Date: Thurs Oct 03 04:54:43 1996

As I think so I do. What is THAT all about? Thinking I know or can control the hour of my demise provides me no extra power or strength or talent or conspiratorial edge to pull it off. Believing I never consciously tell a lie to a person, corporation, or government agency hardly makes it so. Believing the government can solve the plethora of social problems generated by poor or intolerable parenting at home better than the private sector is just as false if I sign a piece of paper confirming I am a Democrat or a Republican or a member of the Communist or Nazi Parties...liberty is the oxygen of productive citizenship among the mundane as well as the splendid splinters who own the bases, the fences too. And Biggie, well he's no pugilist, just a sweet fluffy lumpkin, and shows no sign of a streak of meanness or any other feral tendencies we observe in the high-stepping Truman. It's all in the latter's muscular shoulders. Effingham, I can smell your excitement from over 'ere. From your massive feudalistic top down plan you no doubt think you have me pinched up against the equatorial wall with the absentee parents problem, don't you? It's in our nature to think well of ourselves and our plans. Well, I'm going to just let you enjoy that measure of satisfaction for a moment while I take another tact in laying out the fuller issue at hand for you. It's really not that complex. So Eff, you and your boys had better relax while you can. Tell Forsyth to loosen a button. With his fingers, not with that Bavarian smile he brings to the chart table. And bring Corporal Longbolder in from the mud docks. That's no way to break Lent. Call his wife to bring her usual weights to meet him at the gate as he re-enters the state. Just make sure this time he's properly decontaminated.

Tuesday, 0600 Romeo. Gripping the thick set of notes his immediate superior had tossed onto Eff's regulation neat desktop as he departed, Captain Charles Earl Effingham is puzzled why it is that the operational things we think only take us so far, while the rest is up to the fist or who you can impress through sex appeal or physical toughness? He had long dismissed crazy half-baked theology for the smooth operations of his military post, but times were changing faster than he could keep up. The military as he knew it was changing, and he didn't like it, not one bit. Should an idea take root in infertile soil, is this a miracle or hard work with emphasis on the probabilities? What about you, Private Ware? Anything to add to this discussion? For instance, is any soil truly infertile, even the contaminated and inert stuff? Dirts and soils, unlike men and women, evolve optimum relationships to nature. Maybeeeee I am wrong about men. Define irony at the atomic level. If when tired I am still inspired, is this a good, bad, or ugly thing? Is any soil truly infertile to its inverse proportion that it is a soil horizon and not something closer to another idea or thing (to peel back the Bill Williams onion), running its game under another name: sand, silt, clay, peat? Rock, stone, oil. Dirt unlike salty men evolve optimum existential relationships to nature. Men flounder, lose trust, betray, play the numbers poorly. Perhaps, I am wrong about soil. Real estate law insists that land never loses face value, only improvements do. In my lifetime, I will see this proven false, I just know it. Define irony without an appeal to some measure of accumulative error and I will show you a field without dreams. Man returns to the soil from whence he arrived, and yet, perhaps we should ask if man is an improvement, an impertinence, or a mere integer without intrinsic value except in terms of accumulative error divided by the sums of its parts. Men fight over soil, and while soil can and will fight men, quaking and rolling, it almost always fights beneath the feet of men, but just as dangerous once it sneaks into the bloodstream. Only one thing is certain, value shifts between soil and men are temporary claims which makes the game so risky to man, and of little value to soil which is always shifting, and statistics on both are just dots on the matrix of time. Fuels rustling in the dead heats of ancient fire. If uninspired when completely comfortable, what is THIS all about? There are some things a poet puts in his own back pocket. There are others he puts in hers, and with a vertical laugh, he whispers to her but it turns out like a grunt as he's sliding it in as if punching a time clock, he's working towards collapse. As time would have it, he means one thing. She senses something else entirely.

Understanding that one plus one equals two, why does one more make three? One times itself is nothing more than itself, but adding one to itself, we come closer to the relationship of the bumble and the bee in this man's army. Apologies, ma'ams. We won't mention birds in this context of seeking justice, and punishment for the guilty to avenge the innocent and the weary. EDgar case predicted ow te world would turm upside dowm, fippimg om its axis.Think of all the involuntary movements that enter numbers for duty in this calculation. More fun to run in an endless traceless race against the dead heats of ancient fire, but I think I just lost that argument to a hot-aired leftist with a balloon full of bubbles kept secret from the bean counters. Besides identity can never be added to or multiplied by itself without unfurling a conundrum, but I think this is why America is so very confused right now. I lied on my contract with myself, so dub me an epicurean who works outside the box regarding personal issues. Like the good admiral John Paul Jones. I choose to know only simple things like who am I and why am I here? Are not these the basics building blocks of a life's work on this white continent? The basics we find simple, even fundamental to help sweep our minds clean of certain residue leftover from the purple grains of racial contentment. Siblings or cousins, they put to us, as if offering us the choice between a slice of pecan pie or lemon meringue. First things being first, if I multiply myself do I remain the same as if multiplying permits a clone? If I multiply 6 times 3, eighteen is neither a clone of six or three, but one. Silly I know, but have you ever read the instruction manual of a programmable calculator? Back to the puzzle. Should I add myself to myself, do I become of two minds, nine or eighteen? Is it Wittgensteinian to question the mark at the end of this sentence, which for obvious reasons must remain gutless...

