Dear Friends,

A Requiem for Mubu…

Mubu was a man easy to underestimate. He was the drunk guy, that black cat with an odd accent to his English. He was clever, drinking cheap vodka from a water bottle at dawn on a bench on Main Street. He was fooling the cops.

Right.

He had a volume of “Plato’s Republic” tucked in his left jacket pocket. A heap of Tolstoy was under his skittering knee and dancing thigh. He read from a selection in his open book of great philosophers. Spinoza was that morning’s topic of Socratic to-and-fro. At some moments he took a long pull on that bottle of grain alcohol sweetened with antifreeze and bilge water. Altogether, it went down sweet and too well to be a simple recipe.

He has taken his knowledge to the Edge of the Universe, alas. At his end, he likely stared into the void behind his shuttered eyelids. He saw Everything and Nothing as the lights went out, I’m pretty well sure. He may have seen a bright light at that moment. I hope so, but that, we still bound to our flesh, cannot know with any assurance whatsoever.

Okay, Mubu. Many underestimated you. I did. You managed to bring yourself to the Edge and thence Beyond. Quite an achievement, even for The Cool Black Prince of the Streets. Very daring. You won the game in losing, perhaps. Were you playing “catch me if you can”.

I’ve quit that game, yet I marvel at the star shine that you’ve left with your dust. I value the friendship you forged with me and the space that you will always occupy in my heart, so long as it beats and I still breathe.

Yeah. One last thing. Stumbling home from the news of my friend’s demise, I bumbled upon a big rusty washer in the mud. It looked like a sort of coin. It was left to emerge from the sodden soil to come up under my modern boot heels from the derelict telegraph lines of well more than a century ago. The rust and white moss on it fashioned it into something like a token from the I’Ching; a transport from the past and future. Allow me to toss that coin this morning and say thank you, Mubu. Praise be.

Oh, the fortune is favorable. Mubu now lies forever long as this Earth lasts in a grave, at peace, next to his father. Finally, our traveler has made it back to the soil of Africa. He got out of school early and is at rest from his diligent studies.

Qui Fuerunt, Sed Nunc Ad Astra, Mubu.

Hic Finis Est.

S

Strange David

Strange David

S. Solomon ©2013

I got mugged a few weeks ago. A shadow in the alley put out my lights. I came to just before dawn. My head hurt. My shirt, wallet and right shoe were missing. When I tried to stand up I promptly keeled over. My left lower leg and my entire foot did not seem to belong to me. Trying to stand again produced the same result as before. Then two cops come strolling along.

They asked me my name and what had happened to leave me sans shirt and one shoe as I sat in the dirt by the shrubs. I related my best recollection of the mugging. I told the cops that my leg and balance were out of order and asked for an ambulance. First, they needed to write a report. Five minutes or so later, they did summon an ambulance and I was soon lifted onto a gurney, wheeled over to the vehicle and thence transported to the nearest hospital.

Two weeks later I was moved to a facility for physical therapy; the goal was to restore the nerve that travels from the side of my left calf to my ankle. The exercises and electrical stimulation sort of worked,; just a little. Nonetheless, my balance restored with the help of a leg brace, the insurance company determined that I was too ambulatory to require the medical ministrations, bed and meals provided by the good folks of Meager Estates; Your Interest Is Our Top Priority. Thus, I am now convalescing in an assisted care place, a log cabin in the woods of western New England where people who are mainly very old go to smoke cigarettes on the porch and eat a lot of red meat and potatoes before the hearse comes to carry away their mortal shroud once finally, indisputably shorn of all vitality. 

Not all the folks here at Terminal Meadows; Nestled in a Tranquil Setting, are elderly. I’m not.  The Other Steve, the World’s Greatest Authority, is not. He just yammers on about any topic that floats through his cratered consciousness to grab his focus for a few seconds before he fritters into a confusion of random words on subjects ranging from the sex lives of mollusks to The Truth About the Kennedy Assassinations. But, everybody else is old is except one other guy. He is the real and most intriguing subject of this little literary explateration. He is Strange David.

Strange David is deaf, mute and schizophrenic. So, of course, he is unable to really participate in conversation nor relate to others the messages spoken by the silent voices beamed into his skull by unnamable phantoms hiding in moonbeams and cracks in the pavement. His continence is typically stone like. Even in repose, his brow remains unflinchingly furrowed and the corners of his crusty lips static, as though they were carved into a grimace. He is trapped behind a visage that only expresses bewildered horror.

Strange David sleeps fully clothed and in a fetal position on the floor by his bedroom door. He keeps the light on and his eyes open through the dark hours. He rises at dawn for the first of his dozen cups of coffee. His primary mode of communication is nodding his head. One can, however, reliably get a reaction from him by coming around a corner or walking up from behind into range of his innate proximity sensor. That range is about two feet and his response to the sudden alert is to leap from his toes as though they were spring loaded. Strange David can reach a height of about twelve inches straight up when he’s good and startled.

Yet, he never blinks. He never smiles. Well, he almost never smiles. Over the course of my first two weeks in his company, I only once saw him look me in the eye and then flash a wisp of a smile as transient as a single beat in a racing heart. We were eating breakfast across from each other at the common table. As usual each morning at 8:10AM, Strange David stared into his big bowl of Cheerios® as he swiftly slurped overburdened spoonfuls of milk, plenty of sugar, and bleached and artificially colored, pre-masticated, compressed gruel into his resolutely frowning maw.

Then, for no obvious reason, he looked up at me, milk dripping over his chin. He flashed that brief, thin smile before it disappeared. It was like watching a glistening, soft seeming pebble stolen from sight by a black wave’s exhausted crest. Strange David instantly bowed his head again to gaze unblinking into, perhaps through, the white puddle and bobbing bits of kid’s cereal beneath the soggy, grizzled vanishing point of his jaw. He held his big spoon clenched still and upright in his fist as though a weapon or a torch light.

Thus, normal programming on the Strange David channel resumed and remains uninterrupted. The smile proved to be a one-off, like a never repeated deep space message from a sentient race living in the empty, cold gloom around the dying ember of a very distant star. The meaning of the message can never be decoded nor even inferred. Some things must remain mysteries. Some things may only happen once.

