Creative Camp

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Creative Camp -- 27 (Conclusion.)

(m/f, inc., rom.)

by Feather Touch

Chapt. 27

We are the least entertained generation. Try to imagine, one hundred years ago, walking a mile in any city or town. Put it this way, if Disney, et al, could truly recreate an urban street scene of 1900, with its interplay of animal and human life, and it's great brawl of energy, noise, ripping confusion and simply tearing progress, visitors would pay one hundred dollars an hour to become enmeshed. Real fish and real flies. Real smells, real hustle and harness bells. One hour, and you'd pay two hundred for a second. +That was their entertainment, often with waterfronts and their smells and lingos. Indeed, we are entertainment deprived to the point we've stuffed a forest of a thousand masts and warehouses on a hundred piers into a box that is precious small for the job. Once upon a time in America you had a president who thought we could bomb the Japanese with bats. The critters froze to death and so did little to bring peace, but one can hardly deny the entertainment value of FDR's proof positive of the moronic imbecility making up the heart and soul, terms used very loosely, of liberals.

In writing this book I have found one reason, only, to have any faith. If there is this much talent in the world, maybe somebody will use some of it to pull us from the brink. For me, it's been both the tortoise and the hare and the duckling and swan. Both fairy tales, evolving, not over some months and years, but over decades. Slow and ugly as I child, I even managed to be so brutalized by a wicked birth mother I saw little fiction in the story of Cinderella. And now I sit at the end of the most stupendous dash in literary history. Five hundred pages, non-stop, without thirty seconds of help from anyone, and not a single letter. Number one content provider in the world. Some turtle. Higher by twice than all who've come before. Some duckling. A tickle or two along the way, to live up to my nome de plume, ha, ha, and show that I can be, as they say in Maine, some charming.

Born a prince, abused to the verge of insanity, and out of the cocoon, a butterfly which happened to land on one of Sir William's keyboards and then danced upon it the greatest work of art possible. Even bestowing special gifts on the reader. First, by working as an artist, free, and, second, providing on various pages ample legitimate excuses for the reader to detach and thereby maintain his individuality. Other writers hire agents, flacks and attorneys to prevent reader alienation. I have no need of such. I stick myself into your marrow because I stick you with yourselves. Your only defense is a seething rancor, but you must always direct it at the proper target or it will fester and turn into something incurable. Meantime, the alienation goes a long way toward perfecting my image of myself as king. Why would my subjects spend a nickel, public or private, to build a statue one inch high to a monarch so willing to celebrate himself? I'm not sure there will be other advantages to our bi-polar relationship, but I am sure you have no other choice. Blame yourselves, not your mirror.

Not only are we at the end of entertainment, we are at the end of the industrial revolution. Look ahead. Nothing. Nothing at Comdex, nothing at E3, nothing at PC Expo. The only possible innovation is the external screen laptop, as described in this manuscript, and still, no one has offered so much as a prototype. What's new in cars? So little over the last ten years that listing the real improvements couldn't be done with a straight face. (Plus, the electronic whiz-bang stuff can be installed by after-market vendors.) Boats? Same story. Aviation? Ditto. Television? So far, only about thirty thousand HDTV sets have been sold and digital television is getting off to an unpromising start. I have my Samsung playing eighteen hours every day, and the only new thing promised has been "It," some kind of gufus flummery involving a cold fusion derivative applied to personal transport. Where do I call to find a dealer?

We have a giant collection of idiot empire builders trying to sell us an eight lane highway from our house to the corner store. There is a frighteningly real possibility we do not need an eight lane road to accomplish our daily routine. And look at the quality of the folks doing the selling. Tech TV, for example. Martin Sargent and cohorts become, on familiarity, a bunch of wind-up anarchists embodied in new-age goofballs. And these guys are the crème de la crème of geekdom. Everything has to be wacky, and is judged primarily on that criteria. If not wacky, childish.

From the clothes they wear to the stunts they pull to their hatred of "ME," even unto my little Clippie bud gazing out affectionately from the upper-right margin of the page , they are, with some exceptions, indicative of their wacko industry and thus unwitting litmus strips proving just what I say. The industrial revolution Is Over. It began with James Watt and the steam engine, and ends with Linus Torval and Linux. Our only option for the future is to do our part in the world by bringing over vast number of immigrants to clean up the mess. Our only pleasure will be modest entertainments like the Xbox, Nifty, and, for the nicest and best of us, perhaps an affair along lines sketched in this work. All other roads from bungee jumping to sports-card collecting lead nowhere you want to go.

More top-ten coasters. I often find English quite easy to translate. I'm proud of this, because even though I lived almost five years in Mexico, I learned virtually no Spanish. But if I hear television is going to show me more top-ten roller coasters I can make the translation almost subconsciously.

"Queer as Folk." What's that all about? If you want to know why New Englanders think New Yorkers are a bunch of slippery, dead-faced schmoes, tune in. On the other hand, it has make-out scenes between attractive younger males, so how far can this writer be from top-dead-center, and the power stroke that follows?

Also playing this week, a feature on Stephen King. That brings up writers. Every horror Stephen King has ever imagined or experienced, specifically including living with Tabatha, is going to come true the first time he reads a single page of me. Any page. Each is better than all he's ever written, or will write. Some are funnier, some are friendlier, some are sexier, but all are simply better. More work and about one tenth the booze. Not selling out, not coping out, not entertaining gratuitously. Not hardly. That's where the prince thing kicks in. It's your fault it has to kick so hard, but, as our English cousins say, there it is. And Stephen's problem is simplicity, itself. He never had a chance to practice. He hit so big, so young, he caught up in tournament play and never had the time for the thousands of hours -- creating nothing -- that it takes, in any art, to reach or even reinvent the level of the virtuoso. He got four-hundred grand for "Carrie." He should have high-tailed it to Mexico, and not published a word for ten years. Then he'd have a book he'd trade his money for in a heartbeat.

Speaking of the English, there was a recap of the Revolution on The History Channel. First, it's pronounced Concord, definitely not Con-cord. (Also Thoreau, not Thor-eau, [and congratulations, Grandpa Henry, you made the spell-checker].)

The parallels between Sam Adams and Adolph Hitler are remarkable. Baseline: the Lee Harvey Oswald crowd; mean malcontents. And Franklin ranks right along with Lee (the corn-pone one) as ultimate traitor. I got a kick out of a quote from one of Washington's letters calling his rabble just about exactly that (written at the time William Emerson was dying of his rabble). And try to imagine how Louie had his chops set on all those rivers and all that forest when charming Ben came to dance and prance before him. Of course, the irony of the end game was perfectly terrific. Louie went broke trying to fight England under the guise of peddling rot-gut liberty, and precipitated the revolution that cost him and his family their sixteen thousand heads. Good thing, or we'd be stitching up goose asses from Maine to California. Commoners trying to play with kings are like small kings trying to play with big kings, or, more saliently, dumb kings trying to play with smart kings.

The only luck you have in the world is having a smart king, and if his prize patrol offers eroticism, for the zillionth time, it's your fault.

Good example of Jewry over the weekend. Dylan on the phone. I've heard the tape before, but it was enlightening to once again be reminded of the simple nature of the Jewish mind, a substandard apparatus so dwelling upon itself it has no creative energy left. Listening to Dylan's consistent recalcitrant, knee-jerk, gratuitous disagreeableness is a reminder of his race's compulsion to base life on hate.

How many roads must a Jew walk down, before they call him a man? The answer my friend, is a million and ten, the answer is a million and ten. Poet bashing, and I do limericks. It should be an awesome power. To be not only the best, but the most prolific, ought to humble a fellow. God must have given me this extraordinary gift, therefore I should use it in his name for the greater good. If you buy into this, I'll die of grinning because it'll cost you ten percent.

This is an important chapter. As we come to an end of our time together you need to know, that, A, I won't cost you ten cents, much less percent, and, B, you don't have to build any statues or commission any postage stamps or coins. I wish there was a C on this list of good news, but the only C I see is one for catastrophe if you keep letting technicians run things. Leaders are a breed utterly apart, and honest leaders, yet more entirely apart. For example, a real leader will frequently remind you it is your skill in following, and obedience, in general, that counts at the end of the day, and absolve himself of any responsibility, because he dwells in a region that cannot even be sketched, much less indexed and defined. Why should he do well?

An event occurred last Sunday. For the first time in nearly seven years no one came to visit. This Sunday, I had four, which is normal. That's in case you think I live in some kind of barren little circling world, like Nader. Not one day in a decade. I've even taken to watering my own banana trees. If that isn't a common touch, what is? Shoveling snow? I'm too smart a prince for that, also, too smart to live anywhere there are seagulls.

While no human has helped with a line of this work, or any of my work, for that matter, there are elements to this volume, not of my own making. One example is what is locally called mosquito destroyers. These are incense-like coils that repel sandflies. They are, in their small way, a miracle. Less than forty cents for a box of ten. Each coil actually lasts the eight hours claimed. They somewhat reduce mosquito incursions, but more importantly for a writer, reduce the midges by almost one hundred percent. That alone, adds two hours to a workday and is a good lesson on comfortable working conditions vis a vee, productivity. The mystery of this humble miracle is how they can get the Zebra brand from China to rural Belize and across the counter for half a dollar, including tax. I never fail to light one without wondering at this. It would be a good theme for those What can you get for a buck telephone commercials. One hundred and sixty hours of freedom from sandflies, for one thing. I don't suppose it's cost me even a dollar for Net time to send what by now must be something like seven hundred pages of copy. That's quite a bit for a dollar, and think of yourself. You've received the greatest novel yet written, and it cost you nothing..

For all the ever increasing hoopla that will probably end up nothing more than the death rattle of democracy, I find in my early age of wisdom that the whole goofy experiment depended on coal. Not only on coal, but on coal exactly where it was, and in the quantities it was. For a brief amateur jaunt back in time, consider the fact that by 1850, under democracy, there were no standing forests within seventy miles of any city. What would have happened without coal? Some river cities might have survived a few more decades, plundering their valleys if they were long enough and wide enough, but what would everyone else have done?

Imagine the cost of a cord of firewood if it had to be imported first eighty, then a hundred, then a hundred and twenty miles, by oxcart. As we seem bound and determined to spend our last cultural dollar, today, on geezer pills, so, in those days, the sole purpose of life and commerce would been to get ahold of enough wood to build a shelter, and heat it. In the end, it's something for you democracy buffs to smoke in your pipes. Democracy survived because there was coal, and, under monarchy, steam engines had been developed. If those coal fields had been located even fifty or a hundred wilderness miles west, the experiment would have collapsed for want of twigs.

In the end, all of history is a patchwork quilt of empire builders and charismatics [Spell checker want me to use charisma tics. I think I like it.] mixed with pots full of fickle luck (which way was the wind blowing on battle day). That a few thousand raving geniuses were thrown into the mix, and precious little to do with democracy, per se, is why we have what we do. But they have had their day, and are now rapidly approaching extinction. (Undoubtedly, Marty Sargent will be confused at ending up a waiter, may not get it even should he read this book repeatedly.)

It is almost true that no genius is ever seen anymore, and, not only that, but a class of anti-genius has arisen.

It will be a few years before we have a list with the depth and fidelity required of an official hall of fame, but, in the meantime, we might be interviewing the folks at Iridium and dozens and then hundreds of others in the Anti-Genius rank and file. I know a perfect place for my valadory center, West Edmonton, home of the world's largest mall. Imagine that puppy pulling through tuff times, and try to get your mind around the indulgent, soap-bubble consumerism, on credit, it represents, even in the best of times. Also give a moment to consider the commercial scorched earth such an emporium creates for hundred of miles in every direction, except out to sea, if it's a coastal market.

Additionally, speaking as a prince, at least in my own mind, I would think my peasant class would be getting tired of being scalped with lotteries, snack foods, malls, portion-control restaurants, and enough of their related demons to keep Willy the Worker bent to his task until the day he drops to low man on totem over the grave. Instead of being enslaved by paper, law, ink, and bond, you are slaves to what my class does to keep you ringed, hooked, tethered and bound, for life. It's almost a shocking good thing I am every bit the prince I'm always going on about, and thus above such gratuitous exploitation. I mean offering you addictive alternatives, and profiting from them, while extracting every hour of work you have in you, just isn't my style. I'd rather send you out in a grand old fireball as we race toward fair and square domination of the planet by the good half of American life, and, yes, democracy.

I was a journalist for a few years. Sometimes I play at interviewing myself. If it's yet another sign of arrogance, let me put it this way. Sure, I could circle my toe in the sand (sassy, I'm always barefoot) and say, aw, shucks, no big deal, I just got lucky. For five-hundred pages?

Question: Your Majesty, when did you realize you were the best writer in the world.

Answer: Shortly after completing the letter to Harvard. My computer crashed some one-hundred times, and I still finished it several days ahead of schedule, though I printed and signed it on the first, as indicated. Running that long gauntlet, with no feeling other than that I was lucky to have Word, in any emulation that worked at all, made me realize I'd passed into some kind of stratosphere. It wasn't the quality of the document, which is no better than fair, it was the tenacity of simply completing it while often having to re-write pages I thought I'd just finished. (Ask any writer about that particular hell.)

Question: When did you realize you were a prince.

Answer: When I was five. I learned I was the crown prince when I was in my late twenties and read the story of William Emerson and the depth to which he invested himself in the originating cause of our society. Only this can make a king, or technically, perhaps, an emperor. Direct lineage to the founding individual, and nuts to the loudmouths and their paperwork. The direct connections to AT&T, Harvard, and other legacies provide the timbre and texture that confer fidelity and depth to the heritage.

Question: How many lives will be lost in the transition to Emersonia?

Answer: Ten to fifteen million over the first few years, perhaps double that number in total. It's a difficult question to answer, because it depends entirely on the co-operation and goodwill of my subjects. If they scruff up the mission, the costs may easily be as absolute as the cost staring you in the face if you do nothing. My coin is ten million old and sick people for a vague chance at anything at all.

Question: And that would be in addition to the 250,000 you deport to Newfoundland?

Answer: I hope there will be some overlapping, casualties with deportees, that is, but the short answer is, yes, ten million Stateside deaths, plus 250,000 sent off to determine whether or not socialism is schmo-proof. Inquiring minds want to know.

Question: What is your I.Q?

Answer: I aced the mensa test in half the allotted time. I'm not sure it can be measured. I'm smarter on a single page than all writers saving a handful were, and are, in their careers, and I've written thousands of pages.

Question: So, as I understand it, you are regent by birth, artist by work, and smart by genes. Is that accurate?

Answer: You could add, funny by mother, without offending me, nor would I mind being categorized as arrogant by choice, since the choice ends up being yours.

Question: Why do you write pornography, and, specifically, child pornography?

Answer: Because I'm an anti-Semite and forbidden access to any press other than the manic nonsense offered by enclaves of Aryan gargoyles. I'd rather have the Jews.

Question: Going back to arrogance, isn't that kind of an expense?

Answer: It's my secret weapon. Freedom from my subjects. Arms' length, and that sort of thing. I actually believe my own press, that I'm a god by virtue of the level at which I practice the most difficult art on earth, writing English fiction in an American idiom. Having thus exalted myself in a land where most everyone with half an inch of tread on their tires figures themselves blessed, I become an unlikely encounter of the first kind, and being anti-Semitic makes me an unlikely encounter of the second kind. As a pornographer, a third level of detachment is ensured, and writing without thought of pay pretty well covers any possible additional levels, or any encounter at all, for that matter. That's why I water my bananas, contact under some auspices.

So, to answer your question, yes, the price of absolute conceit is absolute, as is the value received. This raises, once again, exceedingly awkward questions relating to who actually pays any price, and who receives value in kind. This news is invariably bad, so I leaven it with sex.

Question: How would you feel if you were a Subject, not the King.

Answer: Glad that someone else had the headache. Seriously, I'd hope he was a humorless drudge, grinding exceedingly small both in respect to getting rid of the bad guys and also, just as importantly, watching over all the smaller facets, segments and enterprises that amount to the vitamins and minerals, as well as the spices and seasonings of a culture. If you mean how would I like living under myself, I have a sneaking suspicion I'd head for the tropics and await developments. You are a vastly screwed up and twisted society, at death's doorstep thanks to imbibing the socialist cocktail of utopian Kool-Aid, and King or Subject, the best idea is to implement the Mexican concept of afuera.

Thank you, your majesty.