From the Guy Kawasaki file. True or false, he taunts: Managers would rather delegate problems that cannot be solved than empower subordinates to implement solutions that cannot be understood. He continues: "Pity the poor echidna. Captain William Bligh documented this animal's existence on a voyage to Australia in 1793. (This was a trip Bligh and a small number of loyal crewmen had taken after having been "right-sized" from the BOUNTY.) The echidna is an egg-laying anteater that combines reptilian and mammalian characteristics likes its relative the duck-billed platypus. "Because it exibited reptilian characteristics such as laying eggs, biologists in the early 1880s typecast the echida as primitive—not quite up to the standards of us mammals. These bilogits ignored one minor detail: the echidna has a very large brain for its body size.

"We can surmise that these biologists cherished their precious theory: reptilian equals primitiveness. This theory was so powerful that it prevented them from seeing an obvious and myth-shattering fact: the echidna's big head. Retrofitting a popular riddle, we might ask, 'Which came first—the brain or the egg?' The answer for biologists in the 1800s was clearly the egg. Like these biologists, business people can become prisoners of conventional wisdom, traditional methods, and the holiest of mismanagement litanies: 'This is the way things have always been done." My message: Resist the known and defend the unknown. Switching from biology to..."

Trumpets. Gold. Now does gold trumpet its appearance like so many fameseekers man has produced, or does it just exist, sprawled across the bed, inert? Gold is like a boring lay since Pliny the Elder. Laid within a manger, the ultimate manager of fools, Jesus changed his name from Emmanuel, and the world forgot. The early Macintosh was spelled McIntosh, but Apple was forced to change it, but before that grand illusion, there was a configuration originally called Lisa. Poor Lisa. Lost her whammy to the Mac. Forgetting that time is just another number, age becomes the deciding decoding factor in the youth culture which promises itself the same promises at least a dozen generations before them promised in spades. Has someone sued for lack of original thought yet? Language as redemption. I only WISH I could talk like a kitten. Money buys its own safety, but safety buys nothing money can own. Sometimes, I feel like Ben Franklin, but gawd what a fat twisted turnkey he was, no wonder is son William was such a frothing benchwarmer...somebody needs to confront Felicia Rashad on her comments about the computer industry. She made these self-deluded statements on the Derek McGinnety (sp?) Show on WAMU radio a couple of weeks ago. I was in the unfortunate audience. My longstanding pleasure rejecting federal grant monies was rocked by her arguments about art subsidies. It's a discipline thing that keeps on giving, she says, as I distill. Damn, I was indeed moved by her logic. Yet her gall still floors me as she added, and of course the quote marks are bogus as I again paraphrase but only somewhat, "Cutting art funding is racist. The arguments about not enough money are bogus. There is always money for this or that. Computers? What is THAT about?"

Girlfriend, GET a clue. Computers are about the end of time as we know it. What exactly causes a series of word links to race across the finish line of a completed thought? Armageddon of the Almighty brings us closer to both God and the devil. I love Jack and Jack loves me, but I think this analogy frightens us both to the point of a designated conversational nix. Well, a one-sided event multiplied by itself is still one-sided. Added to itself it an event, a single, seemingly detached event becomes a clue doubled over, much more powerful than a mere echo of eggs still in the basket. Easter is a lovely depravity. Who am I when on first, the egg, or the sperm? Both. Dual nature. Gabriel coagulated on Christmas Day, 1954, squeezed out on September 26, 1955, nine months and a day later, as a sign of the ushering in of the age of rock and roll. Not everybody can say this, and mean the same thing I mean, and it follows that Jesus was a Libra, not a Capricorn. Yom Kippur. Yessir, we brake for atonement, children, dogs, falling kites, bridge trolls, indigenous snakes, religious dissidents, foreign nationals. Interrogating the flocks in the asylum fields, the men were kind as they removed our bandages. Ninety-nine versus the one. The still white heat of the perfect messiah, the questioning messiah. The salt marsh imperfect. And we toss the junket to that jerk who invented common numbers in common with uncommon numbers, only to mistreat millions who sought a taste, the banana cartel mechanic wrote into his Nissan pocket notebook. Carrion Funds and its first rung media sources made much of Aloysius Alzheimer's later work on brain pathology in the implementation of Nissl's method of silver staining, in a playful scoop not dissimilar to a George Carlin routine, but many were not convinced of anything much beyond their next line of code. Do the language dude. Fear of flying? Does this mean I am predestined to NOT make the cut on rapture day? And are we sure it won't happen over the six o'clock news, with a LIVE FEED? These two times are congruent only in their outcome, but not at the starting gate. Do the math, screamed the soiled mechanic from Stumptown, VA, who had been recently identified as drunk on upmanship while on duty, which, given his big head and long record at the shop, was deemed a multiplier not a sum, a relief to the tiny community nestled at the foot of the Butterfly Mountains. Not to be outdone, I simply replied, "A hops man, myself." Why haven't the feminasties and their therapeutic hordes abandoned the word: w-o-m-a-n?* Can we not agree that swapping a "Y" for an "A" is hardly a clarifying solution to what ails these daring harbingers? To change the subject, let us suggest that facts are like fantasies. The more rare they are, less one tends to share them with others. So maybe it will be rapture night, or as is frequent with biblical a day is equal to a year or an age...