Hic Finis Est,

S

The following is a brief bit of typically thoughtful prose composed in the aftermath of accidental comedy that was my nation's most recent Presidential election. Ah, the Mystery that is Democracy! As giggles subsided into gasps echoing down the bleak halls of recent history, I turned my literary attention to a true crisis in our time.

Yours in Confabulation, S. 2012

Cannabis Deprivation

Today, we have a President who has boldly sort'a proclaimed that he sort'a, kind'a smoked, uh, well, er, pot, actually choom or boo, in a time when our children need to hear this message. The ravages of Cannabis Depravation among our youth, particularly young, white males, is leading to a scourge of bad music and even physical deformities. The Lawrence Stanley Denton Foundation has well documented the instances of shrinking Hilarity Glands and overactive production of Seriousity neurotransmitters in the brains of weed starved kids. Another effect of the syndrome is formerly luxurious blond locks of hair turning white and falling out in clumps from the pates of previously handsome fellows in their late teens to early twenties.

In the most severe cases the Mary Jane malnourished are known to spontaneously grow wingtip shoes that cover their webbed feet, sprout uncomfortable worsted wool from their bodies in the form of poorly fitting and itchy suits and their faces blossom with horn-rimmed glasses that encrust their dilated eyes. They can eventually can be found prowling the streets of suburbia for days at a time accosting strangers with pleas that innocent, horrified citizens buy insurance from them. No. No. This is no joking matter. Yes. Yes. As the Revered St. Zimmerman said: "Everybody must get stoned!"

Indeed, it is difficult to overstate the immensity of the tragedy of Cannabis Deprivation Syndrome. Take the impact on just one community, Lavatown, NV. Once a thriving small city of suburban tracts surrounding the principle employer, The Lawrence Stanley Denton LavaLamp Factory, it is now a virtual ghost town. In the interest of full disclosure, The LSD estate endowed the research provided in this monogram through the good works of the Lawrence Stanley Denton Foundation, created as some small amends for the tragic proceeds of his cultural and financial empire and personal, willful abandonment of sanity while violating every law of god and man.

In any case, Lavatown, is largely abandoned. The LSD LavaLamp factory is shuttered and decaying, inhabited only by murders of crows and colonies of rabid bats that eat rampant beetles as big as small cars and gnaw on the skulls of hairless rats as large as cats. The streets of the once fair city are empty but for the clumps of white hair blowing like tumble weed in the desert wind. All of the grown ups have moved on, leaving their tidy homes for the safe shelter of dumpsters in Reno. They had no choice, of course. Their children were quite mad, prowling the streets with mom’s Pyrex mixing cups, knocking on doors that would never be answered, pleading “May I have a cup of choom? Will you buy insurance? Please vote for Willard “Mitt” Romney.”

In the early days of this catastrophe, The Centers for Unease Control (CfUC) proposed dumping large quantities of bong water into the local reservoir. The Bong Water Association, a major lobbying group, opposed this action and Congress refused to authorize Federal Agents to seize bongs except in the case of a Member of Congress of the opposing party getting caught actually huffing down a choker of kind bud. Thus, once again, our legislators found themselves in deadlock and reconciled to permit orgies in the offices of Senators with seniority to continue unabated, untaxed, and without interruption. However, it was stipulated that no more than three grams of the finest Peruvian cocaine, six magnums of expensive champagne, and four Thai trannies would be delivered between normal business hours (every ten minutes during two hour breaks between 1:PM and 4:PM). Otherwise, all the coke, hookers and booze was fine. But, no pot! “We have to draw the line somewhere!” proclaimed Senator Comedentures (R-AZ).

So, the CFuC turned to Plan B. Without explicit authorization, out of desperation, the Foggers, helicopter born bombs of a super-double-secret mixture of MDMA, 2Cb, and NO2 were deployed over the entire D. C. area. Alas, the only thing accomplished toward staunching the advance of the plague of Zombie Insurance Kids for Romney was the melting of their already quashed egos. Yes, already lacking any self-esteem or self-regard, the ego loss had no effect. The brave folks who executed this extraordinary and perilous mission did, however, come home to giggle quite a lot and hug everybody.

On September 12, 2012, Secret President of The World, Cheney V.4x, was informed of the unsanctioned and failed mission that he had sanctioned. He then made the most difficult decision of his life since he had to figure out if he wanted pickle relish on his hot dog, and mustard as well as ketchup. He ordered the “nukeyurl bombin’ of Lamptown.” “Do Belize, too. I’m sick of those whiners and I don’t care if they’re bilingual. I am too. Si, comprendo par lez voose!?!”; he continued. “Oh, do New York City, too! Pronto!!! Enough with that Jew bastard Mayor. Don’t tell Obama that Bloomass and The City are smoke. You don’t have to. Okay! You’ve got your fuckin’ orders.”

Twelve minutes and fourteen seconds after the order went out to Secret Military Command, fourteen million souls were no more casting a shadow upon liberty and All that is Right. Of those relieved of their corporeal baggage were some four-thousand and sixteen zombified Insurance and Romney election workers. A grateful nation bowed its head into a pile of radioactive ashes raining from a dark sky to give thanks to The Secret President and good riddance to Belize, that odious City of New York, its Jew bastard three-term Mayor, and noisy kids who smoked flowers.

Hic Finis Est, © Solomon 5/26/2012

More Whimsey From Across the Heavens

Dear Friends,

This little bit of fiddling from a public domain image continues a recent theme. Look to the sky. Be bewildered and question. Why have THEY not yet arrived, or have they? Are they too small to see? Do THEY live in a timeframe out of our own?

Is a moment to we Humans comparable to eons for such creatures. Perhaps they are in no hurry to deal with such an infant civilization as our own. Perhaps they know that we are trouble brewing for them, and want to stay hidden. Perhaps THEY are so big that we actually live inside their beings, as bacteria and viri live in our own Human bodies. There are so many possibilities. The questions are fascinating.

Hic Finis Est,

SCS

The Mother Ship!!!

Dear Friends,

The Mother Ship has now arrived! Thus, now is a good day to be alive, my Comrades and we rejoice. Spill  down your gullets the Philuphian Ale and feast on the roasted loins of the Barsoomer Galumpher. So, ho-ho, we are off to the Home World, Adelphious.

