Creative Camp

This won't make much sense to new readers. Start at the beginning. I have separated the sex with a stack of asterisks. The reader is responsible for the title page. Have a nice scroll.

Creative Camp -- 19

(M/F, many others including incest, no s/m, bond., etc.)

by Feather Touch

Chapt. 19

What's in the backpack? What's Brad's inner secret? Does he have two of them? Has someone nuked Creative Camp? Is the fake chapter really a cover up? Where is Charles and what did his characters, John and Brad, do after Brad's story of Rusty and Polly at the pool? How about Blissy and his little friend, Timmy, the eleven year old over from sheep country? How about your Prince? Is he just going to lie around writing porn all day, or are there liegemen? Mostly, since this is Nifty, will this, when complete, be the greatest erotic epic ever written?

I guess that's why there's a Chapter Nineteen. Who was it, King Kanute who had his throne placed below high water to prove he had no divine powers? I can't remember it he did this to the point of drowning, or just got his feet wet. Anyhow, I have his exact same problem. This chapter simply is not going to write itself. I'm stuck with typing out every single word.

I am a terrible hothouse flower. If I didn't have Word 97 and now my beloved Word XP, and Nifty, I wouldn't bother writing, at all. Been there, done that, and no one gave a twinkie's fart. Now, all these years later, I've got my adopted family, my several cats, my cable, my tropic lifestyle with its ten dollar a month utility bills; the islands twelve miles offshore, several crummy bars, a perfect number of perfect friends, my extensive portfolio of delusions which contribute greatly to my legendary status in my own mind. I don't need you. But XP is so pretty, so reliable, so lightning fast at big copy and paste operations; Times New Roman is so pretty, well, it's become just something to do. Since I can't be out and about all that much, anyway, why not spend the days typing on my pretty screen, and when I get ten or fifteen thousand words, call it a chapter, and send it to David. While there is nothing particularly heroic about this lifestyle, except perhaps taking such good care of my family out of a twenty thousand dollar income, it does involve a subtle sacrifice. How can I read lots of Nifty stories if I spend all day writing them? It's like I feel sorry for Jay. He doesn't get to watch Jay Leno before he goes to sleep every night. I don't get to read Feather Touch stories on Nifty. Once again, the Subjects get and the King goes without. Well, as they say, living well is the best revenge, though, truth to tell, in another three or four years my palm trees are going to grow into the high tension wires and the power company is going to come and chop them down. There's a chance that the three young trees in the back yard will be tall enough to put a hammock under by that time, but I am not optimistic. We're planting twenty four banana trees later this morning,, but who knows how they'll do?

I know of the sickness of America by living here, almost by myself. My town should have at least a thousand artists and writers, telecommuters (though the voice rates are ghastly), retirees, and white folk, in general. Sometimes I don't think there's a dozen of us, out of a population of ten thousand.

You are so stupid. Nice house: $75.00 a month. Weed: $17.50 an ounce. Rice: $0.40 a pound. It sounds like a list of numbers from arithmetic problems of the `50s, except for the weed, of course. English speaking. Thirty miles from Temptation Island. Busses, planes, boat trips to Honduras. The place is a freaking fun house with rolling drums on Sunday morning and Bob Marley as a palpable presence. We shake our heads, us expatriates, and bemusedly agree that most Americans break out with hives, piles and boils if they get over twenty miles from their Wal-Mart or ICU. There is little doubt in our minds that such folk are a miracle because it is so sweet and easy to get away from them. They come to know their hollow vapidity and the worthlessness of their entire lives in their old age, finally, coming to die knowing they have not lived. This is a fitting punishment for those who do not read, period. Aren't you lucky you're not one of them?

Sometimes I try to imagine twenty questions for a king, then I remember kings don't ask questions, they tell people what to do and punish them if they do not do it fully, fairly and promptly. It's a hate/hate situation unless the king is a merry old soul who throws in a little fun once in awhile. That was McArthur's problem. Right hand man of god, king here, and king there, but no fun. History has him slipping quite rapidly from poltroon to disaster; perhaps if he were still alive he'd have something funny to say about that.

Jingoes. They're a breed. One reason I chose Newfoundland. Waay outta town. Terpitz and his Brit counterpart virtually ran WW-I as a private grudge match. McArthur trying to throw a little air power against China cost fifty thousand lives. No human or natural even has damaged the US quite as badly as Rickover's Knocker Boats. (Multi-billion dollar undersea palaces beloved of academy graduates who are of a breed and class to whom a large, gold ring is significant. We've built a hundred of these dangerous fuck heaps. Do you know that scrapping them puts radiation into the metal supply? (Maybe Dustin's uncle was right in recommending Plastics.)) Perhaps there is some justice in the fact that tradeunionists will be the first to die of this exposure. Let me put it this way, as Japan must pay for killing its children on the Yamato, we must pay for allowing the rank and raw treason of the Jew Rickover. McArthur killed hundreds of thousands off of negligence and a conceit that gets funnier with each retelling. Rickover will kill us all.

It's lopsidedness, do you understand that? For example, the AMA. For forty years they've been selling us chemo that is completely ineffective. A lopsided quorum of quacks found certain chemicals killed cancer cells in a Petri dish. They used lines writing on pieces of paper, much like scrolls, to establish a clinical validity, and started writing scrip. Forty years later the juice does nothing other than subject the severely diseased to wracking nausea and by-the-handful hair loss. But we now know the chemicals at least work. For what it's worth. The proof of this is Lance Armstrong, probably Scott Hamilton. Two extreme athletes, brought almost to death by the chemo, and, praise the lord, they're cancer free. Lopsided liberals; hell, all it takes is two percent Jews to come with chemo. I mean people who can tolerate Bill Moyers and Mr. Rogers on television for whole lifetimes must have so many gears, cogs, levers and cams missing it's a wonder they can think at all. I'll repeat, I know, for I grew up in the exact dead center of the whole Harvard mess.

I keep ranting on about Yaad City. I wonder if David would let me publish my letter, dated Jan. 1, 2000, to the president of the university. Don't know his name, he left shortly after. If he happens to be dead of his own hand, then I'll be pretty sure it was my letter, otherwise I just maintain the happy illusion.

Let me think about it for a minute. My uppermost memory in writhing the approximately 80 pages (double-spaced) is enduring over a hundred computer crashes. I never even got mad; was just thankful to be able to write on Word, even when I was saving each sentence as I wrote it. It turned out the fan on the CPU was dead, plus, the ram stick had been faultily installed.

Let's see, sex. Actually, it does. Hey, it was half a million words ago, and I'm getting old. I'm pretty sure it has alternative erotica.

Well, kick my butt. I'm a pro. I've got an editor. David. Like Mikey. He'll know. If he shoves the bowl back, I'll get the hint. Meantime, if you want to see your prince with all four throttles wired to the wall, simply keep reading.

Also, if you would like to get to know the firm of Palmer and Dodge in Boston, try developing my intellectual property. You do all the work, and I get triple damages. The reader is also reminded he or she is responsible for the cautions and disclaimers on the title page of Creative Camp. I'm old, I've got phlebitis, so I'm not very scared of anything; if David wants to leave my name, address and phone in, fine with me. The dogs here terrify even the locals, so visit with care. Finally, these restrictions are on commercial development, only, otherwise, no restrictions apply .)

1996 Rivas Estate

Dangriga, Belize

Thomas@btl.net

1 501 5 23793

January 1, 2000

Office of the President Harvard University Massachusetts Hall Cambridge, Massachusetts

Dear Sir:

Stamps from this outpost cancelled the first day of the big MM are the kind of thing collectors cherish and I hope they will be sufficient lucre to earn a few minutes from your staff on this thickish sheaf. They come with my wishes for a Happy New Year.

This letter is an application for such earned academic credit as you may deem appropriate. It may be ignored partially or in its entirety without giving offense to the writer (in other words, if it turns out you want to give offense, you will have to spell it out). I will append this part of my application with a bit of biographical material.

The following is a list of inventions -- products, processes, names and related intellectual property, which constitutes the basis of my application. Overall, the tone of this approach is informal and since it is submitted as a literary work, unto itself, I pray for review by younger readers and especially those in contact with current media and television

Invention One.

The Wound-Binder. This is a medical device for closing wounds in clinical or emergency environments. It consists of two pucks with tiny hooks on the bottom and Velcro strapping on top. Easily used, it allows wounds to be closed almost instantly, and can easily be re-opened. It is intended that the Wound Binder be marketed in a kit with wound-care aids.

The Stitch-Mate. This is a smaller version of the Wound Binder described above. Instead of minute hooks to grip the flesh, surgical glue is used; instead of Velcro strapping as the closing device, the Stitch Mate has small tabs molded into its top, and these are pulled together both with special articulated tongs and with surgical thread. The Stitch Mate is an overall aid to wound closure in a clinical environment. (Both filed by Johnson & Johnson/Ethicon, Arlington, Texas, Mr. Stan Hall. 5/99.)

Invention Two.

The Fizzle. This is a miniature fire sprinkler system designed in several different ways. Probably the most representative is when it's built into a reading lamp. A Fizzle unit is placed by a smoker's favorite chair or other smoking spot and goes off if the smoker drops his cigarette. When activated it turns on a light, sounds an alarm and finally discharges an aerosol vapor, which will extinguish an ember. Models range from the portable, Fizzle Stick, which would be built into a larger walking cane, to an installed system that would protect an entire room -- but not flood it. (Submitted to Teledyne WaterPik 5/99. A Ms. Mary Hert e-mailed me to say it was being forwarded to the head of product engineering. I submitted these projects to Teledyne under the names LifeSpray and LifeStick.)

Invention Three.

Tropic Seafloors. This is a franchise that covers your floors with three inches of sand. It also replaces rigid furniture with plastic furniture. The reason for installing Tropic Seafloor is that they vastly reduce injuries from falls. Also, if the sand is kept damp it acts as a giant filter, silently and cheaply removing all contaminates from room air in a short period of time. On installation of Tropic Seafloors, all necessary doors are trimmed in such a way that they can be easily returned to their normal length if/when the sand is removed. The floors are intended to be cleaned and serviced at periodic intervals based on consumer lifestyle. I would rate this invention precisely as silly as the horseless carriage. (Not submitted. But I like J&J for this as well as the Stitch-Mate and Wound-Binder.)

Invention Four.

Mailbox Mitt. Mailboxes often sit at eye level along the roadside and are lethal even in minor crashes. The Mailbox Mitt would be sold to the Post Office and installed by route drivers, starting with the most hazardous boxes they know about. While the design is simple, it needs to be well executed to make the mitts as attractive as possible. I envision them with a canvas exterior and trimmed with rope piping to give a dignified and formal appearance. Since the mitts will cover the flag on the current mailbox, a telescoping mast /flag should be included at the front of the mitt. I would imagine the mitt could be installed in a few minutes with pop-rivets or epoxy. Various designs would be stocked to cope with common application situations, and if I were running the program I would be sensitive about installing mitts on mailboxes in particularly scenic areas. (No ideas on this. Everlast?)

Invention Five.

Flee Bagger, Flee Tagger, Identiball and un-named device. These are systems installed on police cars to prevent suspects from fleeing in the safest possible manner. They are mechanical and chemical devices activated electronically. A full description runs to several pages. The un-named device is a variation on the above for static installation.

These inventions are currently (as of 5/99) at Colt in Hartford. If I can take a couple of minutes I'd like to talk about a product not of my invention that yet might enhance not only my ultimate sales to Colt but also their sales in general. This is something I saw last month on DWTV (Berlin). It starts with IBM's deep logic referencing. This is the database where they find that most first class passengers don't have credit cards; that stinky cheese helps sell baby veggies. You've seen the ads.

Anyhow, somebody wondered if you could measure the human face at dozens of reference points and then use deep logic to detect Alzheimer's. The answer is yes, you can detect the slightest hint of not only this malady but other infirmities as well, body wide.

The story goes on and we end up with a system that can make use of a few seconds of motion picture to tell anything about anybody. Even in pre-release a clip of video of two people meeting at say, an airport, allows the operator, actually the data base, to give a positive and accurate characterization of their meeting. In short, it's the polygraph times about one hundred. And one hundred percent accurate, which gets it into court.

Again, any motion picture from almost any angle from any even fuzzy source yields ultra precise measurements of skeletal orientations that are so accurate that if the subject is faking, it simply reads that he or she is really such and such, but faking such and such.

In my opinion Colt should grab this system, at least for civil use, along with my systems. How would that be for a post-pistol business model? They tamed the west and maybe it's about time they tamed the rest.

Invention Six.

Let's give the practical stuff a break and head for the Water Park. Here we find the `Dainty Teacup.' It's slogan, "Now don't go all fainty," seems a bit precious. The Wedgwood cup, standing on its hundred-foot tower, does look dainty. As we approach we sense as well as hear a concussion. A human form arcs into the sky, dropping neatly into the cup. From the brochure we know the rider has pulled over twenty Gs at launch (from the spout of one of six teapots surrounding the cup). Soon we will be following him on the only ride on earth that exceeds the controlled violence of a carrier launch. After you. (Not submitted.)

Invention Seven.

Some will feel we've already gone to the dogs… shooting living humans into dainty cups can't be everyone's idea of tea and scones. Yes, to the very dogs: with Doggy Num-Num (and Kitty Num-Num). These are bottled sauces (`Pan Drippins For Pets') to be poured over kibble. The products are sold in concentrate form and dispensed from bulk containers into reusable plastic bottles. (To Purina in St. Louis 5/99. No response.)

Invention Eight.

The hounds and house lions are taken care of, so lets eat. `Perfect-Burger.' The perfect burger has on it some strips of sautéed jalapeno; a little mayonnaise and horseradish. Perfect Pasta is a good spaghetti and sauce allowed to marinate -- yesterday's spaghetti. Perfect Pizza is piled with buttered onions. Some are well sautéed, some lightly sautéed, and the topping is of a bit of raw onion. Crust, cheese and buttery onions: perfect pizza. Perfect Punch is a combination of grape juice, ginger ale and tea. In addition to its fast food items, Perfect-Burger serves a ten-dollar created-from-scratch gourmet special each day. Employees of the chain can become experienced or even fluent in many aspects of restauranting and food service. (Not submitted. I like Pillsbury because they run a quality co-op here for their Red Lobster chain.)

Invention Nine.

This one I've actually done. It's called `Friendly Jungle' and could best be called a plant/craft gallery. The problem is buying, not selling. Finding the simple stuff that is still attractive and available in quantity. My edition specialized in Mexican pottery but we also did well with cactus. The original store handled semi exotic pets but this should only be done under the most favorable circumstances, and pets should not be sold. Just perfectly maintained as part of the ambience. (Not submitted.)

Invention Ten

Flower-Fresh Flour. I don't care much for the name, but I think the idea is good. It is a franchise that uses high tech grinders to mill grain at the point of sale. This idea was planted by a show called `Epicurious' and a segment they did at a flourmill in Rhode Island. According to the story the miller did lots of repeat business, even at high prices, because the fresh flour tastes better (as do fresh ground, coffee, spices and cheeses).

