The Bic Velocity Bold 1.6 Ballpoint Pen

This is not a package of Bic Atlantis pens. "Velocity Bold" is not a subset of the Atlantis brand. It is it's own thing. I don't know what's going on in this photo.

I've been handing people pens and asking them to sign things for something like fifteen years. No one had ever commented on any of the pens I've used until three years ago when I picked up a pack of Velocity Bold 1.6 Bics.

People really like this pen. Approximately one in twenty signers will comment on it. A few have asked me to carefully dictate the model specifics while they copy down the information. I've given dozen or so away to people who have either asked for one or who have lamented not being able to get out of the house to go look for one. As a life-long scribbler, note taker and doodler, I understand that the joy of a good pen is non-trivial.

The Velocity Bold 1.6 (the name of which implies that there is a 1.5 or 1.7 (there's not) and lets me enjoy presenting the illusion that my taste is that finely tuned -- (it isn't)) isn't without its faults. Writing a long, straight and continuous line guarantees that the ink will blotch on the next curved stroke. The ink path is too wide to repair a long string of miscopied numbers by sneakily inserting a "9" into the snug little space where you'd forgotten to put one. If you're writing in some limited area where precision is a going concern, you've got to fall back to the practical, scratchy, thin-lined realm of the Bic Atlantis.

The Atlantis is a pretender to the auspicious with its silent retracting mechanism and gleaming real (but let's not kid ourselves... disposable) metal clip -- instantly identifiable to anyone who'd care to identify it. It wants to goosestep angularly across graph paper and almost wishes out loud that the next thing you write will be a quadratic equation. Care to break its heart? Bend the clip out away from the body to accommodate the fat synthetically blended material of a work shirt. Care to watch it die? They stop working at at temperatures below eighteen degrees Fahrenheit.

Signing your name with a Bic Atlantis is a lot like having tartar scraped away from your gumline where using a Velocity Bold 1.6 might be what it's like to rub oil on a swimsuit model.

That said, what's up with this package? I find it hard to believe that the people at Bic actually understand that there are VB1.6 loyalists trapped in an Atlantis world, but I'm clinging to that idea. As I go back to work to strain with my questionable handwriting in those restrictive little data tables, I'm going to want to feel like a well-behaved erudite at a Brahms recital, but whose shitty car is parked down the block with a Sex Pistols cassette in the half-busted tape deck, and whose indecipherable signature rings with the broad, dark and inky scream of a gouged Telecaster because that's really all I'm looking for when I buy a 4-pack of ballpoint pens.

A Nostradamic Consideration of the 1988 Song "Kiss me, Son of God" by They Might Be Giants*

*(because I've been informed by my loving family that no one wants to spend the afternoon listening to me tune my piano)

I used some of my Father's Day "do whatever you want" time to reacquaint myself with a TMBG album I really liked. And this song came up, which I haven't thought of in years.

Most of the discussion around "Kiss me, Son of God" has been speculation about whether or not the song was really about some specific political figure or just some hyperbolic archetype.  I've never explored any such discussion, but am now unable to keep myself from overlaying these lyrics over our current American, let's say... "situation".

And a hearty "vaya con Dios" to everyone who is now bailing.  I get it.  I really do.

Verse 1

I built a little empire out of some crazy garbage

Called the blood of the exploited working class

[Trump's real estate carer has been characterized by refusing to honor contracts of those he's hired -- particularly in construction and maintenance.]

But they've overcome their shyness

Now they're calling me Your Highness

[His support remains strong among working class voters]

And a world screams, "Kiss me, Son of God"

Verse 2 

I destroyed a bond of friendship and respect

Between the only people left who'd even look me in the eye

[The most loyal of the Trump loyalists, Michael Cohen, is drowning in legal fees that might, one would think, be paid by the multi-billionaire to whom he has pledged his unflagging loyalty.]

Now I laugh and make a fortune

Off the same ones that I tortured

[I fairness, I see no direct financial connection between Trump's self-enrichment and his advocacy for torture -- which persists in the face of all evidence that it is useless in the cause of information gathering. Those two despicable things exist independent of each other.]

And a world screams, "Kiss me, Son of God"

Bridge

I look like Jesus, so they say

[Surprisingly, given his history and contemporary public behavior, Trump captured the support of the Christian Evangelicals.]

But Mr. Jesus is very far away

[In practice, Trump's policies, which include the separation of tiny kids from their refugee parents and denying amnesty to victims of domestic abuse and gang violence, are so far removed from the most basic core principles of Christianity as to imply that Christian supporters of these practices do not have so much as a single clue as to what they've been pretending to believe for all this time.] 

Now you're the only one here who can tell me if it's true

["You're the only one" because the President has no faith in science or any written document that was not created for the express purpose of massaging his fragile fucking ego.]