One problems, however. We need with the getting to Luna, Moon of Earth. Some small imprecision in planning and trajectory by Central Command and the Mother Ship is a quarter million miles away on a cold or hot (depends on the sun), barren lump of stones. Fermenshup, can you get that old Apollo spaceship out of the Smithsonian? Grummphtr, we need a rocket. Off to Huntsville for you! Bring pliers and bolt cutters. The Pink Stalk Walkers have their damn giant bomb tied down like somebody was going to steal it from the freakin' lawn. Whatever. Let's get a move on!!!

In Hasty Departure, I Remain Yours,

SCS

Our Religious Counselor, Razputine…

Dear Friends,

A guest has come to stay vid us to with to look after the children and the Tsarina. Please now to welcome Monk Razputine. Bring him now with the tea, servants. He likes a little bit of the Wodka in the brew. Oh, oh, also now he is with the live herring and the candied toenail clippings in the brew. Vhat!?! He now vants with a plates of pickled sausage served by Marina, that pert little hussie, dressed only in saucy red neglige. 

Can we instead just have this man shot, shot again, stabbed, poisoned, stomped and dumped in to the freezing Moskva River. Vhat? I'm the freakin' Tsar! Get this nincompoop nannie out of the house. Do it now!!!

SCS ©2013

Dear Friends,

My beloved is not by nature a vindictive woman nor violent. However, like many conscious and contentious citizens of our American Republic, she and I are both repulsed and called to action by members of the Republican party, many candidates for state or federal office. We cannot deafen our ears to their insistence on such principles as a pregnancy born of rape is God’s gift and that a victim of rape should have just gotten over it and enjoyed that sparkling moment enthralled in the embrace of her attacker. Thus, we came up with a practical plan to re-educate the thugs who counsel such notions. It goes something like this.

First you lash the bastard to an old chair with the cane removed from the seat. Use twisted barbed wire as the constraint. Next gag the idiot with duct tape. This works best if the moron has a mustache (more on this in a moment). Get that big, rusty monkey wrench out of the tool chest and clamp his nose. Clinch it real tight and let it dangle from his ruddy proboscis. Next pull out the razor knife and slash to remove his trousers and shorts. Do this slowly and careful-like; we don’t want to damage our volunteer. Now, we need the vice grips. These are good for the head of the penis, the center of the candidate’s thinking. Wind the tension screw tight to choke off any immoral thoughts.

The groaning subject of this ethical instruction will then be allowed a period of relaxation as he watches my beloved macramé a tidy but capacious sack for his scrotal area. This will only take two or three hours as he weeps and shudders. Once the handcrafted appurtenance is ready, it will be filled with steamy, hot mud and tied securely around his unmentionables. Now, simply wait for the estimable pubic figure to swoon and faint before ripping off the duct tape along with his well groomed mustache and perhaps most of his lips. This will rouse the student from his revery. At this point, you inquire, “What it as good for you as it was for me?”

Presently, we’re not sure what to do with our earnest student. We’ve already violated every local, state and federal law, as well as every law of God and man. We can’t have him blowing the whistle on us, so we staple his tongue to what’s left of his lips and take away the whistle. We leave the door to the shack out in the woods open in hopes that raccoons or feral dogs will consume the soon to be corpse. Hope springs eternal.

Res Ipsa Loquitor,

SCS

Dick Cheney on Gun Safety & Regulation!?!

Dear Friends,

Now, let me get this straight. Dick Cheney is today the commentator on Faux News discussing issues of gun safety and the regulation of fire arms in our nation.

Okay, here we got a guy who got so blind drunk that he fumbled on the #1 rule of fire arms safety: one never points a shot gun at the face of anybody whose head you don’t mean to splatter. Cheney did just that and he fired. He almost killed the guy, one of his best hunting buddies and an old friend. Fortunately, Cheney’s hunting partner was only disfigured for life. No charges were pressed against the Vice President as his pal apologized publicly for getting in the way of a muzzle two feet in front of his shit-for-brains skull as an intoxicated man within a heart beat of having his own atom bombs flipped off the safety and pulled the trigger to blast away.

No big deal. Things were settled in an amiable, gentlemanly manner. Perhaps some money had to change hands, but we will never know. Of course, at the time of the near fatal shooting Cheney had already hijacked the Presidential administration of a half-witted fellow draft dodger to start two pointless and doomed wars and set the stage for WW3 with North Korea, South Korea, Israel, Iran, Russia, Turkey, Syria, China, my nation and all the NATO powers in that game. Nice piece of work and a tad more tricky than just blasting your friend in the face at point blank range with bird shot. That was small beans and of no lasting consequence.

Anyhow, Dick then retired from government work to pluck the heart from a dead man and have it plugged into his own rancid plumbing to resume his earnest efforts in defense of lunatics with terrifying weapons of mass murder and his inane, drug induced ramblings about the threats to our citizens’ safety perpetrated by neighbors with weapons of mass destruction that require us to own more weapons of mass destruction so we can be safe from lunatics possessing weapons of mass murder.

This all makes total sense. Well, if you buy the illogic of Faux News, it makes sense. Um, can we get the government provided heart of the dead guy back? We’d also like to be reimbursed on the federally provided surgery that saved your mendacious, cold gutted and shambling, undead corpse from the grave. Thank you, Former Vice President, Dick Cheney.

Well, it's often tough to look at the fat in the fryer, to see how it boils down to the gristle and grit. Somethings can seem complex when they are actually simple, I fear. We have to talk plainly and reasonably to our friends and neighbors, but pull no punches. What's going on in our nation would horrify our founders and most sensible folks today.

Res Ipsa Loquitor,

SCS

Guys…

Dear Friends,

In cleaning out my digital desk drawer I ran across these recent posts to G+ and Facebook over the past week. They are disconnected but also sort of thematically related, or at least similar in tone. I have taken some care to edit and expand them where required.

This first post is in response to a lady’s opinion about males and their worthiness for affection and admiration. She was talking about actors on the silver screen.

I'm pretty sure that there are only two guys that most guys with any sense of being a good guy, but a real guy, that any guy would emulate… Sean Connery and Carey Grant. I think that Grant takes top honors. Thanks for the lessons in guyness, Archie! Oh, Gary Cooper also makes the list. Almost forgot him.