Like half the funnies on the farm, I nurture a Napoleonic sense of destiny. Patton, McArthur, a handful of others. Full blown, too, so rather than nurturing it - as I just said - the truth is, it nurtures me. This sense, probably akin to that of Bernadette, leads me to a mass audience through Nifty. That's actually pretty plain and simple, as the alternative is to come up through the ranks of conventional periodicals and publications, none of which are read. For example, one on-line fiction site lists seven thousand titles. How would a big, rangy novel, on any subject, fare under competition like that? How would it even been found? Plus, I'd have to think up a plot. Have characters quarrel and fight. Use suspense to effect. Include conflicts resolved in stages with clever twists and turns. Charge money for the tome. About what? Contemporary American life? After Mr. Rogers has had you for thirty years? And J.D. Salinger? As if. The only thing you've got left is sex, so don't go dissing me for writing about it.

Those who've made it over these 520 pages will also recognize an additional reason for writing erotica, and that is an attempt to instill at least some insight, perspective and context. Sexual encounters such as I write of, are everyday occurrences, perhaps a bit dramatized, for tens of millions of happy, productive people. If something bad has happened to an individual, it can't but help for them to know that gigantic numbers of people, from most walks of life and backgrounds, happen to like what they deem offensive. This is imperfect. I wouldn't have liked cold, half-cooked Brussels sprouts, if every person on earth swore they were delicious, nor half-burned peas. But sex isn't vegetables. Rape, either. Duh'uh. What do you want me to do, provide a magic spell or sacred balm? You know how much that type of stuff goes for? No, free advice. Look at what others have endured, travails without number or limit, and roll on, faster, better and stronger, for all your individual misfortune. Be nice enough in the process of rolling on, and who knows? maybe you'll raise a Barbie princess and share her bed with leggy Ken.

In some kind of summary, since this chapter amounts to the decline and fall of the third act, America has a short list of acute, non-survivable problems and a moderate list of serious problems. These will compound and escalate under socialism, becoming, at the first serious economic, or other, downturn, fatal.

It might be remembered here that the lifeboat analogy, beloved of high-school sophomores, has, historically, played out thousands of times. Of these thousands of times, a representative sample of survivors' tales has emerged over the centuries. In each lifeboat scenario recorded, exceptionally rational decisions were made as to who should live and who should die, with straws given to those not obviously superior or inferior. Of course, bringing up lifeboats brings up Captain Bligh, and I can hardly take credit for anything but honesty in mentioning his name. On the other hand, if one actually happens to be adrift in a lifeboat, abandon on a stormy and very salty sea, maybe a former before-the-mast prick is just what you do need. Yours is not to figure why, yours is just to do, or die. Not a fun-loving mantra, so maybe you'd be better off leaving the fun up to me.

Acknowledgements, before we bring Charles and Blissy back for their final scene, amount to a total and unqualified admission that this work, or any of my stories, would never have been possible without my ever more beautiful XP. Also, the Griga Boyz practicing their sweet raggae. Many thanks dudes, I owe you. My typing teacher, Mr. Richards, and also Mr. Kohler, a superb chemistry instructor who managed to get across, in a manner I understand to this very day, exactly how thick my beloved head bone was when it came to math sciences, allowing me to focus on the mother of all languages. In like vein, my family deserves much credit. Having grown up in a preppie managerie, and then witnessed over four and more decades, the oxymoronic spectacular mediocrity, and outright mental imbalance of the entire tribe gives me absolute confidence as both visionary and futurist. I've seen it, dozens of bad examples, no good ones, with my own eyes, `it' being the remorseless cost and barbaric cruelty of liberalism. They have left me a clean windshield, indeed.

Samsung deserves much credit. My 19" set enthralls me with its imagery on a daily basis, even after seven years, and makes a mockery out of those who would waste precious money, and even more precious power, on some humongous entertainment system for the 99.99 percent pure drivel that the cable pumps to the tube. On a more philosophical footing, television, as an entity, provides massive entertainment, Rupert, Ted, dem guyz an' der channels. Martin Short aping Lincoln, Four-score and blah, blah, blah. Humor of an impressive stature.

The long hurricane season has begun, so it's time to zero in on The Weather Channel, and pull the trigger. This is the most dangerous outlet in all the media. "Rage" might have caused Columbine, but The Weather Channel kills thousands, and does it in two ways. First, it vastly exaggerates the storms, themselves, and, second, it encourages people to run for high ground, which often means up valleys. They exaggerate in a number of ways. First, they imply that the wind speeds they cite are surface winds and only rarely mention that they are, in fact, winds aloft. Winds at ten or twenty thousand feet, where the hurricanes trackers fly, are almost always far higher, twenty to fifty to one hundred miles an hour, than surface winds. Second, they use time-lapse radar images to suggest extreme cyclonic action, when ninety-eight percent of what they are showing is plain-old weather. For example, Keith, 2000. This storm gained a bit of fame because it almost blew apart the "Temptation Island" set. To look at The Weather Channel's display, you would have though my town, in southern Belize, was in the middle of a hurricane hell, when, in truth, the winds never exceeded a breeze and we had maybe an inch of rain in two days.

Hurricane Mitch was the worst storm in modern times, killed some 20,000 in Guatemala and Honduras. For almost two full days this "Category 6" storm remained stationary over the Bay Isles. Aerial footage taken as soon as the weather cleared showed a god-awful mess, but little serious damage. What The Weather Channel does is use dramatic footage of shorefront property to demonstrate wind damage. Have you ever wondered why they use the same pictures more often than Ted uses Andy? What actually happens is, sure, the shorefront property takes a beating, but get even a hundred yards inland, and the wind is burbled and tumbling, so to speak, eighty percent of its destructive force dissipated.

If I ran this outfit, first, they'd have attractive topographical maps, not the flat diarrhea brown they use. For storms, they'd provide zoom-ins showing significant terrain detail to help viewers in deciding whether to run, and where to run, or to stay put. If the resources of travel books like Let's Go and Lonely Planet were coordinated, specific directions to storm shelters might be included for many coastal regions. Leaving a delta for a valley is a particularly unpleasant form of suicide. Coastal plain flooding is a relatively mild event, the water rises slowly, has little force of motion, and recedes quickly. It is virtually one-hundred percent survivable. For example, Hattie is still cited in every list of major Atlantic storms. Hattie hit Belize square in the chops, and killed 96 people.

So, I accuse. The Weather Channel of being a bunch of shekel obsessed Jews pandering terror for profit with their mindless adage that starts, If it saves one life... This obsession, it's called cowardice, costs all lives; always has, always will. Wait and see. One minor aspect of my sovereignty will be the exhaustive and comprehensive meteorological data supplied from Newfoundland.

There's Jack Lemmon doing his tennis racket schtick. A great moment of comic genius. Sure, to a Jew. But then Lucy stuffing her giant mouth is funny, to a Jew. Myron Cohen was funny, to a Jew. In my eyes, I'm the funniest son-of-a-bitch of all time, though, I'll have to admit, probably not to a Jew. Not a problem, they're getting their innings. They've got the whole crib so twisting and turning, fretting and puling, it's a wonder we last a week. Emotion is their stock in trade, the cheesy, cheap tirade; no reason attenuates their parade, it wasn't for that that they were made.

This is the danger, tiny technicalities linked to vast use of noisy face, numerous societies have identified over the millennia. A subculture never actually guilty of anything you can put your finger on, but, somehow, when they're around, even in small number, things deteriorate. Since it is genetically impossible for the chosen professional scapegoats of god to be guilty of anything, they must be expelled if the society is to survive. The first lesson of history. And yet here we are, perverting the tolerance and inclusiveness for which we are famous to the point we seem to be licking their smear from the toilet seat. Even though wire was invented by two Scotchmen (yes, Scotch. I earned the right to spell as I choose through suffering a Scotch mother0 fighting over a penny, there is still a parasitic evil to this race, all the more lethal because even alluding to it renders the critic an Aryan stereotype, you know, bald nut, no job. Guess again.

As a summary thought, you have your Xbox, you have Nifty, and you don't need anything more except for a few banana boxes full of good paperbacks, chiefly historical novels, which are constantly being augmented with tech era discoveries on land and under the sea. All you have to do is survive long enough to enjoy them.

. . .

This was often the gist of Charles's conversations. Yes, in spite of the bleak harbinger of Napster's death at the hand of quibbling schmoes backed by a judge of glossy political correctness, there actually were reasons to carry on. Sex, literacy, the Xbox and the Web. A short list, and maybe cable should be included, but comprehensive enough to allow some novelty to life, in general, that actually could amount to the new paradigm of legend. Had he left anything out? You didn't need cars, motorcycles, boats, horses, season tickets or window treatments. You certainly don't need to break your toes on an exercise machine. You didn't need one hour in a mall in a lifetime, nor, in all likelihood, an entertainment experience sold by a multinational. What you needed was to read, so if you ever met someone nice, you'd have something to say. Best to augment this with a handy fist, because, if you read, it was unlikely many people would know what you were talking about, so solo entertainment was important. Cats. Cats were good, and the boffins have even come up with genetically engineered house lions, hypo-allergenic.

He was holding Blissy's hand these days. That's how far they'd come in the boy's first month at Creative Camp. Their story hours had ranged to Ireland, to Iowa, to Normandy, to boy bands, to D-Day. Charles had pulled out stops he hadn't realized existed, and many a night he'd have to shuffle his young guests, physically, from his room, though, if he were honest about it, out of sight was not necessarily out of mind. As to the boys, they watched their leader out and about on his immersion tours and tried their best not to succumb to the universal feeling of awe their leader inspired. He was so everyman, except for being a particularly handsome beast. Wore the most ordinary clothes, wandered about with his hands behind his back, head bowed so that it might be a good idea to step aside, least he accidentally run a boy down; in a word, unprepossessing. The awe thing was not engendered by style, nor was it a product of raiment, charisma, or even personality. It was his body of work. The stories he published, the stories they often printed and read aloud. Even without the long list of original product concepts and business plans, Charles was a bit off the earth. With them, he seemed a god, didn't act it, life was too short, but seemed it, until Blissy brought him to earth. Eight, and even nine, were too young for a deity, so the obvious conclusion was that their august leader shared a mortality common to humans. Who knew?

In the process of all this, Charles had managed to fall unutterably in love with Blissy. He'd often held a gentle fondness for particularly winsome boys, and had nursed his share of secret lusts for those whose indescribable carnality intruded, unbidden. But Blissy was a fireball. It burned him awake in the morning, and half the nights, burned him awake until the morning. He was witty, literate, curious and yet still happy to wander off on kid loops, those half-flights to a fantasyland known best to eight year olds and friends. It was appalling the boy was so after him. To be in love with someone who seemed to magnify what he returned should have been the very light of life, itself, and the fact he tolerated pedophilia, philosophically, should have allowed what the boy wanted. But he couldn't. Not Charles. Totally enamored of himself when it came to telling others how they should live, and how they should not live, .he nonetheless found himself pinioned on a dilemma that was, in a not very funny way, horn-free.

A hypocrite. A phony. Not only talking the talk, big time, but writing it, giant time. Yet when it came to the walk, he dove under his pillow. Sure, that was safe. Little Blissy of the pertinent observation and pithy comment would never follow him there. Lazy boy, he didn't even have to. He was already comfortably ensconced, every night of the week. And everywhere else around the camp, at all times. Magic. Well, certainly sublime and subliminal if not actually something one could saw in half. Ethereal. That was an oxymoron because the kiddo could turn flesh to stone with a grin or a chuckle. He was more like a Clydesdale when it came to taking care of business, than anything wraithlike, and his business seemed to have to do with a permanent injunction against anything to do with sanity.

In some ways the boy was tragic. Not so much him, of course, and not the other campers, but how he and they innocently diminished the rank-and-file kid, by comparison. Their moronic Dragon balls, the all but Jewish hollow ritualism of Pokemon. Their angsturbation music, so-called, never mitigated by charming melody or winsome lyric, but rather ceaseless and monotonous neurohowling. Shit only a Jew could sell. Hey, they got seventeen bucks for a fifteen cent platter, they must be doing something right. It was the world's most forlorn garden. Millions of twisted stems, or perhaps swollen pods was a more apt description, seeing as how obesity was as common as T-shirts. The truth of the matter was that perhaps as few as ten percent of them would pursue happiness with any degree of success. The other ninety percent would grow up, so-called, not knowing Gettysburg from the Gestapo and thus not comprehending how something so big could be so empty..

Wasn't it all backfiring? Hadn't it been overdone? How far could the capitalists exploit liberals to subjugate the labor force with gambling, costly weed and endless credit, before succeeding generations became unfit for work and were rendered unable to contribute in any way, at all? One thing was pretty obvious to Charles, and that was that when bent too far, there would be no cracking of bones. What bones? Rather, a ghastly slurping sound with blubbery overtones. What commercial writers called a `sickening' sound, or sensation, take your choice What once had been a labor force now amounted to no force, at all. Bigger certainly was not better and huge was outright repulsive. They needed to be hit so hard to wake them up there didn't seem much chance they'd survive the blow. And what would the popular attitude be, if they did survive? Would they blame him? Duh'uh. Liberals loved the accountability of others as much as the backyards of others for power plants and nuclear waste. They were as tolerant, for all their prattle, as raw nitroglycerin. Since they adored the mile-a-minute subversion of Giant-Faced Seinfeld, they'd be unlikely to see anything very funny in subjugation.

How many teachers would he have to fire, for example, to bring hardball rote and drill back to the classroom, and what on earth would you do with them? His quota for Newfoundland was 250,000, total, and New York and California, between them, probably had that many deficient, jew-box, teachers. And the lesson plans and texts managed to amount to less than the instructors. It reminded him of the Afghans who had thirty words for sheep, and one for women. These kids had thirty words for their footwear, but only `ignorance' described their heads. As for their cocks, most were so disagreeable, personality-wise, they'd end up, whatever their choice in gender, assuming they were cute enough, in the first place, with no higher a level of action than a rooster gets in a barnyard, or a rat in a dumpster.

So his camp, so his refuge, so his outpost away from it all. So his detachment from the main, so his devotion to his modest troop of boys who had read and did think. And now, so Blissy, who, regrettably, did not have any control over the conscience that did not belong to him. If he had, it would have been a push-button affair. Instead, he had to proceed with the tiresome routine of intellectual seduction. Get him talking, keep him talking, try for infinite cleverness and boundless charms, and hope against hope.

"I think you're right about being at the end of everything there is," the child said. They were back under their tree, alone together for the first time since their trip to camp a month before.

"How so?" Charles said, obviously agreeing but nonetheless wanting to hear the delightful voice.

"What is there? All technologies plateauing at the same instant. Medicine with super drugs that make common drugs too expensive. The space program knowing humans will die if they remain in zero gravity for any extended period of time, hanging on by momentum and special interest politicians and tradeunions. Education. With what we've done at C-Camp, already this summer, it shouldn't be two years before you can go into Wal-Mart and buy a brilliant Calculus 101 course, each point presented by three teachers with simultaneous graphic and visual explanation, and lots of review, for ten dollars, including a printed, mail-in test."

This was what love was to the mature male. "Side by side kiosks," Charles added. "One selling high-school and college courses, the other selling processors for $12.95, hard drives for $19.95, ram sticks for $4.95 and a dazzling laptop with external screen for $295.99.

"And between those kiosks," Blissy added, happily, "an Xbox wonderland, ten dollars per program or game."

"I can't get $12.95 for `grow Pedro?'"

"Only if you stop acting like some weirdo prude," Blissy answered.

"No act of kindness goes unpunished," Charles thought to himself, and added a line about the road to hell being paved with good intentions.

"Maybe if I told you a story?" the kid queried, brightly.

Another story. His Nifty manuscript was already massive. In raw page count, one of the largest in the world, and if even one point were awarded for content, simply in a class by itself. But it was flawed. Every time he got on a good tear, kicking Jews around, designing an ultimately efficient power system for light vehicles, inventing cat and dog gravies for kibble, whatever, another story would come along.. Granted the characters tended to be nice, that there was more to the tales than just sex, still, it was over 550 pages, 210,000 words and 1.1 megabytes. All because of story after gratuitous story. And Blissy was right. There was no future, all fields of technology were flat-lined except cloning and genetic engineering, in general. Space was dead, and electronics were at the doorstep of Appliance City. Three years hence consumers would be no more interested in how a computer worked than they were in the operation of their toaster. And there was nothing after it, except for all the recipes for bread to cook in the appliances, most of which would end up being one-trick novelties, a/k/a the shovelware beloved of fast-buck content providers.

Poor kids. They didn't have the street entertainment, the thronging animals and folk of their ancestors. Their packaged entertainment experiences were so gussied and oversold the whole concept of entertainment had been polluted unto death. When Travolta can't flap dem lips to no crowd, boss, you got problems, and Stephen is not going to solve them with the likes of "AI."

