he'd break the whole place down like a mule in a corncrib.
I had yet to fully plomb his ability to take instruction, advice, or correction, to see if he could be made useful in some way he was not now. So far, all the questions or comments he made were not in the order of cooperation, but to catch me out, prove me wrong, get the better of me. But I had to think underneath it all, he was trying to understand something, but on his own. When things got particularly tense, I approached him, my right hand extended toward his right hand, no tricks, no charge, no context. He'd oblige and shake my hand. I could see in his face the electrical rearrangement going on in his head; he'd nearly giggle, and then be much calmer. But beside the handshake, and specifics around the farm that I allowed as his domain, he would neither offer nor agree to any accord; we could not agree to disagree; he would run roughshod over my caveats same as he did my carrot patch.
I resolved to send him on his way, but first there was a project that had been on my mind for quite some time. Years ago, a veterinarian buried the entire contents of his chemistry lab in a big trench at the bottom of the pasture. There were quite a number of bottles and ampules, liquids and gasses sealed in glass; some things I was curious about, things I thought I might get some good money for.

... Perhaps a call for ’Temperance’ ?

The first day out that drunken ass yanked out all my hostas with a pitchfork and then set to bellowing at the draft horses until they pulled down the north wall of the stables in fright. I watched them rolling end over end down the meadow, with the section of wall they were still tethered to, that moron provoking them all the way. I breathed a tiny sigh of relief every time I saw Nut or Bolt get to his feet "Thank goodness they're okay …" and then he'd start at them, they'd rush back in fright, pulling up a section of wall, and around and down they'd go again, until they were stopped at the creek. At least I had a nice dinner planned. You know what proud creatures men are; best you let them clean up these messes on their own, but I was livid – is he ignorant or wholly, wholly evil? Maybe it was the whiskey. The hostas couldn't be recovered – what could I say? But he got Nut and Bolt back in the stable and dragged the wall back up and nailed it back on with a ball-peen hammer and roofing nails, reinforcing it with bailing twine. Maybe I'd outline his job a little more explicitly tonight and send him into town tomorrow so I could repair the wall properly, and assure poor N & B, while he wasn't around – or maybe not. I wasn't prepared for his table manners or dinner conversation at all – exasperating! He started by picking up the gravy boat and draining it into his gullet – flashback to the way he tossed back that whiskey – and then asked if I could fetch him some more soup! It didn't seem he had ever heard of a noodle clipper in his life, and he picked his back teeth with the pork knife, as if he were giving me a demonstration on what dental hygienists do. Also, Oh, oh, let's just say, 112 years of "Mind the Battenburg" down the tubes in an instant! I was quite beside myself.
He was pontificating on modern art. He had derived this subject by reflecting on the little-dutch-boy-n-girl salt and pepper shaker set on the table. Just amazing, I thought, how these cosmopolitan types sniff at the "choice" of something that was inherited and really quite serviceable, and they know everything but don't know how to DO a damn thing, and when they get the chance, they'd rather prove it than ask any questions.
I told him that while he was bucking and pitching and near ruining the clutch on my tractor towing a windfall up to the woodshed, I went around and had a look at the north wall of the stable. The masses of roofing nails were gobbed in groupings that looked like galvanized-aluminum fungus. Ha! Once all those nails are pried out, the wood was going to look like it had been gnawed away by termites. I don't know how he managed to do so much damage, so quickly, while using all the wrong tools -- his mad, nervous energy, I suppose.
I waited until he pulled the knife away from his gumline before I threw the plate at his head, a blunt strike at the temple. Ah, what now? Peace.

Usage

The lexicon was made up of complete words, but all expressions of the language used only contractions of these words. It was hard for me, as a foreigner, to interpret each sentence, for there were no complete words to look up.
Also, it seemed that, after all, in the contraction, some bit of the concept of the word was being deleted as well, such that, say, the word "allow" might be contracted to either, "al" or "llo" or "ow", and each showed different measures of allowance.
The first, "al," a hearty, encouraging endorsement, the second, "llo," a more neutral resignation to the will of the object, and the third, "ow," a statement of begrudged compliance, acknowledgment that the claim of the other could not rightfully be denied, but an inherent vow that sulking, foot-dragging, and resentment would follow indefinitely.
So,
“Y’ al’ ‘tk” means: “I am so glad you have made this decision. I will help you as I can.”
“Y’ ‘llo’ ‘tk” (double L is pronounced as vowel ‘y’) means: “I hear you.”
“Y’ ‘ow’ ‘tk” means: “Just try it; I will make you pay one thousand times over.”
Or that is my interpretation as it stands today, for the particular dialect of that region. My interpretation of the spoken usage was even worse; I would try to lip-read the difference between "al" and "ow," and it's considered very coarse to have missed the distinction, so I avoided asking, and looked for other signs of interpretation. It's taken years for me to make sense of anything.