Next, I stumbled back over this post in response to a fellow who felt he’d taken as much guff as women take online for the being male or female. I’ve had my share of bad weirdness in conversations between the sexes, but have not noticed that women are as apt to be as rude and domineering as men online. I felt that the guy that I responded to was whining and just plain wrong.

I've sort'a sat on this topic for a bit, but have to respond to K. Our male shoulders are wider, our voices are deeper and we've got the leverage in both the physical and social arena as males. I'm sporting a couple of nice scars and a broken thumb from dealing with crank-drenched freak trying to rape a little woman and then kill me. Fine. Let the women hurl angry words at you along with the spice of shame. I think they've earned a certain privilege in that arena. It's what little leverage they typically have where it comes to male to female confrontation amongst us big brained naked Great Apes. Let them have at it while we try to listen to the message behind the sputtering anger. Screw it. I'd rather sleep safe in the arms of an angry lady that might forgive me when the sun comes up than sleep alone and lonely.

Then the topic of our inborn natures as men, women and individuals popped up in another to and fro.

I think I was born under a bad sign and marked from the day that I was born. Still, we are very plastic in our natures and proclivities. I was blessed with clever, tolerant parents and thus was nurtured to live beyond that selfish, mean spirited, puking and pooping being that I was created. I somehow became a more tolerable individual. I, at 57 years old, have not pooped in my diapers in months, seldom vomit on my bib, do not (sometimes to the dismay of my spouse) fondle a woman's breast at every opportunity, and I'll actually share with others (if there's something in it for me). Now, I was born with an apparently innate understanding of gambling. That is why I seldom play games.

You don't gamble without controlling the odds and never, ever, under any circumstances at any time bet against yourself. I haven't been in but two physical altercations and have the busted nose and a fancy scar above my left eye to show for that. So, I stay out of fights other than verbal jousts where the dignity of a female that I am trying to woo is at peril.

Okay, so the last time I did so, I got that fancy scar and a concussion and the girl left me on the pavement as she moved on with the other guy. Right. Whatever. I still do lie when I have to. "No, Officer, I do not recognize anybody in this line up. May I go before you let that big guy with the Ace Bandage® on his hand out of his cage?" Yes. This watch was a gift from my grandmother and I have an alibi. You can't prove anything. Um, can you spare a couple of bucks, maybe five until I get to the, uh, money machine? I'm good for it. Really. Okay. Two bucks?

Thence I moved on to physics and lawyers and experimental space craft hidden in secret bunkers under a mountain in correspondence with the same woman as the post before. She has now really provoked my imagination, though not in the way you are likely imagining.

Well, Ms Smarty Pants, if that's your real name, I know some people who know some people who probably know your people but my people's people have their own UFOs and their own ray guns. Why, one of them youfoes is hovering right along side my castle floating in the sky at this very moment in time. So, just watch yer step, Missy. You don't want to tangle with a passel of lawyers from The Secret World who are so hungry that they'll work for $2.83/hr.

Those seven legged buzzards in bad suits, brief cases over stuffed with briefs (incontinence is a typical challenge for deep space/near-luminal travels in anti-gravity vessels) know something about something and they'll tell you what! Oh, crap!!! I think I just hit the button for the Chemtrail Evacuators instead of the Space/Time Dilator. Dang! I'm stretching into an infinitely long line drawn from an infinitesimally small point in the future, present and past. Okay. Okay. It's all perpendicular from here. I'll be fine.

Somewhat back on track, the conversation turns to a mutually admired old fellow, a fine player of the mandolin. His name is Grisman and he is a good man. He is certainly no Grant, Connery nor Cooper. He’s actually pretty homely. But, he does know well how to make the women smile and swirl. Thus, I shall add him to my honor roll of guys who know how to work their racket and do it right. I wrote this after listening to some of the fine old-timey tunes that he created new but sounds like they’d always been with us. That is a rare talent that few along the line are capable of. There was Garcia, Robert Hunter and just a few others that came up out of the fifties to make brand new old music. Of those, only Hunter and Grisman remain to stomp this tera in their considered way.

Yeah. I figure most of us earn every sparkle of silver and each scar as we shuffle on. Still, dang, that Grisman fellah can still play a good game of "Catch Me if You Can" on his little music box. The notes drizzle sugar water and flower petals here and then gone into silence. He gets done with them and then they only exist 'tween our ears. In that way, it's a simple project that he has undertaken for goin' on six decades. Yup, the guy seems to have figured out why he was put here on our pale blue dot that spins like a dust mote in the vastiness of Eternity.

So, that’s it. My digital drawer is all cleaned out for this week.

Hic Finis Est,

SCS

Dear Friends,

I’m trying a little experiment in self publishing an eBook as a PDF viewable on any mobile, tablet, laptop or desktop web browser. Anyhow, here’s the deal. See the following rundown of the book, a short novel of about ninety pages in print that mashes together hard science fiction with fantasy and mythology. If the following description intrigues you, ask for a digital copy and send your email address. If you get a giggle or perhaps a little insight from it, USPS a check to the address below for the amount of $8.99 or whatever you deem appropriate.

It’s the gleeful story is set in a gloom-benighted future where Earth is a dimly remembered myth, now a sterilized cinder reeling out of a most distant spiral arm of its home galaxy. In this present, Humanity is no more that a collection of cultured genes amalgamated with those of other species; they no more than weeds, melded to components of nano-machines and synthetic life-forms. Our hero, if you can call him that, is a haploid male born of no mother. His name is Saurian LUX. Saurian is a contraband runner caught up in a conspiracy that will either destroy or rescue the galaxy in the face of a perhaps implacable force known as The Flux.

Saurian’s love interest, APES2CB, possesses exceptional emotional intelligence and physical dexterity, as well as photosynthetic, glistening skin. She has several irises in her engineered eyes and can see her lover’s heart beat as well as exploding gamma ray bursts in the great heavens. She is likely doomed. The two are made for adventure and born for trouble.

Yes, the plot is also full of booby hatches in time and space providing for unlimited sequels, prequels, a movie franchise, television series and video games.

I am at S. Solomon, 20 Hampton Ave, Suite #315, Northampton, MA, 01060. My email is ssolxy@gmail.com. Just ask and you’ll find that PDF in your in box.

Res Ipsa Loquitor,

SCS

Compulsive Writing?