Flower-Fresh would not only provide on the spot grinders of various sizes but a carefully monitored logistic channel to get the freshest possible premium grain to the retailer in the first place. Here I would envision actually refrigerating the grain at the time of harvest, shipping and storing it cold or frozen, and perhaps even grinding it in an inert nitrogen environment. An experimenters dream; and flour, for heaven's sake. Common old flour. Consider the environmental and health impacts if people ate more breads because they taste better. (Submitted to King Arthur Flour in Vermont, 5/99. No response. My guess is they are too small, even if they should be interested. Again, Pillsbury,)

Invention Eleven.

While I'd like to show off by presenting yet better ideas as we go along, perhaps I'd be safer maintaining a lower profile and allowing as to how at least there will be no deterioration in quality. Or maybe I could get a bit droll and trump all the cards so far. Best thing is to let you judge, which brings us, via a short ramble, to DropNShop.com (and/or.net).' The slogan for DropNShop' is Aaaaa -- Zzzzz. The theme goes like there's this dude and he's gotta shop? So he drops to his chair with an Aaaaa, then logs on and shops, until, you guessed it, Zzzzz. (If he lives in Belize I hope our happy shopper logged off because we pay by the hour here.)

I do view DropNShop as a male oriented site: e-tailing and other shopping services. It should have a strong chance as a flagship name that will survive the inevitable e-solidation wars in the years ahead. (To IBM 1/00.)

Invention Twelve.

The ES laptop. ES stands for External Screen or Extra Smart. The external screen is an LCD platform, part display and part keyboard mounted on the top exterior of a laptop computer. It can be used for short input sessions without booting the whole system, and, as well, can be used for either writing or reading for long periods of time (days and days) on a single battery charge. The touchscreen keyboard can be reconfigured in may way and perhaps, if it really is extra smart, as a virtual slide rule allowing many math calculations to be made at three times the speed of a numeric keypad. The ES laptop also includes voice recording, a GPS, and a powerful cell phone transceiver mounted away from the head and with a lovely great battery. (To IBM 1/00.)

Invention Thirteen.

Let's play nine holes. On my golf course the `cup' measures 4-1/2" x 12" x 4". On odd number holes this trough is aligned with magnetic north and south, and on even numbered holes, east and west. My short game is much enriched, my time on the green is less, and the fluke logic dominating all but the shortest putts is reduced. I love this game! (I told IBM if they buy all my stuff I'll throw in some pretty good prize money for a demo tournament.)

Invention Fourteen.

Cyber-Cycle. Kiosks that buy and sell used laptops. When we can buy a new DVD/USB laptop for $199.95, say in 2003, Cyber-Cycle may be the only moneymaker left. (IBM 1/00.)

Invention Fifteen.

Cyber-Cite. When we move, a principle concern is available bandwidth at our new location. Cyber-Cite is a consultancy providing current and future bandwidth-availability data to realtors. (IBM 1/00)

Invention Sixteen.

Keyboard College. Slogan: Drill, drill, drill. Teaches alphanumeric keyboard skills in short, sharp sessions. Great emphasis on getting youngsters fluent on the keyboard. Sister school is `Pencraft College.' It drills on penmanship. (These to IBM 1/00.)

Invention Seventeen.

`Hook, Line & Sinker' is a complex computer game. It follows a child growing up on a tropic island and interweaves classroom drill with arcade-play fishing and action sequences. Much more. A very realistic and yet dramatic game of life. Can be interleaved with many instructional variants. (To IBM 1/00.)

Invention Eighteen.

Lose-N-Laff. If you find a laptop, and is has the Lose-N-Laff decal, you can get a cash reward at any Mailboxes, Etc. or Kinko's (for example). These agents will hold the computer (or other article of value) for the owner, ship it to him, or even transfer data to the owner's location. (IBM 1/00, but the storefront names might be better choices.)

Invention Nineteen:

VTC software. Village, Town, City. Software layered for use by people of different backgrounds. Village is simple but foolproof, Town has more features but is still relatively friendly and City is the ultra complex and infinitely powerful platforms we get now whether we need them or not. (To IBM, 1/00.)

Guess that's as close as I get to shovel-ware. Actually, there are a few more inventions but these should be enough for now. I should note that I have not researched any of the names, products or processes described above. Also, many of them are before appropriate commercial houses at this time as noted in the sketches.

I want to add something here. The best new idea that's not mine. The latest Mercedes Benzes have brake and turn signal lights in the front of their side mirrors. This is great because you can see if the car coming at you is hitting the brake and perhaps allowing you to save fuel and pull out in front of him. In other words, these forward facing break lights are applicable to both safety and economy. Another idea I had has just come out; a cell phone with a speaker built into it so it could be used for small groups and by the hearing impaired. Looks better than I imagined it. Another I missed on: a simple water cooler for a central air unit (very similar to the swamp coolers used in the desert). It cuts refrigeration costs by eighty percent. Eighty percent.

I would also like to apply for an earned degree in police science, and present my data for consideration as follows:

Crime: The 1996 bombing in Centennial Square during the Atlanta Olympic Games.

Perpetrator: A man named Robert Gee. Mr. Gee was an amateur videographer who sold a tape of the bombing to CNN.

Modality. This crime occurred about one-thirty in the morning. When Gee starts taping, a stage show has just ended and nothing is happening. Milling crowd as Gee pans right. The camera stops panning at the base of a strong vertical reference point (the media tower), and for a moment wanders about a bit. No sound of warning or commotion is heard, though the sound is very clear. Boom! A dramatic shower of sparks. Gee's lens remains on the spot, then the camera smoothly rises as Gee extends his arm upward so his lens will get a better view. By now five or six seconds have passed, noise from the area of the bomb can be heard, and people can be seen quickly leaving the area.

I saw Gee being interviewed at about three a.m. His explanation that he was doing a study of crowd reactions was specious.

It is my belief Gee detonated the bomb with a concealed transmitter. That he had rehearsed crucial aspects of the crime and thus was able to keep his camera moving slightly at the base of the tower in the crucial second or two before the explosion. He was exactly the right distance to get a spectacular shower of sparks on tape, but still be clear of the mass of the crowd in case of panic. I believe he put extra material in the bomb, including a large battery, to make it look crude. Probably carried it in a backpack within a backpack with crushed paper cups or the like to fill in the void lefty by the missing bomb. As I recall he was traveling with his wife, who in all likelihood knew/knows nothing of his activities. The possibility of a co-conspirator is small but real.

His motive was simply the cleverness of the thing. The money from CNN must have seemed like three cherries on a sundae (or slot).

The chance of Mr. Gee his getting his perfect pictures of a bolt-from -the-blue event, by accident, is zero.

Gee's sequence lasts about twenty seconds; watch with the sound up and then put Mr. Gee and his tape in front of a jury. If I were leading the investigation I would grab him suddenly and subject him to immediate polygraphic examination, though, admittedly, his familiarity with the scene might be hard to work around.

Also, while watching the tape, you might note this: a split second after the bomb blast, an utterance is heard that most likely comes from Mr. Gee. The utterance is an expletive of affirmation, Yow, precisely as one might utter it on sinking a ten-foot putt. Not surprise, not excitement, not fright -- but Yow, it worked! And remember the dog that didn't bark? Gee makes no exlaimative after his Yow. Not a sound. He has just captured a bombing at the Olympics, perfectly, and utters no sound to the many people near him.

I have written the FBI twice and `Time' and Brian Lamb at C-SPAN once each.

I love it.

I'm asking to join the most rigorously selected minds we have, and am willing to put something on the table that could deem me a crank. Well, that's what brains are all about. How many have you left at Harvard? No less than lots of others, apparently, and especially no less than the FBI, God love `em, who, on the day I write this, have taken a Mideastern bomber into custody on the Canadian/Washington border. This man is almost known to have associates, yet what images do we get of him? The vaguest pictures through a reflecting car window. Mightn't it be in the public interest to clearly show this individual, and if at all possible, put out a sample of his voice? [Note: now December 18, 1999 and still only vague and fuzzy pictures of the detainee. December 25, still no picture. December 29, still no picture. Jan. 1, s.n.p.]

Makes me reluctant to consider anything more humble than a doctorate in criminology. Course I can't spell the word -- thought it had an e in it - so I guess there goes any real chance. If a degree is over the top perhaps I could be nominated for the first Holmsey' -- the Oscar of the detective class. (First serial rights specifically stated, though copping credit for yet another awards show shows even the finest mind has its foibles. Edison believed in DC and Einstein created nothing in his last three decades.).

Speaking of awards, and, conveniently, speaking of Einstein, I want to place myself in nomination once again. Here's the scene. I left the States on the fiftieth anniversary of D-Day. Before leaving I'd lived in a very social environment for many years. Now here is what I see. Big kids. Every time something with kids comes on the tube, usually some horror or the other, all I can see is how gigantic even preteens are.

So I have a theory, just like my E bud. I call it genetic bounce. For three generations now children have been so over-nourished from birth that our chromosomes are going for broke. The argument against this theory is that many groups in history have been well fed; royalty, the merchant class and so on. But no, they were not well fed. Their food may have been plentiful and nutritious but it was not very tasty. Now the food is tweaked as finely as the new lasers that sculpt the lenses of our eyes. Boffo stuff, from infant feed on up. Julia Child admits that a bag of Doritos and a tub of dip are righteous eating.

It was recently reported that the age of puberty is now ten. What a shock. And what does it mean? Is it exponential; will kids maturing thirty years from now stand seven feet and weigh in the high two hundreds, on average?

I think so. In fact the kids are growing so fast I find a bit of humor in it. I'm down on anything paranormal, especially astrology. But we now know that the moon is receding from the earth at one and a half inches a year. What if the median height of twelve-year-olds is increasing at the same rate? If that rate of increase in human height is years away, will there be cosmic significance when we do reach it? Y1-1/2"? Sounds awkward.

In any event, we were talking about awards and this is my submission for the Einstein Equivalency Honor. If I could figure out something to do about it, E would be getting my equivalency award

And let's not dismiss the humble `Holmsey.' An awards ceremony for all things detective; fiction and real life; print and film; highly interactive. I've heard of the two-minute pitch but I typed this one in ten seconds. Merrily we roll along.

I would also like to apply for an earned degree in English. The following is a list of literary projects at various stages of development. It does not include several hundred thousand words of non-fiction ms in draft form.

1. The Pirates of Rickety Pier.' When a much too smart failure as a preppy puts his boat ashore on a tropic reef it takes over one thousand pages to tell the story of his rebirth. Comedy. This novel was completed in fourth draft in 1984 and has not been marketed since. As I recall I got ten rejections, five as slips and five with commentary. Too original and eclectic,' from Doubleday. I sent in the worse scene; the only bad one in the book, I guess in the manner of someone playing a card face up.

2. `Rope Yarn.' A comedy about a theater troupe on a western tour just after the Little Big Horn. Basically a rag on mother/son themes, which may give a hint at what the rope is used for. Scott Meredith called it a hair grayer. Submitted once.

3. `Run, Piñatas, Run!' Children's book about animated piñatas. Never submitted.

4. `An All New Jaws.' Very, very, very big shark. Comedy. Complete, but not in formal screenplay format. Thirty two thousand words. Never submitted.

5. `Play Cop.' Sixty thousand words seemed a bit much for a play, so I split it into two evenings. About two thirds finished. Never submitted.

6. Adapted works: Captain Marooner,' The Bone Pickers,' The Golden Hope,' and, finally, but certainly not least, Tom Cringle's Log.' Not only the ultimate sea story but also one of the best novels ever. Author, Michael Scott's comments on Haiti and Simon Bolivar are the most devastating copy ever printed. These works are at various stages of adaptation and none have been submitted.

7. `Anne.' I'm sending this along to put my money where my mouth is, so to speak. It's not only porn, it's kiddy porn used as a subterfuge: the purulent and tawdry dragged as a red herring, not leading to the fox's den, but to a stiff presentation on the subjects of artistic merit and poetic license.

Several comments -- caveats -- regarding `Anne!' Do not leave the ms where teens can paw it. The work is funny and should not be read by those recovering from upper body surgery or those in fragile health. It should not be read when or where suppressed giggling would be inappropriate. I recommend hours between reading it and the likelihood of having to take on any responsibility, even rising to your feet.

This is a third draft in ms, not anything I'd submit. Only `An All-New Jaws' is ready for submission.

Another degree I'd like would be one in international relations based on the following. As the Three Gorges Damn fills, China should encourage the recovery of artifacts by being very tolerant of so-called looters. If this were well handled, Chinese antiquarians would help even amateur diggers and archive their finds with photos and data, but would not interfere with ownership. It will only be a few ticks of the clock before this beautiful giant is able to buy back its treasures at market prices. Not only this, the Chinese department of tourism should actively promote `looting' expeditions. What a thrill it would be to dig in those banks, especially knowing if you accidentally broke something it would have been lost anyway.

Also, if you have friends from Taiwan I suggest that you encourage them to tell their countrymen to give significant thanks every day that they have the greatest of mother countries. As China moderates its politics it is putting on human displays exceeding our own. For example, under Chinese husbandry it is my belief that the lake created by Three Gorges may soon house enough fish to feed the entire world. If you miss CCTV-4 out of Beijing you are missing almost everything. Their ten-year-olds can do Chinese arithmetic as fluently as the Mill Valley tender drop can sing "I love you/You love me." As Jackie Chan is better than Chuck Norris, so they are better than we are. More fun, too.

Bio stuff. I live in a Thoreauvian house in a little tropic city. I pay $75 a month for rent and $17.50 for fifty channels of cable. I pay $2.00 per hour for Internet access and over $1.00 a minute for the telephone. They have a product called catch, which goes for ten dollars an ounce. I have many friends. I have lived in Dangriga eight of the last twenty years, but never fail to demonstrate obtuseness when it comes to the local variant of English. For example, if one of the neighbors stresses he's going outta town, he or she is in fact going to the center. Another example: if I want a boy to do something he doesn't say What's the catch like we do, he says Where's the catch? Maybe they're just trying to be funny. Deodorant is called arm stick and hair doesn't get long, it gets high. Charming place. I am proud to fit it so well. I support a family of five, and help others.

I was born in Concord, March 1, 1946 -- which I like to think of as the year of the Porsche, though in truth it's the year of Bummer Spock (as in bearded Benjamin, father of Wonkykonktonklinism, which is what one gets when one lets the noise of their own wheels drive them crazy. Cambridge, Massachusetts is permanent and undisputed world headquarters and habitat of the world's most dangerous carbon form: the Wonkykonktonklin Tweedy Clenchjaw.)

By philosophy I am an extensionist. If there are one hundred million lawsuits on file will we be a better culture or a worse culture if there are now two hundred million lawsuits? Things can also be reversed, and, finally, extensionionism can be used in default mode. For example, if we don't have at least a thousand fatalities a year in commercial aviation is not the system much too safe costing us much too much and thereby costing human lives because inexpensive travel is often an imperative to good medical treatment?

Class of '64 in High School and '68 for college. That should earn a special prize for simple timing.