Rest and Not

I recall it gave me pleasure to hold his little body in the palms of my hands, lightly, I’d stroke over his wings, smoothing the feathers down, and then cup my palm to the wing, my fingers extending over his back to his spine.
When he was fully awake, he didn’t allow it; he’d squawk and lift his talons and spit: “I’ll put out your eyes!”
But if he were drowsy, and not in a cranky and defensive mood, he’d lean into my palm and maybe I’d pick him up and hold him to my bosom while untangling the floppy tabs of his cockscomb, or rest him in the crook of my elbow, or prop him up, there on my drafting table, between my hands.
Then I could appreciate the wonder and beauty of him as a living being, unconflicted by all the wrongnesses of the quasi-conscious state he lived in typically. There was peace in the disengagement from our constant bickering, our utter aesthetic differences, and lack of acceptance of them, in this proximity. Truth be told, our bickering was legendary; people gathered to watch us discuss matters, sometimes exaggerating things to provoke greater dramatic outrage. I proposed that we call ourselves the “Truth Fighters,” not to labor the point, but to say, it was hard to guess if we were in league with each other or were enemies, and hard to say whether we were for the truth or opposed. At the time, he snorted at the suggestion and turned his head aside.
When he gave into sleep this way, he was making some kind of concession as well, unspoken, but real: he was giving in to me.
I’d hold him, however it was, for a few minutes, feel the chill on my own shoulders, and then put him in his own little bird bed, wash my hands, and find something else to occupy my mind.

Peek-a-boo

I was coming in from coffee one morning and I saw him going out the window, just a green flutter of wingtips, and the dust, that bird-dust, that I was really slightly allergic to, curling off of him and glinting in the sunlight. Good. I was glad he was taking in some sunlight, and getting around town, talking to people. But we always got in a sticking point over his mad penchant for calumniation. I was struck dumb by his need to tell me every incident he had seen flying over back-alleys from my office to the quay – and always people I knew! Judge W. changing his girdle by the dumpster, Mrs. C. shaving in quite the reverse order – and out-of-doors! Mr. R. scavenging the dumpster for old muffins from the coffeeshop, and then sitting in the bottom of the thing, legs splayed in an "L," the balls of his feet pulled back, eating the whole trashbag full of them. I skipped over the question of why was he telling me these things to what I really wanted to know:
"What, Double-A, are you telling people about me?"
His beak would chatter a bit, and then he'd say, "You're paranoid!"
I didn't want to hear the dissembling any more than I wanted to hear the gossip. It was evident by the way people tried to take up in the middle conversations that had never started with me that the bird was up to something. Or it was just endless, senseless, niggling noise.
Perhaps I should have mentioned I have a disorder that gives me very bad reaction to big surprises. And to vague hinting around. How had I gotten stuck with this creature?
Still, I liked and could tolerate, and was trying to build tolerance for, a steady stream of small, pleasant, and maybe delightful surprises, by some controlled measure.
I worked all day, and he hadn't come back. So before closing up, I went in to change the papers under his work area. Something told me it was time to take a look.
First, he had a scrapbook, or collage kind of thing, references of some sort he had torn out of the celebrity magazines he loved. There was the Alien Queen that Sigourney Weaver fought, the queen's ovaries and breasts strung out and wound around and along the trusses and conduits of an immense basement. There were all kinds of collapsed things, wrecks of sorts. There were a bunch of popular images, the random mass-marketing-assigned cravings of the 18-44 male demographic.
Then there was the model, the thing. It looked like it could make toast, except it had round slots and the electrical cord hanging from it was frayed to look like a dandelion. It was on collapsed scissoring legs that had no way of being extended. The legs flopped around a bladder with a peek-a-boo window displaying dishwater with potato peels, oatmeal rubber, coffee grinds and general filth. Set back from the toaster console, the thing had some kind of suctioning device that smoked the ends of cigarettes in an enclosed bowl that was sealed well enough that I hadn't smelled it. All of it delivered the feeling of want without redemption, empty offerings. I suppose I had guessed he was making a gift for me, but this thing repulsed me, and the idea that he might present it to me made me nauseous. I wheeled around, and spotted a mess in the corner I hadn't seen before. The wall there was streaked with stains that all pointed toward a mass of rumpled papers. Moving closer, I saw he had lined it with the strips from burst perforations of my invoice forms, and in it were eggs, quite a prolific number, and not like the eggs he had been laying before, but fresh, and pulsing with internal effort.

From the Breath of a Talking Squirrel

Perhaps it was a matter of a confusion between the treat being withheld as punishment and the forbidden thing one is being punished for having, but no matter. I was never taken off punishment, and couldn't remember whether any one thing was inherently bad or instead, that I had once appeared to enjoy it. There was no sense in asking; that only ever made matters worse.
I told you I had only ever written one spell. I had specifically been forbidden from making any of "my magic," but sometimes when one is in the woods, and is approached by a talking squirrel, it seems only civil to hear him out and make a reply. By increments, by the aspiration of another's breath during conversation, and the social necessity suggesting particular pairings of syllables suddenly dangerously close to taboo incantations, some hidden world was sparking. Intentions were there, not fully formed by utterance, nor action.
"Monsieur Squirrel, according to the schedule I have been given, the time is not now."
"Oh, but it is! The time is always now!"
This hadn't been true before, but suddenly made a whole lot of things true. There was a lot to be sorted out.