Publishing. Returns. Nothing left in the books, so they were being sent back. The only stock left to buy, related to the industry, was UPS, who carted the books until the last store returned them, and Waste Management, who carted them to where they belonged in the first place.

In the end it amounted to the old sports' homily about winning not being everything, but the only thing. Crap. But, ah, writers. They weren't everything, they were the only thing.. Madonna didn't make a buck until someone wrote a note, (and many artists could sing the note).

In the end, Harry Truman, oddly wrong in his own time, was right when he said the only new thing in life is the history you don't know. That's what we were left with. A common computer and a common Net hookup were all the intellectual highways and byways needed, precisely as a sedan with 120 horsepower, along with a network of two and four lane roads, were all that was needed for the vast majority of consumer transport. Whether anyone used the vehicles and roads depended primarily on what it cost to ride, and secondarily, on where the roads led. Suddenly, without any revolution or major flap, writers ruled. Absolutely. And they not only had to work, like the union hacks turning out Hollywood schlock, they had to excel. Examine and redefine with both legs buried to the knees in the cement of reality, convention and conformity. Everything else was rubbish, not worth the time and price, just like exercise machines.

Occasionally, Charles regretted his literary foundation was built on innumerable failing math grades. It would be interesting to quantify the emerging paradigm. Writers, but writing what? What were the vectors? One e-publisher offered seven thousand titles. Mightn't one, however splendiferous, get lost in the crowd for years before he sold ten-thousand copies? At one time, sex might have been an answer, but Nifty, as one among several, had enough sex to act as a catalyst to the detergent industry. So sex was eliminated from the formulae. He thought of Joan Cusak's line from "Adam's Family Value." Talking about her nice family, she says, ominously, Or were they? He modified the line to Or was it? Sex was out of the equation, Or was it? How much skill would it take to write real sex into the mainstream? To turn out a manuscript so dynamic, innovative and engaging that established communities would start whispering and passing links or even printed copies. Coalesce, like a colloidal agent, bringing the nugget into the main, and, ultimately, lead the main to engulf, to the point of wolfing, the nugget? Not to put too fine a point on it, to render juvenile erotic themes as common as the very recently forbidden or at least shocking bikini?

Of course, it would go against the grain, conceptually. Academics were into tearing things down; nitpicking, hairsplitting, worrying, fretting, puling, and sniveling when not otherwise engaged in backbiting, much like the artists. And offering nothing in its place, whatever "it" might be; witless ciphers that they were, other than ritualistic rolling of populist platitudes.. Neither group, in all of American history, had grabbed onto something, buttressed it, and brought it healthy and strong into the world, something the commercial community did routinely. Randy's war in Cuba was a possible exception, otherwise it was, don't you know, so much easier to tear down and leave a shambles without bothering with those pesky nuisances known as alternatives.. Law enforcement was a classic example. A case where three people witness a killing, and surveillance shows the suspected killer wheeling the body into an animal control incinerator at three in the morning. To satisfy Jew lawyers, the cops have to sift through hundreds of gallons of animal ash to get their man. And the Ng case in SoCal. Video, bodies, witnesses, and twenty million dollars before the jewboys are satisfied the brute's rights have been subjected to due process. To repeat what I said in the Harvard letter, be there a hundred planets similar to our own, the ultimate in loathsome obscenities is the phrase Bill of Rights uttered by the mouth of a Hebrew. They are simply the deadliest poison in the world.

Perhaps a bit smug, who wouldn't be with little Blissy practically panting on the picnic blanket beside him, Charles realized that if the classic communities failed to respond to him, they would die in special disgrace. Their socialism was a porcelain Ferrari. Not designed for bumps on the track. And their sleek truckster was heading for deep rough, and lots of it. To mix the metaphor, it was going to take a tiger to stroke out of it; to both rebuild the car, and smooth the track. To give Blissy and his millions something simply to live for. The academics, the artists, had better change their ways, and that was a period, unless, of course, they were waiting on the politicians.

Plenty of boylovers out there. Pedophiles. Representing freaking everybody. Couldn't be worse than the lawyers. Had built Nifty, et al, while the judicial jewboys tore Napster limb from limb. Twenty percent of the population, likely more. An absolute force, just by dint of number. Persecute them, go right ahead. Accountability. Remember? Twenty percent of us, give or take. Fifty-six million cells outta do it. Since Boston is stuffed with liberals, perhaps their tradeunions and the profits from the Big Dig can play a role.

The same truisms applied to the artistic and academic communities as to society at large. If you hit them hard enough to wake them up, would they survive in the first place? Or might a carrot be tried? Under the circumstances, that seemed a bit phallic. Perhaps they could be lured with humor. His survival as a youth had depended on it, but had dear mom stimulated the talent diligently enough to yield something of interest to the man on the street? So far, the answer was No. Nobody had responded to anything, not a single letter. This meant nothing. King Gillette sold 160 razors his first year in business, and Thoreau, about the same number of copies of "Walden" in its first year. Half of the world's great successes had inauspicious beginnings, half of them tortuous. Charles was hardly half way through his rookie season, and had known, from the outset, he was dealing with clunkers. The real fly in the ointment was a little catch known as Window of opportunity. How long would it be open, if, indeed, it would ever be open at all? Comfortingly, this was entirely up to others.

The sickest sin, according to one source, was any enjoyment in being envied. Charles agreed with this, and so wrote in a dreamy effort to stoke his subjects to the point they'd never envy anybody. Resistance was a given, and it was perversely exciting to anticipate the likelihood of enough grabbing the life ring in time to do any good. He bet against them. His countrymen had simply benefited far too greatly from random fickle luck and fate, with a terrifyingly shallow understanding of, or appreciation for, what had been showered on them by a minute handful of geniuses, almost always fought tooth and nail, to deserve any more lucky breaks. And for sure, there were none on the horizon.

Foi all his crying, Nifty had done a good job archiving his stories. There they were. On Forty-Second Street at Broadway. They would be read as surely as Stop signs, until the end of electricity, and perhaps beyond. Few messages. Get rid of Jews and Jew-types. Import half a billion immigrants to bury the power lines and clean and give the place and old fashioned shave and a haircut. Make universal use of the new-dimension polygraph to clear prisons of harmless folk, and clear the streets of dangerous ones. Clean-sheet the military and academia. Re-evolve family and neighborhood life around Xbox games and programs. Re-invent a love of history, it's all that's left. (If we make a little ourselves at least our descendents will know we didn't all die on the john. Parenthetically, if we don't there won't be any future generations to wonder at our shenanigans, straight or crook.)

In the past, empire builders had manipulated round heads to stand in front of cannons by extolling one of two franchises, liberty or solidarity. These were derivatives of religion, which peddled faith. All were false; weak at the knees and hollow of head, unnatural, and survivable only under conditions of material opulence. Life was just to complicated, the difference between competence and excellence, too vast. The communists realized this and so set one person in three to spy on the other two. Excellence in such a venue would go a long way toward ensuring a diligent individual's success, but it was hard to find any long-term benefit in the scheme. Cuba, East Berlin, North Korea, Albania, Angola. If those were the success stories of Karl Marx, what must his failures look like? Afghanistan. Burma. Yeah, workers of the world, go ahead and unite `till the cows come home and once again the hammer and sickle will be raising mainly calluses from dawn to dusk. Also, mass graves are an often overlooked benefit of solidarity.

The Jew loved his scroll-in-a-box for the simple reason that in thousands of years he'd created nothing new to love. But boxed scrolls did not a civilization run, not for long, and certainly not through adversity. Iridium was proof, Napster, Webvan, and hundred of similar enterprises run by technicians and buck artists who happened to be in the right place at the right time. The leading class amounted to little more than winners of a grand lottery for overblown egos and staggering levels of blind-leading-blind incompetence. Common sense had been so devalued it appeared as if OJ's Jews had been successful in their efforts to subject it to a final solution.

While this had a novelty value at a certain time and in a certain place, the stage was being set for a much wider playing of the old theme. Days after getting the 2008 Olympic games, China signed a formal friendship pact with Russia. This was a direct result of not granting the nation the millennial games, with the salt in the wound of giving them to nutty little Sydney. Rasputin destroyed a monarchy and liberal voters brought down democracy. One crazy as `tother. On the bright side, it is now likely sons of liberals will get to remind the Chinese about Tienamen Square, mano a mano, if that's not an overly clever way to put it. That's how things tend to go. For example, Japan. Brutalized a vast area of the planet, committed history's longest list of gratuitous atrocities, and, in return, got McArthur as a committed governor general, whom they loved. When the flames and trials were over and Sony was making pix in H-town it began to become apparent what the real war was all about. Vaguery. Nothing. Poppycock and A-bombs. A harmless minor diversion and incidental nuisance in comparison to the defeat they stare in the face today. See, it's like this. McArthur was a democrat. He infected Japan with trade unions.

So he continued to write. Yes, above blessed Mozart. The manuscript grew. The word was there, not through the yowlings of a camera professional, but in English prose with a few limericks thrown in to relieve the monotony. Clear stuff. No Hebrew miasma. To paraphrase the middle male Brady, read it or die.

The Jew sips his tea from a glass,

The goy is crude, unclean and crass;

He drinks from a cup, his luck is up,

`Cause he's gonna to take the Jew up the ass.

The world adjusted to his preference, at least in the abstract, Charles turned his attention back to gazing into Blissy's eyes. He was so real, so close, and had infinite trust in his king, however provisional the crown. While others might one day turn to Charles, forced by a lack of alternatives, this boy was drawn, heart and soul, not like an indoctrinatee, disciple or cultist, but with the realization that an utterly new way was not only needed, but essential, and the only path was an aggressive struggle -- what else was new -- under singular leadership. The host must be freed of its parasites, or it would die of them; indeed, was already floundering in the clearing with its scent drifting downwind and into the forest, the last place a wounded animal wants its pheromones.

Ruminations complete for the moment, Charles asked his little friend about the story he wanted to tell.

"I think Stephen King really blew it with `The Stand.,'" the sweet child answered. "I mean, what if he'd kept all the paranormal gibberish out, psycho witches of the west and junk like that, and just worked with the premise of a vastly reduced society living amongst immeasurable legacy resources. How would people be motivated? Someone would still have to do the dirty work. How would you pay a worker to haul away garbage when he lives in a mansion and drives a Mercedes?"

Sneaky boy knew the way to a writer's heart. Charles had fretted a bit around the edges about bringing his present work to a conclusion. What to write next? Science fiction? He'd started, a month or so ago, a re-write of Pvt. Ryan, history wide and history narrow. Having re-written D-Day as it should have been, he now wanted to tackle the Pacific theater.

What had been their all-fired hurry? After Pearl Harbor, the US should have gone methodically and diligently to work building a thousand subs, and pointed out to the Japanese that it was going to do them precious little good to dominate their rightful trading partners, militarily, if they had no ships or boats, and, if they didn't withdraw quickly and completely, in three very short years their navigation buoys would be used for target practice by bored sailors, while inland, the delights of feudalism would be reintroduced to every household. Unquote. The year before the war, Japan had produced forty-eight thousand automobile, the States, ten million. There was nothing to dither over or get excited about other than a bunch of stargazing stuffed shirts who rarely failed to do three things wrong for every one they did right.

Emotions should be kept out of war like oxygen is kept out an oil fire. Perhaps it could be a Nifty story if he developed a theme of subs on such cloyingly peaceful blockade duty that cadets were assigned as apprentice crew.

Wrong theater, but it would be nice to include the Battle of the Bulge. Paint Ike as a military genius who knew damn well the Germans were planning a run for the oil, and let them come, rather than fight them in a well ordered withdrawal, luring our forces ever closer to their supplies while stretching the Red Ball Express tighter with every mile the white hats advanced. Oddly, and one-hundred percent unintentionally, Vietnam had amounted to an identical repetition of the concept. In the end, Russia was so bled white it could be stated, with respect to the greatest victory in military history, that never had so few sacrificed so little to save so many. Military history. Fabulous. And when Leno, a foreign sounding name Charles's ears, repeatedly played tapes mocking the Chinese leader for singing traditional opera, it was likely there'd be more military history, this time for the man in the street, not just an elite group of aficionados. Some of these scenarios seemed less than ideal for sexual themes, and the camp leader's mind returned to Blissy's sketch.

"The Stand?" Fantasy? He'd need a collaborator. Someone winsome and bright-eyed. Creative. Imaginative. An eager beaver. Someone small enough to sit in his lap and help with the typing? Hmm. He'd be playing into David's hands, of course. What could he pout about if he were in fact writing sf-fantasy? Could an artist exist without temperament? Very few had. Mellow didn't seem to go with magnificent. Settling in with young Mr. Charm? That in fact might just take the edge off. What edge? No polygons on Blissy. Edgy he was not. On the contrary, soft, lithe, supple and probably with brains in his liver. Boy gras and likely worth the pate he yearned for.

Charles's mouth went dry. He'd said what he had to say, stalled, temporized. The kid was neither moony nor creepy. Close, but that went with the IQ. Was something going to happen? Why should it? How could it? He was in paradise, already. Fifty-five with a nine-year-and--one-week old? That was about as califragilistic as super got.

Face it, he was the best writer in the world, a monarch by birth, replete with the conceit-free confidence that could only come from being part of a large family who, decade after decade, had thoroughly proven each and every theory and tenet he held having to do with liberalism. Heady stuff for a visionary, plus, there was a practical side to his mental agility, which he'd demonstrated when he fingered Robert Gee as the Olympic bomber, and revolutionized automotive design with his Six-Pac Pac power system. Creative Camp was located in Mexico, which was a great plus when it came to the human side of living, proving a good working man's acumen and mental resources, and, now, he was with a newly-minted nine year old who thought he was the cat's pajamas, and had felt so since their first meeting a month ago. This was life as it should be lived in an ultimate demonstration of cranial perfection that dictated one fan and one subject, at a time. This logic, romantic as it was, also had a practical side.

His subjects deemed themselves free, or at least as free as it was possible to do under stupefying debt loads and equal loads of fat. They'd been diddled, but had accepted it readily enough, had gone so far as to give their popular vote to a functionary who would not operate a light switch one full day out of seven, said day obviously being Saturday, and so were not a bother. Asked by his campers why he wanted to hassle himself with such a bunch of retards, his answer was that he wanted to see if he was smart enough to save them, merely as an intellectual exercise. Sort of something to do, a project if you pleased, in case he ever got tired of writing. He actually thought he'd make a better leader than author, problem was, most of 281,000,000 people had to think the same thing. That fact that they had no choice might influence the development of things. As good a king as he'd be, considering what he had to work with, he might still be able to use his English talents to heighten the interest level and level of personal involvement If that didn't work out too well, it happened to be a well know fact that men thought with their dicks. Perhaps that might be at least half an avenue.

On the other hand, readers never wrote. Maybe he wouldn't be popular. If that's how it was, then who in their right mind would lift a finger to save a culture that harbored and even nurtured ill will? Napster had died of ill will. Then came the writers in New York, who forced newspapers to de-post their material, because they weren't being paid the little handfuls of money their stuff was worth on the archival after-market, and these ripping hypocrites had been followed up by union radio talkers whose ill will delayed the rollout of Net radio, because the jewlines on the sheets of paper didn't make specific allowance for various commercials being disseminated, other than by the little box a jew puts things in, forever.

All three were examples of raw jewpower, if for no other reason, by their speed. Literally, suddenly, the slow but sure wheels of justice had been set spinning in hyper overdrive. Napster, in its popular sense, had come and gone in a flash, but that was nothing compared to New York papers destroying archives practically the day the first schmo said boo, while the uniontalkers had kept their commercials off the air before they ever were aired. As a little game of whose got the chutzpah, Levy's parents had set a precedent for house-to-house and lot-to-lot searches for missing adults. How many good men would join or stick with the force when due diligence meant incessant searching of dangerous derelict buildings and endless thousands of clumps of weeds? Totally irrelevant, of course, if it's one's little princess who has disappeared. The Levy case, right down to the sleazy-faced SoCal pol, from a family of absolute crud, amounted to a perfect example of emotion riding out with iron shoes flashing on flint, the rider beyond criticism because only a loathsome anti-Semite would raise a murmer of protest while a good little American would be calling out the Guard. In all it seemed like a lot to go through for one dead Jewess, but there was every likelihood the pace would pick up the second the pendulum reversed itself. (It always had, before.) Pendulums, tides, shifts in the winds. Calms before the storm...