I have a 32" waist. I have been in a store three times in the last three years (thus `DropNShop'), though my present net is made up of neighbors, not silicone, and I order by voice, not keyboard and mouse. I consider my highest intellectual achievement to be living a utopian life on minimal resources for years and years. I'm even smart enough to smoke so I won't end up with too much of a good thing. I look like a prince. My uncle, Lawrason Riggs, worked on Park Avenue for years and said I was the best looking guy he'd ever seen (even handsomer than my dad). Hope he knew cute. I should be cloned. Six hours of cosmetic surgery and I'd look as good as an Anglo Benjamin Bratt. I pushed myself enormously and when my efforts ended up in phlebitis I only needed rum for medicine and a year and a half in bed. I even have all my hair.

The beginning of a popular novel has a girl calling her boyfriend in the middle of the night and asking What's the best thing in the world? Inherited money, he immediately replies. Amen. Actually, I happen to have a second. Granny Cochran, to whom I read over three hundred English novels. Her middle son is Will Cochran.

Be this as it may, money is always interesting whether inherited or not. My Forbes ancestors spent a fortune an hour on Naushon, leaving me `n' my pumpkin to the tender mercies of split-session suburban schools (and, eventually, a sweetly modest stipend).

Even this diluted privilege makes me feel guilty most of the time -- others work so very hard. So, I do the only thing I'm good at which is thinking. In truth, I got the highest p.t.score in my basic training company, but more recently got nailed with venous inflammations resulting in loss of lung capacity. Anyway, thinking is what I'm left with, though I like keeping my hand in at the writing game.

I try to come up with ideas that will benefit others, or at least entertain them. It might interest some researcher at Harvard to know the following: I am an incest child; my paternal grandparents were first cousins and the Emersons and Forbeses have been hanging together for generations. My father is dyslexic and has bad teeth. I once took the MENSA test and got all the answers right in half the allotted time. Technically, I had to go back and change the third answer, which I realized I'd gotten wrong, and I still finished in half the allotted time.

It seems like overkill to get the looks and the brains. When we're at Gran's house on Pleasant Bay Narrows I make a joke by saying all this and Naushon, too. Fortunately, I have a modest side and underneath always harbor a nagging feeling that someone who can't understand how a mirror can reverse an image without inverting it probably isn't going to live up to even his mother's forlorn hope. It's my cross to bear, but it really should show upside down in a mirror. Rather than Ms. Primm's A for adultery, I'm stuck with an inverted A, as in moron Alpha male.

Now, what do I want from Harvard? Degrees, tech and editorial support, and money. A Porsche would be nice, but the new Cadillac with the infrared display projected against the windshield might be more fun. New adventures in parking, especial here in high-energy jaguar country.

Since it might be embarrassing not to mention it, the nepotism thing should be done here. Sometimes I think I should cast it all as a song: "I Don't Know If Grandpa Went to Harvard." [This to a comic Christmas doggerel that goes something like `I don't know if Santa killed his reindeer.']

The Emersonian irony here is that I don't know if either of my grandpas went to Harvard. So many did, for, what, twelve or thirteen generations? In truth, even though the yard has seen a bunch of post-war ones of us, the only one I'm particularly proud of is Uncle Will.

I have little liking for your school, but, under duress, might turn out something Lampoonish (i.e., extracurricular) along the line of a fun-loving dean confronted with a mustang yahoo; figuring the guy probably has earned a degree or two, then huddling with his squash bud, the registrar, so when the sheepskins go out they are accompanied by a knarly invoice.

In closing I hope the dismissal of my family as perverse in `The Proper Bostonians,' (after financing AT&T and running it for decades??) and my seeking the authentication of Crimson diplomas, while avoiding the stigma of actually attending the House of Dershowitz, will serve in verifying my identity as accurately as DNA would. Just to be safe I've affixed a stamp under my signature. I licked it with my very own tongue [as I did all stamps and both envelopes.]

This concludes the first part of my application. Many thanks for reading it. I've enclosed an SASE in case you wish to respond by form letter. At least you don't have to worry about me taking my dog and pony show to Yale. On the other hand, don't get complacent. Much of the material herein is as much a New Year's presentation to IBM as it is to you-all. No reason to go all fainty, either. We could just be friends. I mean if Bill Gates succeeded by not graduating, think of my chances, having never even attended. Plus, I've got charm.

Sincerely,

THE FOLLOWING IS A FAKE, SIMULATED, PRETEND AND FICTIONAL RESPONSE TO A LETTER FROM TOM EMERSON TO HARVARD UNIVERSITY. NOT ONE WORD OF IT IS ANYONE'S CREATION BUT MY OWN. THIS LETTER SHOULD NEVER BE SEPERATED FROM THIS HEADING. TOM EMERSON.

Dear Tom,

Thank you for the stamps. I don't know if you happen to be a Woodehouse fan, but just in case you are I want to disassociate myself from the humorist when I tell you that the car, I believe its a Fleetwood, is enroute. I will take this opportunity to remind you that Harvard has a zero tolerance for any kind of, shall we say, shenanigans. Sex police, do-ya follow?

The infrared screen is relatively small, Mr. Emerson, and cannot be viewed from the passenger seat. To prevent any chance of misunderstand related to ventures into jaguar-watching (sigh, we only get starlings here in Cambridge), our technicians here at the university, school, as you call it, have hot wired the `OnStar' system to always be activated when the infrared viewer is used and no forward motion of the vehicle is detected. Sounds of excitement will be logged and cross-referenced with video imagery from the camera as appropriate. If you're thinking of using a mechanical jaguar with a little heater inside, save it for Hollywood.

We have included our archival accountants in discussions related to your application for various degrees at the pleasure of the university, or, as you call it, school. Since your grandfather Raymond and grandmother Amelia gave the Estabrook Woods to Harvard, also known as the school, we thought maintaining a pattern of mutual generosity might be the Yankee thing to do. Thus we have forwarded one million dollars to Acct. # 74-360 4830 at Barclays Bank in Dangriga in hopes this will underpin our relationship.

Tom I don't mean to ask personal questions nor dwell in the land of the crude, but do you ever wonder how rich you would be if the Forbeses had been modest Quaker-like people? Our computer modelers got a kick out of the problem and used a Cray. Their answer is that mainstream investments of the same capital over two hundred years would buy you everything east of the Mississippi; with any luck you would simply have it all. Good thing they were spendthrifts.

Further research into your family brought forth `The Diaries and Letters of William Emerson' by your grandmother Amelia Forbes Emerson. His career as minister of Concord in the decade before the revolution delineates him clearly as the prime mover and instigator of recruitment, operations and logistics. They may have done the paperwork in bean town, but the fieldwork was done in Concord and that is why the troops marched on Concord. [Grammatical note on prepositions: Peaceful troops would have marched to Concord; the troops involved marched on the town.] Rev. Emersons appointment as Chaplain of the Revolution was a mitigated reward for those thousands of miles of walking from pulpit to pulpit, and his death, really, of anarchy, I suppose, is a muted call to the future. Of course you already know you are descended through the Davises of Plymouth from both governors Bradford and Winthrop. I guess that would have to be called, in all the history of our still young country, the ultimate in one-upmanship or gilding the lily a/k/a overkill. By any and all standards of all cultures through all of history from the aboriginal American to his fellow in Australia you are a prince and by virtue of being eldest in your generation, crown prince. Think of your potential if you can get your subjects to think you are worth a dime a day to them. Of course you are severely challenged by earning it back faster than your ancestors spent it, but, who knows, maybe your message will have appeal and you will get a little help from your friends.

Your relationship with the Bell System, Western Electric, Bell Labs and now AT&T and Lucent -- is, well, lucid. Complex, yet complete. Certainly compelling. Ralph Waldo Emerson celebrating the achievements of his grandfather, in `The Concord Hymn,' is profound, in all of history, profound, but for me the Forbes connection is the most fascinating.

If we praise the inventor of the transistor must we not hold one small inch higher the man who found the inventor, supported him and provided his tool and his stool? We must, for this man gave many inventors their tools and stools and thus becomes the most important man who ever lived, by far. It must be terribly embarrassing for you not to know his name and exact relationship -- and I'll not let you off the hook. Just because one of your ancestors started the revolution and another is the most quoted man who ever lived is no reason to forget the little people. To add an additional personal note, nobody exactly placed me in my seat here. I was ticked that you addressed me Dear Sir until I had the grace and good fortune to remember a song you want to write. As you remember it is titled: `I don't know if Grandpa went to Harvard.' So it is always possible you just aren't very bright.

Again, on consideration, your generic greeting reminds me of a sad story. I sold a boat to a retired fellow who'd spent his career as a buyer for a large company. His memory was the quick glance at the day book on the pathway, and How are Alice, Tim and Wendy… isn't her birthday coming up, the little one's? As grandson of a Harvard legend (or two), perhaps it was just good manners. Obviously you didn't look it up. Still, as a man once said to Mozart, a little humility would become you, sir. Then again, we remember Mozart.

The first volume of the Norton Anthology presents the finest sentence ever cast in the English language. In essence, it speaks of our inability to tolerate the tormented child, pity him though we may. Frankly, the opinion has been offered that your constant attempts at humor are at heart, defensive. A barrier to ward off an extreme evil, as it were; failing that, a balm for the lacerations. Others look at it this way: who knows with an incest child? Maybe he really is funny and we should look carefully at ourselves if we're not at least giggling. A wag, we still keep a few, you know, said if you're so funny the wounds must have been really deep, and for this you owe deep gratitude. That brought several to the verge of an awww until someone pointed out you don't have to remember her with tears.

Personally, I have come to like -- love, I guess -- the high powered relentlessness of your work; yet amounting never to a jot away from absolute truth, fairly spoken. You never let up; never back off, not because you're clever -- the wit thing is a thin disguise at best, but because you are right. You are like Paul Drake from the old black and white Perry Masons shows; he makes his living spying and telling, yet you could not bend him from the straight and narrow for a million dollars, nineteen sixties' money, an inch. If people do exactly what you say the largest number will have the happiest and longest possible lives; if they do the opposite or even a bit less, they will suffer accordingly - every day all day.

Tom, I'm using a little of your precious literary license here -- so I'm talking to you after you've passed: Tom, is it lonely up there or if you look down can you see Wolfgang? Well, I can see Wolfgang but I'm not telling where he is. You know rap the tabs put on me. Tom, do you see anybody else? No, and I'm glad and sad. Glad not to see anyone but sad not to look up and see Jackie.

I'll use my scrap of license for a last line (with an option to renew.) Tom, do you think Jackie Chan should be King of the World. He answers, your future you, Who would you rather your son be raised under, Jackie or myself?

That's the world's easiest question: both of you or either of you. Never neither of you.

Now, as to the folk headed your way in the Fleetwood -- they have your number but I doubt they'll have any trouble. Use them well, they're an important resource here and will be missed if they are away too long. Dangriga is described as a dusty frontier town; our folk have been warned. The Pelican Beach Resort seems like a nice place and Theresa Bowman says she's known you for twenty years. You haven't been around for happy hour so she thought you'd died or moved back stateside. Anyway, our crew is at your disposal on an open basis. The Fleetwood is towing a trailer with white boards and markers. They are for use in developing the game schematic for `Hook, Line and Sinker."

We have sent an editor who has extensive experience with the use of quotation marks. Yes, we know Mariache music is meant to have a bit of a ragged edge but you write words that may be the best we have for awhile and ragged edges stale quickly. Remember the scene were Ace is tramping the guy's shoe? How nicely he suggests the mope not press his luck? Keep remembering it

A sad note now. In point of fact, and not to put too fine a point on it, a tragedy and a tragedy of real dimension. A death has occurred, a killing, and, ultimately, I'm afraid, well, a murder has occurred. One of our plant engineers… let's just suppose he got hold of a certain sheaf of copy and deliberately removed certain material which was to have appeared. His mother-in-law, I'm afraid. One would think that here in these hallowed halls there would be a higher level of at least imagination. Her surgery thoracic; less than a week since the knife. He, the fellow about to be brought to the bar, hasn't a chance; your warning was unambiguous and the missing copy was found with his fingerprints and matching tear surfaces. Money was involved, inevitably, I suppose; cash and insurance. Still, first degree seems a bit much. Another Murder at Harvard. Dear, dear.

Tom, do try and remember this. Humor may work for you. It does happen, but you face two challenges. The first is maintaining the quality; that special, unexpected verve that is so special to both you and your heavenly bud. The second is it may type cast you. People may come to view you as only funny. A giant but a clown. I mean if that's how your mother left you, fine, I guess, but I certainly don't think it would hurt to put the grabass on a few alternates. (Just not in the front seat of the Fleetwood.)

Re: Dershowitz. We are glad you laid your anti-Semitism card face up, though obviously we'd have found out William Emerson was suspended for putting ashes at the door of the Hebrew School. Any embarrassment at this should be mollified and mitigated by Ric Burns' film on New York. Peter Stuyvesent tried desperately to keep those of the Jewish faith out of New Amsterdam, but was over-ruled. The result was an immediate decline in the culture of the embryonic city and for two full centuries New York boasted the lowest standard of living and highest level of overall misery for the largest number of people over the longest periods of time in history. Anti-Semitism is deep, powerful, considered, and fairly wrought. It is a concept whose validity may be proved by its reverse. Like an aspirin when it wears off. When it wears off, you know its been working. Yes, its hard to prove Jews destroyed New York -so many factors - the reactive case closes the case, plus a significant gentile population can take credit for better New York. But any confusion can be stripped clear when we consider what happened when the aspirin wore off. When Jewry was removed from German culture. An immediate improvement in the standard of living of all was realized. It continued for many years; indeed survived its own thorough Dresden-plus holocaust while inventing, developing, testing and mass-producing the rocket and the jet; the camera and the tape recorder.

When challenged before, the Anglo-Saxon has dropped atomic weapons on big cities. Your manuscript provides a safety valve.

Jewish and gentile comments have been numerous: He'll sell forever because we love to be hated, and we're very, very good at it. Hey, we worship on Saturday, drink tea from a glass, read backwards and obsess five thousand years over foreskins, cloven hooves, clams, lobster and shrimp any way they can be served. Let us read any rule, we'll break it, for money or fame, it matters not. Next Year Jerusalem.

The guy deserves to be more pissed than he is and if we don't deal with him we'll end up with someone who - is - more pissed. Another comment: Einstein would have been the youngest Jew to memorize Torah backwards and Freud would have been the youngest to memorize it backwards in a mirror, without assimilation. Another says: The Jazz Singer says it all. Hatred of progress, hatred of man even unto the firstborn son. Another: Roseanne actually said it all: "I'm Jewish, that's why I'm the way I am." Roseanne - screeching the anthem then launching a fat cunt grab! Perhaps she's as far as one had to go in search of Jewish pride. A voice adds: "Cossell latched onto Clay and forgave him everything so he could go on the ride. Motive: He knew he sickened a vast majority with his huge earphones and bug face, and gloried hot in it." I don't know if you'd look to him for pride and dignity but it is acknowledged that before Clay dodged the claymores Howard was absolutely everywhere absolutely always. I wonder if he'll be remembered as much as Arthur Godfrey?

The stories seem to go on and on. One says, `I've heard this a dozen times: Question: do Jews have excess representation and power? Universal very fast answer: Has there ever been a Jewish president? My answer: Bill Gates has done more on an average weekend than the last five presidents, excepting Nixon/China, have done in their lives. For every stroke of the hammer of Jimmy Nails, Intel has provided a career. What lawyer could keep out a determination of net worth as related to intrinsic value? And here's a thriller, though certainly a heartbreaker. All the Jews on earth are not worth half of what Bill Gates is, and only the Forbeses might be richer had they stayed in the market place rather than buying Gosnold County. (Of course, you still have the Elizabeth Islands.)