A Day at the Other Desk

I was way behind on my collections, and decided I really needed to devote a full day to calling on overdue accounts.
The first place I called was the Atlantis Company, for which I had formulated "invisible paper."
"No, I don't recall that project ever going on here," the purchasing agent there said. "The purchase order isn't in our system, but if this is something you contracted directly with one of our engineering groups, send us the contract, but from here I can't see any evidence it ever happened." I made a note to dig out the contract, and hoped it was as I had remembered.
Next I called Bendeye Inc., about a four-way mirror I had devised for a specific optical application. They said they had paid me in full, and didn't understand why I was still sending late notices. After being transferred through several departments, I found someone who said she'd look up the cancelled check and send me a copy. I was certain there was no check.
I dialed up The Excellent Group, and told them I really needed to close out the balance on the Bigness-intensity capacitor farm I had finished setting up for them last quarter. The switch-flipping party had been totally off-the-hook; I was afraid to ask for the check at the time – I thought my own person was going to be torn to confetti in their general rioting over the project's success, so I thought it would be a bad idea to be carrying said document right then, lest it be shredded as well.
"Oh, man, about that," the Project Lead said. "We kind of haven't been getting the bignesses this past month, and demand is way low …"
"What has that got to do with me? I delivered …" I could tell this was going to be drawn out.
I checked in with Deflex Inc., on some schematics I had sent them pertaining to a hydroplaning boomerang ferry they were setting up on a holiday route between Dubai and Madagascar.
"As we recall, that was speculative work on your part that we decided we had no interest in picking up – we're sorry; we're still not interested."
"Excuse me but -- how could I have made that project up? Of course you had asked me to do it!"
Now it seemed the Director was insulted that I thought his idea was stupid, after all, or insulted that I thought he was stupid enough to come up with such an idea, and now I wouldn't claim it as my own.
"… I'll send a copy of the work order."
Next I called the Everlong Corporation about a time machine I had delivered to them, oh, man, I can't believe it, it was back in 2000, so that they could take a pallet of baseball trading cards back to the beginning of the national game's inception, and front-load the past of the trading-card market. There had been a big race on to do this, and I charged a RUSH premium on it, but had never seen the check. I couldn't believe I had kept my head down, working on new stuff, without ever looking into this since the year 2000.
"We wouldn't have any paperwork on that," the clerk said. “It all gets shredded after seven years … I think there's a statute of limitations, anyway."

Nutter, Honey

I'd practice my final presentations with Double-A. He was always hanging around, after all, so I supposed he had some interest, something to say about things, and I wanted a second opinion. He had listened in on all the client conversations. Maybe he'd see something I missed.
I showed him schematics for a corkscrew ring. For a public fountain made of giant cascading titanium tacos. For a rainbow machine to mount on parade floats.
"Rahk! What is all this FOR?"
I was a little crestfallen that he wasn't following the design intention, after all. How could this be so? He had handled interim client calls flawlessly.
"whaddya mean, what is it for? You know what it's for!"
"What?"
"What?"
"WHAT!"
"HWHAAT!" I had the lung capacity to blow him off of his perch, and I was angry enough to do it, but I checked myself.
"It's just …" Then he'd huff his little, whistling huff.
"Go ahead. Tell me what you want."
He'd hide his eye under his wing.
Roller skate stilts, Hydraulic clocks. Dust-powered lamps.
"Rahk! Why are you doing this?"
"Whaddya mean, why I am I doing this?"
"It's CRAP!"
"It's not crap, damn you! Tell me why it's crap … Oh! Who are you to say it's crap."
He was quite willing to look over my shoulder all day long and watch me work, but he approved of none of it. I kept the window open, and reminded him every time he gave that little bird-sigh, "Double-A, the window is open."
Then he started building models from some balsa and scraps I had in a canister in a space I used for storage, hidden behind a Chinese screen. I was glad, after all that time, if he didn't have one constructive comment to make, if he was going to condemn the lot of it, if he was going to keep saying "There's a better way! There's a better way!" and not tell me what it was, yes, I was glad that he had finally found something else to keep himself busy.
I'd check in:
"Whatcher doin' Double-A?"
"Nutter, Honey!"
"Okay, I'm not looking!"
If he didn't want me to know, that was fine with me. Sometimes I worried when I'd hear him using the Dremel or the jigsaw, or when the smell of glue was getting too intense.
Before leaving at night, I'd look in just to see that the area was in order, that he hadn't left the burnisher on, and I changed the newspaper in the area he generally habituated during the course of the day. But I didn't look at his project, since that was his stated wish.