Cincinnati, where a very jewish outrage over alleged police mistakes made on dark streets and in dark alleys gelded the profiling coppers and spiked the rate of shootings, and, presumably, associated general misery and terror, by eight times, immediately after the riots. Same exact thing that happened in Johannesburg a few years ago, turning it into the murder and torture capital of the entire planet. Nothing a big bellied bog of a jew editor loves more than haranguing for over reaction one day, then haranguing for dereliction of duty later that same evening. It was commonly said by the Bolsheviks that it hardly mattered whether or not they won the war, because they'd come to power from the inside, in any event. How many times did Clinton visit Isshwriealle?

In the end, Mel Brooks was right, it was good to be a king. Being a camp director wasn't half bad either. He'd been able to winnow over a thousand nuggets and find the purest in the world. The boy had panned a few nuggets of his own, so there was considerable serendipity, oddly, in knowing there was little kismet involved. They were like totally right for each other.

Blissy began his story

. . . .

The time-release poison capsules were developed in Lebanon. They were deposited in the 250 principal water systems and reduced the population by, it was later estimated, ninety-nine point seven percent, leaving three alive out of every one thousand. The plot had been imperfectly executed, word had leaked out while there was still time, and a diverse and understandably confused retaliation had frozen the major enemies in time and place.

For three years, rural populations had coalesced. Mad Max-type films had rendered the surviving population violently leery of odd behavior, so an aurora of peace, friendliness, grace and goodwill had existed as various survivors shuffled themselves together. Many cells had been surprised at how few leaders had to be hanged to establish and maintain a new era of really peaceful peace.

In was late May of 2023. The conferences had been underway for nearly the entire month. Paper after paper had been presented, carefully read and thoughtfully discussed. Emotion was forbidden at the meetings, and even in the bars, so the atmosphere was of people who genuinely hated disagreeing with each other, yet had varying viewpoints based on overall education and life experience.

Wayne Hancock was enjoying the conclave. It was good to be in a larger group. His village, with its dozens of horses, was something no one had thought to dream of before Pastoral, quiet, sublime, and, yes, a bit boring. His feelings had linked him with thousands of others over the second and third years, and thus the convention with its agenda to explore more social avenues and possible venues for their future lives, and try to decide whether coalesce and relocate, or not. How happy should one be?

So many people all of a sudden. After the poisoning, now known colloquially as The Great Pill Drop,, there had been massive contractions of the remaining population, but stinking urban landscapes, notwithstanding, a rural imperative had quickly reasserted itself, and so society had expanded, geographically, almost as quickly as it had come together. After three years, the cycle was at the verge of repeating, and interested participants had elected delegates to dampen the swings of the pendulum, so that a happy medium could be achieved.

So many people. Wayne, 24, had gone off with his two brothers, in the first contraction (their parents had been picced, pronounced `pissed,' slang for poisoned in the city), and the threesome had ended up on a horse-rich farm with two semis of assorted goods neatly parked in the north pasture. The wolf kept further from the door than they ever could have imagined, the boys had spent eighteen months in a foggy paradise of excellent liquor, kilos of weed, and literally tons of everything from golf clubs to peanut butter and jelly. It had been everlastingly great, but a bit on the vapid side. This feeling had quickly become a groundswell. Three years had been enough for the decay cycle to be largely complete, the rats would have come, the maggots and roaches would have helped, then the mice for the bones, and, with the poison long since diluted, voila, any American city they wished was not only theirs, but also at its historical height of perfection.

Indeed, cities had come to have an almost magical allure to the ten million survivors. How you going to keep them down on the farm, after they've seen Paree? But city life would bring complications. No more tossing the garbage out the back window and dealing with on clean-up day, which was the first Monday each month. No more running a little generator when you were in the mood for some electricity to power the water system or watch a DVD. Yes, city life would be different. Some would have to work. No one had worked for three totally cool years, other than looting and muscling plunder around to suit taste and convenience. So? Who would work and who would chill out all day, doing precisely what they pleased? It was an ironic replay of the chiefs and Indians relationship, which had dogged history since cave one.

It has long been held that if everyone in a culture were given a fair share of its assets, ten percent would own ninety percent in short order. Given a few years, three percent would own ninety-seven percent. Now everyone had thirty thousand percent. Three hundred times their so-called share. It would take a century to even slightly change that balance, indeed, most individuals would not be able to intrinsically change their worth, whatever their mode of living, in the span of an adult lifetime.

The convention faced two problems. How to motivate labor for essential services, and how to entertain, in general, which was the reason to speculate on change, in the first place. A few foresighted survivors had argued, at early gatherings, and, anticipating just the problem that had now arisen, that a few Jews should be retained, because they were bred for marathon nitpicking and hairsplitting, and thus might have come up, before mid-century, with a formulae that would satisfy the needs of the moment. In the end, the forces of here-we-go-again, and let's-try-something-different, had won, and the small number of rural survivors had seen the handwriting on the wall, and departed.

So, these years into the new way of life, the situation had not been rectified. By consensus, people now wanted to live together, but who was going to do what for whom, and when, and what could possibly entertain in a society where free entertainment was stacked a plate-glass window away from anyone looking for packaged fun-and-excitement Product?

As with the chronometer, the first person to fly the English Channel, and the Atlantic, and other leaps and stunts of history, a prize would have been offered for a brilliant solution, but what would constitute a prize? Back to the drawing board, but there was no drawing board. There was nothing except obvious suggestions from assigning everyone small blocks of work each week to the establishment of a new slave class. These were not greeted with derision because the suggesters had been sheepishly trying to break the silence, contribute at least something, more than they had been convinced. In any event, the conventionalities had been presented and had died out through lack of interest.

Still, it was fun to congregate. Be part of even a modest ebb and flow of folk. Hang at a bar where a man entertained himself by acting the role of bartender, sometimes three or four hours at a stretch. By the same token, handsome young boys seemed to take pleasure in guarding the pool, and a group at the hotel had come up with their own small-scale service system so that the place would run for their amusement. A modern variation on the theme of the babe magnet.

Two hundred families had gathered for this particular segment of the convention, and, in the limited venue, aligned themselves with the staff of a dozen to share and share alike. While a pleasant and efficient atmosphere was maintained, all realized it was driven by novelty and maintained by the simple fact it would be over in a couple of weeks, and everyone could go back to doing, or not doing, precisely as they pleased.

So hopeless was the situation, in its bizarre way, that the so-called congresses tended to adjourn by ten in the morning. Wayne found it strange to sit by the pool, wishing for more, and yet did they all, because, even if they did not urbanize, sooner or later men and women were going to have to do consistent manual and mental labor to preserve even the laid-back rural and outer suburban lifestyles in vogue since the first implosion of survivors following the pill drop. The pool was beautiful, but wasn't it on a cruise ship stranded a thousand miles from land?

Wayne noticed them about ten minutes after settling into his deck chair, double gin and tonic cooling his palm. He looked about seventeen, she, perhaps ten. Obviously siblings, obviously athletic, and there seemed to be more that was obvious, but it wasn't obvious, so it left Wayne picking up his towel and pulling it across his waist. Other males did this as the brother and little sister frolicked in the clean water. While the behavior of the youths was not obvious, neither was the atmosphere of awareness surrounding the pool. So not-obvious the level of awareness might have been compared to an air horn in an elevator.

"Did they have to be redheads?" Wayne sighed to himself. "And so light completed?" Their skin looked nakeder than naked, and there was lots of it. Both redheads were tall and just a pound or two over slim. Long legged, with the male so juvenile in appearance he was as hairless as his little ten-year-old sis. Amidst their horseplay, the young couple occasionally locked eyes, glanced in a certain direction, and then went back to ducking and shoulder diving. At one point, the glance was so obvious Wayne looked over his shoulder, the way they do in comic movies. Nobody was behind him, and he blushed, thankful for his foresight with the beach towel.

He closed his eyes to sizzle for a few minutes, May was the time to do it, and then was interrupted. "Can I borrow just a corner of your towel, dude?" the teen asked. Wayne nodded with a smile, and the youth wiped the water from his handsome face.

"Are you here by yourself?" the teenager asked.

"This trip. I live with my two brothers, but they stayed home."

"Here for the convention?"

"Delegate. Ozarks. Everyone died in Branson. Smallest town they took out.."

"It keeps getting better, doesn't it?" the boy murmured. The green-eyed redhead sat at a wave from Wayne, and they talked across a one-foot gap.

"My sister's name is Brenda, and I'm Cal, which is short for Caligula, not, but better than the alternative my mother chose. I mean it wouldn't matter much, would it; Calbert, Calvert, Calvin, or Calloway?"

Wayne agreed that the shortened form of the name would be his choice.

"Brenda's getting drinks. She wanted me to introduce us. Is that okay?"

"Fine," Wayne said, swinging his feet back onto his pool chair the moment Cal was done with the towel. The boy followed suit, and both males relaxed a few moments, letting the spring sun shine down.

"She really likes you. Me too. Even from the middle of the pool, and even with the crowd, we both spotted you before we even hit the water."

"I'm flattered," Wayne said. "Brenda is very pretty. I didn't dare steal more than a glance, you know how country folk are when they get around big-city outskirts, but she passed every test I could think of, except age. That's why they call it life, I guess."

"Well," the boy responded, "she's not over the hill, and that's a fact."

"Are you very close?" Wayne asked.

Young yes, but also beauteous and with a gamin friendliness that might indicate a personality beyond the Touch-me-and-you're-dead-meat stereotype which had fit most kids up until recent years. Wayne had heard about this. New attitudes. A twelve year old with his own Porsche, and vast open roads on which he or she was permitted to drive it, had little to whine about. Kids were meant to be nicer now. For many, according to what he'd heard his few days in town, this fact, alone, made up the A list of notable improvements in the post-urban landscape.

That, and shunning. That was on almost everyone's A list. The old Amish stricture where disagreeable and offensive people, whether crook or straight, were precluded from social intercourse, at the first level, and precluded from commerce, essentially, a regional death sentence, at the second level. It paid to be nice in the new world, and the ethic of limited recalcitrance had, in just these few years, seeped so far downtown in Teen City, even the ten year olds were waking up and taking notice. Sure made life a sweeter proposition, all the way `round. So much so that here he was talking to a seventeen year old, former mortal age of the twenty-something. It was often remarked that there was something auspicious about the year 2020, and the funny ended with a delightful formulae banality that went, Sure, in hindsight.

"The `rents went in the big pill down," Cal explained. It was an indicator the boy had been out of touch, because the acronym, TBPD was in common usage, the tongue-twisting nature of the arrangement endured as a sign of respect for the many deceased

Sure enough. "Brenda and I went on a marathon camping trip," Cal explained, "walked over a thousand miles south, then back. We were raised fifty miles from here, and this is our first time out of the woods, so to speak. I mean," the boy went on, "other than nipping here and there to pick up more tins of caviar, extremely nutritious, and maybe some new batteries for the stereo."

"It sounds terrific," Wayne said, comparing it with the in-depth drinking bout he and his brothers had used to while away the time following the first bouncing, frightening months. Spunky kids.

"Yeah," Cal seconded. "Awesome, in fact. Just walking along, knowing you'd find tons of whatever you wanted from vodka to marbles. T-shirts for hot weather, Cortex, for the cold, and, you know we always washed them and re-used them for at least a couple of months. Isn't that weird? We could have worn one every hour, for life, but we only changed once in awhile, just like the old days. Course, we weren't heroes or anything. We had plenty of soap."

Wayne couldn't help giggling with the boy. Lucky little sis. He was all of magnetic and energetic. Cute beyond words. Surely the Garden of Eden, itself, had never seen such happy campers as these two must have been, wandering their two-thousand miles, staying warm, rarely hot, and now back, in May; obviously with a decision in the offing as to whether to stay for the urbanization conferences or go on north, perhaps another thousand miles, to while away the coming summer and keep those long legs ripping.

"What did you do?" Cal asked. Well, he'd been back in civilization long enough to know vocational inquiries were couched in the past tense.

"Librarian," Wayne answered.

"No way," said Cal.

"Sorry," the twenty four year old kicked back.

"Are you kidding? Want to marry a ten year old? Brenda reads all the time. So do I. When we're so called hiking? we start by running two-and-a-half miles as fast as we can, then we do our gym workout setting up camp, then we read `till midnight. Every day. The only other activity is scouting up new supplies, but there's nothing to that once you've had a little practice."

"And you still want to urbanize?" Wayne asked.

"We're pretty sure," Cal answered, thoughtfully. "Maybe after we do Canada. I mean, it's fun to live like Tarzan, in a way, and curl up with a good book, or a DVD of an evening, but, well, it's like Christmas every day.

"It would be better to be around more people. Now that the spiritualists and faith merchants are out of the picture, we can, for example, talk about the overall monsterism of Catholicism without some slick-lipped Jesuit tonguing doctrine out of one side of his mouth and arrogance out of both sides. That was getting really old, you know, the phoniness, money grubbing, and all. We figure if we urbanize there will be clubs that know real history, and we can put together a properly balanced assessment of America as it was, not as some special interest group told us it was."

The young males batted this conversational ball around for several minutes. History always came surprisingly high on the list of reasons for urbanization. That, and computer gaming in groups.

This was the source of the enigma. The reasons to pick a city and resettle it were so vague as to be almost translucent. Many offered the opinion that it would be hard to beat what they had, and any system which compelled a few to work for benefit of the many was rendered half-way moot by the lack of any life-or-death aspect to the situation. Most logistical experts agreed that the surviving population, making a nominal effort at extending the life of prepared foods, could breeze ten to twenty years before they began to run short of mainstay goods.

Yes, it was the ultimate back-burner issue, but, by the same token, it was the only issue there was. No Jews, no issues. Could it really be that simple? Or was it no clergy, no issues? Academics? Criminals? Artists? None had the same ring of truth. In any event, it was an issue of no immediate import, though, as to Cal and his sister, it did have a certain sweet ring of community and shared experience. Again, what else was there?

"Brenda wanted to invite you to dinner," Cal allowed. "I guess we're looking for sort of a half-dad. Someone older and wiser, you know what I mean, and not all up-tight and jittery."

"Well," Wayne answered, "I'm twenty four. I read a lot. I kayak a lot, usually fishing. I write. I had a girlfriend, before, I guess more friend than girl, but she nevered, and since then I hang with my brothers and we drink and keep the place looking good. We have more grass than the livestock can eat so we do a lot of mowing to keep the scrub at bay. Room for the horses. We have six Arabs."

"You're a librarian, and you have Arabs?" the boy asked, showing surprise and respect, alien emotions scant years before.

"The library was then, the horses, now. But we kept a couple of thousand books after I abandon my post, so I guess I'm still half-way in the business."

"What happened to the rest of the books?" Cal asked.

"Nothing," Wayne said. "They're still on the shelves; the place operates freelance, no locks, no overseers. It just had a new roof so it's safe to fly until we-all decide what we're going to do."

"Everybody's in that boat," the teen acknowledged with a nod.

Brenda came bouncing up. Her brother swung his feet and the girl released one glass of wine to Wayne and settled beside Cal, handing him a glass. With a look of badness over the rim, she held her glass to the guys and giggled Bottoms up.

"Have you told him all our secrets?" the girl asked after a long sip.

"Not even one," Cal said. "Wayne's a librarian, and he has a herd of Arabs."

"No way!" the little charmer squealed, and launched herself, wine and all, into Wayne's lap. Her brother grinned. This was going to work. They'd met hundreds of survivors on their camping epic, some super nice ones, too, but Brenda had never acted like this. Indeed, it usually took her some hours to warm up to new acquaintances, if she did so at all. She maintained a friendly-child motif that covered most of her relationships -- and seemed to have outgrown it in a big hurry.

"How many Arabs?" she asked.

"Six," Wayne said.

Apparently six was enough. The girl knackered his chin, gently enough, with her teeth.

"Do any of them bite?" she asked.

"They're rough on grass," the twenty four year old replied.

"Ah yes," the girl twinkled back, "good old roughass. Large herbivores need lots of it."

"Large herbivores also need a whip," Cal pointed out.

"It's okay," Brenda responded. "We're in love."

Old news. Wayne had know that for over a minute. Cal looked into his eyes. No trace of denial. The teen grinned happily. Ten years old and happily betrothed. He'd been a good brother, after all. There had been times he was not sure. Taboos and mores said this, the new way of living, said that. A lot had been going on with other hiking couples and small groups. At the time it had seemed utterly natural. Even the things that had happened by the swimming hole their second day on the trail.