Another comment is about stereotypes. Did you ever notice, the speakers says, how Hollywood casts any character who might have the slightest ambivalence toward those of Hebrew extraction as one variation or another of Woody Harrelson reprising Clockwork Orange' as a one skel show? Another participant sketches a scene: a temple with a madman at the helm. Two shrieking women enter with a squalling child. Feverish quarreling splits the air till the leader's had enough. Cut the fucker in two,' he bellows, and throw each bitch half!' So starts the sizzle of Solomon. It's hard to believe the product is very kosher: however, if you can sell it you can sell almost anything to almost anybody. But what is it sizzling on the grill? Something for our children?

You know, there was a time when the WASP could sit atop a stack of his story, we call it the `Britannica,' and ignore the huffing and puffing over cult scratchings. In the age of form over function, this is a lost option. Today's media runs at an eighteen percent approval rating, and, while this is six times Yeltsin's three percent it still

An interesting thought: Can one be denied freedom of speech and expression on the sole criteria of disliking Jews? Are all talents and years of dedication meaningless and to what degree meaningless, if there can be degrees, if someone thinks the more stuff Streisand wears the uglier she gets and that she is very, very, very ugly, in and out, in the first place. If one's pages contain an apparent hatred of almost everything Jewish, how does this play against the talk of two Jews in Israel? One is a soldier and one an apparatus called a Hassidic. You know what the apparatus says to the soldier? You fight, I'll pray. If there can be a higher level of hatred than that on this planet I will be most surprised, but I do believe it renders one an amateur in any event.

Of course none of it would mean anything except for this. If there are a thousand planets roughly like ours, the greatest obscenity, still, which could be uttered is the word Constitution from a Hebrew mouth. Look what they have done to it. O.J. nesting with Sydney and Sheck on the tube. Larry King inviting a sad sack juror back months after the trial. Jew-sell. Ugly, ugly, ugly and so unsurvivable the only hope for American ground is that it soon fall under the stewardship of the Chinese, for whom hatred of the Jew is absolute without a trace of my appreciation for their occasional exhibitions of charm, wit, and self-depreciating humor. An added comment, re The Jew In The Chair: The nice guy with the animals brought a big pretty monkey on `Larry King Live.' Looking on the bright side, Larry King was live enough to actually start backpedaling his chair a bit. The coward in this lenstalker was very easy to see; his unstated but obvious: "Keep that filthy thing away from the King of Talk." Picture, if you can, a sniveling bug hater, fraidy cat over a beautiful primate, yet able to stomach Flea Belly "For the full hour." Such is so far from human you must ultimately call it sub-animal. Even vermin play a role in cleaning up. Imagine being lower then lice? Imagine being Milton Freidman and really believing a hundred Anglo banks were wrong in not supporting the Jewish private bank called The American Bank, because its name was patently misleading. According to Doctor Friedman, the collapse of The American Bank was the direct cause of the depression. Perhaps my banking ancestors will be sued, like the Nazis, for ethnic insensitivity.

Here is an example of Jewish interpretation of the Constitution: Thirty-year plastic at up to twenty-six percent per annum. In Jewish America it is now possible to hold a your daughter's christening and not finish paying for it by your great-granddaughter's christening. An Anglo parallel would be three years for durable goods, one for other charges. Quite a difference. At the core of the question is a simple principle: the dignity of the dollar. I'll let the other side speak, then, Tom, I'll call on you to go drag them by the hair of their heads off the hill. If your truth is the real kind that lasts you shouldn't have to leave you keyboard. Remember the famous story of WWII; the mayor of the large German city who cleared out his Jews with his telephone? That is a good story.

Little people, big hatreds. You know what is big about Jews? The tinny, tacky menorah on the back White House lawn in `98. Big as the Christmas tree -- a lotta tin and foil. Hanukah represents a minor waypoint for two percent of our population. Perhaps there's something inevitable about it all. Who would want to be the chosen of the Lord that devised and set free to prosper on earth the sand fly?

With your family's published tendency toward perversity, perhaps, considering God's apparent delight in not only ravaging the insidious Jew for gentile amusement but in allowing the process to go on for an extensive period of time, you see a more direct connection than others boast to the deity. It is my feeling that a bread-on-the board example of contemporary Jewry can be found with Labor. They engaged in adversarialism, recalcitrance, contentiousness, militancy, conspiracy, extortion, terror and violence until Ford pays more for pensions than they pay for steel. The crime was horrendous and severely -- probably fatally -- damaged our culture, but perhaps the punishment is, even so, sublime. Now that rank `n' file dropout is housing his kids and raising his grandkids every day of the week and every week of the year because the only jobs are for flippers and telesellers and the kids are lazy and lack motivation. Delightfully, they are also rude, very ignorant, often noisy and always hungry with many hungers, none of which are cheap. Our sweet little American holocaust; so quiet yet utterly pervasive. Just what the customer ordered when he made his deal via the Hebrew labor lawyer a/k/a the workers' devil.

Greenspan's name came up. The giant lensware; the stale lifelessness behind them. The dead eyes. Party to fete to soiree on Intel's wave. The ultimate pussyfooter. I view it as follows: picture it: the Mississippi off Bellevue, Iowa. January of a coldish winter. Ice reaching from the shore. Greenspan would be the one to get us the farthest onto that ice. A soft quarter point here and a soft quarter point there. --- ---- ----. That's the sound of pussy's feet. I'm an Anglo, I'd stamp, stump, jump and bump. Whumpf, bumpf, clumpf. That's the sound of the man. Hell, I'd fall through soon enough; right up to my knees. Change my mind. Meanwhile, my bud with the scholarly glasses and academic haruumphing is way out there. Only problem: Old Miss has a gray streak in her middle. Now I know our king of coin is gray, but this gray represents open water. It is dangerous. It symbolizes six trillion dollars of federal debt and many trillions of personal, commercial and international debt owed and owing. That impassable - Styx - streak of gray also represents the collapse of the computer industry, now representing twenty five percent of domestic gross and seven million jobs. The irreducible reality is their product will soon represent two pounds of inexpensive raw materials and far less labor than it takes to make a shirt. Machines that sold for thousands all through the eighties and nineties will soon cost a few hundred, brand new. This product lasts forever and once the level of the cheap DVD laptop has been reached, it becomes universal. A commodity. Little value, yet representing a faster and more violent potential for an economic catastrophe than any event in our history, and cast against the most intricate web of commercial and social complexity ever imagined.

Now it's possible HDTV will take up part of the slack, but only part. That's a wide, gray streak. The water is cold, it is deep, and the current is strong. Greenspan has partied us close to the gray. Guess, Tom, you're there on the bank to pull us out. I hope your magnum opus has some suggestion; I'd hate to think The Pirates of Rickety Pier' is just a big farce written by a giant clown. If you can subtitle it, accurately, The Only Manifesto You'll Ever Need' it might turn out to be worth reviewing. I understand; you're saying Easy on my pirates; they've had it rough enough without clever commentary from Cambridge. On second thought, if you love them, they've got it made in the shade. I guess it would be disingenuous to ask you to love us: SUVs. Cathedral ceilings, hot tubs and sips of wa-wa from wondrous three-gulp-last-forever bottles. Even without our giant, toxic kids, or gambling, or big box stores, or the Moron City of kid's TV, what's to love? I mean we went a year and more without a fatality in general aviation, then when some dude offs himself praying the while we spend millions and leach the souls from good men to dredge up all that beautiful marine life habitat to satisfy some lawyer somewhere.

My guess is you'd only love us if we did as you told us. If this turns about to be a burden or at least seem like one perhaps we can take heart in the billions and billions we spend every year touring cultures far and wide and stretching beyond antiquity with a common denominator of doing what they were told and not doing what they were told not to do. I just hope you try to make it fun; forgive us our trespasses as we will forgive yours. But act.

We are passing `Tom Cringle's Log' around as I write this, and I can tell you it makes Cambridge a brighter, fresher, cleaner and sweeter place. The only Jew is a wonderful noble fish --remember that fine scene? His influence on you is clear -- Mr. Scott's, that is. What a student, already. He must be very proud.

Before I forget, Messiah talk has begun and a select group of intellectuals from Brandeis is debating if a presenter of doctrine on the first day of the new thousand-year epoch is viable as a big M if he sends the Jew home rather than beckoning from the shores of Galilee. Your evidence is made more powerful by your simply not presenting it. Perhaps your allowing me to present it is a subterfuge (I can't wait until they get to your next one), but if so it is nicely worked in. Not cleverly, nicely. As I write, rabbinical scholars are scrutinizing every word of your work. If they find an error you are a false Messiah and they are off the hook and free to ignore you entirely. I thought nothing could be found beneath Seinfeld's robin's-egg-blue Porsche: wrong.

Other comments have run along the line that you're just as rough on your own self and family, when warranted, as you are on anybody Jew, Gentile or Green Man. There was something else… oh, yes, how stupid of me. Your buddy with the camera? All taken care of. They've bumped the reward to a million dollars and say the check is in the mail. I believe them.

The fun-loving dean and his squash partner have decided your decision not to attend was a good bargain for the college, so you owe nothing. Their decision was not hasty; putting any rush aside, they concurred that your application, in fact all you applications (I fear you're going to call me amigo and ask for a degree in Spanish), seem to have a pasty footing. They feel you were educated by Harvard, not at Harvard, and if there is no difference then we cease to exist. Again, we would be hasty putting you forward on the basis of your submissions but will take the matter under advisement.

We strive for restraint and even dream of the sophisticated. Your idea of humor seems to depend apun puns, puns and more puns. Try Everglade's College. Sorry… reading you and your one hundred thousand hours of practice is fabulous and strong and I can't help trying my hand, by way of flattery. How am I doing? (And why am I obsessing over Mozart?)

Nice talk, Rusty. Remember that from Vacation'? Take good care of the sprouts in the Fleetwood. Try and make sure they have some fun. Thanks again for the precious stamps. You were smart to enclose DNA sampling material instead of a photo; by the time the peasants get done with you, I-MAX footage would be useless. That's me trying to be funny again. Seriously, you are safe from the Jews. [Insert: I once read a most droll story of Mossad chasing restaurant to restaurant after somebody then killing the wrong dude. I live with lots of people around. I am the white one. T.E.] You have a tremendous impact on them; their emotion; their culture, is vast and deep. Their doubts are deep, as well, and your power is obvious - so who knows what the outcome will be. They broke the codes. They build the hospitals. They make Airplane' and Naked Gun' movies. Norm Abram is the best person on television. Oklahoma, South Pacific, Bob Morrow, timeless and super-human in rendering the absurdities of a young doctor from Queens in Northern Exposure.' A single Jew amongst eight hundred is a rare and toothsome spice. Two, is, well, just, too.

Why don't they police themselves? How do they bring song to Shaw and Michener, then show President Ford tripping dozens and dozens and dozens of times for a little money? Time/Life. And recently the tragedy of their flagship magazine: Since it isn't Gatestein, they rewrite history and suddenly have their B list Jew numero uno by simply crediting him with television and the microchip. Who knew the weekly Jews magazine had a sense of the droll under all that chutzpah? For example, Jews are a culture of vast and sacred tradition, yet capable of ignoring the world building culture and tradition of tobacco and rooting through boxcars of memos to ferret tiny points of law for brilliantly selected moron juries. When one points out the shattering effect of costly smokes on poorer families that becomes the fulcrum of a logic that never says, well, if the poor are stressed they'll buy more cigarettes at ever higher prices thus funding more lawsuits. They're like eels. They muddy the water, then grab in the mud. Practically kill folk over pot, while booze and prescription drugs flow like water. Slippery. Shalom, they say. Translation: stay absolutely still until I've robbed you completely blind. The NEA, very, very Jewish, hard-mouthed and militant has dumbed our kids down so low they can be sold anything by anybody, even the endlessly tedious arteesticness of the filmies. MTV is another fair example, with a subset titled Pearl Jam which is the grossest of idioms for semen. Too bad we haven't come up with a psychic condom for the nippers' heads. From the AMA: first do no harm, except, of course, for profit. The result is three decades and counting of chemo. It does nothing, it torments the sick and it costs a fortune. Yet good sellers can offer it as the only hope there is. While we're on the subject maybe we can take a guess at what the only hope for a fair clean world is. Hey, if I'm wrong maybe there's hope in the thousands of prescription ads flooding the airwaves. The vast promotion of Pokemon; that's a winner. Of course they didn't innovate, just sold and sold and sold. Or how about the media? That's Jewish. Vietnam. The greatest victory in the history of battle; the quick almost cost-free stroke, however wrought, that left a giant enemy moribund and entirely, permanently and most-deservedly wopshot. That's pretty obvious. Yet sold to us as a disgrace. Watergate. Follow the money, like the man said. Where? Ask yourself this question. What percentage of Watergate dollars went into Jewish pockets? I guess a more realistic casting would be to ask what percentage didn't. Then there's JFK. Two thousand conspiracy theories, ain't it neat? The most perfect example of the sizzle of perception is the Pristine Bullet. How could it have done thus and so? Run long copy on all the places that bullet allegedly went; describe every gory inch. Say it is Pristine over and over. If it is noticeably and obviously bent in the photos, ignore it or just change the definition of an old Latin/English word. In other words, keep your eye on the shekel. It's like the Rodney King tape. Show one inflammatory part of it thousands of times; show the part where King is for a second on his chin and Koontz's hand flashes towards his cuffs before King bounces up again, just once.

On the platform of hatred of truth what edifice can be built? Well, I'm sure my pages may fairly reek of ignorance -- I call an ancient people schlong schleppers -- but one thing I do know is this and it's that in over fifty years of conscious life the only structure I've ever seen on a platform is a tent. Maybe we'll tune up our glee club for a little `Stormy Weather'

Look at the story of the Exodus.' Picture it: refugees in the endless thousands, and the best minds and best hearts trying to use every available resource for the sustenance and settlement of all. Then along comes a splinter group, probably using smuggled or stolen loot, to buy a ship and go charging off to Palestine, utterly against the international law that has just spent fifty million lives so that some few might survive. The Exodus' drags six big ships after it for days and days as those ships try to enforce the law. When, at catastrophic hidden cost, the Jews beachhead in Palestine, they industriously set about crawling the ditches sniping the English boys who by some miracle have survived the very recent war and are just trying to keep the peace. Stories of equal cold-blooded shame have not been written recently, though the Jew's bible is packed full of such assholes. So few causing so much harm and so many deaths. On the bright side, their hijinks especially when interacting with various other cults, limited population growth in many areas for long periods of time. Of course, the Anglo's particular delight is in how they suffer, and somewhere in each pure Christian soul is the knowledge of at least a possibility that God gave the Jew his through and through Streisand/Hoffman ugliness as a form of pleasure that the gentile could take as a reward richly earned by said gentiles for being so gosh-darned good for so long to so many (while making only the fewest possible major mistakes). Take the Jew out of Germany and you get a skyrocket. Take the Anglo out of the colony and it's the `Challenger.' A tangential example is the Native American. On Columbus Day, 1992, PBS ran a ninety-minute prime time exposition on tribes around Santa Fe. Glossy haired, bright-eyed smooth skinned Native Americans told of having their children dragged off to steam heated schools and made to learn English. The density of the people holding up photographs of ancestors with faces so riven they look like they would drop off at a sneeze, and blaming whity, their endless graves yielding young skeletons twisted with tragedy notwithstanding. This flagrant nonsense, once again, on what one writer calls the electric Jew, and on the five hundredth anniversary of man's boldest adventure, which was not discovery, but returning time and time again with pinpoint accuracy. Sea craft.