Shirley knew, after spreading her warm but nasty harbinger around the entire commissary, then to the rest of the base, all behind Dave's back, she was born to seduce me, although speculative math proves nothing as long as free will remains a constant, except that men are easy pickings, and we know this is mathematics enough for rock and roll. Said she'd wanted to fuck me ever since the first time she saw me as I moved from the top floor unit seventy-five yards across the parking lot from the backside of J Building to the frontside ground floor apartment in Bldg. G two Decembers before, though years later I'm more convinced my fifteen minutes of game (more like ten) under tiny thin-lipped chain-smoking Shirley had to have been a called audible that convinced her bellwether cunt she was only interested in herself. At least she were bold enough to put it into words, gasping to my 23-year old face that she were done and that was all that mattered to her as she fell off my still throbbing and not yet ejaculated cock, rushing to throw on her usual jeans and tee with the excuse she had to pick up her kid from day care now because Dave was coming home early that afternoon. I'd bet Dave could have used the same information. But somehow, I forget now, I knew Dave was not privy to this roving free range nymphomaniac card Shirley that afternoon bragged about passing to complete strangers, albeit mostly sailors and air corpsmen she and her husband knew and vetted through his E-5 PO2 desk rank. Dobbins AFB was a big place but Shirley'd found what she thought was the perfect way to make it feel even bigger. At least, we were G building stack neighbors—Harban on top, Nix on bottom, just like this fuck. Given the annual Thunderbirds Air Show was scheduled for that weekend I admit yours was one fine feathered sack I fell into that afternoon. I'd seen a Blue Angels air show once when I was a youngster in the Boys Scouts Troop 219 down at Glynco back when it was still a naval air station. Got to crawl inside one of the stationary jets afterwards. As a salute to perfect timing I never saw you again. Within two weeks I was packing off to Big Texas to start making the biggest money of my life to date. Such was my changing luck in February, 1978. Smyrna was in the past now. That apartment would become the home of siblings; no word from Shirley arban again. My path had been set before me.

This certainly applies to writing, interrupted Tom. When questioning Darwin, Tom insists I don't understand the enormity of time. I suppose he does, given he's a vocal member of the Russ Braen wing of the Dupont Circle-Mt. Pleasant considerati (formerly, the DCMP Freethinkers Society of 1967), and the number of legacy donations he's bestowed upon it. Tit for tat. It's long been rumored that when Tom Howell speaks it's all hands on deck, or get zapped back to the Mother Ship. Mother, if Mom suffices, why do you bother with the other? There are times I think on purpose and there are times I cannot stop. My question, sir. Are those two points in time initiated from the same congruency? Do the math, screamed the aeolist drunk on uppers and oneupmanship. Why haven't the feminasties abandoned the word: w-o-m-a-n and replaced it with willpower? Tit for tat. If one figgers a wigger is not a ni**er on the trigger why scramble for a bigger chigger in the woodpile? Rather we'd rig her routing gears for each rocker along the first set of stones timed to sinners as blood is to beer.

Facts are like fantasies. It takes one to know one. After a naked lunch break along the tabby walls of Dungeoness, there's one less goose egg to fry. Tit for tat. In all honesty, I can't believe I am delivering this to you, Frau Viperschaden, but my disbelief is as illogical as your own I'm sure you'd agree. The sun sets around 'ere on a fisherman's wink. Our island is groom to a cascade of astonishing celestial lights from the intracoastal banks out into the sounds at both the northern and southern tips. The unsettled sun fumes and cackles, heats the system for breakfast, and sums the days of our scientific year, giving up on voluptuous blonde virgins and rare pop-eyed mice long ago. Tit for tat. No wonder the subsets and parrot squads are rioting in the streets. Bright students of the calling fell out when the signal was clear. A freaking star leads to a mangled Chinese finger puzzle dangling on the wood beam in the grand room. Put some newspaper under it. It'll drip more than you think. Taking a bullet and taking a cold for you are two different energies, ma'am. But I also know the only way to get the point across a circle is to throw it like a heavyweight title fight. It doesn't take much insight to realize the iron horse is more than a sum of its car parts. That much is cold science. Remember that afternoon at the National Zoo? The spice elephant and his pachyderm sister deserve better treatment than they have received at the hands of bitter swarthy men in these latter periods where once the proud beast was celebrated with great cultural awe and tradition. Today, that tradition is rote, and any awe is delinquent, and more apt to be pulled from a bucket of itching powder. Men are slow to change unless it's to die for, while women change every day. Somewhere a fisherman winks. Tit for tat. So, can we count on your signature, Frau Viperscaden? This is a very important project, ma'am.

GT