That you love me and I love me

[*the author makes the "well obviously" gesture*]

Refrain

I built a little empire out of some crazy garbage

Called the blood of the exploited working class

[To underline what was previously stated, consider that he was sued for nonpayment by the USA Freedom Kids -- the little dancing girls from his campaign appearances. Like... come on!]

But they've overcome their shyness

[According the the FBI Uniform Crime Reporting Program, racially motivated hate crimes tripled on November 9th, 2016]

Now they're calling me Your Highness

[Of Kim Jung Un: "He speaks and his people sit up at attention. I want my people to do the same." Source: Fox & Friends.]

And a world screams, "Kiss me, Son of God"

[Enjoy the rallies -- buy a hat!]

Yes, the world screams, "Kiss me, Son of God"

[There's no rush... most of the floor space the Trump Presidential Library will be a Gift Shop.]

Songwriters: John Flansburgh / John Linnell / John C. Flansburgh / John S. Linnell

Kiss Me, Son of God lyrics © Warner/Chappell Music, Inc

Love and Rain

We were married on a rainy day,
The sky was yellow and the grass was gray,
We signed the papers and were on our way,
I do it for your love.

- Paul Simon

On a Saturday in 1994, I'd smoked three Marlboro reds on the drive from Meadowlands to Greensburg and left the windows up to keep the rain off of my tux. Hours later, after my new brother-in-law drove my car from the church to the fire hall, my bride blamed the smell of cigarettes on him and I, the newest entrant into the family, didn't say a thing.

It rained that day the way that makes you forget when the rain started. An unbroken slate of relentlessly gray sky hammered rain on a sinless flock of congregants who crowded together and evaporated rainwater and all of nature's judgment in great plumes of invisible humidity into the vaulted ceiling of a Methodist church. They looked on with the detached bemusement of casual NASCAR fans with no skin in this game at all.

More scared and stupid than I'd ever been in my short lifetime of being scared and stupid, I stood there like it would all be okay. (The) bride smiled at me and showed her lower teeth for good measure like a private joke. "This is crazy." "This is really happening." "What are we going to talk about when this is over because this is the only thing we've talked about for almost a year." Her eyes, bright and wide, said everything.

I was swimming my own cold pool of doubt. I was going to pay the rent a week late with money from the bridal dance. I'd just been busted down to cashier for not selling extended warranties at a job I hated. I was about to begin two courses of antibiotics and eleven days of walking around with a fever. In sixteen weeks, there'd be a phone call in which someone would offhandedly predict we'd break up within a year and I'd wonder what they knew that I didn't know because what the hell did I know to begin with?

Now, decades hence, I've seen the pictures in retirement homes and assisted living facilities, of young, mid-century dudes with pompadours and crooked grins standing next to their young wives in floral prints and pearls. People dressed this way, in post-war refinery, had always seemed older than I could ever get -- until some point two years ago, when they suddenly started looking like teenagers. And with that paradigm shift came the sudden and skull-struck realization that the thing I'd thought was specific to me was, in fact, universal. That we're all making this up as we go along. That they might have stood as we stood, rain hammering the stained glass like it wanted to settle some old score.

An artist can only paint so many placid and sunny seascapes before he sickens of it and renders a set of storm gray skies and cobalt waves with wisping spray and broken foam, where some tattered schooner with rain-slick sails lurches and breaks through the swells. Even on this side of the frame, we hear the thunder and wind and the creaking of the hull which is sure to break and yet, somehow, hasn't.

Twenty three years has turned recollection of that Saturday, of my timidity and apprehension, into wild-eyed, derelict and reckless crazylove in which I am dumbstruck and aimlessly blind.

Here, now, in this then unimaginable stretch of road, where where we skid and pitch and fade from our fixed, fast course, where the water can creep and buckle ancient plaster ceilings or bow a basement wall with the malignant indifference of the fiercest pathogen, where torrents swarm and twist as if they were specifically bent on tearing apart any two people who'd pledged, above anything else in this world, not to hurt each other. Does it rain?

You're goddamn right it rains.


And we don't care.














Happy anniversary, Tracey.

Rickles's Wake

From nowhere, there was a sudden flash of seasickness. Johnny Carson had leaned over to a young, pretty actress and intimated, "you'll be forty-seven someday."

Carson was, himself, forty seven in this clip. As was his main guest -- Don Rickles, the man who'd brought me here -- something like forty-four years later and only a day after his death. In this clip, and the others I watched that night, Rickles was bemoaning his station in life -- being a club comic at this point in his career. Carson, as Rickles was wont to remind us all, was a millionaire a couple of times over. Their mutual friend, Bob Newhart, was a year into his first sitcom deal. Playful as it seemed on the surface, it was hard not to notice, maybe only because his course was now known to be set and fixed, Rickles's insecurity.