Perhaps seeing how Jews and Native Americans suffer is a focusing device. If one lives by perception, sizzle, it is a missed steak and sooner or later, and at least often in history, a hungry-then-a-dead belly. Perhaps the Jew's motto should be Live a lie n' die, and their gift, besides population control, is the importance of truth. The real kind, like when you drop something it breaks. I mean the way it is, The Inquirer' is much more accurate than The New York Times' (All the Jews that fit, we print') with its political correctness that is either more monotonous than it is inaccurate or more inaccurate than monotonous, though even the Times' may have a funny side. They followed a recent story wherein African Americans were ticked at not being included in prime time. So LaSalle gets twenty seven million dollars to stay on ER.' We live in a nice place to visit, but gentle Jesus I hate to live here. For example, I like the friskiness of your commentary, even if rendered through myself, so I'd give LaSalle twenty-seven words in each script. Wouldn't that be cute? Think anyone would catch on? Get mad at anybody but the messenger? Funny paper.

One the bright side, Jews like to dance and you like to crack wise. Such people do not always fight. Bottom line? They figure you care and it is difficult to ignore a man's card when it is true to the deck and dealt for all to see. Again, the emotional impact of your writing at the symbolic beginning of a thousand years rings deep and resonant. They are a people filled like eggs with superstition and fear. Your appearance at the dawn of one thousand years may simply scare them so badly they actually change. I remember reading your great great grandfather's comment that the Jew cannot be separated from himself; his nature is indivisible. In my opinion, if your raise a Jewish child in Syria he will smite the Jew and if you raise a Syrian child in Israel he'll fly jets against Syria. Don't know if there is any relevance to be found in that or maybe it just makes them all look like world class imbeciles. In any event, it's the one hundred percent answer to another product of the poorly developed mind: nurture or nature? Gee, was I born da way I is, or is it all me learnin'?

Tom, teach them to take pride in being good highly assimilated and highly christian Jews. Jews that are tired of earned hatred, pogrom, disaster and death. Who has time for all that malarkey at the dawn of the e-age? Perhaps you could try using a bit of wit and point out that just because they've been wrong for four thousand years is no reason they're right today.

We've shrunk you every way we know how, my friend, and we are unanimous that you haven't an evil bone in your body. Not even a cruel one. Sam Morrison once described your great uncle, Alex Forbes, as the most Christlike man he ever knew. But your uncle didn't invent Tropic Seafloors nor did he give away seventy percent of his income. You've got my vote, my prince. (But I'm saving my heart for Brooke Shields if that's okay… still trying to be funny. It isn't as easy as you make it look.)

Thank you for helping with the letter. Someone's got to keep school for the next thousand years and it looks like I'm on the starting line. Write again.

Ps. Our offices will be sending paperwork covering your retainer, the car and a few boxes of e-stuff. Our students are bringing a fountain pen and ink as a gift from my family and myself. You need sign nothing, the paperwork is just for your records. One of the Fleetwood packs contains fifty pounds of jalapeno chili. Our research found they are not available in Belize and the whole Fleetwood pack agrees: no Perfect Burgers, no joy. We serve them on a toasted, buttered and slightly chewy sesame seed bun. Wow. And Perfect Punch is the perfect pun… Christ, will it never stop? What's the infallible source of the lowest wit: e-punNet.moc. Anyway, we use a quart of Canada Dry ginger ale, a quart of Welch's and a cup of strong tea. What do you mix with it?

THE ABOVE COPY IS FICTION. A LITERARY DEVICE. IT REPRESENTS MY THINKING AND MY THINKING ONLY. TOM EMERSON

This poem is part of Tom Emerson's application to Harvard. It is a sad poem.

Havana Farewell

The water hard and hot, waving softly not;

The mother at the shore. One-step more.

The boy, kit, and his little cot.

We must leave the madman's shore.

The beard scraggy in the tropic sun, Nose back, braying out Marx in an endless babbling run; Thirty years of the same-old tout.

Finished city of dirt of dust of bone;

Pope lenses showed it worldwide true.

Hopeless hopeless dead man's home;

Failure failure through and through.

In a foot she is there, in another not.

Good-bye forever, from the bilge she prays.

Aboard with her boy, and now the cot.

Still no softness to those waves.

We don't write now, we simply cry.

How slowly slowly the many died.

Alone one boy survived the try;

And now the far away decide.

Was she the mother, on that shore?

Wanting what for her little child?

The dreary gray of Mr. Stalin's whore,

Or to grow free, half tame, half-wild?

The man who won the race said,

"Women, ladies, babes and girls,

Time for Weirdy Beardy's bed."

Next day half of men wore curls.

Your prince sighs and lies back;

The poet also, his breath doth take.

The point is down, the letters black.

Dead mother's song to him to make.

T.E.

The Pirates' has lots of poetry, but I think I note a new essence of maturity. A slight willingness to back off. At the same time, there's a side to maturity that is boring. For example, using poetry, in the days the million horsepower engine was factory fresh -- peppy - I do I believe I wrote with more verve and gusto; more saliency and with a closer honing to absolute truth. If I smoked the tires I think it was me being new to the utter power of simple words rather than any deep bigotry, though I fully acknowledge plain and simple bigotry. How could I deny it when the pen having written, writes on, and though all the tears of heaven fall they cannot change a jot? I can't. I see Benton on ER' and it's just bigotry though and through. For the nasty man; the cruel, thin skinned, recalcitrant prick. Sipowicz on NYPD Blue. Same feelings. The big B. We waste our lives, energy and treasure defending his ilk? Guess we must have cause they're still going at it. Benton/Sipowicz? My solution: the Amish thing they call shunning. Stead we put `em on the tube. Or if we find a group that is particularly offensive, we can extrapolate bigoted thinking from the mad man to the mad group and do unto them with a few lines of poesy. For example: Mormon, Mormon went to church / To worship something phony. Stuck an angel in his past / And called the thing Marione.

This is a good demonstration of the power of genius as it relates to the power of truth -- and yet it reveals potential prejudice in the writer and so leaves us not fulfilled. All the Mormons have to do is to overcome the convenience of their missing tablets and explain how PBS dismissed in mere lines their obsession with gross coot bellies grunting over peach fuzz pussies - as matrimony. Then the thing will be at rest. If their explanation is that the grunting was a thing which declined with time and was eventually to be heard from the room next door I am afraid if it were my daughter I simply would not accept their rationalization. Would you?

As stated, the above paragraphs illustrate plain and simple bigotry. It is not the kind of thing a writer would leave ambiguous if he could help it. You know who I am. I know who Fidel is; I know the Mormons from the first salamander to their latest television advertisement to my very street where they come begging for the tithe of the very poor. But then I'm down on churches et al. Except perhaps for the Jane Austin kind where the church is of value as a community center and the pastor is a low-key community assistant and servant. If I started a church I'd call it The Church of Civic Beauty. Its motto would be That in nature is most beautiful which man has loved. The congregation would devote itself to cleaning up the streets and alleys of their neighborhoods and would carry weed eaters and rakes instead of bibles and hymnals.

Speaking of which, if the glee club wants to work with the mother's poem they have my encouragement to tinker away. I wrote it for truth, not beauty, so see if you can sing it the other way. As an aside, I would recommend listening to Sandy McCone's record Concord' narrated by Alex Scourby; it has The Concord Hymn' sung as a hymn. Also, if you want to hear the greatest actor never known you can listen to Grandpa recite from `Hamatrae' -- "Each of these landlords walks amongst his farm / Saying it is mine, my sire's - and my name's." He spent his life as a stockbroker.

I call the poem `The Havana Hymn.' Public domain. Acknowledgement is to the Griga Boyz who've been wailing sweet raggae at the Wamasa while I was drafting the lines. Their kewl rolling drums covered my tears and sobs as I typed. I wonder who will be there for you. I'll add a little anecdote in a lighter vein. I first wrote the final line as Snake left dying, then no snake. I felt the reference was prejudicial even to the firdelance and so I changed it.

The next ms, titled Anne,' is a comprehensive exercise in poetic license, but let me admit to using a bit in The Havana Hymn.' While Communism is merely a strongman's franchise, I think one facet of this canny-Jew's one-size-fits-all [or none] doctrine has worked reasonably well in China, all things considered. On the other hand, I also feel that our brothers there will see and feel the power of the New World as they move slowly and carefully toward disciplined free enterprise. They are making earthshaking progress on many fronts. Now if they can find a way to use communism to keep out Wal-Mart, I'll sign and carry the c-card, and I don't mean `credit.' (For McDonald's and Starbucks NOT I'll wave a hammer and a sickle.)

This said, if Weirdy Beardy sends his trash to us we should respond by picking them up at sea: reconstitute them, organize them, train them, arm them to their very teeth, land them and supply and support them. Fast, and for one hundred years in counter-revolutions till the counter breaks. I would carry out their wounded and carry in rested reserves. As W.B. sent me lemons I'd drown the Loony Tune in l-l-l-lea-l—emonade, or maybe just good old Yankee p-p-p-pea-a-urine. I would house the boy with his friends, family and ponies in Cheyenne Mountain and paint a little sign that said Dig Here.' And a twist on the whole thing: if Cuba had developed as a quasi-American free state, South Florida would be less than half what it is and Cancun would be a turtle beach. I kid you not. Never say never, but my personal bet is those bumptious for their worker's paradise vis a vee the solidarity thing will never seen nuttin' honey.

Let me close the subject by saying this. Prince though I may seem to you, I drove an urban bus for three years. I know from nuts. If I saw Fidel Castro standing at a bus stop I would fly past even if it was Friday at five and there were a dozen tired workers at the stop. As I just said, I know nuts and the proof is eight million weary and contaminated workers living at half of half speed while Cancun and Miami live at double speed. They let Castro on the bus.

Anonymous: If Cuba were a thousand miles north, I'd blockade its seagulls.

WARNING WARNING WARNING

THE FOLLOWING STORY IS NOT TO BE SEPERATED FROM TOM EMERSON'S PLEA FOR ACADEMIC CONSIDERATION BY HARVARD UNIVERSITY WHICH CONSISTS OF TWENTY PREVIOUS PAGES.

WARNING WARNING WARNING

THE FOLLOWING MANUSCRIPT COULD VERY EASILY BE DEEMED PORNOGRAPHIC. IT SHOULD NOT BE READ BY ANYONE OF INNOCENCE. IT IS ALSO A WORK OF DECEPTION AND SUBTERFUGE SO THE URBANE SHOULD LEAVE IT BE. THE AUTHOR.

WARNING WARNING WARNING

THE FOLLOWING WORK IS FUNNY. IT WILL MAKE YOU LAUGH. IT COULD CAUSE INJURY OR DEATH TO ANYONE SUFFERING A MEDICAL CONDITION HIGHER UP THAN GOUT. `ANNE' SHOULD NOT BE READ ON THE JOB OR EVEN WITH A JOB OR ANY VOCATIONAL ACTIVITY OR RESPONSIBILITY PENDING. YOU'LL HAVE TO MAKE UP YOUR OWN MINDS ABOUT DATES. INDIVIDUAL REACTIONS WILL VARY, BUT EIGHT HOURS BETWEEN CHORTLE AND HORTLE WOULD BE GOOD, IF HORTLE MEANS SOBER AND ABLE AS I REMEMBER. TO BE SAFE, I RECOMMEND ALL READERS SPEND SOME TIME PERUSING THE LATTER PAGES OF MY APPLICATION FOR HARVARD DEGREES AS A WARM UP FOR WHAT IS ABOUT TO COME. I HOPE WE ALL KNOW PERUSE MEANS STUDY, AND, IN THIS CASE, SPEND TIME WITH. I ALWAYS THOUGHT IT MEANT SKIM. THE AUTHOR.

WARNING WARNING WARNING

CLIP MASTRESS TAGS TILL YOUR SCISSORS BEND, BUT DO NOT REMOVE THIS WARNING FROM THIS MANUSCRIPT OR THIS MANUSCRIPT FROM ALL THESE WARNINGS. THE AUTHOR.

AUTHORS NOTE: This is a work of absolute, utter fiction but I have used real people, as most artists do, to hook the work to reality and give it texture. Again, none of the attitudes or behavior of these characters has anything whatever to do with any person alive or dead, myself included.

It's art. All art. Only art.

And now I exercise my license to thrill.

Anne

Conventional… there should be no such word. Conventional not only ruined my marriage but cost me my marriage. Whining? I rather think not, but the thing is we were locked in convention: that consenting-adults thing. You've heard it before.

I lay with Anne in our marriage -- once a week there occurred the straight thing we did because it was part of the package. Far from inseminating her we took it pill by pill. That all changed on a Thursday night; Friday, one night away. She'd been promoted which brought on a bottle of bubbly; the extra bucks (as an artist as work in progress I wasn't bringing anything but inherited loot into the family and since I'd grown under the Calvinistic whip this was no ego builder) and her nice young step up the ladder were good things.

We lay together and she said this to me: Tom, I love you but I want a divorce.

I didn't think it was the champagne [the only French word I can spell], so I listened.

There's a doctor at the hospital. I'm going to marry him.

I liked my wife. She was bouncy, athletic, friendly and a pretty good parallel to Bruce's Jersey Girl. The next-door kitten, times five, even with a lost cootie talking neighborboy who'd split when she was ten and he was twelve and they'd spent like five thousand hours over the nonsense of little girl and a bit bigger boy.

To cut to the chase, we got divorced and this is how it happened. Grin.

Tom, the doctor's name is Chuck. He's six feet four inches tall. It's kind of a long story so I want you to feel me up while I tell it to you, is that okay? Since she had the breasts of an athlete I agreed. And it helped that we'd never had a carnal discussion in our relationship, now three years in the making.

There's a swinger's club at the hospital, she said to me. Since I was feeling her up, I needn't ask any questions, or, more accurately, I asked my questions, all several of them, by fondling her left breast instead of cupping it. I think I might have shaken some. I remember shaking but I shook so much that night I can't remember when it started -- exactly.

How do you know, I asked, simply because I had never really heard her talk before in spite of all the by-the-book dating and btb marriage. This was new and unexpected; her yearnings for an obviousality that seemed unlikely for someone like me who spent eighteen hours a day creating, finishing and polishing. Whatever it is was that was itching, I wasn't the man to do the scratching. Our pasts were locked a certain way. She'd dated minister's sons and I hadn't dated at all.

She broke down a thousand years of Calvinist claptrap and Puritan pontificating when she said this to me: He (Chuck) masturbated in front of me.

Did he masturbate on you? I asked.