Apt: 'Bodies Sive Eidolons'

Hey, everybody, everywhere has got a tater tot pressing hashbrowns into her potato jacket, all the time. But is that the story or specifically other-than-story? Sometimes there's a thing to be learned, and sometimes it's just so much noise. But okay. I will.
Perhaps it's the reverse of what I thought: So action is the horse and theory is the cart, but I've always had to plan carefully what I do, and liked to think I was a rational being, worth being reasoned with, and if you leave it to the horse's judgment, she'll stay out in pasture until afternoon and you'll get lost on the road to Kilkenny, and never even get to market by nightfall. Yes, I know the other thing is true, too.
But action wasn't what that period of time was about. I had lost my identity, and not for the first time, and hoped to reassemble it in a more stable manner, starting with confirmed empirical observation of my current disposition.
I believed that doing things, and showing them to reasonable people would net me reasonable advice on how to proceed with my presumed goals, as my training had been based on cool-headed, reasonable critique. I wanted to know the answers to the questions I was asking. Why choose him as a cipher? There were things he knew and things he hinted at knowing, and why not, I had to start somewhere. I did try to check the provenance, examine the hallmark, as it were, but he was resistant. I am not incurious, but I want to force nothing. Given the murky nature of my own origins, I was willing to let this pass, after all.
"You're NOT NORMAL!" He'd yell in my face. Relieved that there was suddenly something to learn, I'd ask for an explanation. But he'd refuse to explain just how he meant it. It seemed a condemnation. I'd be relieved we were through, but he'd start talking to me again the next day, despite everything, telling me something either kind of sad or nonsensical, and throwing a little tantrum when I did not laugh, but was sad and quizzical. Finally, I told myself that words would come out of his mouth while we were in proximity to each other and there was nothing I could do about it, nothing I ought to do about it, it was of no consequence. Myself, words mattered to me, but in this unique case, they couldn't. As someone helpfully explained, he was "Cuckoo." Oh!
He seemed to think this was the funniest thing in the world, but I am my own standard of "Normal." I've assumed everyone else is just like me. I see now I've put too much truck in consensus, but still, how am I to judge?
I see: If you try to apply the polemics of a fighter to the ever-finer-grit polishing necessary to remove the burrs from precision-machined pieces, the tolerances go all to hell.
One thing I assume is true for everyone is that we all have a great deal more to say than we're saying, but after so many false starts, we all wait to see if we've really got a listener. And still we choose the story carefully to match the audience.

Kewaunee

We had ridden forever
our every waking moment
pedalling through rolling dells,
a long thread being drawn out
behind us and in front of us is
the mass of tangled darkness
our bicycles as spinning wheels
making fiber into bound yarns
of memory, somewhat crystalline
and somewhat pliable yet fixed,
malleable, to be made into stories
we had yet to fully discover
the stretch through time and space
here, a long taut thread
setting our range from coast to coast
we were far-ranging animals on machines,
machine animals;
our purpose was to be far-ranging, to see
far, to live just about everywhere, to have done it.
The messy jumble of the to-and-fro daily life
of running in the same circles again and again
was untangled somewhat, or the knots
pulled to tightness, the organization of
our thoughts on the recognition of
the necessities in the constantly unfamiliar
and we rode as if
we had dropped from the sky riding
we had come from nowhere, from over the
horizon of yesterday, from the between times
and we were born like this and we had always been like this
and this is what we knew which was everything.
We found our way and we threw ourselves in
ditches or rested on banks of fog on in the swirling
eddies of rivers when we could find them.
Yes pain and hunger, but the moving, the keep-going,
the absorption through all senses the experience.
Nothing else was, Nothing else mattered
the rumination of bottom brackets and miniscus and the throwdown
of the derailleur and we just were is how we came to be and
sense only had to be made later on.

Exercise Sombrero

He had a propensity to tell stories that ended just as they might get interesting.
“Me and James, we were walking in the woods, and we came to a river.”
My interest piqued, I’d say, “Well, what did you do?”
“We came to a river.”
“Did you find a place where you could wade across? Did you take all your clothes off and hold them over your head while swimming across? Did you walk along it until you found a bridge? Did you have a picnic or look for snakes? Did you turn back?”
“No!” He’d say, and stamp his foot, and retreat.
I got the feeling he had never been in a woods, or had come to a river, at all, ever.

I will not lie for him: The handcrafted acrylic knit exercise poncho is not his invention but prior art that he and I both witnessed with our own eyes. I could tell the idea shook him to his foundation, and he’d never be able to get it out of his mind. That’s more his thing than mine.
However, together we did develop the idea of the exercise sombrero. I animated its use on a stack of his business cards, stapled together, which he proudly showed everybody. He wanted to make an accompanying video of its use, and I tried to persuade him to do a simple WAP version for mobile phone and PDA, as the mobile phone companies were gaining an appetite for marketing this type of thing for amazing profit. We’d need only make one sale, and they could market and distribute it right through people’s phone bills.

But I don’t want to talk about it. He was a fine subject for observation, but obviously, being highly prone to false negatives, and to jumping or abandoning the script, he was not the best subject for my controlled scientific experimentation. It wasn’t helping matters at all.

Differential Settlement, plus one.