These aren't new clips to me. I've rabbit-holed on Don Rickles a few times. I've seen the roasts, which are edited so badly you can barely watch, and I've watched the Tonight Show interviews at all stages of his spikey career. The best of these were from the "CPO Sharky" era when Rickles was close, so close, to the sitcom legecy, the prestige and the security that came with it, with Carson needling him about the show's precarious spot in the NBC fall lineup. The ribbing was stark and cruel, but Rickles was one of the only people Carson would talk to this way. Rickles could take it. The studio audience marvled at the unfamiliar acid-laced approach of their Late-Night buddy and watched Mr. Warmth squirm on the end of his fork. We all got to be insiders. We all got to be thankful that Rickles, for all his venom and discontent, was just as dissatisfied with his lot as we-- or, more to the point, our parents -- congregates of the Silent Generation, lit only by their console TV's in their ranch style suburban homes and constantly wondering if this was as good as things were likely to get and not wanting to go to sleep because tomorrow was going to be just another mundane interval in their typical and unimprovable American lives -- and dear God can't I just stay here with these people in Burbank for just another hour?

We're not supposed to be watching this.

It was supposed to be ephemeral. It's just a trick of technology that we're here in 2017 and able to call up the collected appearances of a performer as the warmth of his lifeless core slowly drops to room temperature. Twenty years ago, we crossed this quiet milestone where we, the human race, had more space to store digital information than we had digital information to store. Then, Game On. Digitize everything. Build a box to show the frozen ghosts to anyone curious enough to call them up. Without intending to, we turned seventy years of entertainment into a haunted house where no one knows they're dead.

"You'll be forty seven some day."

No, she won't.

There's a sweaty clip from some Network Stars show where Gabe Kaplan is playing, for reasons no one will endorse, pinball.  Pinball -- on primetime network television. It's long and it's terrible, and everyone knows it. The contempt of both Carson and Rickles is palpable.

The show is a summer replacement.   The windows in the long, low, blue-glowing, cathode-lit brick ranch homes are open and the chilled breezes of autumn will never get here. America will wake in the warm steam of their own sweat-soaked nightshirt. Next year, a president will leave the White House in disgrace and for him there will be bourbon-drunk nights when the south lawn spins beyond the night-mirrored windows of the Oval Office, the world ruined with the pointless ambition of the California lawyer, of a Vegas comic, of the prettiest girl in a class from some Illinois high school.

Carson is forty-seven, precisely as old as I am, on the night of the eleventh anniversary of his taking over the Tonight Show. He and Rickles reminisce about where they were eleven years ago. When they are joined by a young, perky Carol Wayne, the resident sketch girl, and they ask her where she was in 1962. She jabs that she was in high school, and teases that they are terribly old, and they remind her that she'll be forty seven some day, not knowing that she'll be found dead on a Mexican beach at forty-two.

I don't know why I instinctively know Carol Wayne didn't see forty-seven. My memory isn't that good, but the living room spins and my mouth becomes dry. A smartphone search later, my inkling crescendos into a dread that sickens me like a whiff of bad meat and I clutch the arm of my unremarkable American couch amid the ghosts of stagnant comics, marginalized actresses and sweat-soaked suburbanites all raging against the mundanity of life as it has been dealt, rather than languishing in the larger truth that the most bitter losers and the most opulent winners are all just as gone as gone can be.

Life and Graph Paper

[A warning:  this is going to feel like being on a long bus ride with someone who can't stop talking about some weird, inaccessible thing which that person finds absolutely fascinating.  I've been rewriting this stupid entry for six weeks and this is as conversational as it's going to get.  I don't think I'm doing justice to the subject matter or to those of you who are nice enough to check in here and look around, but it was either this or the 400 insomnious words I wrote early one morning about Steve Bannon's hair.]

It's weird, the things that stay with you.

In October of 1984, I read an article in Omni  magazine about a game developed by an English mathematician. That article contained a single sentence, the philosophical ramifications of which I'm still feeling thirty years later, which is a lot of bang for the buck for any magazine, much less one I'd bought just because it had a lot of pictures of plasma generators in it.

In 1970, John Conway began experimenting with cellular automation -- a concept that had existed since the late forties but enjoyed little popular interest for reasons that are about to become bluntly apparent.

Cellular automation (CA) is simply applying a set of rules to an array of cells so that the condition of any one cell is influenced by the cells around it. So, you'd have a sheet of graph paper, you'd designate some squares as being in some specific state, you'd get a second sheet of graph paper and apply your rules to calculate the influence of the cells on one another. The second sheet represents the second "generation" of cells. And you'd repeat this for as long as the rules continued to change the state of the array.  Sound fun?