Just in front of me.

Anne, I said.

I'm sorry. It could have been different with us if I'd told you the truth. I got imprinted in my cootie days - right out of the Bobsey Twins; what you should do and not do and say and not say. And now it's too late for us. I want a divorce and I want it fast. I want to be with Chuck tomorrow at the party, but don't write us off as a total loss, okay?

What do you mean, I asked. You'll find out she said. How did we get to this point, I asked. You never asked me anything, she responded. Should I have, I asked. Yes, she said. What should I have asked. About Winn and me; about Winn and Stewart. I tried to tell you.

I'm an artist in development, I said back to her. What do I know about the outside world? I don't learn, I did that as a kid. Now I create. The two are at least partially exclusive of each other. I won't get stupid with clever examples, but it does make me obtuse.

You're not kidding, she said to that.

So what did I miss in my indifference, I asked my wife.

I told you Winn and I went camping, a lot.

The sun comes up and except in Maine the rising sun melts the morning fog. Actually, this is kind of literal though there are other scientific words for it. Fortunately, since Anne has just told me about camping with Winn and it seemed it might be a good time to go on a bit of a learning jag, I got selective in my obtuseness and just whispered Babe. Jesus, I'd never called Anne anything like that before. Why is it that what she told me after I whispered babe to her is so very, very dirty. Or maybe what she told me was only dirty because I truly am obtuse. In any event, this is what my wife told me, my hand barely moving on her athlete's breast.

Chuck and I talked for four hours, she said. Mrs. Abernathy was dying. Chuck held it for awhile and then gave her dignity. Her natural course would have taken four more hours; that gave us our time together. Somehow she, Mrs. Abernathy, a bit of a scalding lady, by the way, lying there raised a curtain. Eventually, he asked me, Anne, are you happy being married to Tom. No, I said: if you marry an artist he should make it and sell it and cash the checks. At least some checks. I thoroughly agree, Chuck said to me, but artists are like old growth timber. The slower they grow the finer their product; hell, it even sands and takes varnish better. I had a yacht, but that's another story…

I don't know what to say, Anne said. Well, Chuck replied, I did the neurosurgery trip. Thousands of hours on my butt and a license to show for it. Tom may take twenty years, even thirty, but he, unformed and unschooled as he is, is an artist I'd trade my degree for in ten seconds. But, Chuck added to Anne, he's an artist, not a man. I am a doctor, and a man.

I know, my wife said to Chuck. Then the conversation went along this line.

Anne, Chuck said, we've spent about what, a hundred hours together, and the only thing you've mentioned three times is going camping with your brother.

That's because Tom's not doing anything except on Saturday night.

For most of you life, Anne, people aren't going to be doing much above and beyond the daily routine. Hell, if they did we wouldn't be here in the first place or if we were we would be living on a whirligig instead of a planet. Yes, but I think we'd be happy that way, Anne said back to Chuck.

When's the last time you were on a whirligig, Chuck then asked my wife. I hope I haven't had my last spin, but the first time was with my brother, she whispered back.

Anne, at the time now at issue, was ten. Her brother, Winn was sixteen. She was a fencer; sword girl. Liked dancing. Little girl face closer to Allison McKenzie at her `American Graffiti' age than the slick pube-babes on the tube. Winn was what used to be called a stripling a/k/a hobbledehoy; long legs, big feet and hands -- needing new everything every few months, especially underpants. From Anne's point of view, the best new thing he had was a driver's license. One for the road to all places and then that place.

Anne's mom was tuned in. Her dad too. They thought it was cute that their little girl had a violent crush on Winn. Welcome to a largish club. They teased like you hold a kitten, about ten seconds, then let the kitten go. With the teasing, they set up the first date between Anne and her powerful and mature brother announcing, it `cause who could wait, several days before Anne's eleventh birthday. It was nothing fancy; the fancy money was for a special -- very special -- trust fund. But they did rent a Cadillac, two hundred dollars. They said, go to the drive in. Also, they gave the brother and his little sister a gift certificate, again, two hundred dollars, to the Plunkett Motel. Anne saw the name and a fire raged through her; she almost grunted aloud. Marcy had told her about the Plunkett. Little boys got molested there by their step dads and their uncles. Little girls by their dads and big brothers. She said a honeymoon couple had stayed there, sort of by accident, three years ago, then, after a single night of hanging by the pool and sauna, had invited their entire family and when they left after a month of renting half the establishment, had given a tip of one hundred and twenty five thousand dollars. The old scholar that ran the place had lowered his prices by twenty percent, doubled the staff's pay, and instructed him to change the sheets once a week whether they needed it or not.

The two-hundred-dollar gift certificate was not only good for five days, but included a giant pizza each day. Anne shuddered. But suddenly she remembered, hella, they were going camping. Tonight, two days before her birthday, and tomorrow night. The Cadillac and the Plunkett - the date - seemed a century away, but camping was, well, practically here and now.

….

As they drove to the river they were silent. Winn wore his basketball jersey over a pair of shorts his kitten had made him last year when she was eight [warning to editor: you are being set up]. Anne had flailed to her room in the last seconds before departure, darted out the back door, and approached the car from the off side knowing even so her dad would see her in her tube top and short shorts. Their day-to-day car was an Impala and she piled through the rear door, lying in the back seat while telling Winn, Let's go.

By the end of the block she was in the front seat; now it was an hour toward the river. Half the trip.

We've got to talk, Winn finally said. That first hour he'd been active horsing the tough Chevy through traffic. Even on his first long solo Anne's big brother used the Impala as a symbol that said you may have spent more but my timing is better. This to Bimmers he aced without cutting them off or making them go peep peep. The quick moves of his body; the quick blasts of power just a second before she expected them. If hookers had sexy traffic, and she doubted this, her brother was sexy in traffic. The car almost seemed to spurt at times and, young as she was, she slacked in her seat and knew she was in exactly the right place at exactly, out of all creation, the right time. When she added to her equation that she was with, out of six billion souls, the one she loved madly, the total came to a numbing happiness.

Now, an hour into the drive they cruised at sixty-eight. Winn talked to her.

Anne, he said, I don't want to shock you, but do you know what an Ibby is. No, she responded, her voice matching his. It's an incest baby. Have you ever heard about that. No, she said. I'm not ten yet, maybe I'm not meant to.

Winn didn't say anything for two minutes. Would you like to talk about it he asked. Yes, she replied.

It's complicated. There's a club. College, money, all that good stuff but there's poor kids too, lots of them. Anyway, all these smart people got together and came up with the fact that if a girl has a baby with her brother, her baby is her daughter and her sister. Allowing for mustang blood, plenty of mustang blood, it's good. Those babies are very loved all their lives and get an awesome start in life.

Are Mom and Dad mustangs, Anne asked. No, Winn replied, but I'll tell you about that later. Right now you've got to tell me how it's going to be when we camp. Do you want your own tent or should we share one?

There's a rest area in a mile, Anne said to Winn. If we are going to share a tent, let's stop there for a little while, okay? There's a sheet-blanket in my stuff, so if anybody looks in they won't see anything and I even have a flashlight so I can see what you're doing to me under the blanket. Is that okay.

Yes, Winn said.

Tom, do you want me to tell you the rest of the story. Did you tell Chuck, I asked. Yes, she said. Okay, I replied.

When we got to the rest area we sat and talked. I mean I wasn't even ten, he was sixteen, there were no tornadoes or missile trails around so we knew we could take forever.

Would you like to have an Ibby, Winn asked. Yes, Anne said. Wow, Winn whispered. What, Anne said. I wish we could, Winn replied. But you can have an honorary Ibby.

What does that mean, Anne asked her brother. Well, Winn answered, like I've already said, it's complicated. Ibbies are usually given by a father to a daughter or by a brother to his sister. In any case, the bond is doubled. See, what the idea is is to bring up a few children, female only, with total love. In a mustang family either a father or brother can inseminate the female. It's complicated, not as bad as baseball, but bad enough -- and as in baseball, good enough. Strict rules make for a much higher level of participation… yada, okay… for now, there's a clinic in Sweden -- it's known as absolutely the sexiest spot on the planet -- where very young girls can go, with their incest partner or partners, to bear their young females. Is this making any sense. About half; Anne replied. Why do they have only females. Because, Winn answered, the children themselves are likely to have incest and very few males want to have incest with their sons or brothers.. Now that we're all teched up, we can tell that stuff as the baby is conceived and remove males as a tiny cell group. Only fanatics would call that abortion. I hate abortion, Anne said, for the moment relieved to take a bit of a break by talking about something she knew about. You may not have to have one, Winn answered. And I don't agree. Whatever we like or don't; life has it's practical side and fifty million women a year simply cannot be wrong. Their voices overpower God and put Christ and that very devil of a Pope on the trash heap of history. They must be free.

Her brother was magic in her eyes. She'd have adored him had he been born a goldfish. His enormous caring, yet grinding pragmatism. She fenced; he simply cut -- away all the non-nutritive. A farmer who cleared the weeds before casting his seeds. On the court he rarely scored but his hissing passes were legendary and when he dislocated his thumb and was out four three games, the Husky's score dropped twenty points a game. He averaged one foul in five games featuring practice over elbow (and he was never considered pro material). What a mega-muffin brother thought the ten year old female as she sat beside him in the rest area and they talked, glad that his days as anything to do with being a muffin were obviously about to be ended. Just hope he doesn't become a … then she stopped thinking bad thoughts.

I have a special bra for you, Winn said. I don't really need one, Anne replied, her not bad thoughts not lasting long. It's for Stewart, he said. What do you mean, she said. Well, Winn replied, it's red silk. Stewart picked it out. When I get you in the back seat I'm going to ejaculate underneath it, then you've got to take it off and wrap it in a towel. You will wear it the first time you are with Stewart so I can be with you. Is that okay?

Genius brothers were a bit much, even if they could sport like a demon, make an impala leap like a jaguar and bring the whole team along for the ride, never forgetting His Kitten. Then she overlooked the fact that Winn was wearing his team jersey, that she was sitting about seventeen and a half inches from him -- and thought of Stewart. Seventeen. Keyboards didn't matter to Stewart; digital or analogue; music or data or copy. His Lancia didn't have a keyboard, and she'd realized he was just being honest when he said it didn't need one.

Are you feeling like a ten-year-old yet, Winn whispered.

No, she replied. Do you have the bra with you. Yes, he said in a grunt. Do you want me to put it on in front of you. No, Winn said. Okay, Anne giggled. I'll be baaack.

That was the end of the seventeen and a half inches. Are you wearing it, Winn whispered to his little sister once she was back in the Impala. Yes, Anne whispered back. Did you masturbate while you were putting it on, he quizzed. I don't know how. I've only read about it. Did you have any special feeling, he said. Yes, she answered. Winn, she added, do you want to rape me. Yes, he said. But brother's us a very slow rhythm with their sisters. It's friendliness and incest -- sometimes impregnation - rather than tempest. You can save that for Stewart because he will only be your brother when you're wearing the red bra.

Tom, Anne said to me, I married you because you were and are so much like Winn; so slow, so gentle, and so utterly complete. But I want an animal. A big powerful spermy animal. When Chuck masturbated in front of me he sprayed more semen in forty-eight seconds than you have in a month. You can't blame me for wanting that. Besides, all is not lost. Sharon is in love with you and wants an Anglo child even though she's with Havo. He's a spermy kind of guy, I said, having resumed fondling her like a little girl. I'm going to let him get on top of me at the party, before Chuck. Also, do you remember Mary` Ann's husband? Captain Cum? I answered to her giggle. I've invited him to the party. I want to hold hands with you while he's on me, would that be okay. What if I say yes, I answered. To bad you're not a politician, then you could say yea. I'm not even a voter I deadpanned. Chuck is, she replied. I don't want to disparage my wife but nonetheless must note for the record that I believe there was archness in her tone.

Let me tell you the biggest part of the secret, Anne said in a tone that was, well, not exactly back to normal. Chuck has a daughter, nine, and she's seen you three times. Think what it might mean if a nine year old girl; in point of fact, a skinny, plain, red-headed nine year old girl, nicknamed Strawberry, remembers each and every time she saw you. Tell me more about Winn I said.

He put his right arm over the back of the seat, and played with my hair. He tilted my head back a little and reached over with his left hand and put it on my tummy. Tom, is it okay if I use some little girl words? Yes, Anne. Do you like the bra, he whispered. Yes, but I want sperm on it. Anne, he whispered, you've got to be sure. Smart people can be manipulative. Dual eights on the boards can make a guy pushy, especially when he takes them a year early. Yeah, I said, but I'd rather be pushed by you than your jockrocket buddies from the gym. To them dual eights isn't SATs, its intelligence quotient.

Let me interrupt here by adding that my wife's irony is something I have to appreciate from a distance. The oddity is that we get along like the proverbial brother and sister; the idyllic brother and sister.

Winn was more responsive to her. Or millimeters, in some cases, he said to her quick giggle. Then she added, tell me more about Ibbies. Well, he said, the club hasn't been around for a long time. Like I said, there's this clinic in Sweden, it's new, too, so when a girl in the club gets pregnant before her first period she goes there with her lovers. Best of everything, mandatory abortion if the tests indicate problems, and labor is induced when the female infant reaches four and a half pounds. The taking of the child to the young mother's breast for the first time is sexual ceremony with the female's lovers and any of the male birth staff that are invited. The child is introduced to the passions of incest, literally, with the first touch of her lips to her girl mother's breast. After that she is allowed complete innocence to three, then, if she is responsive, gradually increasing sex play with incest partners until she is five. On her fifth birthday, assuming she is entirely willing, she is mounted by a male of at least sixteen but with a long slim penis. This happens in her father's arms, often in her mother's as well. Three times. Then she spends a night alone with her father while her mother takes a lover in the adjoining room. Used to be that just a curtain separated the rooms but in modern houses the walls will do.

Anne giggled at her cool older brother. What happens after that, she asked Winn.

I giggled too. Funny fucker. Then I whispered what did he do to you. She whispered back, the same thing Chuck does to his daughter. Did he use a slow rhythm, I asked. You're jumping ahead, my wife chided me. Did Stewart, I asked, still trying to get ahead, no she said. What happens after the father spends the night with his little girl. Anne said Winn told her they set up a schedule and a small group of partners. Little girls with their dads and big brothers. Play came first, at that age, then a little school, then a lot of hanging around with normal kids until the special hour which was an hour twice or three times a week

In the car, Winn asked Anne if he could pull up her halter. Forgetting about the bra she'd just put on she said there's nothing to see. I want to see red, he said. She blushed and Winn got his wish. Gently he felt her hard athlete's tummy and caught her tube top on the top of his index finger nail while he pushed her from him and lay his head in her lap, looking up. Her blush subsided. How, by being boyish, did she become the ultimate female? That was like trying to figure out why things are not upside down in a mirror. If, after all, AMBULANCE reads from backwards in a mirror -- he'd noticed this yesterday, the first out with his new license -- why isn't... And why was Anne so beautiful; sparky plain but absolutely beautiful. Even her tummy wasn't perfect, thirty-one freckles and a mole… he thought of what's he'd heard about the club. That incest babies where often discovered by father or brothers in the shower. In Anne's case it might be him or dad that detected the first gentle swelling, but it would be Stewart's child. Unless she played around. Unlikely. Anyway, however it turned out, it would be quite something to remember to watch his little sister hand in hand with her dad walking down the long hall to the bathroom with its walk-in spa; to loiter at the ajar door and enter when a mature male or immature female voice grunted Winn. It would happen soon. But not posssssibly soon enough. The thought of his a bit clown faced sister standing in the shower with her belly covered with dad's semen while she urged him behind her, his hands over her womb, to feel, through the slick male fluid, if she was pregnant tantalized him and he pulled the white top away from Anne's chest exposing the pristine red silk below. I come gift wrapped, Anne said. I'll say, Winn replied. Thanks to Stewart, she added. You will be gift wrapped for him, too. But he'll be getting a soiled creature tied in a soiled ribbon. I think that's what he wants, Anne said.