Dear Friends,

I’ve been thinking a bit about my compulsive writing. If I didn’t write each day, I think I could not understand myself nor others. I might be diagnosed as somewhere on the autistic spectrum. Whatever.

My incessant writing is something like self-therapy. It puts into play feedback loops from my external world of experience and my internal world of desires and imagination. There are loops in loops in the process of writing; basic neurology. They strengthen and inform each other and drop their output into my mind and those of others at the end of the production line that vanishes yet continually reappears at the dawn.

It is also an escape from the external world. For some moments at a time I dwell only in my mind and some precious notions delivered by other writers. I find rhymes in my mind that syncopate with experience. My thoughts dance. I know something that I had not imagined before. Words bring those notions to form and my synapses and dendrites swirl with them.

Writing is also a meditation. I can go into the Sanctum Sanctorum within my skull.

Writing is a discipline that requires concentration; a commodity much undervalued in this world. Focus is a blessing and a curse, but there it is.

Writing is the Dragon in the Dark Cave. Head on in. That Dragon favors a writer not as a meal but a companion well equipped to tell a bed time story.

Hic Finis Est,

SCS

An Election Autopsy…

Willard "Mitt" Romney

Dear Friends,

It’s been a few weeks since the recent Presidential election. Now that we’ve had a chance to observe the aftermath, it is time to perform the autopsy on the Romney/Ryan/Rove campaign. What have we learned?

Well, most obviously, the GOP gets its revenge in losing by eating its own. Sure, they gave old Dick Nixon another shot at the prize, but we saw how that turned out in the blaze of deliberate, plain stupid and public self immolation of his career and reputation. They shan't repeat that sort of error. Yes, no sooner was Mittens sent to rut in humiliating defeat by a skinny black guy with bigs ear and a funny name, a lousy economy limping too slowly into recovery, the longest war in our nation’s history wheezing to an indecisive end at the hands of folks who make bombs out of camel dung and kerosene, Romney started to plead that he was just misunderstood and Obama outbid him for the approval of Americans. Then the PigFest® began.

Swiftly his own people were upon him, gnawing at his skull, shredding his carcass with their angry beaks until his viscera lay in the hot sun hanging over the merciless, dusty Desert of Losers. The flesh between his ribs has become dried jerky and the vultures plucked his pearly whites from slack jaws. His eyeballs and liver, of course, were saved as appetizers for the Big Donors, but more on that in a moment.

As to Ryan? He is finished. This freakish product of a Star Trek transporter accident that melded the corporeal forms of Eddie Munster, Eddie Haskell and the pathological, wounded mind of a child terrified by the knowledge of his own mortality while loathing all of those who represent the prospect of Birth that inevitably begets Death, everyone his senior or possessing a vagina. Paul knows that he is on The List. He’s lying low in his secret bunker. He’s reading comic books with a flash light under the bed covers. He is fervently praying that Mother, the Great Teat of The Grand Old Party, will not crash his own party and grind his flesh to paste under her elephantine hooves for his very poor grades in civics class and A.P. Pandering to numb skulls.

Paul "Puppy" Ryan

Then there is the matter of Karl Rove. I will now join with my good friends on the other side of the aisle and help toss the fat punk's carcass into the frier before throwing the bones boiled and shorn of flesh into the dumpster. The most admirable and reliable behavior amongst these thugs is how they detest the aroma of a loser, the stink of defeat, and will swiftly abandon their own after getting nothing but derision for the three billion spent trying unsuccessfully to buy a nation.

Karl "Porky" Rove

Qui Fueunt Sed Nunc Ad Astra, G.O.P.

SCS

Thoughts on Secession in 2012

Dear Mr. President,

I understand that a number of folks in several states in our union are unhappy that you won reelection to the Presidency. These states have citizens who have signed petitions to secede from our nation’s union. I’d like to help you out here. The following is a suggestion for an address that you might offer to our nation on this topic. By all means, do feel free to have the folks in the black suits airdropped from black helicopters seize all television, cable, radio and Internet operating centers to ensure that each citizen in our citadel of freedom has the opportunity to watch, listen to and digest this message.

With Warm Regards and Unflinching Support,

Steven C. Solomon

To: President Barack Obama

Fr: SCS

Re: Go F^*k Off Texas

Dt: 11/15/2012

Please pass this on to your staff, Mr. President. I believe it is a dandy concept, at least a sketch of a speech that needs to be made.

“My fellow Americans, I interrupt this baseball game (Kathy Lee and Hoda, soap opera, idiots yammering on Fox News, etc and whatever) to bring you an important message. It has come to my attention that a number of folks in several states of America are sore about the fact that a guy with a funny name and is supposedly black or not and born in America or Kenya, is an atheist and Islamic, a transexual married to a man and a woman, and is a communist who wants to kill your grandmother is still President. Okay. That makes total sense. Nobody likes to lose a race of any kind. Now you want to secede from the United States of America

In any case, I will focus my remarks today on the state of Texas for the sake of simplicity. I understand that you folks in the red states require any help that I can provide in terms of focus and keeping things simple. I am, after all, the Chief Executive of Helping Explain the Obvious to Cranky Idiots. So, here goes!

Now, Texas, you can petition the Congress to secede. I’ll begin with the upsides of letting you do just that. Then I will move on to the counter argument.

Well, first, please write Uncle Sam a check for your portion of the national debt. We’d also like the roads, bridges, ports and airports we built back. Pack up the military bases and all the folks that work at and for them. You have an outstanding account regarding your citizens’ payments to Social Security, FICA and Medicare/Medicaid since the date of your declaration of secession. You need to settle up on that. Oh, and what about the bills due on support for your substandard and ill administrated systems of higher and K-12 education. Also, we want all the food back that we bought for your poor, as well as the medication for the disabled since you decided to break up our relationship.

Then there is the matter of subsidies to your oil and chemical industries. They might prefer to move their operations elsewhere in a more profitable economic climate. Mexico might look good. On the other hand, maybe Mexico would prefer to just buy the infrastructure and move their workers up your way. Yes, we know how much you’ve enjoyed that cheap labor, but now those guys will be your bosses.

Oh, you do get to keep the Alamo in this deal. Well, unless the new landlords tear it down to build condos for drug kingpins and former Latin American dictators. That will be your problem and the rest of your former nation will see about a trillion dollars returned to the Federal government. Yes, we downsized as you wished and are financially better for it.