I believe I have worked with your cousin before; Steve. Perhaps you can confirm or deny my working theory about him: That his parents used an old microwave turned on its side as his bassinet and kept it on low power all the time to keep him warm.
We were very much at cross-purposes, which was very hard for me to figure out, on account of his lying, his refusal to answer my questions, and his refusal to state his reasons for refusing to answer my questions. Smarter women simply left the facilities, but I was desperate, with nowhere else to go, and odder and odder gossip coming out; stirring up relationships that had been in a benign stasis for years. Can’t be friends with everyone. Women whose snubs I had come to accept as a matter of fact suddenly licked their lips and asked me provocative, presumptuous, and impertinent questions. Was I to leap at the chance to unburden myself to someone who had been occluding fifteen degrees of my field of vision for months, without the slightest nod of acknowledgement?
I was creeped out. I did not want to know what it was about; I just wanted it to go away. The idea of setting this all to right, a particularly hard case, since these women appeared so entirely misinformed, exhausted me. I wanted them to just go back to being who they had been.
The whole place was built on a filled in pond. On my own maps, there was still a pond there. Sometimes the ground belched up sulfurous odors that the management tried to cover up with splashes from a 55-gallon drum of mint. Massive potholes showed up, inside the building and out, from time to time, on account of the differential settlement of the pond sludge, washed out in pockets, seasonally.
A creek remained and looped around the complex, pouring in and out of culverts under the busy road. One time Steve and I watched a ragged cat, going frantic and mewling in the parking lot.
“It doesn’t know what to do. It’s trapped by the creek and afraid to cross the road.” I said.
“Barbara’s like that.”
Barbara had been the worst offender. The first few times I had given her a hello or a nod, she wheeled around on her heels, and went the other way. I let it alone. So be it. But now she was openly insulting me, and encouraging people to join her in “golf applause” as I entered the building. I was asking Steve’s help in figuring out how to put down her attacks. I really didn’t want to know what her problem was, but now it had perhaps become my business.
“Okay, then: Tell me what the deal is with Barbara.”
Steve looked at me hard and walked away.
More than once he boasted that he knew smart people. He teased me that he knew someone who could be both very profound and very dirty at the same time. I told him I would very much appreciate an introduction to such a person. He sniffed, and made a quarter-turn away while thumbing his phone.
I am recalling he mentioned you once. I said given my own history, I was not aware of you, but I was willing to believe that you were as real as he said, and please, tell me more. He refused.
So, how to believe, how to believe how to believe my own bullshit? If truth belonged to the past, then my compulsive truth-telling bound me to keep living it. If things were to be different, I would have to be able to see things as other than they were, to put aside the truth as I knew it.
Take the hydrogen car … by now one can watch video demonstrations of one on Youtube. Oh, yeah, a car that runs on water; what an amazing extension of the potato clock! But no, it didn’t come from the potato clock … it came from people who wanted a car that runs on water. And it still didn’t meet the standards to be licensed to run on an American street. Maybe it would only work for a few days until its works got gummed up with the patina of oxidation or bubbling corrosion. – a car that needed its cylinders re-bored with every fill-up! Oh, there I go again.
For a time, I tried asking people who believed in me why it was they did. Their answers quickly disintegrated into tenuous and sad personal comparisons: Really, I was alone.
One time Steve’s family had given him a book on fixing vision through muscle control. “Oh, really, a book on squinting?” I said. He got angry again.
I can only recall one spell I’ve made in my life, and it was for Steve, who incessantly complained about his life, and specifically about being a coward. His pain, about things that he could and couldn’t control, to my mind specifically related to his cowardice; became my preoccupation, as I tried to find a way to end his high-pitched bleating short of stuffing a towel down his throat. This spell was the “Inverse Pinocchio.” [I’m having trouble finding it for you in my journals at the moment. It used to be in the SENT TEXTS of a cell phone I no longer have.]
I couldn’t tell if the spell had helped him out. He would never let on if I was right, and besides his cowardice, he had a tendency to impulsive idiocy that threw everything off at the last moment.