Will you feel soiled after I cum. Yes, but remember how I wasn't much of a puddle jumper when I was a kid? We both liked getting dirty, Winn answered. Mom was too tolerant, now look at us. Anne said, if your finger goes on more inch inside my top we'll be having incest. Dirty? her brother grunted his face now by her ear.

So much for perception and those cerebral monkeys and turkey talkers in church. No incest, and ten percent of your paycheck. Who thought that one up. Someone without a kickass tomboy for a little sister, I imagine.

Winn, how much of it's taboo, Anne asked. A-plus, kitten, he said to his sprite. It's all taboo. What we're feeling for each other now isn't natural. If it were, we'd just go off and boink under a palm. For us it's a beautiful ride to a wonderful new world, but, unfortunately, for most of the twenty percent of females now getting molested by family members it is a lifelong horror. So what gives us excitement, because we're cool, can wack out someone who's been bred uptight. I've seen women in their sixties that can be spotted as incest victims from fifty feet away. It's responsible for over half of eating disorders. But we were raised to know much better than that, and for good reason. The whole story is that incest over generations, in a small community, gets you maybe a bit of talent with a banjo but that's when Hollywood takes over the story; usually, spindly kids. Thus the mustang Stewart, Anne said. It's a bit more complicated than that, Winn answered. How so, Anne asked. Because Mom and Dad are sister and brother. Otherwise I could inseminate you; but that would be two generations. We're both incest babies? Anne whispered to the sixteen-year-old male. Yes, he replied, it was before the clinic and they just had me, boy or no boy, isn't that cool? Yes, she said, but it would be cooler if I wasn't wearing this halter.

Anne giggled in our marriage bed. What's so funny I asked. I was just thinking, you know, thinking out loud; I mean if you wrote all this down, what would happen to the reader. What do you mean, I asked. Tom, she replied, the way you write; rare punctuation -- wouldn't the reader be likely to sustain a neck injury snapping back and forth through the copy trying to find either the last or next attributive so they would be positive of who was saying what to whom? I use question marks on long questions, I answered. Then I pointed out you have to use the shift key; two strokes for one character and `The Woodwright's Shop' had a guy that cut dovetails real fast because where he grew up they couldn't afford nails. I'm a lazy artist, I can't afford effort so I write so I don't have to use the shift key; or, you could blame Mr. Richard's who did a superb job trying to teach me to type but failed to box me when I looked down for the shift key. You're lucky I take the effort with caps; some writers don't. I think you're showing off, she said. I think you think if you can tell people about Winn and me; and Stewart, you'll get the reader so hooked he or she will improve speed and comprehension. Dramatically, I acknowledged, if they don't break their necks. She giggled. She hadn't mentioned Chuck, but then she hadn't mentioned me either, so I didn't giggle with her even though I wanted to.

You are such a fiery talent, Anne said. Yes, I answered, but I need another log for the flames. Winn is in the process if committing a very serious crime with you. You are in the back seat of the Impala, headed to the river to camp; need I say more. You forgot the Cadillac, the drive-in, and that motel; and wrong, we were still in the front seat when I started telling him about Marcy.

Tell me about Marcy, Winn whispered to Anne in that rest area twenty-five years ago. This is the story she told me, Anne said to her sixteen-year-old brother as she reached under his jersey and put her index finger on his nipple.

We never use bad language, Marcy began. Not even damn and hell more than once a week or so. But I am, in my whole life, allowed to use the eff word one time. Do you want me to tell you about it. Yes, Anne said to Marcy… have you used it. That's kind of part of the story. Sorry, didn't mean to zoom on you. That's okay. Anyway, it's a really strict rule. I mean we joke about it, but I could steal the Subaru and there'd be less disappointment than if I didn't use my one shot at just the right time. I guess it wouldn't be as bad as becoming a chain smoker, but it would be pretty bad. Sounds that way, Anne interjected. Yeah, it is. Okay, so it's once and it has to be perfect, right. Right. What would that mean to you if you were me the nine-year-old asked her older female friend. That I could only use that word, once… I'd never use it. Think about it more, isn't there a situation where you could get so excited you just couldn't help yourself. I mean you don't have to like speak it slowly you know. It's not a word for English class.

If it was, Anne pointed out to her friend, it must be quite easy to sound out. Exercising her last gram of control Marcy gasped a riff from Brenda Lee's `Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree': Now the giggling has begun, she reprised. Both girls dissolved to the floor, quaking, finally begging each other to stop and branding a lie to the pervert's thought that there is anything special about sex. Life is special and love is extra special. Sex? Well, at the moment it's just funny, but you can put this in your pipe and smoke it: you will hear more yelling, screaming, hollering and bellowing in thirty seconds of a tight home game, a dip on a roller coaster, or a mouse up a skirt than in a lifetime of sex. It should also be noted that it does not take the master's fingers on the keyboard to bring out the funny side of mating. A certain nine and ten year old were doing that and the nearest keyboard was two rooms away.

It is well known that girls reach a giddy age where their attention span is not all that it might be, so the tears cleared and their breathing returned to normal. How they'd handle English class on the morrow is a proper use of the word problematic, but there was one small miracle in the offing. They had Mr. Averson - awesome Avey - at different times.

Do you give up, Marcy asked Anne trying to get her slightly older friend to calm down so they could talk about serious stuff. I can't even remember what we were talking about, the older girl replied. Marcy's eyes almost squirted tears and she said, what's wrong… don't… you… understand…. English? The only thing that saved their lives was it was just the tiniest of stretches; not nearly as bad as Let's-light-this-candle's Stewart's second (swimming-pool) commercial in spite of its good line Well, I wouldn't mind living here. But just enough to spare them a 911 scenario. Like other great writers I steal from my characters and I am stealing from Anne at the moment. If you do that again, I'm going to need medical help, she said, and since I'll be the vic and you'll be the perp, you'll have to answer all the questions and make your utterance of a lifetime at the cop shop. That's a buzz buster, answered Marcy, quoting her beloved Shelly from `Northern Exposure.' Yeah, Anne replied, reaching for the phone: we'd better put a civil bung in it. That dear reader, is un-stretched humor. Perhaps twenty of us on the planet can pull it off. Luckily for you, I'm over half way down the list so there is some hope to be had in reading others. I acknowledge Jay's writers, Frazier's, Jamie Uys, and a nice handful of others. Someday we should all get together at the Pelican an see if we can find anything funny in Y2K for I swear that trillion in lawsuits takes the humor out of it. And you, reader, be patient. You've had a better ride on these pages than the last ten thousand you've read; you've already got double your money's worth even if you've gobbled up half of Woodehouse. Shut up, back off, and let me get my hand on the shifter. We need a change.

Neither girl died. Both eventually sighed. There actually is a story, Marcy finally whispered to her slightly older friend. They lay in two of Marcy's trainers and their own panties, long legs twining. Neither pretty, but very, very beautiful -- a zillion miles from the valley. We went on a trip -- remember. Yes; two summers ago. Well, it wasn't the trip, that was sort of okay, but it was the trip. The flight. Eight hours. Baboon was along, right. Marcy's brother's name had come from Tim Allen's movie, `Jungle to Jungle.' Baboon was fourteen the summer in question, his sister was seven. Readers wonder what editors do. Editors take a pencil and write down the names and ages of the characters. They take a calendar and do math on it. Simple stuff, mostly helping with inconsistencies, I suppose, but I tell you what, there is nothing finer than getting a sheaf of galleys and finding out everybody is the proper age for everybody else from beginning to end. The moralists and religious review the ms with emotion, which is why the editor uses a pencil. See, he or she has something to contribute.

Well, let me get back to my self. I've got more to say on editors but its hours to Paris. Yes, nonstop.

Chapter 2

Marcy untwined her right leg from Anne's left leg and raised to her knees, reaching into a dresser drawer. She fumbled for a few moments, then brought out a small leather box. Oh, I can a-l-m-o-s-t smell it she spelled, holding the object to her nose, then passing it to Anne who was lying by her feet. Marcy dropped, hipped, and retwined. How about you, do you smell anything like boy. No. Well then, it's just my imagination -- psycho semenantic. Anne groaned again. Will we never be rid of this cursed language she sighed. Finally, she decided to let it pass. If she rose to every bait she'd wear out her fins, and she was a mere broth of a fish. What's in the little box, she asked after sniffing closely again and catching a sense of musk. Look, said Marcy. She opened it and found a set of wings… not stamped, but wrought. A pink jewel divided the sculpted foils flaring to each side. Baboon has a blue stone, Marcy said to Anne. Where'd you guys get them, Anne asked. It says on the back, but you need a loupe to read it. What does it say. Just a bunch of numbers. The only thing I remember is 33,022. That's how high we were. The rest is a bunch of numbers you need a chart for. Anne removed the jeweled gold and slowly turned it over. That is a lot of numbers, she affirmed. She could see the tiny digits but not read them. This must be longitude and latitude -- real accurate. Almost to the inch, Marcy replied, her eyes firing to the verge of control. So - what, did your dad get the tickets on that credit thing -- card, I heard they give you extra stuff if you use one. Oh, daddy wasn't there, Annie Rooney. Mommy wasn't there either. Just a moppet, seven, and a baboon, fourteen. And an eight-hour flight -- all night long. Picture it. The plane is expensive. The passengers have litigious kinfolk to whom they are all fabulously valuable. Safe arrival at Orley is in everyone's best interest. Ergo, and this isn't in any of the airline lit, but, still, ergo, the crew must stay awake all -- night -- long. Now picture it in a bit more detail: the baboon and the moppet, the latter with a sweet little note pinned to her like the tag on a present. Entrusted, by parents who were already on the far side of the pond, to the friendly airline staff.

I guess I can guess what these wings aren't, Anne said to her younger friend as they lay on the floor of Marcy's bedroom studying the glowing gold pin. Well, it's like this, Marcy responded: angels are like kind of retro. Low tech. They run out of air at twenty nine thousand feet. Heck, they're useless above sixteen thousand feet unless they're specially conditioned. You know there are over a hundred fifty corpses on Everest. Ever ask yourself why. No, Anne replied, going along with her Num-Num little bud. Well, don't. It isn't important. What is important is that a turbine compresses air when it spins. Even at 33,023 feet the air burns in the engines and the plane goes. That's four thousand feet higher than Gabriel could fly on his best day. Anne said, I think I understand: these are not angels' wings. You just said a mouthful. Is this going to be a long story. Well, Baboon's okay for his age. Oh, you mean is me telling it to you going to be long. The look of disingenuousness was well hidden by the seventy-pound virago; indeed it is entirely possible the word would have weighed the little chic down.

Anne, ever alert to the clinical side of things, commented to me at this point that my book should have a warning advising sick folk and those who've undergone surgery not to read it. I'm afraid my wife as well as having just that slight tendency toward edginess when it comes to me, is also fairly faulted at not always seeing the wider picture. Now Barry Corbin, in his overall tour de force as Maurice Minnifield, was a man with good wide vision. Hell, he'd say, being aloud to cuss, look at the big picture here, Anne; you're a nurse for god's sake. A professional. It's part of your code to practice your craft. On top of that, Anne, who'd you think you're gonna teach. I mean, for god's sake, to teach you need students and there's no point in funding a lot of goddamn schools and training a lot of bright young gals -- and one guy in each decade -- if there ain't gonna be no patients. Understand? It's business 101. Your guy's gotta book that's gonna split folk open, why, hell, they don't have to read it. Nobody does. Cicely may be an outpost but it's free. No one's gonna hold a gun to the next moron's Texas tomato and threaten to blow the goddamn thing off his shoulders if he doesn't read some book that might bust his guts. Child, if you put a warning on it, then what's gonna happen. Thought about that. Don't get fat. Fatter we get every single minute of every singe day. You know, when I was diddling with Deke, Gus and those fellows we broke the electronics down so we could measure all that stuff in micrograms per minute. That's another story. Back to the point, and the point is the more you warn people the more they want to do it. Kids. They warn those morons about smoking, and they're lighting up faster than they're bulking up. Plumping up. So you go putting a label on this thing, missy, you go telling folk read this book and it very well may damn near kill you… you're legally safe but morally wrong… wait, I've changed my mind. Look, what I was gonna say is that the label will get into the hands of the wrong damn people. Now, from a legalistic point of view, you do have a case. Even a microscopic warning -- hell, look what they've gone and done with medicine, for god's sake. Now I know I've got a reputation here in Cicely, two, three subjects at once. Takes a bit of time; well, they didn't strap me on top of that Saturn Five cause I was dumber than the next guy in line and I stood in a lot of lines, young lady. So hear me out, and I'll get back to you before you know it. See, what the doc's have in the wings is this new laser. It's the four-point o version dot fu… you know, perfect. What the hummer does is you strap a guy down and peel back his lids. Then you put the sensor over the old eyeball. It can tell from tiny variances in color the relative thickness of the lens. That goes into the computer, like the weather. You know, all those colors they use for putting out the word about a storm. Only now it's the lens of the guy's eye, you follow so far. Good. Step two comes next. It's like the laser stuff that's been around but tweaked. I learned about tweaking in the sixties, and by now when I say tweaked I mean to what they call in the trades an r.c.h. Ask somebody else about that one if you don't know it. Builder, any builder will know what a goddamn r.c.h. is. Well, hell, in the end it's just a hair. What I'm saying here, is they've tweaked the laser down to a fraction of an r.c., well, any hair. What does it matter. It's not part of the story. To cut to the chase, what we end up with is an eye lens that is perfectly shaped. Mathematically, optically perfect. From it we get perfect vision for almost everybody. And we're not talking aspirin here; no little Rhode goddamn Island five- percent improvement. One hundred percent: 20/20, or whatever you start with, to 20/10. And for every swinging dick and purse, unless they've got a condition of the inner eyeball or something like that. You know where Maurice Minnifield's money is not; with anybody that has anything to do with glasses, unless of course the geeks get monitors so small you need the frames to clip em to. Won't be a pair left in twenty years. Hell, the kids'll get the procedure in the birthing room. Now to get back in focus here, excuse the pun, the docs see this in the wings, so they make the labels on the pills smaller and smaller. I mean for older folk there's no real point in having heretofore unknown vision because you can't catch what you can see, so they put little mites of letters on your pill bottles. Now you've got this here book your ex wrote. You say it may kill people. So we think labeling. Caution, these pages… work with me here… where's Shelly… that girl can turn a phrase with the best of em. [Author's note: A&E, at this draft, has recently completed its `Northern Exposure' cycle, returning to the first episode. To their infinite, and I do mean infinite -- credit -- they somehow realized they'd lost it. And they stopped, with one poor episode, the last, to forever give evidence of their brilliance in creation and immediate realization that the thing had gone as far as it could go. It would be an oversimplification to define genius as knowing when to stop, but at the same time, I'm a genius and if nothing else a master at knowing when to -- stop. Parenthetically, I also note the real task of a genius is to find someone smarter than he is. You will join my hunt, I feel sure of that.]