But twisted sister images couldn't help haunt him. She woke to him as a lover, then kid sissed it all day, returning to his bed as ardently as she'd left it. His bellows over her had matched those of other males when they chanced to camp ensemble, had scared bears and terrified wolves when they settled for the night in a wilderness. Had it changed her? Obviously, not for the worse. She was a truck, she'd found her target. Road kill. He had to be happy at that. Perfection. She looked over her shoulder, her eyes blazing with excitement, and at the same time soft with unutterable thanks for the things he'd done to her so gently, so tenderly, so she'd loved them from the first, and wasn't scared of anything, and especially not a meager librarian with a few nags.

Having completed her hug, the girl became demure and returned to her brother's side, stroking his inner thigh down near the knee. "Isn't he a doll?" she said. "Imagine being off in the woods with him for months and months. Do you think that would be good for a little girl?"

"Only if she survived," Wayne responded.

"It was close, at that," the child said.

They were delectable. A pair that would beat three of any kind. Around the pool everyone was still trying not to notice. "Not a limp dick in the garden," Wayne mused to himself, including himself. Looking at it from an intellectual point of view, he was ready to get married. Why on earth not? What was Brenda, ten years old? They'd have to keep it secret, maybe unofficial was more realistic, for six or seven more years. With the brother as chaperone - they were close enough in age to be friends in the new order - it could hardly help but work out. There were even enough horses.

"Meaning?" Wayne almost bubbled his wine at the thought, "We're on our honeymoon."

Problem. How long had it been since he'd had a problem? Aside from a few weeks of strife and confusion immediately after the pilldown, problems had removed themselves to history, back to the past. Yet here was a situation representing the very essence of tribulation. A fiancé with no ring.

It was that kind of place. Wayne excused himself from his new friends and circled the pool, looking for a petite lady. In took him a minute or so to home in on a pixie brunette. She was obviously a newlywed, coaxing her handsome young husband to paw her, which he did. Approaching the couple, he introduced himself and explained that his niece, sitting over there with his nephew, had misplaced a diamond engagement ring she was carrying to her best friend's older sister. Would they mind?

With happy grins indicating they believe about one percent of Wayne's story, the bride handed over her diamond, saying, with a wink, I hope it fits.

The fit was pretty close and Brenda was delighted with the thoughtful offering, smiling at the happy couple who splashed childishly and grinned back. Wayne, mature as he was, with twenty-one of his years before TBPD, idly speculated on how much jewelry he could obtain repeating his story around the pool. Would it be more or less than ten million of them old dollars? As the old saying went, It's the thought that counts. Brenda's eyes glowed with excitement as Wayne slipped the ring over her dainty finger. No one intruded by actually whistling or clapping, but the walls of the courtyard fairly ricocheted tolerance and best wishes. No Belzer types with a pithy comment or two to evil up the ambience. Dull razors and Jews. Uptight dykes and screws. There had been a lot to lose, but a few thousand pounds of poison had driven off the blues. Now he was sipping wine with Miss Nine, well, almost, and it was time to dine.

The whole institution seemed to sigh collectively as the threesome decamped and adjourned to the second floor where they'd agreed to dress for lunch. As they entered Wayne's suite, he wondered if anyone had ever made the transition from carefree bachelor to family man quite as rapidly as he'd just seemed to manage it. Books to horses to ring to husband to father to daughter to son and off to the boudoir in a little over half an hour. Wife and daughter seemed a lead-pipe cinch. Son and lover? Oh, wow, is that what the boy wanted? Like the engagement ring, it smacked of being a problem until the situation was resolved as Cal dropped his towel the moment the door was closed and let Wayne look at the swollen mass jutting to his right side. Brenda danced off to the bathroom, leaving her spectacular duo of escorts to get acquainted .

"I can make myself scarce," Cal whispered.

"No!" Wayne interjected instantly. The injunction sprang from his lips before he knew it. What was this all about? He'd never touched a male. Gay stuff? This would hardly seem the time or place, except for... The thought had such an obvious conclusion he didn't bother thinking it.

Cal stood in front of him as the groom-to-be sat on the arm of an easy chair. Came closer and now was a foot away. "Is it okay?" he asked.

Wayne's yawned, his mouth dried not by wine. If the legs hadn't been so long, and, strung with, lean, muscle, he might have stood a chance. That was, no innuendo intended, how things stood. Cal was long, Cal was lean, Cal was... He couldn't think straight which turned out to be fine because there was nothing straight about the situation, so he straightened himself and stood, bare chested inches from the thirteen year appearing teen.

"Is your mouth dry?" Cal asked.

"Totally," Wayne whispered with a yawn that seemed to alleviate panic, at least for the moment.

"That happened to me, too," the boy explained. "There's an incredibly effective cure, if you want me to show it to you."

"It's not experimental, is it?" Wayne managed to rasp.

"More like all-natural," Cal said, tilting his face to the taller male in front of him.

Wayne looked into his cute boy eyes. Was this the flame that drove women mad for jewels? Poor things. What difference would there be kissing a diamond and kissing a lump of quartz? But then again, jewels appealed to headstrong imbeciles, and Wayne felt himself a long way from this category, especially with Cal so everlastingly.... close... That was the problem. If the Hope diamond's curse was derived from proximity, what foul deviltry would befall him, and how quickly, it he adjourned himself, say a foot from those depthless orbs? Conversely, what would be his fate if he solved the closeness problem with togetherness? Maybe it was the hormones talking, but it did seem worth a try.

Einstein had a lot to say about time and relativity but Wayne doubted the sour old schmo had ever truly understood the term `instant' as it applied to the length of time it took to get used to kissing a boy. Indeed, the experience actually warped the continuum because he'd adjusted himself to the idea a full inch before contact was made and the first light nibbling exploration even began. No wonder there was so much spiritualism and psychic desperation in the world: only a fraction of its population got to kiss a willing juvenile partner, and so were destined to search until eternity, like Ponce baby, for any fraction of what only the friendly and generous had any right to. Good luck to them. (Try Florida.)

So far, his luck was running well. Cal loved being kissed and it had been intensely exciting when their young naked chests had come together. Both had moaned at the sensation, and their foreplay kissing had warm-jellied into the real thing. Jelly laced with tiny nuggets of pure cocaine, boy, that was how it felt. Soft, warm, and electric. Shocking at times. The way the youth, after several gentle minutes, began gently sucking the tip of his tongue in a suggestive way. Shocking, or so it seemed at the time.

The kissing went on, after awhile becoming intermittent as the whispering began.

"Have you ever done this with a boy before?" Cal asked.

"Never even thought of it," Wayne whispered back, suddenly aware that Cal's remedy for dry mouth had worked, adding a holistic dimension to the frantic warping of time and morality that had all crammed their way into way less than a few seconds. History's wackos had raved of liberty, solidarity and faith to mold emotion to their will. This boy was not in the club. Said nothing for the moment. What was the old adage about truth coming from the lips babes. Boggle.

Cal, following the train of thought, was just, boggle again, a prequel. As if to clobber him simply dead with sensation, Cal whispered, "Brenda's lucky. She learned about this almost three years ago, when she was eight. I had to wait until I was eleven, for my first time."

"Well, tiger," Wayne replied, "you beat me by thirteen years."

"And Brenda, by sixteen," the boy added, helpfully.

"Then I guess this is what you call making out for lost time," Wayne whispered as he returned to the trembling lips of his ever-so-boyish lover.

. . .

"They were a well suited pair, Blissy pointed out, and became fully involved with each other. This resulted in another shocking experience, do you want to hear it?"

"You've gotten off to a very good start," Charles acknowledged. "I would like to hear more of your story, yes."

"It's going to cost you," the gamin youngster replied.

"I hope not a diamond," Charles replied.

"Think pink, think red, think warm, think wet, think what Timmy has done here," the child replied, moving in like a serpent.

The boy had left his hero, Cal, in the Boggle Hall of Fame, dropped out of his story, and absolutely instantly recreated the literary effect on the blanket under the oak. All Charles had time for was At least he's nine, now, before the child was against him, licking and nibbling just like the couple in the story.

The camp leader reflected back on how many tales had been told, some by him, some to him, over the past month, in an effort to keep exactly this from actually happening. Veteran of so many epics, and such tawdry ones, he really had thought he could bring Blissy back to this private spot for a heart-to-heart talk, prepping the boy for departure at the end of the summer season.

Now the child was against him, more friendly and happy seeming than obsessed or neurotic, like Mel Gibson's first young lover, the one that died, in the film, and more than Santa when it came to giving. Sometimes Charles hated being a writer. He wanted to concentrate, return the boy's gentle inquiring kisses, and he did his best, but his mind, writer's mind, had spun crazily off on a tangent titled: "The Ultimate Santa." Not the right thought at the right time, that was for sure. The boy had just begun a brilliant tale of his own. One the two of them could plot; heavy duty sci-fi that would shake the ground under Isaac's feet, or bounce him clear of the grave, if that happened to be his abode. He grew almost giddy at the thought, which, since he was kissing a nine year old, must have been a good one. It was. Supreme, in fact. If he had a hardball plot, he could avoid, a, politics, and b, himself. How ace in the hole would that be? "Oh, Blissy," he sighed to himself, scared stiff of any word or sound that might possibly be interpreted by the youngster as encouraging, "you have done it, angel of all possible angels."

Of course, he realized, Stephen King had really done it, established a premise of miniscule population surviving amongst a vast legacy infrastructure, but, and here his thinking became ice clear, if he wrote it, triple X, no one would dare admit reading it, thus he could steer clear of intellectual property issues. A fiendish plan, but they'd come happily through a fiendish era, who could ever tell?

It was a plan, more than. No writer's ego, no Jews. Loads of characters, conflicts and resolution. It was a shame he couldn't mainstream it, but he had loads of manuscript for the straight set, so that hardly mattered, one way or the other. The writer's strike had not happened, he'd been counting on it, not happily, as an opportunity to scab. That had ended up a Sigh, because when one thought about how long it took the schmoes to recognize Jackie Chan, while wasting massed fortunes on Kevin Costner, you had to be pessimistic over excellence having any influence over the right door opened in the right place and at the right time, just like a McDonald's.

He loved his age, Charles did. The crystalline brilliance of precocious youth, with a well tried set of springs and shocks to dampen the rough spots (and take the curves at high speed, te he). Mostly what maturity brought was an absolute ability to concentrate, to focus, as long as XP was running, no matter what. A case in point. Here he was dithering about how grand he'd be writing a full-blown sci-fi novel, his job of work, while an ardent nine year old was probing softly at his teeth with an insistent tongue.

. . .

How cool is this for a hero? Truth to tell? I think you're going to miss me. On the other hand, instead of bringing this colossus in for a full-stop, as it's known, some us will be doing a touch-and-go together. Since execution of this maneuver crams the vagaries of landing and taking off into a brief window you can count on minimal commentary from the flight deck. For you pilots in the crowd, we are marker, inbound, and an assumption is made about your seat belts, smoking materials, and tray position.

. . .

The kissing won out. If this boy ever wanted a dog, all he'd have to do was march a day into the forest, and kiss a wolf for five or ten minutes. He'd come out with a pack big enough to rule a Texas county. Fiendish type, really. Interfering, with his lips and hot panting. Biting so it reminded him of being ejected from the deep blue sea, not by a shark, but by a remora Six inches of persistence, and it was back in the dory for him. How long would it take to cut the oak, and hollow it out? Grasping at straws, that's what he was doing. An oak. A straw. What did it matter? Blissy. Stop. Kissing. Me. No...w.

The obedient child looked up into his cranky old god's eyes, not in disappointment or frustration, but with a purely happy smile. He won himself an oscarmajigg for picking up a cue. "I knew you'd like hearing my story," he crowed. "I think whispering is best, too." With that they were again side by side, simply holding hands.

. . .

Cal and Wayne were holding each other gently at the waist, still experimenting with kissing. It was getting out of hand, really. At it and at it, dizzy, to the teen just as new as to the young man. Yes, Virginia, there was a difference between curiosity, lust, and being stone-fox in love. The books were right about the pheromone thing, there was an absence of it in an incestuous relationship, and those puppies had some kick. It was neat-o they hadn't been swimming; if they'd stopped in the gym for even five minutes Cal knew he'd be fainting, if not actually dead by now.

And this was no one-way street. The boy smelled delicious in his own right. That drove Wayne's Fahrenheit to four-fifty. Powder exploded at Fahrenheit four-fifty-one. It was getting dangerous. How many lips did the boy teen have, anyway? A minefield. What did it matter that one was alive, half-way across?

Both males were aching, shaking and moaning into each others' mouths. Where did the air come from? They were frying off the oxygen, had to be. Panting helped, so they did. After each other. All but wanting blood. They learned to rub their teeth together in a way that made them tactillians of sex, clicking gently, not to a beat, but as a last wall of defense of precious tongues, each more valuable to the owner than as a trophy of passion, however grand.

On a practical note, Wayne was braced solidly against the arm and back of the massive easy chair. He usually rode bareback, so his legs were strong. Cal, as mentioned, was a few hours off a two thousand mile hike, and, while neither male had the lung capacity of the trained athlete, both were fit enough to be comfortable standing with their hands on each others' waist, and kissing.

Cal broke off to whisper. "Bren didn't get her swim, and she's luxo bath crazy after our hike. She'll be in the tub for awhile. Additionally, she may want some time to digest the idea of being a bride. But she wouldn't mind if you want to go in with her, you know, if you want... or stay here...."

"You're in charge, Cal," Wayne whispered. "You've obviously done well so far."

"I'm also one-hundred percent biased," the boy whispered in answer. "More than." More kissing interrupted for more panted whispering.

"You never did any homosexual stuff when you were a kid?" Cal asked.

"No," Wayne said. "Not all that much of the other kind, either. Hazard of the library trade. When I started riding, some stuff happened, but it was too close to consenting heterosexual adults to be of much interest."

"That will be a thrill for Bren," Cal said. "As it happened, all the people we spent time with on the trail, mostly guys but a couple of girls, were experienced as children or with children. In her eyes, you're bound to be a virgin."

Wayne hadn't said Oh, goody since he was five, hadn't thought it, possibly because the big news had spread and clarified itself over several weeks -- thus yielding no notable celebratory moment - since he was ten. It seemed almost rudely out of place, but he was young, inexperienced and very much in love. That made a difference and so Oh, goody it was. Silently, of course.

He had not understated the case. Cal was a rapture. What he'd done with his mouth, the sensually blatant rhythmic sucking against Wayne's tongue he now seemed to do with his fingers, seeming to teach the older male what he wanted done to his own boyish body. It was easy stuff to learn. The nipple part was so stove-bolt simple he felt sure he could have figured it out on his own. The extra three or four pounds the lad had picked up since returning to civilization was a marshmallow heaven, baby silky skin with a prepubescent feel, soft but definitely warm and there, a pre-pre love handle in the sense there is an off-off Broadway. More like a petting zoo, on second thought. A good place to spend some time with a nice young boy. And....

"Let me turn around," Cal whispered, "and stand behind me." Wayne released the boy for his trip and was thrilled when he made it a short one, executing a half-turn without moving away more than an inch or two. Now the older male was able to really molest the boy's chest and even run his hands all the way down over the hint of softness at the belly and to his muscular inner thighs. The shoulders and neck, and back to chest and belly, this time right to the verge of the boy's bathing suit.

"I was letting a man do what you're doing our second day on the trail," Cal said. "Brenda was in a Ramba mood, or maybe Hiawatha, anyway, she went all tip-toes, and when she saw what he was doing to me she crept in for a good look."

"Was the guy nice?" Wayne asked.

"Yeah," the boy answered, "he was great. I told him I hadn't done anything since I was eleven, so he took his time and asked me lots of questions and told me his secrets. It was cool being really mature, you know, just finding a nice guy, youngish, reasonably good looking, and letting him do what he wanted in a private place. Like I was grown up to make the decision; wise enough, too. Twice a month remedy for psychic problems, real and imagined, you know, sometimes just it for its sake."

"You were heading in opposite directions?" Wayne asked.

"No," the boy said. "We were all headed south. His name was Lenny Proudfeather. We spent three days hiking together, half the time laughing because he actually was pretty much American Indian and didn't now squat about the bush, so the white buck and his squaw were teaching tepees and woodcraft. It gets a little weird when rich white teens know more about survival than Indians even one generation removed from their tribes."

"How did he start molesting you?" Wayne asked.