We're already in deep water here, so let's go ahead and touch the bottom of the pool before we come up for air.

As an illustration of CA's limited early appeal, consider that John von Neumann, one of its inventors, seems to have spent the early fifties using it as the world's least sexy way to model reproduction in biological systems. He designed three dimensional cellular arrays (bleh) in which cells could exist in twenty nine different states (which makes my head hurt) as governed by differential equations (I don't know what those are). I'm sure he was having a blast with all of that but, wow. No thank you.

In 1969, John Conway's interest in CA led to his developing a set of rules that produced interesting results and, at the same time, were easy to understand. The net result being that a lot of people began playing with and exploring cellular arrays that were governed by his rules, which were applied to a nice, manageable, hobbyist-friendly two dimensional array. Those rules are these:

• Cells exist in only two states, either alive or dead.
• A dead cell becomes alive if three of its neighboring cells are alive.
• A living cell dies if less than two or more than three of its neighboring cells are alive.

Here's an illustration from that article which traces the development of a shape called the "T tetromino," the name of which communicates with equal effectiveness the shape of the configuration as well as how annoying it must have been to share a dorm room, work space or cafeteria table with anyone who was so deeply into this.

There's a recursion, by the way, in the last two steps.  Here's a written description of what's going on.

The four sets of three connected red dots designate these "cells" as "alive." Apply the rules, you'll see that the two squares on the ends, being connected to only one "living cell," will "die" in the next "generation", the middle "cell," being connected to two "living" cells, survives to the next "generation", and that there are two currently "dead" cells that will "born" because they are adjacent to three "living" cells. This results in three "alive" cells being arranged in a vertical/horizontal line which, obviously, will revert to the original configuration in the next generation, making this shape a "blinker" and some people find all of this very "interesting."

I'm not sure I actually would have been one of those interested people if the article which described Conway's game ("Life," as he came to call it) hadn't contained the following quote from a book Conway co-authored entitled Winning Ways (Academic Press, 1982). The first time I read it, I felt like someone had pulled my brain out through my eye. 

"It's probable, given a large enough Life space, initially in a random state, that after a long time, intelligent, self-replicating animals will emerge and populate some part of the space."

The implications of that statement hit me very hard because it was the first time I'd ever considered what it was that defines something as being alive.

There's that philosophical safe haven of life being inherently biological, but relying on such a narrow definition seems arbitrary when we're just thinking about a series of reactions.  The temptation to speculate that it's possible for "living creatures" to spawn and begin conducting their own business in this realm was hard to dismiss amid the increasing availability of computers allowing Life enthusiasts to generate large, random colonies of shapes and watch the consequent battle between order and mayhem.  Some of the simulation's emergent shapes do actually crawl around on the grid in a cohesive way.  Some self-replicate.  Some produce parts that collide with other parts generated by different clusters and they, in turn merge into configurations that crawl off to do Tron-knows-what in some other part of the grid.  It's weird.

You see this sort of thing happening in Minecraft now, but it was probably significantly trippy the first time someone designed configurations of cells that can be employed to create logic gates which will work identically to (although, for now, more slowly than) the two billion transistors that do the heavy lifting inside every iPhone 6.  Putting aside that the whole system is deterministic (that's an existential panic attack for another day) it really kind of does seem like there is some way that these little blinky so-and-so's might be considered to be, on some level, awake.

But, this is the thing that really creeped me out at fifteen.

If any of those configurations prove to meet the criteria for being alive, it's not because they exist now in digital environments and are propelled by CPU cycles. Bear in mind that Conway and early devotees of this game were executing it by hand. Every behavior exists in some theoretical realm waiting to be described by either a blazingly fast supercomputer or a compulsively diligent math hobbyist with cases of pre-sharpened pencils and stacks upon stacks of graph paper.  If it's possible for configurations of dots on paper can be considered alive, "alive in a way that a virus is not," according to someone named Poundstone who is quoted in the article and is undoubtedly smarter than I am by a bunch, then I am never... ever... going to Office Max again.

My reacquaintance with the Omni article happened around the same time I heard something really interesting on Tested's Still Untitled podcast:  Photosynthesis and combustion are the same process running in two different directions. One converts hydrocarbons and oxygen into carbon dioxide, light and heat via an exothermic reaction, the other uses an endothermic reaction to convert carbon dioxide, light and heat into hydrocarbons and oxygen. In summary, to quote Adam Savage, the speaker who had just laid this at the listener's feet, "So the opposite of fire... is plants."

That's interesting and all, but plants are alive and fire, by most conventional definitions, is not.