Now, there is another way to scratch this itch that you have, this desire to reinstate the failed Republic of Texas. Let’s look to history as the issue presently on the table is not new. Indeed, it was settled by Congress, the Supreme Court, another tall, skinny guy with big ears in the Oval Office, and the most horrific war up to its point in history. Remember the Civil War? I’m a professor by training, so I’m going to give you a history lesson in terms that even folks challenged by a public system of education that teaches that Jesus rode around on dinosaurs and that the world is 6,659 years old can understand it.

So, forget about Honest Abe as the President. He’s a short order cook in this presentation. Picture old Gus at the Mope On Inn Diner. He knows how to whip up an omelet in a jiffy; a three egg omelet. He knows that you got to break the eggs to make that omelet.

The first egg is a vision that dates to the founders of this nation, The United States. Those folks back in 1776 had a concept for a nation that would be a democratic republic and span the entire continent to serve as a beacon of freedom for the entire globe. They saw the resurrection of an ideal not executed in two thousand years: free people sharing their commonwealth (think about that word) and collectively executing the will of the majority without trampling on the wishes of a minority.

The second egg is the notion that what this nation is about will never be altogether achieved but always strived for. We will always work toward that more perfect union that remains forever on the horizon as a goal. The nation had to be united and the our states indivisible lest we might as well have just thrown away that first egg.

The third egg was delivering the People’s franchise in those first two efforts. Everybody, every man and woman of whatever race, religion or no religion, wherever they came from on this planet or in this land had to have skin in the game. Else wise, those first two eggs got busted for nothing. Half a million folks would die in bloodshed beyond what any in Lincoln’s time could have yet imagined and half the nation would lay in utter ruin for no purpose. Thankfully, Lincoln was a fine short order cook.

So, Texas, here’s your omelet. Don’t worry about splashing it with pepper sauce. You can have extra onions if that pleases. Some folks like their’s with beans and tangy cheese. You can have it any way you want it, but you do have to sit with the other folks that amble into The Mope On Inn and abide by their chatter.

Thank you and good tidings to all in our United States.”

The Future is Now!

Dear Friends,

I present to you at no charge an exclusive look into the recent past, our present and near future as it may be. I am no mind reader nor savant of any kind. I cannot reliably prognosticate nor see into the future. I just read the writing writ upon the mists of Time as the river flows by.

Since the simultaneous rise of electronic computing, advances in modern prosthetics, medicine, surgery and brain science it has been a recently realizable dream to meld Human with machine. You encounter the present result each day when you notice an individual with a small neural implant on the back of his skull attached to a microphone in his ear. That part looks like a hearing aid. The implant’s interface to his brain looks like he’s pasted a quarter-sized piece of Silly Putty® to the left rear of his head, just above the hairline. He is a deaf person given the chosen gift of hearing by technology. He is a Cyborg; a Man Machine.

He is not alone. Today you are starting to see folks with funny looking glasses. They are blind but they can see by means of machine vision that communicates through digital to analog pulses to their Visual Cortex. It doesn’t work all that well yet, but it hold the promise of much better performance. Why settle for normal Human vision when you could toggle a switch to see like a butterfly or bee, see into the radio spectrum or perceive a night sky full of Gamma Ray Bursters making the best fireworks you could hope for?

Meanwhile, a lady in a wheelchair, a paraplegic, took the first sip of orange juice she’d had in thirty years without the help of an aide whom she communicated with only by blinking her eyes. She recently simply thought about having that beverage and a computer wired into her head told a disembodied robotic arm on a rolling table by her bed to give her some refreshment. It obeyed. She controlled a machine that, albeit temporarily, was part of her. She did it by wishing for a drink. That simple.

Well, it wasn’t really that simple. To get to this point of modest Human/Machine integration, a code had to be cracked. It’s the toughest code we know of this side of >Why and How Does Anything Exist?<. The code I refer to is the code of our most basic cerebral and sub-cerebral nervous functioning. It is the code clacking, gurgling and ticking behind our every physical and verbal expression, our very thoughts, both conscious and unconscious. A machine with such capacity would truly be a Mind Reader. Such machines have already been demonstrated in prototype to construct the words that a person is thinking and shine digital images of their visual imagination on fluorescing screens.

Flash forward to 2016. The United States unveils the federally mandated Mind Meters® to be installed in every airport, every ATM, every 7-11 and intersection where there is a stop light. Citizens can no longer get to the curb from the cab without having their minds scanned.

What sort of problems will pop up when brain scanners are perfected and installed on every corner. How will my nation’s economy and social fabric be ravaged as millions of folks from all walks of life leave their jobs to take online courses so that they might qualify as a Homeland Security Mind Readers and thus be able read the rampant pornographic thoughts of airline passengers and all the folks at banks or just walking down Main Street during lunch hour?

Surgeons will leave anesthetized patients in mid-appendectomy on the operating table. Lawyers and real estate speculators will leave money on the proverbial table to lunge at this new opportunity. The food service industry will become bereft of illegal immigrants working the dish washers as they flock toward the opportunity to find out what other illegal immigrants are really thinking about that skinny girl in the summer dress. “Is it what am I thinking or even dirtier?” Grandmothers will abandon their charges in bassinets to examine the secret thoughts of those swarthy fellows with their Mind Meters® as they also mine the imaginations of the very proper business man visualizing a lady’s underwear as she in turn tunes in a “suspect” for a reading of his response to another’s response to the response of another grooving to the spike heels of that “looker” as he ponders what’s on top of those long legs and her girlfriend monitors the entire situation. Teachers will ignore their classes while staring out the window to relentlessly scan the visual imaginations of folks on the town’s streets for signs of secret assignations underway while the kiddies are doodling on the margins of forty year old text books.

The economy will collapse, as will our culture, in a heaving sigh of an infinite loop consuming its own tail. No real work will get done. Children will be left unfed, ill educated and unattended. Every aspect of our civic life will be corroded. Commerce will sputter and belch and eventually swoon in a faint like a Victorian lady mortified that her bloomers were showing at the grand ball.

Oh, that has already happened. We don’t have to wait for 2016 and the perfection of Mind Meters®.