"He quizzed me," the boy explained, "while we were walking along. First it was stuff about te situation, I mean, you remember how it was, meet a perfect stranger and you'd have a million things to talk about. Then he asked me the girlfriend stuff, and I knew from what Mr. Terrance had told me that he wanted to touch me. I thought it was cool, and, even without the world having been so recently turned upside-down, I think I would have been happy hanging out with him. As it was, he was twenty, and smart, even if not about the woods, so it was extra special. Plus, it had been a long time. Grades and all that flat-earth old crap. I didn't have time to know myself, physically, or any other way. Plus, Bren and I would run five miles every day, so it was neuter city for this kid.

"Then Len, and we were a mile or more from the trail and our camp, and walking along and it was hot and he was asking me questions and then we came to the brook and like we'd been together all our lives we settled on a fallen log and we started talking about really mature stuff, and then I was sure he was going to play with me."

"Did he ask you about your sister?" Wayne queried.

"More like told me," the boy responded, "I mean, not told, like dictated, you know, but more like just pointing out some pretty obvious stuff, like that we got along really well together, and she was cute enough, not that it especially mattered, then he told me something he'd seen when he was a boy."

"What was that?" Wayne whispered to keep the conversation going. It was the perfect way to maintain that magic 450 when any touch would jolt the thermometer.

"He'd dated a really pretty girl when he was sixteen and she was twelve. He really fell in love with her, and she let him do things with her, but he was scared to, you know, do what he wanted to do inside her. One night, after he left her at her house, he walked around to the side of the house to get one last look at her, Paula, before he went home. There was a lot of honeysuckle off the porch, and loads of frogs making a racket, and the widow was open with just the screen, so he was able to see and hear what happened."

If this was playing with fire, Wayne took no notice. He was a superbly intelligent young man and realized he had a whole degree to work with before things got out of control.

"What happened?" Wayne whispered to his young partner after several minutes reviewing what it was like to kiss a boy.

"Her dad was sitting on the sofa right under the window. Paula came in from the hall and stood in front of him. He put his book down and looked up at her and asked how it had gone. She told him he, Lenny, had had an accident again. Then she sat on his lap, straddling his knees, and he began unbuttoning her blouse. When he got down to her tummy he saw his daughter was covered with sperm. He commented on how Len was a pretty awesome young man, and reminded Paula that the accidents happened because he was in love with her. He dried her with some tissues on the end table and then she stood and he unzipped her shorts and pulled them down while she got stripped off her blouse.

He asked her if she remembered the first time as he touched her girlish chest and fondled her under her training bra. She replied that it had been the night he'd come into her bedroom and she'd helped him make her get all wet. Then her dad started kissing her around the bra and reached back to unclip it so he could get her naked on top. Meantime, she was working on his shirt, and even the front of his pants. Then they started kissing, and stood up for a minute so they could get each other all the way naked, then he lay her back on the couch, and stood over her so he could see. Len said he was really big. Then he got on his knees between her legs, and she spread really wide with her left foot up over the back of the sofa, and about a foot below the window, and they sort of froze together when he lay down on top of her. Then he saw Paula's legs come up around her dad's waist and he started moving. He could see her golden hair all over her shoulder and some was across her chest.

Then she threw her arms straight up over her head, so neither of them used their hands, but he found her. She called out Oh, Len, when she felt him in the right place against her, then Len could see the big powerful man's back hump strongly and he heard him grunt. Then it was like a porno movie. He was fast and hard on her, but taking really huge long strokes. She kept mewing Len's name, and sometimes, Oh, daddy, then, Len, Len, Len.

At the end it got frantic and noisy for like five whole minutes and suddenly Scott, that's Paula's dad, grunted I'm coming, baby, and her legs went more up around him and that's how they locked together for more than a minute. Even over the honeysuckle Len could catch a scent of what Paula's dad had done to her while he was frozen on top of her. Then they kissed a little more, and she told her dad about the rest of the date, and Len went home. Happy."

"People who spy often see spill of themselves," Wayne commented, wincing at the atrocious paraphrase of the adage concerning people who eves-drop hearing ill of themselves, but unable to pick another thought from his cotton brain.

Humor helped, even at its extreme of lameicity. It was the single ice cube that kept the powder from blowing to kingdom come. That it left him iron hard and with balls filled with raw nitro was a down side only if one did not consider the alternative.

"Had Lenny got you naked when your sister showed up?" Wayne quizzed.

"No," said the boy. "He was doing what you are."

"For how long?"

"I guess half an hour," the boy said. "He was asking me lots of questions and making sure I liked what he was doing to me, and, you know, asking me about what happened to me when I was a kid."

Then again, where was it going to end? How long could he stand behind this athletic boy and molest him like a cub scout? He was in no hurry to find out. And, he needn't be. Plots were the essence of any fiction collection, and, as a librarian, Wayne knew they often developed slowly, Dickens was good at that, with a corresponding grandeur at the end, not through artifice, but with legitimate complexities. So, if things developed slowly with his new friends, that would be okay with Wayne so long as it didn't turn into a new edition of the Waverly novels. Cal wasn't feeling especially bookish, either. That was nice. They ran against each other, gnawing for bone, happy with nicely marbled flesh, soft and toothsome. Who knows where it might have ended had they not decided to leave some for little Brenda.

"What happened when you were eleven?" Wayne asked.

"Big stuff," Cal whispered back over his shoulder.

"With who?" the new papa quizzed his boy

"Friend of my dad's," Cal said. "He came to stay in our house after my parents got knocked out for a week with food poisoning."

"Did you like him?"

"Definitely. He's a famous photographer, and he brought an extra Leica with a seventy millimeter and a twenty-four millimeter lens. Once I had the hang of that, he let me use a Rollei so I could try Tri-X Professional, you know, the kind of film you have to store in the refrigerator. Serious medium."

"That sounds excellent," Wayne commented.

"It was," Cal acknowledged. "Totally. He taught me that the most important piece of photo equipment is a good tripod, to never shoot at anything other than f-22, locking mirrors, cable releases, and when you print the picture it's nothing but sharp. If you overexpose Tri-X but rating it at ASA 100 and underdeveloped it by ten percent. There's more, but that'll give you a hell of a start."

"I was always interested," Wayne commented. "When I was a kid, we had a nutty neighbor who'd saved a bunch of Kodak instant film in his freezer. Made Polaroid look like something from before WW II. And sharp? One lens to final print. You could count leaves on a birch from fifty feet."

"Frank, he was my friend," Cal explained, "had a four-by-five Polaroid back on a view camera. That was sharp, in black and white. You could see the tread lugs on a truck tire from two hundred feet away."

Photography equaled chemicals and chemicals equaled hormones. They were in a fix all right. Prevaricating, temporizing, stalling. Why? Because they could both hear Brenda chirping away in the bathroom and it made them horny. So much so they were scared to do anything but whisper to each other, while Wayne kept at his younger friend like a priest with a stuttering altar boy.

"Did you pose for Frank?" Wayne asked.

"He didn't use that," Cal explained. "Thought it was too likely to be manipulative or exploitive."

"What did he do?" Wayne quizzed.

"He was pretty up front. The second night he was there, after my parents were out of danger and everything was half-way back to normal, he asked if I'd take a shower with him?"

"Were you shocked?" Wayne asked.

"Kind of. I asked him why."

"What did he say?" Wayne asked.

Cal leaned back against the powerful horseman holding him, the better to whisper intimately.

"He said," the boy explained, "that two of his girlfriends had loved to, you know, do it to him orally. Since they were both nice, average kinds of girls, he'd been intrigued at what it would be like to have the experience. Then he said I was pretty cute, and, this was really embarrassing, that I was probably really full of sperm, because of all the running and worrying, so he just thought it might work out to be an ideal time to experiment if it wouldn't make me really uptight."

"So he'd never done anything with a male, before?" Wayne queried.

"No," the boy said. "That kind of made me feel better, you know, that it would be new for both of us at the same time. I thought about it for awhile, we were printing in the basement, and then I decided I wanted him to do what he wanted, so I said if he wanted to try things we could stay in the darkroom so we wouldn't run down the hot water which we needed for the lab. He thought that was a good idea, so I let him do it to me right there. It was a good thing, because it took a long time and we would have been frozen in the shower."

"Sounds like he was a good teacher," Wayne commented.

"We had two accidents," Cal said. "Big ones. Very messy. He joked that it was a rare student who learned before he was taught. Then he had his, so it was a rare teacher who taught before he taught."

"Were you naked?" Wayne quizzed.

"Not even half," the boy responded. "We'd been working in the lab for three or four hours, you know, at the light box, plus, he'd had to teach me how to roll the thirty-five millimeter film on the spools for the developing tank. So we'd been really close for a long time, and that was mostly what it took. A few suggestive remarks, and chaos in the darkroom."

"So Frank didn't get what he was after?" Wayne summarized.

"Not until the next morning, then it was about half the first time."

"No complaints?"

"None."

During this interchange, Cal had turned in Wayne's arms and they had resumed their full facial assaults on each other. Their whimpers and moans filled the room, big as it was, and neither young male heard...

. . .

"That's the trailer," Blissy whispered. "Why don't you use it to set the mood for a prequel?"

"I'd be delighted," Charles said. Indeed, what would be a greater demonstration of plain, every-day, ordinary-old panache than ripping out of one story and into the next. The big brassy ending. Almost entirely missing in fiction. Sometimes there was a bit of show and tell during a story, but most novels faded, as if, perhaps, in an attempt to satisfy. Moves, too. Songs, for that matter. But why not try it the boy's way. After all, how much time did one take flipping a beef patty? It was a sizzle off, sizzle on affair. If he could make it work, pull it off, then the second book could have a dreamy, casual ending and he could hold his head up high as a real novelist.

That would be then, this was now, and now included persistent fingers at his buttons. Awfully businesslike, seeing as how this was a picnic and came under the heading of rest and relaxation. Charles sighed. Here he was again, sans conflict. The very lifeblood of fiction, and he couldn't raise so much as a hesitant glance or arched eyebrow. He'd have to talk to his little partner about it; maybe the boy would be so enthused at the though of staying over the winter, he'd think of something nasty that could lift the story above his usual cotton candy prose. Unfortunately for Charles, he was much like Will Rogers in having met few men he didn't like. That left women. Lots to not like, there, so best they stayed left and let Hillary prove his points for him. Having assigned his enigma to safe hands, the camp leader turned his attention back to his nine-year-old camper.

He kissed the child, he honestly did, right on the pretty lips. Not a peck, either. What a buttery little mouth you have, my dear, he couldn't help thinking, all the better to inhale me with. How many angels could dance on the tip of a tongue? To the nearest million. And wasn't equipping each of them with a cattle prod overdoing it? So much voltage. But the love angels were tough, they had a planet to populate, so the electric sizzle not only sustained itself, but seemed to amplify in shocking waves. So this is what it was like to kiss a passionate nine year old. Good thing it was against the law there would be mass starvation the moment the populace discovered what they'd been missing.

Yes, it could easily have gone on for hours. Maybe that's why there was sex, to bring an end to this madness of almost cannibalism. Had they managed to consume each other, Charles was sure two very satisfied grins would be left. Hadn't something like that happened in Alice in Wonderland? Cats? Who knew? It was all too literary for the moment. But then, anything would be, even the Tear Here commandment on a condom foil.

Blissy and Timmy must have been practicing, diligently. That was a no-brainer. How could anyone spend much time around that sweet face, it could have been on the end of a broom handle and still sexy, without practicing on that hot, young, eager mouth. What else had they practiced? Since they roomed together and were all-but inseparable it was likely their repertoire was extensive. Also, Timmy's almost wild fits of giggling when the three of them were alone together, well, they were evidence of a salacious nature to that particular relationship. So many nights the boys had lingered after any others who might have joined Charles for a story, and, while never ungracious or unmannerly, heaven forbid, they were nonetheless obviously frustrated at being sent to their own room rather than being allowed to stay the night. He wouldn't even kiss them, except friendly-like. Not ogreish behavior on the part of the lean, powerful fifty-five year old, but hardly co-operative and amenable. Now, things were changing. Timmy would be thrilled out of his mind, vicariously, if need be, but then, who knew? if when they mighty could be toppled they could be trained to do it on command.

The nine-year-old camper was not a selfish child. He wasn't thinking to himself, wow, if I pull this off, I'll be like the total hero of all time at C-Camp and go down in history as legendary. He wasn't thinking that. Charles, for his part, was not thinking of what it might mean if he yielded even just the one time, what being leader of a camp of a hundred or more boys, and all. Under other circumstances these would have been consuming thoughts for both the males, but on the blanket by the tree, with the Dodge sitting in place of Brad and John's Yamaha, there was only the here and now. Lips forever with cute little teeth like very sloppily buried nuggets of ivory. Beyond the pearly gate, an entire tropical reef; warm, but perhaps a bit overpopulated with cloying, love-sick octopi. Suckers. The kid had to stop it, honestly, he did. Had to. At least someday.

Nor was some boggy reef of carnality the only distraction. The aggressive boy fingers had not slacked off in their assault, further, they were pulling at the camp director's fingers, guiding him to the child's own buttons. Yeah, that's just what he needed. A heavenly, sweet, eager mouth, topped, if that was the word, with a naked nine-year-old chest and tummy. Well, need it or not, it was delicious; at once silky soft and creamy, yet with a dazzling supple sinewyness that told of sprinting the camp's war canoes. Yes, unbuttoning the child was a slow business, each new few inches of the childish breast forcing a halt to civilities so Charles could examine and kiss the fresh treasure, but it had its pleasures, too.

Blissy was so extraordinary in his mouth and in his hands, the elder male wondered almost aloud at the absurdity of church people who paid ten percent to a god that brought them torment without end, while, in his infinite stupidity condemning the one pleasure on earth that rivaled a serpent's venom in intensity. Perhaps it simply meant god was a damned old woman. On the other hand, the church was maintained largely to provide vectors to precisely the kind of behavior Charles and his boy were involved in, but the institution managed to do it in a way that undoubtedly amounted to a hundred horrors for every good experience, from the point of view of both partners. Without love on a wide-open two way street kissing a kid would be like kissing a kid. (Might as well french a puppy.)

As the ludicrous mormons had their latter-day saints, Charles was a latter-day hero. Only real. Latter-day, because he'd only recently started writing for the Net. The real honest-to-gosh heroes had been those who published early in the nineties. History's oddest oddity. The despised pederast and child molester had saved the very planet; had motivated the early adapters who'd bought the expensive, primitive machines and taken telephonic data sharing from academic embryo to the very keystone of the industrial arch. Laugh, nod, cringe, or pitch a biblical fit, never had so many owed so much to so few. Porn artists and game writers. Revolutionaries, not of the tavern. Gruntled and happy rather than disgruntled and seditious. In a word, heroes. Sam got the Medal of Freedom for devastating thousands of sweet American towns, the prurient key pounders would get nothing, not even paid. The reality of a society comprised of little jew boxes, the head box not knowing the ass box from a hole in the ground.

These thoughts occupied a full millionth of Charles's mind as his fingers went to Blissy's all-important third button. As he aligned the pearl disk with its hemmed slot and made it disappear he wondered if virtue might not, after all, be its own reward.

Oh, a reward he'd been expecting. But this? What the hell was this? What was going on here? Who knew? Jesus, Blissy, what... what... what... ?

"Sorry," the child said. "Timmy was going to tell you. So was I. But, you know, we're just kids. Stuff falls through the cracks because we get embarrassed or confused. I mean, half of us still look under our beds, right?"

She was right, of course.

Kids!

She.

Boy to girl at, literally, he shrunk within himself at the raw savagery of the pun, the touch of a button.

Always, to his toes, 24/7, the writer, his first thought on beholding the beautiful blossom of the Blissy's juvenile left breast was how the hell was he going to sell this to his readers. Snuggling up on six hundred pages, and, with the approach lights actually in sight, a sex change? What was going to be next? Amnesia? Cultism? Clairvoyance? How could it be? The minx with the modest shirts and shorts, hiding out. That's what she'd been doing, though, on a second's consideration, it was pretty obvious Timmy knew the little secrets.

God, but they were pretty. "Is it okay?" she whispered as he stared at her, the moreso now that the fourth button had revealed both her rosettes peaking pink and seemingly very happy from their little half muffins of pubescent swelling. Perfection, with cherries on top. Where were his manners?

"Next, you're going to tell me you're Jewish." It was all he could think of to say, and was funny because he'd railed up about women -- bessies - a time or two in `her' presence. Blissy took it as he meant it, and giggled in delight.

"You're just a big old wolf child," she scolded, "you'd love me if I was a syphilitic leper with warts, carbuncles, whatever they are, big feet and body odor. Right?"

"Well," Charles replied, still awestruck by her pretty female chest, "they do say a mind is a terrible thing to waste."