Consider, though, that one of most vague definitions of life, "matter capable of extracting energy from the environment for replication," seems so broadly inclusive as to bestow the quality of life to fire. It also, kind of, in a way, if you step back a couple of feet and squint, describes the existence of these infuriating little theoretical squares within cellular automata if you categorize the constant intellectual curiosity of a hundred thousand people as "energy," which is not a case I'd want to argue against. 

The capacity exists now for arrays large enough to accommodate Conway's imagined creatures, and so far, nothing has tapped on the glass.  Online resources for the game are vast, dizzying videos of intricate configurations are available on Youtube, as are interviews with John Conway -- who is glad that people found this pursuit interesting, but laments that is has overshadowed his other accomplishments.  Maybe that's the infestation he was really sniffing out thirty years ago.





Appendix:  

[Here's a timeline of my personal history with Life.]

October 1984 -- I read the aforementioned article in Omni 

Early 1985 -- I attempt to re-read article and realize I've misplaced the magazine

Rest of 1985 -- I search the house for the magazine.

1986-1990 -- I browse libraries and used book sales for said issue without success, although I do accumulate other back issues of Omni. So, yay.

1990 -- Someone gives me a copy of Applesoft BASIC and I take a shot at coding a program that will actually run these rules. I eventually get something to crank out large sets of coordinates and cell-states, but every attempt to write a program that turns all of this into observable graphics fails on every level.  Well, mostly just the one level.  The one where they don't run.  We'll never know if they could have failed on some other more interesting level.  I like to think they would have, but I'm kind of a dreamer.

1993 -- I get a job selling computers and discover that there is a version of Conway's Life included on the third Microsoft Entertainment Pack. reading the Help file, I discover the rules I had implemented in my version were wrong, invalidating all of my incomplete programming and also all of the cycles [which I had played out on graph paper and was, yes, a little cumbersome but totally doable -- not that you'd know or care to find out].

1994 -- I find some discussions and software on CompuServe (the online service I joined because I'd read about it in, as it turns out, that same issue of Omni). 

1995 -- Omni stops publication.

2013 -- The entire run of Omni becomes available in PDF format at archive.org.

2015 -- The entire run of Omni becomes unavailable in PDF format at archive.org.

Like, last Thursday or something -- I kind of, you know... Pirate Bay that archive. And here we are.

Autumn, 2016

Wearing a yellow hardhat and inattentive stare, a PennDOT signaler stands along a paving crew and absentmindedly executes a series of drop spins with her little orange flag, so obviously lost in the recollection of some two, five or fifteen-year-old halftime marching band performance that you can all but hear the crackle of the drum line.  The tempo of the music that only she is hearing dips her knee on every second beat and rocks her slightly in her tar-smudged Timberlands.

Just downtraffic of the PennDOT crew, a groundhog, dead but intact, still a day away from the first wave of flies, lies half inside and half outside of a circle drawn by a surveying crew.  His brown fur, dull but still inviting in a "go ahead and pet my tummy" sort of way, is striped with a single, vivid arc of pink Krylon Quick-Mark road paint.  I'm confident that no one pets his tummy.

*     *     *

Two women at the front desk of an empty dentist office are talking about the approaching holidays and one discloses to the other her strategy of gradually accumulating small gifts as stocking stuffers, but accidentally describes them as "stuffing stalkers" and sends her co worker into a surprised burst of snot-shaking laughter.  This confuses the woman, who looks to me and then to her laughing companion and asks, "What? What did I say?"  This makes the co-worker laugh much harder.

*     *     *

Weeks earlier, in a different dentist office, I'm let in through the locked door to the treatment area by woman who is the last employee in the building and who is talking on her cell phone as she holds the door for me.  I smile and nod.

Because there is no other sound in the place other than her voice, and despite my polite disinterest in what she's saying, I gradually come to realize that she's describing to someone her recent experience of being in a hospital room with someone who, in turn, codes, is set upon by a crash team, is jolted and injected and ventilated, and is ultimately pronounced dead within the space of minutes.  By the time I finish transferring an armload of cylinders into and out of a rack in a back office, the call has ended and this woman, who I must now ask to let me out of the office and, if it's not too much trouble, sign and print her name on this invoice, has begun to cry very, very hard.

*     *     *

Instead of spending a Saturday afternoon in any sort of productive way, I try to lull myself into a nap by lying on the couch and weeding through my phone contacts.  My finger hovers over the "delete" key as I read the contact information of a person whose name I don't immediately recognize.  I eventually remember him  -- a social worker who is totally blind and whom I'd met only once at a job I used to have.  In the notes of this contact entry, I've mentioned that he has a Rush poster on the wall opposite his desk because he is either a deeply devoted Rush fan, or a vocal Rush critic who shares a workspace with a deeply devoted Rush fan who has a sort of dickhead sense of humor.