Frost Heave Surfer

“Okay, because see, I’d like it if you choose what you want to do with the eggs, and I’ll choose my own friends.” He’d drape his wizened, decimated wing over his head and slyly peek out through a gap. We’d have to see if that would stand, because I could see his ideal was to hold the whole disposition-of-the-eggs thing over my head while screwing up my associations according to his whims. Finally, he got caught up in a hawser and strangled while fishing on the docks. It was purely accidental, but I felt bad about because I really did want him dead.
The thing about William was this: The bigger mess of promises he made to the client, the bigger the mess I cleaned up, the bigger the mess of money I made so I could go off in the woods and get over it all by myself. The comfort of others never quite did it for me. Better would be a recitation of logical axioms and small theorems, and a listing of elemental concepts: There was certainty one could rely on..
As much as I kind of wished it could be a peaceful stasis all the time, the fact is, bullshit makes the world go around. And, even, it’s fun. The ridiculous jams that William put us in made me laugh. Of course I wanted to run, too. I wanted to just throw it and yell, “You’re on your own!” over my shoulder. At times when I wasn’t being torn apart by having to deny far, far too much of the reality that I felt I had to grip with all twenty digits, every second of every minute of every waking hour, until I could retreat into my own subconscious where I maintained my own properly-corrected gravity such that I could rest on a surface without violent lateral upswells smacking me around.
I was aware my neurotic attachment to the factual truth held me back. It was a rigidity in my own mind. that I couldn’t throw off one reality for another. Sure, I could make things up, but only in a very ploddingly aware, conscious way. I would ask William, quite earnestly, how did he rectify the replacement of one old set of lies with a new set of contradictory lies? I really wanted to know how to do it, as it would help me get on with things, but it just pissed him off. That was rather unfair, I thought.
William seemed to think of what I did, applying knowledge to effort, as magic. Called me “Rumplestilskin,” but I thought I was more like the hapless maiden; besides, I quite remember doing the work.
I knew it was a drag, too, to need to know, to have things make sense. But the footings have to be 3’ deep at this latitude to prevent frost heave. Maybe frost heave was just the thing. I could become a frost heave surfer …
Because I had already learned just about every fact there was, about everything, and it hadn’t done the trick for me. Something eluded me. If I knew all the facts, what was left?
Believing. What beliefs should I believe? Finding my first ideas of belief intolerable, how much belief would do the trick? I had to believe, at minimum, that I was capable of believing. Okay, Check. And what did I believe? I did believe I could beat this thing.

... 11-07-08

We had rescued an ancient parrot from the ship, and the first week we kept it in the office. Birds aren't that good at sums and such, but they're really pretty good at reading moods, which mainly means they'll do what they can to get under your skin rather than even you out: The joke's always on you.
More and more the parrot sidled closer to me and watched me with his eons-stained eye. It wasn't the kind of beast you would want to pat or coddle and I was never one for enticing animals with treats. So, well, there he was, without any encouragement on my part, trying to badger me into laughing at myself.
I was working on plans for a hotel in upstate New York, and because I was bored and the client irritated me, I put in an extensive tunnel system accessible from the wine cellar that led out to the back of a waterfall at a nearby river. I set a date in the future to raid the cellar and have a picnic behind the falls. The whole time the Admiral was pecking at the chelenque that decorated my hat with his broken beak. The bird's breath was like rotting melons.
"Guilty conscience! Best good girl! Midnight oil! Toe the line! Stand and deliver! "
"I don't think so, asshole."
"Admiral!"
"Admiral Asshole, it is."
The bird began to tear things up if he wasn't with me, and the kind of people who were more willing to take in an ugly old bird such as Double-A were the kind whose feelings were more readily hurt by his constant niggling and insults. So, he was my "pet," or, I was some kind of loosely-held captive of his. He was actually handy at driving away people I'd rather not talk to; it was his one concession to cooperation with me, except when he wanted to play matchmaker.
Although I was assured he was a "he" -- his big scaly purple coxcomb was said to be the definitive sign -- he had an odd habit of laying eggs whenever he was overexcited. It was weird that each egg looked as old as he was -- they looked tattooed and gessoed over, heiroglyphics and runes, several layers deep, were scratched into their worn out, chipped nacre.
Each time, he'd look at me and say, "What're you gonna do with it?"
"What do you want to do with it, Double-A?"
"Pickle it!"

Where what was none of my business becomes all my fault.

I know you’re under stress and you are flaming out every week. That it seems to be about me this time, but yet looks nothing like me, is not surprising. Last week it was over a mutual friend who deleted you out of the blue. I tried to tell you that I knew she had priorities to set in her own life and MySpace took a backseat to IRL. Everyone who has known you for any length of time knows your propensity to blow things out of proportion.
Even with the “Mike” thing, you didn’t manage to show him to be any more than a button-pressing dickhead. Admit it, there are other things in your life more stressful than knowing that an asshole breathes in Arizona.
I think your general tactic of preying on the unhappy by empathizing with them and pumping them for information, sitting on their heads and then noisily threatening to dump them is reprehensible. Whether you ARE Sonia or are merely manipulating her with your spy characters, I find your behavior in either instance despicable.
That you appear the most vulnerable at the same time as you are most despicable is a problem. You make yourself appear so unable to deal with reality and I have no wish to destroy you.
As to your dealings with me:
When I ask you a straight question, your secret societies of interconnected “colleagues” keep getting in the way of you giving me straight answers. Your attempts to control my relationships with other people by hinting vaguely at how I am aggravating their secret pains smacks of plain manipulation.
If a girlfriend cannot answer a girlfriend: “Is that guy flirting with me,” and “You said you know him; is he available?” Then what good is said girlfriend?
Even though I appreciate your enthusiasm for my April-May project, “Mumsy Darling,” I have come to regret keeping confidences with you.
I wrote on a page for you, knowing full well you were trying to attract the attention of someone whom you would not name for me. I was actually drawn in mainly (and what other reason would I have, besides my sheer delight in writing [but in this instance, not under my own moniker]) by wanting to know the object of your deceit. Is that so wrong, considering? You micromanaged me, and apparently other writers, right off of the page. It was hard to freely write without crossing your secret agenda(s). Think about that. No one can help you when your goals are so unclear. What do you really want? Consider where your tactics take you, time and again. Your dramatic calls for pledges of felty from people who really are unable to help you is painful to watch. I wish that you could keep for yourself more of the self-worth that you deserve for the things you have accomplished in life. You treat yourself and others as buckets or sacks that are either grandiosely full or entirely, contemptuously, devoid, dependent on the current wind. That is not how it is.