Lord love a duck, she was a girl. What was a fellow to do? Kiss her and tell her everything was going to be alright? Any port in a storm. The journey begins with a single step. Nearer my god, to thee. Bromides, adages, homilies and clichés ricocheted around inside his head

The girls eyes brightened with mischief. (Hadn't there been enough of that?) "It could be worse, you know," she intoned, letting a bit of drama creep into her voice. "Timmy and I could be off to his olde sod for a season of trekking the high meadows.

She had a point. The situation could be worse. But that still left Dear Reader. How to handle him. Leave him to his own devices, and hope for the best? With a sigh he realized he'd not read Silas Marner in years. Hadn't earned the right to use the Eliot quote, but, it was the only one which fit the circumstances. In a situation like this, talent would do what it could; genius, what it must.

Three more buttons for the delicious girlish tummy. Her turn. Was this some kind of race? Whoa there, feather touch, guys my age can have accidents, too. He didn't say this for the simple reason he was too busy doing what he must to say anything. The kissing turned into a slow, languorous tongue licking, tender and intimate; more sensuous than ripping. There was something god-awful permanent in the taste of the young female. Was she some kind of pay-back snapping turtle, or, heaven forbid, a species of squid that ate only the tongue? Whatever feral instincts drove the little virago, they seemed to know their minds and to be content with what they had. She wasn't kittenish enough to actually purr, but it was a close thing.

At some point in time he had her naked to her waist, and she him. Charles lay on his back, Blissy's back to his chest as he ran his hands over a thousand square miles of infinitely soft baby skin, only formed to tender chick. If he'd had an adversarial bone in his day-to-day body, Charles would have taken his child love to task for setting up vis a vee the opening chapter in her post industrial sf-fantasy; specifically, Wayne and Brenda. Engagement rings. Wedding bells. Deliberate. If Brenda's name had been Alice, it would have been with alice of forethought. Well, such a cutie had to be guilty of something, and if she'd wriggled aboard through adroit story telling, what ploy was a girl her age meant to use? Of course, she'd also faked out the entire male institution of which we was founder, director and kahuna of kahunas. Add to that thousands of readers over the years and a tally began to mount. If he thought for a moment he could spare he'd dispatch her to Edward Bangor and let him deal with her utterly precious tail. He wrote spanking stories and didn't wimp out with any phony pen names -- such as Feather Touch.

And what touch was this? Paul Bunyan? It seemed to have something to do with logging; heavy timber. To Blissy it was babe and oxy; to Charles, blue. Timber!!-? There had damn well better be some outcry in the immediate offing or this blue thing was going to get nuts.

Her hair smelled of moronic strawberry shampoo. All she needed was Kool-Aid on her breath and her childish nature would rise up and smite him dead on the spot. Why did she have to smell of delicate, red, tasty fruit? Oh, lord, Blissy, you need intriguing scent like a moose needs a hatrack. And what if her scent were of lemons? If a girl gives you lemons, does that leave you getting lemonlaid? Charles realized he was getting close to a state of mental fibrillation. It was one thing to tell and listen to stories of horn dogs making it with pixies, quite another to have a solid, half-naked, all-eager nine year old wriggling happily as one molested her with ten crazed fingers. Smokin'.

What an angel. What a spirit. What a child. What if she turned over? What if she didn't? Would it be strawberry feels, forever? The brazen stupidness of the pun brought Charles half-way back to consciousness, for all the good it did. Blissy was still no inches away, her young breasts still half marshmallow, half crouching tiger - at once hot and scalding. And for relief, there was the not quite flat tummy. Yeah, that did a lot of good. Face it, she was a trap from her gamin, boyish face to all ten of dem little piggies. Question was, who was going to blow whose house down?

Turn over she did. Wasn't there a law against branding human beings? On the chest? Twice? Well, she was a lawless bit of a vixen, what with her big secrets and all, so, law or moot, she was going to burn into him. Not just lawless, willful. Oh, she tried to make it better with kisses, but even with a will, no way. It didn't help a bit. The more she kissed the hotter her kitten breasts with their pretty hard nipples became. What was that all about? Cooking? Fine camper she'd make, if she burned the host. Lawless. Urgent. Untrammeled. From time to time Charles like to pull out all the stops; see what the keyboard yielded at the virtuoso touch. The absurdity of a moose needing a hatrack, was, in the camp director's mind, akin to Blissy needing a keyboard. The young girl didn't need anything, and she was the first to know it.

No. No. But, yes. Her hands left his shoulders, where they'd been roosting so she could do push ups, the better to stare into his eyes between kisses, and were now, as she lay full-length against him, moving down. Hadn't the child done enough damage? Two breasts. All but unendurable, and she had ten fingers in reserve. Apparently her concept of needing nothing specifically included her boyish cargo shorts. If there was more she didn't need, Charles was in no condition to think about it. Some things, besides manned space travel, were better left to the future.

"Are you thinking about the future?" Blissy asked, practically freaking the writer out of his jock.

"Me, too," she chirped happily, cueing off his startled look. If she'd said it ordinary like, me, too, it might have been survivable. Not Blissy. With "me" her little hands unfastened her safari shorts while with "too" she went to work on his slacks, panting now, and rhyming it with "you." You, too; you, too.

Charles lay on his back. Stone. Blissy stood, after an eternal lingering good-bye, between his feet, now in her pink baby-doll panties like the frost of heaven. Timmy had made her neither a show off, she didn't bump and grind, nor a toed-in recluse. She simply stood there for the sake of standing there and letting him get used to her being a girl. Good, that was over. Time to be a young woman. Charles, ever the writer, as in The Writer, watched the transformation as emblematic of the vagaries of the human condition. Yin and Yang the Chinese called it. Bal and oney, but still, this metamorphosis taking place in his immediate presence; wasn't it analogous, at least vaguely to other variances? For example, the brilliant ad copy in some commercials, and a hairball in jammies: client? IBM. Was Blissy free of the ugliness so tolerated under the guise of political correctness?

Charles was amused with himself. Lava moments after congealing on the one hand, yet so entirely the artist and human he was watching a pretty nine year old girl kneel between his legs for what was obviously going to be a hundred percent Santa Ana / Alamo engagement and he was wondering if she had an ugly side. How freely could anyone come through the leftist morass? What was humanly possible? For this was the realm of the novelist, absolute, it took time to write, but was fabulously worth the effort. Charles's readers would have to wait. Net copy came off at breezy ten thousand words a day, but Blissy chopped that all to hell. She froze time, she froze the world. The Mexicans had toyed with Davy Crockett and tortured him. Killed him. Shut him up. Well, he had nothing to say, either. Just try to remember.

Had they used torpedoes in San Antonio? He was dealing with one. It launched spontaneously but only struck him a glancing blow, scooting along his chest, spending its momentum and finally coming to rest, head against his chin. Oops, squid. It had tentacles. Not only had them, but was not bashful about using them. Out of the frying pan, into the fire; branded and now hog-tied. Bitten. Whispered.

"Are you scared? Because I'm ba-ack!"

"I'm not exactly keeping notes," Charles whispered back.

"Mind gone completely blank?" Blissy teased.

"Just plain-old gone. Nothing left to waste adjectives on."

"That's trouble," she said, "because I'm not the kind of girl to waste anything on a boy who completes sentences by sticking a preposition in."

"It was an emergency," Charles whispered.

"That's why I called you a boy," Blissy responded. "I mean you go getting all tongue-tied, what was I meant to think?" Here the child threw a pout. "Honestly," she whispered in mock frustration, "I think Timmy was more grown-up about it when he found out."

Right. Now she was going to lie full length against him, her perky breasts still fiery, and tell him about Timmy. Well, he chided himself, he'd wanted to end his story an unquestioned masterpiece. Maybe Blissy could help.

Not by more kissing. Why even bother? Yeah, but that left what, dodo? Timmy.

"I was just kidding when I said he was cool when he found out," Blissy whispered between bites at the base of the camp director's neck.

"He survived," Charles commented.

"Yes," she whispered, "but then again he's very young; heart of a lion."

"I'll bet there was more than heart to the cub," Charles replied.

"Oh," Blissy cooed, "you mean like brains and charm and wit? What did I know about them? I was only eight years old at the time."

"So you substituted?"

"I guess so," the girl said. "Explored alternatives. Experimented. He liked the movie where the girl pretends she's a boy so she can stay with her brother. In the art world they call it a provenance; an established and authoritarian pedigree. So he didn't run screaming down the hall of the residence or jump out a window. I mean he'd been..."

"I know," Charles cut in. "Just faked out. You weren't exactly girl-handling a wispy virgin."

"Close, though," the girl responded.

"Well, duh'uh," Charles interjected. "He was in love with you. Was and is. Pretty hard to be all crow and flutter when you're struck dumb."

"I was a virgin," she whispered.

"Wispy?" Charles teased his little camper.

"No," she said, "predatory. I had no practical idea on earth what it was, all I knew was that if it had been hypos full of strychnine I wouldn't have cared as long as it was his needle, seeing yours was in the autoclave or some damned fool thing like that."

"I'd traded it for a pencil," Charles explained. "I was writing for the Web at the time. It was amateurish of me, you know, write, edit, submit, publish, in the end, it put quite a hole in my day."

"And?" she prompted.

"And now I'm a novelist; more accurately, back to being the novelist I once was before push button publishing went to my head. Slower pace. As little as ten hours a day."

"You're just making excuses, Charles," she replied.

"Ditz," he shot back, "how much time did Timmy spend with you, once he knew you were a girl?"

"From ten p.m. to nine a.m." the girl said.

"And he'd a highly experienced immature lover. What do you think the impact would have been with an older guy who hadn't been with anyone for a long time? Answer that, then explain how one who is besotted might fare in his reach to be number one content creator in the world."

"Always with the explanations," Blissy sighed, digging her chin into his meaty shoulder.

"They're true," he sighed. "That's what it's like being an artist, child. An insatiable lust, yet delicate as the fronds of a freshly unfurled fern."

"Sounds narcissistic," Blissy replied.

"I don't know," Charles mused. "Look at Cassius Clay carrying on so, and he was just a boxer. Mussolini, just a dictator. They thought the world of themselves, just like Mickey Rooney. Surely, on that scale, writing for the ages, even though one has no belief in their existence, is worthy of a little self adoration."

"Next, you'll be telling me you're the only one capable of understanding how good you really are, therefore, your only legitimate fan."

"And critic," Charles added. "It's a devilish business, as the English would say. Unless the critics are just going to sputter, you know, ad lib, they have to write a script. Freedom of speech, but what good does it do when you sit at your keyboard and end up worshiping rather than nitpicking?"

"You really are that good?" Blissy asked.

"There's no word for it," Charles acknowledged. "Like the Jews with their Yahweh. But not the name of some kookamuggin made-up god, rather, a self-evident thing, no burning bushes needed, no whispers, visions, legends or taboos. Just there, not only for the literate, but so rendered as to greatly stimulate literacy, itself."

"I asked for an excuse, and I get a god. Guess I came to the right place."

"Always room for a lass that knows a provenance from a pedigree."

"Good boy," the silly child chortled, arching slightly to rub her pretty tummy against the hard belly of the adult. "Exactly what I want to talk about. Pedigree."

Then she added, "I'm on message," while rocking her belly against his yet more graphically.

"Do you get it?" she quizzed.

"No," the writer gasped.

"Pedigree," she hinted, "what's the basic element? Without it, there can be none."

"I guess you'd need an engraver. A number of gardeners. It's why I run a camp, to stay away from the rigmarole."

Blissy stalled. She used her teeth to climb his chin, then bumped her chin over his teeth and onto his nose. Hitching herself forward, she stared into Charles's eyes.

"Are you being dense on purpose?" she hissed.

"I'm not even alive on purpose, at this point," he rattled in response.

"Suffers bashfulness," the nine year old whispered, doctor like, to the sky. "Delusional, but quiet and competent about it; momentary attempts at levity. Possibly of a nervous derivative. Tries to diffuse excesses with explanations rather than excuses. Laudable, even plausible, yet, all the while, extremely dense. Could be genetic, or environmental. Patient needs regimen of remedial linguistic review so when a happy girl rubs her tummy against him and talks about pedigree he doesn't go all obtuse."

She had him there. He had been dense. She'd only dropped a thousand pound hint with her prequel to her Stephen King knock off and the almost immediate introduction of Brenda, with its implication of what Brenda wanted from Cal or Wayne. She hadn't reached that part yet. And the thing about the essential ingredient? Well, that had been-broad brush.

"Are we on the same page, at last?" she whispered, her dramatics stifled for the moment.

"A little queen?" he hardly dared whisper.

"Absolutely tiny," she whispered, adding, "no more than five pounds, because I'm a bit of a tyke, myself."

"She'll have to wait her turn on the throne. No upstarts or usurpers."

Blissy sighed happily. They were on the same page. Good. Writers could be difficult, she understood instinctively, having never met one before. And a writer-king god? She felt sorry for the Greeks and Romans, all they could do was write about magical superhumans. Myth, legend, tradition and tale. Hers actually did the writing, or at least he said he did.

Charles interrupted her musing. "Where does Timmy fit in?" he asked his princess.

"Father of second child, but not until I'm eighteen. You and I are going to be very careful to get it right the first time. I want to rock until we get married, and when I'm not rocking, I want to be teaching our princess, and Timmy's baby is going to be our wedding gift."

"And how does a five pound prince fit in, I mean, you know?"

"The prince is the younger brother, by nine or ten years. Vice-regent. I want your reign to demoronize women, and what greater motivation could you have than a moron-free household of females, with two of them, one taking over for you, when, as they say, the time comes, and my daughter, for me when I turn sixty. Unless, of course, she's not right for the job, but that's ninety percent your responsibility."

Since it was going to be ninety-nine percent her responsibility to produce said queen, in the first place, the trade-off seemed logical to Charles. After all, the youngster would have a fine mom to look after her.(when she wasn't rocking). It was a plan.

"You look pensive," Blissy whispered, taking her chin off Charles's nose. "I think I need to distract you, before you think of something diabolical." With a lingering kiss she slowly pushed herself free of her lord and master and knelt between his ankles. Businesslike, she finished what she'd started some little while before. The thing she'd been doing with his khaki slacks. The belt. The zipper. The... There was no more the, because they were gone. And that wasn't all.

Obviously proud of her decisive victory, Blissy stood and skinned down her panties. No lie. She was a girl. As before, she let him look, but this time his hugeness filled her sweet young eyeballs and the girl child froze in position for so long Charles began to feel he might be gawking. Blissy wondered if he would ever grow up. How could someone old enough to be her grandfather just look like a bigger, more powerful version of Timmy? Cripes, what genes. And look where they came from, would you? She bumped to her knees, coming in close to stare. And she'd had her heart set on a little princess. The whole queen thing. Now what? Imagine what his boy-child would look like? Yeah, that was a great idea. Why hadn't she thought of it? Or was she just being selfish? Might something happen between such a child and his very young mother? And where would leave this mag stallion she was almost touching? Half the reason she wanted a girl was so he could teach her when the time came. Timmy, too, of course. Hmm. It almost seemed trivial to be thinking along such lines, what with the future of the nation at stake, but, as Charles had pointed out a time or two, the nation was pretty much beyond leading by anyone of character and fidelity, so it was a back-burner concept any way one looked at it.

Blissy had marked off the inside band of her panties with a ruler. Timmy's suggestion. The cute twelve year old Irish boy had five and three quarters inches when he was, in his words, hard as Chinese arithmetic. She fiddled with the wisp of pink fabric, holding it about half an inch from him as she satisfied her curiosity, spying for her young boyfriend, sure, but relationships were a two-way street and she had to do her part to keep things exciting. Seven and three quarters. Big, like in wow, but not freaky; some big whore stuffer. She blushed at all the ribald thinking that was going on in her head. Turned pink.

Charles groaned aloud as the girl flushed. Pretty in pink didn't begin to describe the child as she messed around down there, up to something. Well, so was he. Took one to know one. Then she was done and had dropped her little panties. Well, half-done, anyway, what was this, a skit? Oh, my, god, she was playing dolls. Whispering, not in his ear, not this time.

"Every one has to wake up now, sleepyheads," the girl cooed, and she touched him. Charles was so hard he couldn't tell if he was circumcised, or no, and Blissy's pretty little girl hands made him swell so he felt like a horse. "Mommy's here," the sweet young thing whispered, coaxing. "It's that time of day. Rise and shine."