I know that this man will continue to exist whether or not I delete him, but I'm also absolutely positive that once I touch the "yes" button in the "are you sure?" dialog box, that I will never, ever, think of him again.  From my limited perspective of the universe, he will cease to exist.  And since my perspective of the universe is the only one I'm ever going to experience, I'm deciding an absurdly large thing which is entirely inconsequential to every other living being who ever has or will exist. This disparity fills me with dread and for some reason scares me into keeping his number.

*     *     *

I hasten to leave the dental office before the laughing woman can collect herself and explain what the other has said.  I want them to exist in my memory forever as they are.

*     *     *

Since the hose I use to dispense liquid oxygen becomes as cold as -300 degrees Fahrenheit and often flops around noisily as its metal re expands, I assume that's what the pronounced "clunk" is that I hear from the back of my truck as I sit in the driver's seat filling out some paperwork in an apartment building parking lot.

Moments later, a woman walks past my side of the cab, startling me a bit.  She's moving quickly, and as she gets further away, I can see that she is dragging a long white cane so that the tip engages the asphalt ahead of and slightly to the right of her path.  When that tip engages the raised edge of the driveway, she follows it to the street where she continues down the right edge of a moderately busy roadway, her cane scraping along the edge of a drainage rut.  And I'm watching her, because I'm fascinated with how well she is interacting with her environment, how at home she seems, and also I'm wondering how she is going to detect the illegally parked car which is twenty feet ahead of her, now ten, and now five, and now she walks right into it.

The impact with which she hits the car is audible even from this distance.  Now, from my vantage point, pulled as far as possible to the right of the apartment building's roadway in a large vehicle which I had unknowingly put in her usually unobstructed path, I realize that the sound I heard earlier was this woman walking briskly and squarely into the back of my truck .

She has now navigated around to the front of the car which she hit with a force that would have left me rolling around holding one or both of my knees, and she stops.  She bends over to pick something up.  She places the thing into her purse.  And then she picks something else up and places that thing in her purse.  Seeing a redemptive chance to help, I start the truck and head down the hill, but as I get closer to the place where she's dropped her stuff, I start to imagine what the footsteps of a rapidly approaching stranger might sound like to a woman with a visual disability walking alone.  And so I pull over, well uphill of where she is, and watch her like a creep.

*     *     *

I wonder if the Rush poster could possibly still be there after this many years.

*     *     *

In the eternal moment before I approach the crying woman at the desk, I fidget around in the office, picking cylinders up and putting them down, folding and unfolding the invoice noisily so as to remind her there is someone else in the building.  I notice that when I'm not doing anything purposeful with it, my right hand twitches its first three fingers in a rapid and familiar pattern.  I think it does this frequently, and now I recognize it as the trumpet valve fingerings for an ascending C scale.  As I think about it, I'm decades away in some chilly and pristine October.


Later that afternoon, on my way home, when I'm alone in my car, I swear at myself for starting to cry while I think about the groundhog.

Electors

Monday

Oh hey, members of the Electoral College, just wanted to drop a line on behalf of America to see what's up and say that we're all thinking about you. We know you have a big week ahead.

Excuse me. I have something in my eye.

.. .... --- .--. . -.-- --- ..- .... .- ...- . -... . . -. .-- .- - -.-. .... .. -. --. - .... . -. . .-- ...

Sorry about that. Anyway, I want to express our appreciation and support of you. We don't always think of the electors and the huge responsibility they carry. But, you know, sometimes you got to stop and acknowledge the people on the fringes of your life and tell them how you feel. Know something? You're just swell.

Man. What is this? An eyelash? Excuse me again.

.--. .-.. . .- ... . .... . .-.. .--. ..- ...

So if you need anything, like someone to walk your dog or bring the mail in while you're busy, don't be shy. Name it. We're here for you.

Wow. I apologize. I don't know why I picked today to go back to contacts. Give me a minute.

.. -.-. .- -. -. --- - .. -- .- --. .. -. . .- ... . -..- ..- .- .-.. .- -.-. - .. .-- --- ..- .-.. -.. -. --- - .--. . .-. ..-. --- .-. -- ..-. --- .-. --- .-. --- -. -.-- --- ..- - --- ... .- ...- . --- ..- .-. -. .- - .. --- -. ·-·-·- .. -... . --. ..-. --- .-. -.-- --- ..- .-. -- . .-. -.-. -.-- ·-·-·-

Big ups! Be well. Stay safe. Ima go get some Visine. I don't know if this is dust or pollen or what.

.... . .-.. .--. -- . --- -... .. .-- .- -. -.- . -. --- -... .. . ·-·-·- -.-- --- ..- ·----· .-. . -- -.-- --- -. .-.. -.-- .... --- .--. . ·-·-·-

This has been nice. We never talk.