Hic Finis Est,

SCS

Spiritual and Cranky!

Dear Friends,

I got pretty cranky yesterday morning when I encountered a commentary by this yutz, Alan Miller, on CNN calling folks who were "spiritual but not religious" lazy and timid. Hey, boss, you take a look at a Universe that stretches from before the beginning of time and all the way to the end of time. See a universe that is one of an infinite variety and multitude but has perfected itself to create Human eyes and Human minds that seek to comprehend it and all the other possible creations in every possible dimension within and without time. Look into the near emptiness of space and see Reality being born out of that emptiness adjacent to dark stars that drink up even the aether of light born out of nothingness.

In this Universe matter is mostly unseen and most light dark, most truth must left be unspoken about the hidden mysteries on worlds beyond our dreams begging to be revealed in a place where Space and Light bend and few so-called facts can be trusted from our vantage. We cannot know where and how fast It becomes new or old or not at all; no more than that cat in a box that has puzzled us since those cats Heisenberg and Schroeder dreamt it up or not. The end of the story of that cat does or does not forever live in a book that has no beginning nor end.

So, stand there at the edge of a sky with new stars birthing new planets and look at them. Stand alone without some old man in a throne above the clouds of our piece of lint in the Cosmos, this pale blue dot, our home world circling an unremarkable star at the tenuous fringe of one galaxy swirling amongst a trillion others. Now, tell me that I am lazy and timid. Brother, what I just described is where I live and it is not a place for the timid. To you I say, welcome home.

Res Ipsa Loquitor,

SCS

Tasting Comets…

Comet Kohoutek Seen from Earth in CE 1973

Dear Friends,

Have you every tasted a comet? I bet you have. When you were a little kid, did you ever stick your tongue out as a snowflake fell in a blizzard? That tiny bit of water melting in an instant upon your tongue was from a comet. Have you ever mopped your brow after an afternoon of playing in the sun? That salty and sweet flavor of sweat came from a comet. Have you been to the sea? All those gazillions of tons and 1.3 sextillion liters of water and much of the stuff of our own beings and every living thing we know came from countless comets falling through ancient winds in an orange sky of nitrogen and methane and ammonia to deliver us water and the chemistry of life. When you inhale that breeze on the surf, you are breathing a comet.

That surf you feel vibrating at about one and a half cycles per second is the vibration of our Home World’s Moon bouncing around Terra as it wobbles about old Sol. It is also a cerebral sound; it is the frequency of our Human minds at rest and in meditation. It is no wonder that we can sit for hours or lie with our eyes closed under the Sun listening to that beat. Listen long enough without distraction and your own pulse cleaves to that rhythm. It slows. You are at Home under the arc of a heaven that once rained down comets.

Hic Finis Est,

SCS

Coming Soon…

Dear Friends,

Coming soon to an electronic bookshelf near you…

©SCS

Talk nice-like. At least be clever…

Dear Friends,

Willard "Mitt" Romney

A couple of days ago an old friend of mine posted a question on Facebook. It read…

Why in the world would white working class people support Mitt Romney? Besides any echoes of racism I mean.

I replied…

See, what'cha got here is the basic crisis in American public education. About half the folks in this great country presently suffering the Mystery that is Democracy thinking that it is a dandy idea to give a filthy rich criminal all of their money and turn over to him the keys to a nuclear arsenal so he can realize his avowed dream of ushering in a New Kingdom of Zion ruled by a worldwide Mormon theocracy as outlined by the lunatic Joe Smith while camping in upstate NY in the 1860s where an angel named Maroni from a secret planet gave him super-double secret tablets of gold that he could not show to anybody else but had instructions for making magical underpants and how to take a bath before praying and stealing the souls of dead Jews. It all makes total sense in this context.

To this a friend we have in common commented in no uncertain terms…

Romney’s a total fake-poser-moron. A fat-ass phony piece of shit garbage asshole. Thanks for reading. PEACE.

After some thought, I replied again… 

I'm thinking of your last post, my friend, and how we use words. I trade in words. That's my business. I like to toss them like the anvils that fall out of the sky on Wily Coyote or the pianos that tumble from skyscrapers to ring with a crash and a thud unheard in an old Buster Keaton movie as he walks blissfully down the street.

For me, some precision is needed in aiming these weapons of literary destruction and obstruction. Simply name calling and cussing will persuade nobody and reduce we of good heart to the level that thugs like Romney and Gingrich and their ilk live in; a scummy pool of vitriol. When you hurl those words, please gloss them with some wit. Be as bad ass mean as you intend, but keep your wits about you. Drench those words in a syrup so sweet that those that torment us, steal from us, cheat and lie can’t help but be embarrassed by the truer than true reality of your words and the fact that they liked them because they just felt right and true.

Those bastards know what is true; most of them do. They know that their own parents would be ashamed of their foul behavior. So, don’t give those creeps a break. Don’t lose discipline. Work hard with every word you utter and keep it out of the gutter no matter how pissed off you get… even if you are as angry as I am tonight.

When Gandhi, who Winston Churchill termed a little man in diapers, took down the British Lion and unlocked the chains on the territories of the empire, he did it without firing a gun nor throwing a single punch with anything other than well chosen, often clever words delivered with an unfailing smile. He embarrassed the mightiest nation on the planet into just going home to lick their wounds. In the little dust up we got with global commercial enterprises, the same tactics can work if we keep our wits about us and lend our queer shoulders to the wheel.

Thanks to Allen Ginsberg for the purloined line. Words are fun!

Res Ipsa Loquitor,

SCS

The Crisis in America

Dear Friends,

There’s been a lot of talk, gnashing of teeth, sympathy expressed, and just plain foolishness spewed after the shootings in Colorado. I’d like to make a few points from my own perspective as clear as possible.

Hand guns and assault weapons are horribly imprecise weapons. Assault weapons, semi-automatic rifles of large caliber, make up for the deficiency in their accuracy by spewing a large number of lethal projectiles in a big hurry. Pistols are good for making hamburger out of human flesh at close range.


At long range, except in the hands of a well trained shooter with good vision, time on his hands and a clean shot at a well lit enemy; well? They are not reliable at hitting the intended target. This ain’t like it seems watching western movies.