He'd wanted to end his novel at dead run but this was ridiculous. They were meant to be experimenting, man and child, now it seemed she was planning on moving in. One thing was for sure, she had the key. Also, two hands, ten fingers, two lips, and, as if her sweet young nipples hadn't been hot enough, a tongue. In all, enough keys to open Fort Knox. As much as anything could, it made a certain sense. A queen would need a lot of keys. Using all of them at once was unfair, but it was love -- better than war -- so he let her proceed.

"Whose first," Blissy whispered. "I'm not going to make much of a mother, I have other responsibilities, so I want all you eager-beaver, hyper-active, short-attention-span guys to leave before you grow up and make me cross." She seemed serious about this. Not dominate so much as firmly in control. Rather than continue her coaxing and cajoling, she accomplished her goal with a steady, rhythmic stroking, using her mouth silently but liberally.

What was the nonsense about a man being putty in a woman's hands. More like iron. Timmy first, now this. Good. Something to build on. Putty. How silly.

What a dream. Looking down over his flat belly with a nine-year-old girl, totally naked, beautifully taught, obviously involved, stroking happily and intently. Bracing with her left arm so she could lean well forward and hold him against her breasts as she masturbated him with long working strokes. Alternately, sitting upright so she could fondle him as she continued with her urgent business. This went on for whole lifetimes. Then she got childish and ended it. Lunging forward she bit him where it hurt, then looked him in the eye, her hand still masturbating him, now against her slightly soft tummy. "Let the naughty ones come out," she instructed, "then you can spray the good ones inside me."

Having laid down the law, Blissy again rose to her knees, wet her right hand on his seminal fluid which was flowing freely and was plentiful seeing as how she'd laid of with her tongue for a few moments. That was it. That was it. Enough... already. And it was, of the childish stuff. Her expression changed, her mouth sagging with lust and her eyes growing both soft and wanton.

"Cum, babe," she whispered.

"Oh, child," Charles groaned as he obeyed totally and absolutely.

She sphinctered her left hand at his base, sliding her soaked right hand down to meet it, holding him tight and rigid against her left little-girl breast. When it was lost from sight, she move him to cover her right nipple, then her neck and shoulders. Charles whipped his arms back under his neck and arched to the young girl, hardly seeing her through a fiery haze that made her look like an angel.

God, he was cumming all over her. Like it was the first time in the world for anything of the like to happen. Worth the wait, but he was glad it was unlikely he'd have to repeat the experience; the wait, that is. For the moment, they both had to wait for it to be over. "I'm behaving like a damn kid," Charles had ample time to muse, as it kept happening and happening. all over his princess. How to double your lifespan the quick and easy way. The infinite minute. And that was just the beginning.

Blissy fell on him, slick as a seal, wet as a seal, and slithered forward. "You're a little impassive in the bad-boy department," she commented, but there was no reproach in her pretty young voice. Maybe she really was impressed.

"They got what they deserved for being so pushy," the girl continued. "But that's not their fault. I probably set them off. No matter, they're out of harm's way.

She seemed content with her analysis and cuddled very sloppily against him, reverting to the kissing she seemed to like so well. In this case, youth was not wasted on the young, and her rampant energy quickly focused itself on Charles's right ear. "Now is the good-boy time," she whispered. "Before you make a lot more impetuous rascals. The tricks is to give me the very last one, not one of the first of the new ones. Understand?"

He tried, but the only conclusion he came to was beyond comprehension. He though of Sally, the little cruise director from a camp night-story. Little administrator. Theorist, too. Quite the scientific package, was little Blissy. Nonsensical, even for her tender age, but wow, in what a delicious way. Regrettably, also adamant. Her theory on seminal transmigration might have been juvenile, but she was determined to proceed with the project, her way. Charles pointed out in a half-dead whisper that experiments at her age were likely to be premature. She blithely replied that it wasn't real smart for a girl to take risks, since the girl would have to live with the results. Why take chances? Unfortunately for Charles, minimizing risk did not mean abstinence, it meant giving the last of himself, now. Indeed, it may have been a practice run, so to speak, being as she was, after all, nine years old. What did that matter? Theories and abstractions were moot. The window of opportunity, according to the little miss, was more a shutter than window. Open for the moment of a glance. Dread. Open now. This is not a drill.

The spermy critter's vagaries focused in an instant. With a hold-everything thoroughly wifely french kiss she broke off her top action and faster than a bartender could shake a martini rolled herself underneath him. And she wasn't being coy. None of that. Not the way she spread Flattering. More than. Spread, wet and opened. Maybe the dude in Iran had an answer, marrying his female subjects at nine. Positively more Muslims. Perfect matches were made in heaven, so certain churches said. A blanket on the grass; hell, that wouldn't even amount to a chapel or sanctuary. A little brown church in the wild-wood. Truth to tell, the match was not spiritual, or, more elegantly, the spiritual side was assumed, but physical. For a fifty-five year old man, however sleek, boyish and cute, to crow Look ma, no hands, would have been unseemly, so Charles kept the inanity to himself, true as it was. No hands meant neither of his, neither of hers. Her openness needed to be half raped, so he pinned her hands high over her head, found her, and ripped his hot, swollen penis into her, gasping at her screams and flailing legs, heedless of her frantic struggles to free her hands so she could claw him to the spine.

There it is folks. As advertised, flat out to the end, and I'm not talking about Blissy's hooters. Your choice from here is simplicity, itself. Sit on your media butt, your academic butt, your corporate butt, your political butt, your theological butt, your judicial butt, your tradeunion butt, your environmental butt, your fat butt, your black butt, your kiddie butt, your e-butt, or your rank-and-file butt, and die, no ifs, no ands, all butts. You're the subjects, I'm the king. Live with it.

Denouement. It's kind of a here-you-are-at-the-platform, watch-you-step, literary tradition. A transition between the heady climax of a history and what's beyond your exterior door. A shock absorber, only written down, though, if done absolutely superbly, blush, perhaps with just a Midas touch.

Few will want more, but we strive to please all. Those who have had enough may exit at this point. To each of you opting to quit, the cabin crew will issue two life vests. A strip of foam has been laid down on the left side of the runway. If you wear one life vest in the conventional manner, and inflate the other around your head, your chances of escaping serious injury should be quite good. For you continuing passengers, we'll be taxiing to a part of the field where the sun doesn't shine, and off again after this last commercial message and a quick change of title.

. . .

Creative Camp boasted a rich layering of prizes, scholarships, grants and developmental aids, in general. Principal amongst these was the Billings Award, an after taxes lump sum of a quarter million dollars. For this reason, excitement was especially high on a particular night as boy after boy delivered himself of his entry material. There was great enthusiasm for the novel roller coaster. "Simple as shitting your pants," a boy a row or two behind Charles whispered to his seat mate. Invention boiled down to making things simple, hundreds of components wired together so one man could tap out SOS to another, tens of thousands of man-years to render a word processor that could handle a five hundred page document as if it were a grocery list for a family of four. The SOS was needed, the novel entertained, so both became mothers of invention. Nor was the formulae perfect. Big, kludgey wrenches were invented because they demonstrated well on television, pretty close to useless; super sanding blocks, strip paint or rust with hardly a touch, for a few seconds before they wore out. Tried to avoid that kind of thing at camp. It may have been the sex life. Take highly focused and imaginative kids out of their little, tiny conventional boxes, and, lo and behold, you ended up with a kid like young Brad from Iowa who'd stunned the group with his ingenious little problem solver, christened, in the spirit of C-Camp's minimalist elegance, The Cumera.

Blissy was back to being a boy. She was awfully good at it, except, of course, for a fatal flaw that only the director and Timmy knew of. Pop kid in all other respects, though. Nice round of applause as he approached the dais for his Billings presentation and promptly set about demonstrating his feminine side. His true sex had disgraced itself time and again, bessies included Amelia Earhart and Princess Dead, but she wasn't going to play in that sandbox.

Blissy prefaced his dissertation with a review of the most stressful occupation next to fire fighting and flying in combat. That happened to be shopping, especially grocery shopping, particularly for males. Since the stress and misery of this necessary occupation was all but universal, the customer base for his business was nothing less than massive

The artist's recipe had endured for years at C-Camp. It was known as odds food because there was an old British saying which went odds fish. No one knew what it meant, if anything, but potato fried rice wasn't exactly on the A list at the Ling Duck, therefore it was odd enough for the name. Tasted good enough for any artist, and was stove-bolt simple to prepare, either as an original dish in under an hour, or heated up in ten minutes. The only secret was cubing the potatoes -- smallish -- and adding them at the right time, so they'd add a toothsome crunchiness to the bland texture of the rice and vegetables which made up the main ingredients.

Quickly he reviewed the intellectual pedigree of the concept. A, they ate it happily at camp, six or eight meals out of ten, and often enough for breakfast on especially busy days. B, the massive nature of the customer group. Damn near everybody, making it easier to calculate how many would not be interested than how many would see the program as the answer to a prayer.

Blissy's report was not particularly organized, style was not counted for much of anything by campers and counselors, alike, and he read through it as if delivering a lecture on the various uses of toenail clippings. [The one use of a toenail clipping is saving your teeth. Parings from the big toe make perfect auguring instruments with which to root around at the base of the human tusk. Any time you feel a congested sensation in your gums, dig until it bleeds freely. Now if I could just figure out some use for phlegm and puss.]

"GROCERIES AU GO-GO

Groceries au Go-Go.

Slogan: "A Little Like Living in Heaven."

Possible ad slant. Does supermarket shopping leave you a market-basket case?

Groceries au G-G is a variant on Webvan. It delivers basic food baskets valued at $250.00, plus optional baskets, keyed on a basic potato/fried-rice recipe, with an alternative based on various pastas..

Basic Basket:

Fifty pounds rice packed in three-pound plastic bags, twenty pounds of onions, twenty pounds of potatoes, six quarts of cooking oil, two cases of mixed vegetables, two cases jalapeno peppers, salt, pepper, soy sauce and basic spices.

Optional baskets.

Dairy Basket: Powdered milk in plastic bags, four percent, two percent, or skimmed, coffee creamer.

Bread Basket. Mix of baked goods, breads and pastries.

Vegetable Basket: Our selection of top quality general produce. Choice of spicy or conventional. My be substituted for the canned vegetable products in Basic Basket

Meat Basket. Our selection of meat and poultry products..

Fish Basket. Our selection of fish and seafood products (includes appropriate sauces).

Picnic Basket: Hamburger, hot dogs, buns, chips, condiments.

Fruit basket: Our selection of common fresh fruits.

Baking Basket: Ingredients (and recipes) for breads and pastries.

Snack Basket. Chips, dips

Beverage basket. Coffee, tea, hot chocolate.

Juice Basket. Mix of fruit juices, vegetable juices.

.

Condiment basket. Sugar, premium herbs and spices, cheeses, pickles, olives etc. Choice of spicy or conventional.

Soup Basket. Canned and dried products.

Pet Food Basket. Dog, cat, and a limited choice of others. Choice of kibble, canned, or half-and-half, with a selection of treats included..

Household Supplies Basket. Detergent, toilet paper, shampoo.

Medicine Basket. Alcohol, swabs, bandage strips, cough and cold remedies.

Utensils Basket. Heavy gauge aluminum frying pan and rice kettle. If codes and safety considerations permit, the company should also offer high-output, table-top gas stoves. These greatly increase kitchen output, and, in short, allow the system to work at its most efficient for the consumer. It also provides a focal point for advertising. Free double burner with first year contract, that kind of thing. Installation issues should be addressed by the company, either through doing it or subbing it to reputable contractors.. System may be used with ordinary appliance stoves.

Baby Food Basket

Kid's Basket. Macaroni and cheese type products, Kool-Aid, candy.

Soda Basket; Cases of bottled drinks, priced by the case

Party Basket: Mixers, lemons and limes, for popular adult drinks.

Specialty Basket. Based on quality potato and pasta salads that can be eaten from the container. Soups. Easy access meals for use by the aged or disabled. May be ordered without Basic Basket, minimum of five baskets per delivery ($250.00), and also may be ordered with "refrigerated" or "non-refrigerated" food products.

Each optional basket costs fifty dollars. Minimum contract, six orders per year.

Advantages to concept. Typical selection available to customers will be in the order of 250 products, making for extreme efficiency in purchasing and warehousing. Easy business model to scale. Inexpensive to try in test markets, yet with unlimited growth potential both here and abroad.

Groceries au Go-Go solves a massive problem. Grocery shopping. With G au G-G, the average householder's shopping time will be reduced by eighty or ninety percent. Less shopping means less impulse buying, a factor in both physical and economic health.

Background. If it could be profitable to deliver customer-specific orders, A&P would have figured out how to do it years ago (as would General Motors). The only way the model can succeed is to offer a fair variety, and some flexibility, while sticking to a core basic of some few hundred items and strict minimum orders requirements. (You have to buy a whole Chevrolet.).

Proof of concept. If a friend invites your family to spend a week in his or her house, it is very likely you will be happy with a well-stocked kitchen. This is the principal behind Groceries au Go-Go. Lots of good food delivered at routine intervals, like bottled water. The basic recipe supported, potato fried rice, is a delicious base for anything the chef wants to try, and a quick and simple meal if time or budgetary restraints are in place.

Method of doing business. All products are premium brand names such as Hellman's/Best Foods, Heinz and Del Monte. Deliveries are made in plastic tubs on exchange basis, again, like bottled water. Customer can initiate delivery or avail themselves of automated delivery. Internet or telephone may be used to place or modify orders. Here there is a great advantage to the limited inventory concept. Where the company is flexible, it can be very flexible, and may be able to accept orders and modifications as little as six hours, or even less, before delivery.

Consumer prices will probably be slightly higher than those in the supermarket, at least at the outset. Grocery margins are thin and any significant general discounting would likely depend on extreme volume. With a limited product line, it is important to offer many customer oriented refinements. Holiday meals would be an example, possibly pre-cooked (outsourced!). The Company would have staff devoted to searching out values and products (or coupons) that might be of interest to its customers. These would he highlighted in a magalogue (magazine/catalogue) distributed with each order. In addition, The Company would maintain a premium Web site and otherwise try to respond to profitable customer input. An example of the Web site's use might be to establish neighborhood drop points, where a designated consignee's address might serve a number of local families. A discount could be offered, because the savings to the company would be substantial.

A valet service might be offered, but it would likely be better to link to an established firm dealing in custom pickup and delivery. It would be interesting to explore models by which unused packaged food products could by relayed by the company from its customers to reputable food kitchens and share programs.

In summary, the customer lives in a carefully orchestrated flow of groceries controlled by a short phone call or a few clicks of the mouse. It saves lots of time, and,, if shopping expenses are counted, lots of money, too. It's healthy. It's wealthy. It's wise. It's a little like living in heaven."

Blissy smiled at his audience. "C-Camp's a lot like living in heaven," he added, with a wink at Charles, which didn't surprise anyone because the whole institution knew they were friends.

. . .

It is not relevant to this history who won the Billings award. Suffice it to say the runner up had cooked up a scheme to add considerable defensive capability to the Spad. It amounted to a JATO bottle mounted in the aft fuselage, with a stove-pipe size nozzle just under the tail of the plain. When fired, the solid rocket added fifty knots to the plane's speed, while discharging a hail of shrapnel into the face of the pursuer.

It had been quite a day. Charles and Blissy whispered in bed, their first night of pillow talk. The writer worried about his readers, how would they react to his not only falling off his pedestal, but with a girl. Blissy was helpful in reminding him that his readers faced such a daunting list of extreme obstacles any androgynous characters, and especially children, in a work of fiction, was not likely to be a problem. "In fact," the bright young thing summarized, "with the proof of concept of everything Creative Camp stands for provided by JDS Uniphase, on top of Iridium, Webvan, et al, it is likely your readers will be in the mood for a little hanky panky."

The writer thought back over the high level of poltroonery that governed national affairs, from the founding father, through the slobbering pursuit of Microsoft, and realized his chick was right. Lay on the sex with a trowel, American had produced some interesting moments in history and maybe the bums did deserve an even break, so far as he was able to provide one. It was going to be hard to boot up, tomorrow, and not see "Creative Camp" in its customary place at the top of his file menu, as it had been for months. He took solace from the fact the manuscript said most of what he had to say. Genius must. In doing so he knew he'd far exceeded all artists in both the quality and size of his creation. It was a monumental work, underpinned with granite, yet soaring. He was totally proud of and satisfied with it, but, yes, it would be hard to face that empty yawning screen after so many thousands of hours. On the other hand, he still had his doll, and her story, "Blissy's Song," and "XP," so who knew?

After the narrative, the climax, and the denouement, there was only one thing left.

The End

Posted by Thoms@btl.net

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xxx