gingerbread

Of course it had to be in drydock. It's tricky these days with the big ships. A draft too deep keeps them from going into more shallow ports, making some really exciting small transactions, but of course offers a lot more stability, more amenities, more freightage, economies of scale.
On the side I worked on a dove-winged nautilus balloon I planned to take up the Appalachain Trail. I would walk it some days, the balloon tethered to my wrist, and fly on days when the wind was right. I wouldn't have to set up camp but instead tie or stake off the balloon and climb up for the night. It broke up the monotony of having to hike every day, and gave my knees time to recover. And I had a compact studio up there. Last time I planned such an adventure, there was a following. People said I did it for the attention, but that wasn't true; I did it to see what would happen and for my own delight. Only now do I think that maybe I should have paid more attention to the people. I only worked until I had enough money to be away. Save for a very few, people drained me. A certain type worked me like a handpump until the water stopped running clear, then cursed me for taking their attention.
Then there was some other stuff. I had a habit of "taking it back to first principles" that I knew drove everyone else crazy, but I couldn't stand working on a small section of the problem, cutting all the facets right there for some precision optical piece, to reflect back maximum sparkle from light coming from an expected angle of incident that in truth would never occur in this hemisphere. Frankly, I didn't trust anyone. There were times when I'd dive right in, saying, "I will suppose everything you say is true and complete; here we go …" But other times, I'd check the reasoning, Then I'd check the math. Then I'd look hard into his eyes, trying to fathom why he'd think he'd said enough for anyone to go on. "Are you shitting me?"
"That's not what it's about!" William would yell at me.
"What do you mean, that's not what it's about?" I'd say. "You're telling me that doing this project will somehow make the sun shine from the North?"
"It's a drawing; just a little razzle-dazzle. We're just trying to get everyone on board."
"On board with the sun coming from the North, and then we'll just change everything around?"
These things were left to me. William would "yes" the project into total untenability and then bring me in, toward the tail-end. Wagging the dog. Later, the client would be belching my phrases at me out of context, historically technical terms coming back with smarting, personal connotation. "Gingerbread!" I would know William tried to straighten-things-out-without-really-straightening-things-out. He was a boneless mask I spoke through, desperate to be the "good cop," out of his depth but demanding the authority of his position, so frightened to make necessary corrections that the issues were pushed to absolute absurdity. And I wasn't the "Bad Cop," I wasn't "being negative," I was just going through the caveats and necessary steps to make the thing really real. Was it or wasn't it the goal? We'd make the thing, no? Or should I get off of your cloud?
There was some other kind of necessary step I wasn't getting. That's why my balloon had to be built up from salvage, scrap-wood, and used building paper from a demo site. I considered myself a genius of making-do.
I envied William, but I didn't understand it, that part where he'd do a little dance, shine the client's shoes with fresh donkey-dung, inhale and sigh, pull a silk cord and have an anvil land on his head, waddle forward, de-accordionate himself, bow, and take a money shower.

[cont.] ... That's nothing (2)

I felt I had become used to being disappointed by him. I have known architects who design the same building over and over again, in some cases, chasing after what the client wants, giving more of what it was that brought the greatest eyebrow-raise, to see if, eventually, POW! His chair would topple back from the force of his eyebrows, then his arms, following, shooting up; Hooray! … And it would all be because that arch, the way it sprung from the capitals of the columns, its traversal through the great overhead, had been finally perfected in form and scale and placement to cause utter astounding delight.
Larry told me this: “When all the juniors are presenting drawings to him, I study his face. And when I see he likes it, I look and see what it is and what he’s talking about. The next time, I DRAW THAT EXACT THING! I COPY IT! I draw into the design EVERY ONE of the elements he admired that day!”
It took me years before I figured out he was trying quite earnestly to give me kindly advice. I thought he was complaining about how desperate he had gotten and how bereft of inspiration and enslaved to that single client he was. He was broken. He told me all the time he was a hack with no self-respect. “But YOU …” he’d say, and never finish.
And the client was a simpleton who liked the same forms over and over again, and wouldn’t care, or wouldn’t notice or wouldn’t remark that he was getting the same oatmeal as he had had the day before. Some people not only tolerate familiarity, but prefer it, clasping their hands together and sighing with time-tinged fond delight to hear an old story once again. Comfort! Standardized tests are being devised now not for the college set, but for retirees wanting to be placed in retirement communities where everyone agrees with their positions, and no one has to feel the gnawing dissonance tearing at their brittle, drying, rubbery cracked skull pudding. No to say there isn’t something in it, but then the most terrifying thing would be going for potluck and finding oneself badgered by remaindered crackpots all day.
Perhaps I could take a different tack. Perhaps clients didn’t come because they wanted to be actively engaged in the pursuit of their own delights, but they didn’t want to deal with it, didn’t have any bigger ideas beyond the liking of the trace of a Bezier curve. All-righty, then.
The new project involved the redesign of a massive ship that had been burned down to the waterline, a few charred ribs holding up a small bit amidships. It had loped into the harbor, laboring over gentle rolls, a single sheet on its one remaining withered, charred mast and now lay swamped in the slip. I could probably just start completely over, but everyone, myself included, wanted to make it “just as it was, only better.” There were things a ship was supposed to be and have and do.