Tuesday

What's up, EC? This a bad time?

I just wanted to drop these cookies off. My neighbor made them and they are delicious, but jeeze. Look how big this box is. This is way too much for our house so I thought you could split them among the 538 of you.

Oh, in case anyone has allergies, these are made with "Wild Rumple Nuts."

Yeah, I know. Me neither.


So anyway, enjoy these "Wild Rumple Nuts" cookies from my neighbor, Anna Grahm. She's a big fan.

Dig you guys... have a great week!

Wednesday

Well, hey there, Electoral College! What a surprise! You come here too? To this off-leash dog park in suburban Pittsburgh? All of you? Well that's great. There's really no partisanship in being a dog owner, is there?

Yeah, that's mine over there. He runs a lot at first, but we've been here about twenty minutes and now he's just sniffing around. That's his thing.

Sure, sure. He loves other dogs. What's your little buddy's name there?

Buford? Aw, that's cute. And you all share custody? All of you?


Oh, no. No no no. I don't think that's weird.


Hm? Me? I was just noodling around on my phone. Reading this thing by Thomas Lux.

Yeah, the poet. You know him?

A "fan?" Well, I don't know much about poetry. But I like the way he bumps words together.

Do I?  No.  Not really. Well, I write a little poetry. Here and there. Just for myself -- as a kind of meditative thing.

No. I couldn't. It's not very good.

Well... okay, Electoral College. I had a little Cabernet in me a couple days ago and I scribbled something down. Like, don't show it to anyone. It's not very good.

Untitled No.38

G azelle-like, our comforts flee
E ven as we reach
T hankless and desperate toward the night.

H arrowed, shrill and lithe,
I guanas stare -- unhurried,
S unning on inconsequential stones,

T angerine hair and eyes like Vicodins.
A nxious, liquidus dreams of
X enophobes abound,
E ntreating them to reason,
S ilently, we wait for night to fall.

Oh, stop it. That's nice of you to say, but...

Okay, thank you. And thanks for reading it. It's nice to get out of your comfort zone now and then, right? Would you like a copy? Here. I'll message it to you in case, you know, you'd like to refer, um... back to it for and reason oh look Buford found a stick!

That's hilarious. Now he wants my dog to chase him. Look at them go.

I bet those little fellas are going to sleep all afternoon.

Thursday

Hey, Electoral College. I'm sorry. I don't want to be THAT guy, but...

Yeah. I'm so sorry. It's a little loud. Just a little. It's not bothering me, but my wife is real sensitive to bass frequencies and, you know... they carry.

No, she's not mad. She told me to be polite and she sends her regards.


Thank you. Yes, that's much better. 

Huh. I couldn't even tell what you were listening to from next door. Of course, now I can hear that The Electors got some Diver Down action goin' on over he-

Oh, really? It's Fair Warning? Those two always blur together for me. That's funny, huh? I guess they weren't, like, the biggest albums.

Oh, yeah. Definitely. Screw Sammy Hagar.

Okay, cool. I'll let you get back to your thing. You guys probably want to kick back a little before your, I imagine, briefings on the CIA findings or whatever...

No, I know. Of course you can't discuss that sort of thing. I wasn't digging, that was just me being careless. You know, careless -- like appointing Rick Perry to head the very agency he forgot the name of during the-

Oh sure. A coincidence. Like asking for names of the department members who attended...

Yeah? Well maybe YOU'RE not reading ENOUGH into it.

No, you're right. You're right. I'm out of line. That was uncalled for. I'm just... it's late. I was sound asleep and now I'm out here in my slippers.

Yeah, I'm a little cold. I keep doing this thing where I buy long johns and then it turns out that they're made of material that's designed to PULL heat away from your body. They never used to have stuff like that. My whole life, the more clothes you put on, the warmer you got. Now, it's kind of a crap shoot.

Oh, no thanks, Electoral College. Tea sounds lovely, but I'm just going to head in. Again, I'm sorry about the whole (waving hands) everything.

Thanks. Have a good night yourself.

Oh, hey! Real quick. I keep forgetting to ask. Does it bother you when I leave the Christmas lights on all night? Heheh -- speaking of the Department of Energy... heh...

You're sure? It's just that I might not put them up next year. I thought this might be sort of the last hoorah.

Oh, I don't know. It's just getting to be a hassle. That's all. And the top string around the roof is getting spotty. There are a lot of burned out bulbs. I don't want to go through and fix all of them next year.

But it's a pretty neat pattern. Look at them.

01010011011000110110100101100101011011100110001101100101001000000110100101110011001000000111001001100101011000010110110000100001

Hm. Makes you think. Ah, well... goodnight.

And hey! (Singing, pointing to Christmas lights)
"Vision of light, child of the night passing byyyyyy..."