I can tell you this most assuredly, as I have had the opportunity to train on hand guns. I’ve also had the stimulating experience of being fired upon. I am grateful that pistols make very poor weapons at any range aside from those circumstances found on a target field.  Else wise, I would not presently have a head on my shoulders to make this report.

In any case, the idea of arming ordinary citizens without real training, I mean REAL TRAINING as a deterrent to psychopathic criminals or even just plain thugs is absurd. First, a nut case who is intent on spraying a crowd with bullets, tear gas, and is wearing a flak jacket, helmet and a gas mask, is likely not afraid of seeing his corpse on the evening news. He’s wagering that he won’t be around to see that news and/or is so far gone that he really hasn’t thought things out all too well.

Second, letting loose more lead flying in a darkened theater full of panicked and wounded people is only likely to cause more carnage. Even in simple situations, a home burglary, a bored perimeter guard on duty at a Marine base in Guam, a kid trying out his new BB gun, whatever, four out of five gun shots are taken in accidents. It is seldom the intended target that gets the bullet. More often it is either the baby sleeping in the room next door or the terrified homeowner plugging his own foot.

So, let’s please get a grip. More weapons of carnage, good for nothing but making holes in people and most likely to kill the innocent, are not going to make anybody more safe. We can honor the spirit of the 2^nd Amendment in such a way as we do the 4^th (we do allow folks to have their car registration and driver’s licenses revoked) and stop this homicidal nonsense.

Oh, one last thing! This guy Holmes, this mutant freak, this damaged child managed to get thrown out of one gun shop while trying to buy weapons acting “weird and making monkey noises”, got thrown off a rifle range for the same sort of simian gesticulations and behaving like a “frightened animal” in the weeks before his attack. Nobody called the cops. No. The gun shop owner referred him to a web site to get his six thousand rounds of ammo. His neighbors watched him tote in enough explosives and grenades and weapons to blow up the entire building and kill hundreds of people. Nobody called the cops.

I’m no fan of the cops where it concerns my own ill behavior, but they are there for a reason. Next time you see a kid toting heavy weapons, an old guy taking a little kid into the shower, don’t keep quiet. Don’t call the guy’s boss, a football coach. Screw your head on and don’t wait for a neighbor to make the call. You are the neighbor or the friend or the coach. It will be less embarrassing to be wrong, if your judgement is not right, than see a little girl shot or another ten year old boy raped in the shower.

Res Ipsa Loquitor,

SCS

A Solemn & Reverent Look Back on The Mighty Grateful Dead…

Dear Friends,

It was June 23^rd, 1995. My Rider and I had just decamped from what would be our last run with the Mighty Grateful Dead, their last tour before dumb ol’ Jerry’s demise on August 9^th. I was exhausted after all the driving back and forth through the Berkshires to Albany from my little city by the Connecticut River. But, as dawn broke over my home, I had to write. The following is that explateration retrieved from the archives.

SS

Ho-ho-ho!!!

What you gotta understand with this Grateful Dead situation, you know, that musical outfit, is that it is weird. It’s just a weird situation. You got a posse of mainly homely guys, a couple of the gang now truly dead.

One of those dead guys was so ugly that he scared Satan himself when he showed up with a note from Saint Peter beggin’ the Lord of Darkness to please take the fellow off his kind hands in exchange for an unlimited supply of Ripple and Southern Comfort and all the charcoal briquets The Devil might wish for in an eternity of unspeakable cruelty and sodomizing dead people with hot pokers. Ol’ St. Pete even threw that Joplin girl into the deal. He was fond of Janis, and she could sing, but our Minister of The Pearly Gates was desperate to get that Pig Pen guy out of his house and figured that nasty-ass Lucifer deserved her bibulous attention, anyhow.

Whatever. The rest of the crew, except for that lovely and long legged lady was not so charming. She, of course, could bend your ears quite well with that wail from beyond the grave. Hoo-boy-howdy! But, look at the rest of those beasts. You got a kid with giant hands, digits like a gorilla’s, who makes a noise with a guitar that sounds like Quasimodo busting up the bells of Notre Dame with a jack hammer one minute, and the next it’s an ear shredding racket akin to a locomotive skidding off the rails into a gully full of roiling lava bubbling with titanium spikes and human skulls.

Then there is that freak, the nine fingered guitar player that doesn’t seem to know any discipline at all. Right when a song gets solid and almost surpasses his ability to fuck up the lyrics with that singing soundin’ like a teenager going through the voice change or finger nails on the chalk board, well… he takes the whole thing to pieces and ruins everything in all possible ways. This guy has destroyed more good songs than most folks could write in a lifetime. One after another just melts away into the next that melts away itself or gets blown up and on and on and on. That shaggy monster seems to never have met a tune to be content with. He treats notes like a cat worries a mouse.

Oh, speaking of tunes… what is that lyric writer going on about? Craziness! One minute he’s prattling on about something that I think might be from the bible, maybe not, and the next we got some bums on a locomotive yelling at some underwater green guy on their way to see a fellow who might be dying or not while a lady with ribbons in her hair is laying behind a broken window in a bed of clover with a cat from China. Yeah, and there are tigers and soldiers in a campfire with a sailor torn loose from the axle of a paper canoe full up with alligators and gypsies. Man, can you just write a simple story, or are we supposed to figure all this out ourselves?

Now, the sound guy of many years, prior to his incarceration for violating every law of G-d and Man, was a mad chemist who excelled at unraveling his own DNA. Yes, there are ugly rumors that drugs may have been involved this Grateful Dead Enterprise®.

Anyhow, there’s also that guy on the bass. He plays it like it’s either a trombone or the detonation of an atom bomb. The drummer is an eight-armed dragon that eats its own tail and never seems content to rest in that endeavor. The guys on keyboards, the ones without the sense to flee before their hides are aflame, reliably self-combust after a few years in that seat. It’s a hideous sight, but the fans keep paying to see the conflagrations.

Yes. It is a weird situation. Unaccountable, really. There is no satisfactory explanation for its duration nor the satisfaction that their growling, howling, moaning, often confusing, oddly inspiring even while lilting and off-angle tilting, bone jiggling, giggling, skull eating, mind melting, soul mending, back breaking and healing strangeness imbues upon children of all ages over so many years. Yes. Although the band has left and gone, nobody has noticed, not at all.

Res Ipsa Loquitor,

SS