[cont.] ... That's nothing

Sometimes it seemed I had become merely a boiler-gauge watcher and fire-stoker, throwing my painstakingly-designed delicate precision machinery to be smelted by his ravenous, fickle-yet-indiscriminate passion; the molten sludge of my designs’ own material oozing through the filigree of the tines and borings of cogs, carefully-set parallels giving way to the buckling of hub-bars and precision-filed disks.
I had met with Franklin more than a few times. He wore the sheen of fellow-well-met over a seething vat of infantile lust. No, he was as charming as a fat, happy infant. But just as one dangles the pendant from one’s necklace in front of him to see his delight, one realizes he is not an infant, but a man, and there were consequences to consider.
He seemed delighted for my company, but at the same time wary, unable to let down his guard. Each time we met seemed some kind of contest. It was hard for me to say who had won at the end of any session; his “You’re catching on” chuckle was only a slight intonation different than his “You’re just not getting it” chuckle and it was as if we were playing “You’re getting warmer,” with him knowing no more about the end but “I’ll know it when I hear it.” Sometimes all the easier to tell him what it was he wanted, but other times he just seemed to be brooding, and making me run back and forth across vast tracts of logical territory. Then I detested him and detested my own earnestness. Where did it end? Something always came next, there was always next time, and his little bent-fingered waggling wave good-bye. “Toodle-Ooo!” he’d say, his bifocals twinkling and throwing a little coin of light down the front of my person. It drove me mad. I’d go back to my drawing board and draw mechanical methods of transport that would carry me away, read the Gazette and make applications to newly-staked-out western cities in need of everything that makes a city.

... That's nothing: Ben Franklin

… That's nothing compared to the international melee between Philadelphia, Boston, and to a lesser extent; Paris in making claim to Ben Franklin. There were offers of tax abatements and gorgeous books; fantastical developments of screw conveyors and fountains; one city even allowed that he could tinker with local time as suited him.

The disorienting phenomenon called the “Bermuda Triangle” was torn from its moorings at its still-suspected longitude and latitude, and resituated over Cambridge, Massachusetts in misjudged attempt to improve the kite-flying conditions in nearby environs.

I myself reviewed numerous drafts concerning provisions for firehouses, pumper trucks, ladder trucks, excessive carrillons beyond the acoustical acuity of any ear, swim tanks in which he might test various mounts and strappings of fins and webbing and “electrocution salons;” any manner of constructions that might appeal to Mr. Franklin’s tastes. I was quite aware, myself, that the man hated to be bested, and that it was wise to present him with hints, such that he would not be surprised by the blueprints, but believe that he had ordered the drawings himself.

So, it was a delicate balance. All work-for-hire arrangements can be kind of dicey this way: Does the cost of security have to be a grating constant denial of value? I pace myself. An eighth-grade health teacher was explaining it to us once: “There’s VOCATION and there’s AH-VOCATION; one you do for money and the other you do for fun, like a hobby, and you don’t expect to be paid for it.”

“So does that mean you’d rather not be teaching here, and no one can expect to make a worthwhile living at what they enjoy?” comes from nowhere.

The nights in the Northern Liberties were filled with the wheezing of bellows and the clanking of non-stop bottling of ale. Days were filled with delighted, excited chatter about new things coming to be, “An order that shew up after closing time, this contraption that I couldn’t help but make up right away to see if it were even possible,” and “Why had it not existed before.” Certainly haste is required in the rectification of the world’s deficit. In truth, those are the only times I feel alive, when some of the gaps are filled in, and I can see a little progress is being made. The boredom of otherwise is painful.

I devised a cipher of several concentric wheels of paper, every manner of material and endeavor and method and individual I knew about town recorded on the outer perimeter of each that I could continue coming up with inventions to stay ahead of the competing burghs. Thus I could turn the wheels a few clicks until I found an intriguing combination, and tell it to one of the girls, who would whisper it to Franklin. I would rather take my inspiration from watching the work of carpenters or blacksmiths, wandering the hardware stores, seeing power looms and printing presses in motion, but I was less and less able to take time from the city office.

We had a series of spies on horseback along the stage road and working on the docks and custom-house that went through the crates and mail packets, kept me informed of our rival’s correspondence and gifts, and arranged the forgery of return letters.