You know... from Hang 'em High?

Really? THAT'S on Diver Down? Dammit.

Friday

Heeeey there's my Electors. Get on in here. It's great to see you. Thanks for coming. Let me take your coats.

Wow. Lot of coats. Didn't think this through.

Tell you what, let's make a pile on the couch and one on the loveseat. You want to split it up, like red state/blue state? Is that cool? We're not deepening the divide there, are we? Ha-HAAA! We're just having some fun. This is fun.

Wait, no. Blue states? Obviously, the loveseat, because...

Right. Less of you. Thanks so much.

So, go ahead and have a seat. You can start the salad around if you'd be so kind.

So anyway, this has been really great connecting with you this week. I've learned a lot. I think we've ALL learned a lot. Right? We almost never pay any attention to this stuff. Even the faithless electors are just nameless footnotes in books that election geeks read.

Yeah, well, I meant that in the best possible way. So...you know. Be cool.

Can I be honest with you? Not a lot of people agree with me on this, but I really kind of like having an Electoral College.

Yeah, I mean... just for the gamesmanship. And I know that's a terrible justification for it.

Yeah, you're right. It IS a mixed message. My fondness for the sort of... I don't know, mathematical intrigue that it brings to the election process is weighed against the idea that a vote should be diminished or inflated due to the amount of square mileage that surrounds a voter seems really absurd.

Sure, it's just an opinion.

No, it's just that the argument in favor of it is always accompanied by a population map -- it's like they're relying on our inability to visualize the empty space between...

Well, yeah. I think they're being honest, but like imagine looking down at Heinz Field from a helicopter and there are fifteen thousand people in one color sitting near one end zone and another twelve thousand in a different color are dispersed evenly throughout the rest of those bright yellow empty seats. That paints a very different picture than an electoral map. No one would question the results of a poll among the stadium people.

I don't know what they'd be polling for. Like, what kind of mustard to put on their hot dogs.

You're right. They'd probably go with Heinz mustard.

Yeah, but anyway, now you guys have to define what patriotism is and how it aligns with your morality. For my whole life, I've just thought of you guys as elevator operators -- just some holdover from a quaint era. Now, your whole thing seems really Punk. I mean, the man who won the election is nervous about you. That's... amazing! Your role as safeguard is, like, very evident for the first time that I'm aware of.

Wow! “Talents for low intrigue, and the little arts of popularity.” That's how it's phrased? What's that from?

You know, I've never even read The Federalist Papers. All I know is that "Hamilton wrote the other 51!" Heheh. You know, from the Broadway thing? (Singing) "Why do you assume you're the smartest in the room..."

Never?

(A timer beeps)

Ooo. The potatoes are done. Give me a minute.

(Returns)

Watch out, this bowl is very hot. You guys can start with the vegetables too. Hey, what's that paper? What are you holding?

It was under your plate? Weird.

Really, yours too? You all got one? What's on it?

1,15,18

9,13,1

2,3,85

2,7,81

1,2,14

1,1,1

1,20,22

Is that what they all say? Are they identical?

They are, huh? I don't know. We rented the place settings from a caterer -- I was going to say it's some cataloging thing, but that doesn't make any sense if they're all the same thing.

Oh well, it's probably nothing. Oh by the way, I've got a couple of bottles of this Bordeaux, if anyone's in a wine mood. If you know anything about wine, you'll just have to humor me. I liked the label. That's how I pick 'em.

Yeah, I can't tell anything apart. I keep thinking that it's a skill that will come to me later in life but, come on. How much later is it going to wait?

Yeah, me too. I'm late to the game on a lot of things. Music, movies... books! My God, I'm terrible with books.

No. I'm serious. Like, Gatsby. When did you guys read The Great Gatsby, like high school? Show me hands.

See, almost all of you. I was like 35. That's pretty embarrassing.

Yeah, maybe. Maybe it's better to come to that book as an adult -- scuffed up a little. Faded paint...

I heard Hunter S Thompson used to type copies of Gatsby as, I guess, a writing exercise. Or a meditation. Or...

Right. Or because he was a lunatic. Ha!

Imagine doing that, though. Going through it that thoroughly -- every chapter, every paragraph and every word.

(Picks up glass, swirls wine, repeats thoughtfully, picks up slip of paper) Chapter, paragraph and word.

Well, hey. Know what? As a souvenir of this evening I'm going to keep my little weird piece of paper.

I don't know. I'll probably wind up using it as a bookmark. In fact, I'll probably wind up reading Gatsby again. It's been a while. It seems as good a time as any to consider a story of the disastrous consequences of a very wealthy guy who finally catches what he's been chasing.

Yeah, I'm definitely going to re-read it this year.

Maybe more than once.

Cheers, everybody. Thanks for everything.