I guess it was because we were in bed and I was doing what I was doing but Anne stuck up for me. Chuck, no. The wonderful Mr. Corbin, yes. She alluded how we had this long flight; how her future ex was in like with Chris and even had a lead for him in his vast screenplay titled An All New Jaws.' I blushed when she pointed out it simply smoked for over thirty thousand words. Shucks. Though, for a straight R it probably isn't all that bad. Mr. Corbin departed saying he had to see a man about a moose. [By the way guys, shouldn't it be KBRR (brrr), not BHR (bear). Chris, glad to hear your recent narration and work for Ford; but please one small inch at a time. Take it from the master, you are much to good to go too fast. And Bob, you play Fleischman so well the stories go on even though you up there on the river… acting an essential role by default. You have one peer, an actor named Chris Jury who plays Eric Catchpole on the Lovejoy' series. He may be a bit better, but your performance is far longer. What I love especially about Northern Exposure' is the very slight overacting and overwriting in the first episode or two, and the almost immediate settling of the writers and cast into a state of near flawlessness episode after episode. By the time Chris builds his catapult, you have it dialed even using his full size flinger just perfectly as backdrop. I salute you all. If you ever want to try a reprise, Dangriga is exactly like Cicely, only bigger. I work endlessly on my stuff and am pretty careful about protecting it, but Southern Exposure' I claim in your name, if it's available.]

For an hour before departure Paul (Baboon) and his sister hung in the VIP. Reps from the carrier were playing a game called Who's the Nicest with the eighty or so fledglings. The sprite and her baboon won because like in a fairy tale it would be harder to be much nicer than they were. The carrier was Erp based; Dutch crewed. They knew from nice. Actually, two dozen boys and girls made the cut. They went into a special room with a trainee flight attendant who looked like a schoolgirl's barely older sister. In Holland, and over most of Europe she explained to the bright faces, we have different feelings about how people get along with each other. In some of our schools, if a little boy, even maybe a boy as young as five, likes to jump and play on his swimming teacher, or any adult, that adult can take the little boy, or little girl, in the shower. Most of you American kids know what I'm talking about at least a little bit; you are all over five. The luckiest of you already know a lot about what I'm talking about. You can giggle if you want to, but if you don't want to don't, and if you do, don't start now.

At the rear of the room a woman of about thirty rose from her chair and left, staggering slightly. Through her mind was running the Staples commercial with the hyper stock boy who says Wow! Yeah! All-Right! when the boss hands him a thick clipboard of price changes as he, the boss, leaves for the day. `That kid was a find!' the boss says as he heads home. The new trainee, Polly, had just given her first desensitization presentation. How would her word fare against the lazy ways and sloppy thinking of much of the world's clergy and the failure and hypocrisy of moralists; more accurately the simple irrelevance of narrow-minded up-tightness in an educated and fun-loving society. Although the subject was both complex and profound, Polly's mentor felt optimistic about her protégé. Somehow she'd make it simple for the youngsters for she seemed an honest sort. A rush of kid noise, quite happy sounding, followed her into her office thirty feet down the hall. Even with her door shut, she thought she could still detect a quaking undertone.

As ever, it is important to know all of a story for full appreciation. Polly would get an outstanding review for her first desensitization presentation, but there was an extenuating circumstance. It weighed eighty pounds. When Polly asked Do you all know English this twirp became what Baboon later called a goose cannon. Like the aforesaid sad creature forced to swell so its liver may serve the plateproud, Baboon's goose-cannon swoll, praying for what was obviously some kind of overseer to leave. And here's where it pays to be good at what you do. Because Polly was nice, and did a good job, the supervisor did leave early. Marcy was able to hold on five seconds after it was just Polly at the front of the room. By being nice, and being capable, the novice instructor had turned what might have been a first-day embarrassment into something else entirely. It would be jumping ahead to follow Polly's relationship with her first class of those who fly above angles. Another time perhaps.

Anyway, her dozen students tried not to giggle as they climbed through the twenties to the low thirties as the heavy queen lifted on her four air rockets. The Nantucket area was bad for climbing queens. That's how Polly had put it. Try not to giggle, she'd warned, `caus if you blow up and come down burnt and misshapen it won't be funny and you won't get to be notangels. It takes a real horn dog to eat a soggy, salty crust.

Ah, my beloved Dutch. Deemed dour in the past, they now seem know how to be a bit jolly once the day's work is well done. Maybe they've got a secret worth sharing. Bet they know about love as good as anyone.

The plane leveled off safely at its initial cruising altitude. Polly's kids stopped giggling. Most of them knew this and that, and a few had even had halting scarring sessions, furtive, scared, not knowing what the hell was going on, tube and taboo ripping through everything while defining nothing. They were all scared now. Deliciously. A male and a female would get gold, another individual, silver and the rest pewter. But it was becoming a notangel, and little to do with jewelry, however pretty, that was making twenty-four hearts pound in anticipation. (After this flight Baboon would say to his little sister, when she jumped on him fresh from the shower and tried to run her little fingers through his hair: don't tangle the notangle.) With a flight crew of four who could have made a wing for any soccer club; yes, in sorts and knit shirts like the Baywatch dudes; plus with an eerily lit batcave type of hideout where one could dim the glow and see the stars… well, if one were to take angeling seriously, the whole set up did not look like a promising place to start. Otherwise the possibilities seemed endless. And there were no bats to frighten children, not at thirty thousand feet.

The fans feeding the air rockets hummed a bit slower. A bink from the overhead said it was cool to move around if you had to. Selected hearts beat faster when they should have been mellowing out. No matter, they all were young and some were gay.

Okay, who's ready for a sex scene? So many hands… tut, tut. Remember, we're in first class, headed to Europe. The invitations arrived on crafted silver trays, they have a name, is it salver? I leave the dictionary and thesaurus to those with more time. I know it not a samovar, which is for tea.

One problem I have in attempting lit for the masses is that folk read at quite different speeds. This makes one guy's ten-second tease the next fellow's thirty seconds of torment. As an ideal, increasing the speed and comprehension of all readers should be one of my master's tricks if I'm halfway to live up to my opinion of myself. Oh, I try not to be obvious and am good, if I say so myself, about raising the level of comprehension as well as boosting raw pace. My goal is to accomplish this by entertaining, educating and informing as titillation is not exactly a noble motivator, though, to flirt with the absurdities of talent, I will say it is the only time you'll find me using the three letter t-word except if our wanderings together should carry us to a dairy farm where they become teats. In the meantime, perhaps we'd all be more comfortable in the, and you'll have to excuse me here, cockpit. It's almost dark save for the orange glow of gauges and a plasma display in front of the pilot and first officer that impart their messages from fields of blue. Their copy is so complete a moron could fly the craft around the world as long as the fuel lasted, and even stop for more. Other than that, they are monotonous. Not so the strapping male, Paul Reynolds, affectionately known as Baboon and his winsome little sister who, if more salacious fingers than mine were at these keys, might be known as Baby Poon'. (On the other hand, more salacious fingers would be unlikely to busy themselves tapping plastic. On the other hand if mine were less salacious I'd have invented Stress Scalp Itch and be copywriting for little tubes of lotion. Go figure. On second thought, since I've run out hands, there is a tube of lotion on the flight deck. No dandruff severe enough for treatment, but you've figured that out already.)

Enter strapping boy and pixie. Exit clever writer; well, not if exactly exit, then would you believe stand a little aside. In other words, step into my office. There is a little list of issues we need to peruse together. Peruse means study carefully, not scan as it is often used., (Problematic means a potential trouble, not surefire trouble. For example, by perusing this paragraph you may put the immediate words in terms of the problematic. It is, more specifically, up in the air as to how much teasing you, dear readers all, can take. If I have done a virtuoso job of setting up kewl characters and involved them in situations with potential, then there is nothing problematic about your attendent attention. Pederasts are a phenomenally patient lot; sometime quite energetic, too. The Mormons booked it all the way to Utah -- hoofed it, would be more accurate -- so they could be alone with their nubile yum-yums; did staggering amounts of work so when they were sixty they could buy the ripest, youngest, freshest, dearest, sweetest and most tantalizing of little wife mates. A whole bed full, if you were a superMormon.)

Another example of problematic is getting this copy ever published. To keep myself from attracting tawdry labels; pornographer, pervert and so on - it is essential I imbue my work with what is known to legislators as artistic merit or its close cousin poetic license. Now I'm proud of being a nice person and I am also proud that I have spent over fifty thousand hours developing and practicing my craft, read a truckload of books and magazines and filled small hard drives with my keyboard. Does this buy one literary merit? I think not. The MENSA brain. No, that's not it. In the end it's quite simple; if I am artist then I must simply prove it by using artistic license. While the proof of my footing will be the reading, I claim, in the meantime, the following as artistic or literary license. Okay, we've got Paul and sweet little Marcy in the softly lit cockpit of the jetliner headed for France. Actually, these scenes should have taken place in the Sixties. I hope that is enough literary license to brand me an artist, but, of course and as always, it is up to the reader to make final judgment. Let's summarize this way; even perusal of my qualifications leaves my stature as an artist a good working definition of problematic. To attenuate your doubt we must return to our stripling lad and his little fox-haired vixen of a sister, for the future holds all and any license, artistic or literary, has to be earned page by labored page.

As Paul and Marcy enter the flight deck and the door is locked behind them, they hear radio traffic. Paul, a reading type of boy, and a boy who has an all-band radio, recognizes the voices on the speaker as those on a company channel, not air traffic control, which has pretty much been left behind in any event. The principle voice didn't say a sexless childhood is a bore; no, it seemed to be telling some kind of a joke.

It seems there was this inventor. Talented, even a genius, but he had a hard time getting his act together on the practical front. Always late, disorganized; adjusting his various devices as he was trying to demonstrate them to potential investors. Even so, he sold his clever contraptions often enough to keep working on his masterpiece. No time machines for our inventor; no flux-gate capacitors or jigawatt power sources. Even retractable wheels in an automotive application were beyond his ken. But what the inventor did know was refrigeration. Okay, he knew it cold. Ha, ha, ha. Miniature refrigeration units; very powerful, very compact. Drop one suitcase size unit in an average swimming pool and the pool would be a block of solid ice by morning. Day and night for years he'd work on his prototype and he called it the Megafreeze One Thousand. Now Alvin, for that was the inventor's name -- yes, Alvin Tinker if it pleases you (shut up, I could have used Peter Tinker, Dick Tinker or even Willie Tinker to patronize my Brit fans) - was reaching the home stretch. The One Thousand was approaching the status of one of papa Loman's feasible ideas. It clicked solidly and whirred lustily when it was turned on. It's lights blinked in the right sequence most of the time. To make a long story short, it was ready for advancement to the next in a long series of steps toward the day it would be ready for sale to commercial customers (a retail consumer model was deemed impractical; the Megafreeze was simply too powerful and fast acting to ever await Harriet Housewife on the shelves of Sears.)

Through connections, and they were honestly earned, Alvin obtained an appointment with a potential investor. What happened happened because he was late; also, because he'd looped the ear piece of his reading glasses over the side of one of the dozen cup holders in his van and simply did not remember which one. Thus we have Alvin late for the meeting with his sponsor and not wearing his reading glasses. Though no one was rude to Alvin, the sponsor had a busy day ahead and was interested in getting down to business. Flustered and myopic Alvin opened the Megafreeze One Thousand. He flipped up the top of the suitcase size unit and spent two minutes configuring it for demonstration. Crossing his fingers he paused for a moment and watched the Florida coast fall below as the investor's Lear jet climbed out of Miami. Then he took a deep breath and turned on the Megafreeze One Thousand.

The baboon was no match for his sister but he giggled a fair share under the right circumstances. This is going to be a cool ride he thought, giggling again. What's so funny the elf asked, leaving your humble servant (right!) on the horns of a dilemma. I guess it goes something like this. If you share a secret it's a bond; therefore, an unexplained joke is several times funnier, word for word, than one that's overly accessible. Added to this is the reality that if someone doesn't get a joke it probably won't be funny when delineated. Part of the reason to educate one's self. Funny stuff is funnier. And you can leave to mortals who take their minds and intellectual development less seriously the frigid wastes of ignorance with the knowledge while the underclasses probably never experience the grinding mirth of the dues payers they, by the same token, are less subject to the byproduct of fun gone wrong, known to most of us as pain. Hey, don't get in a stew. Art is mercurial, even imperfect. That's why I stick to love and sex. It's imperfect too, but not always. Sex and trying to come off as playful and winsome. That's a lot to ask of twenty-six plastic keys, though I have to admit to some help on the way.

For example, an entire episode of Northern Exposure' is devoted to the outlaw disc jockey -- the one that gets to play ---- in An All New Jaws' -- that was awhile ago, but you remember. Well, the entire hour is pretty much devoted to Chris sitting his orals -- Comparative Literature or something like that. Fans will remember `Casey at the Bat' as the catalyst. I hate to give away the ending but I have to, after all it's just television. Yes, Chris gets his Masters while his friends from Cicely clap and whistle. Then the focus shifts and sound fades as in the background the next scholar in line receives his degree: a Master's in Musical Percussion. That is an example of a joke not stretched even a micron. More saliently, a sublime touch of wit that doesn't have to be drummed in. Here's another touch that leaves the reader gasping for air. There's a famous short story about a restaurant that serves food out of this world. No salt shakers. What tastes a soupcon bland at first bite almost immediately melts in the mouth in a heavenly way. Now we cut to The Brick, the hangout in Cicely. A story of cannibalism has come through the door. It is, after all, Alaska. Now back to the restaurant that serves the utopian dishes, including a specialiality known as the Main Course. The story of the restaurant focuses on a man that plate by plate is drawn to this heavenly establishment's ultimate presentation. The discussion at The Brick stays focused on cannibalism. The last scene in the short story is the gourmand been led to inspect the kitchen, the chef's hand resting lightly on his shoulder. At a point in the conversation at The Brick the innkeeper's hand touches one of his patron's shoulder. Perfect, fabulous writing.

In any event the atmosphere in the cockpit is pretty obvious, I guess. After all, the ice has been broken. Now let's melt it.

Chapter 3

Did you see the original Airplane?' Stein, the twenty five-year-old captain asks Paul. Baboon, that's our very favorite, pipes in Marcy. Yeah, bout a hundred time, answers the fourteen year old. And we take it you like it, interjects Rob, the first officer. Definitely, says Paul. What's your favorite scene, quizzes Stein. I know the best one, says Marcy. Yes, miss, and which one would that be. Good a place as any to giggle, and Marcy's just at that age. Have you ever seen a grown man naked, she eventually quotes. Paul adds, Jimmy, have you ever been in a Turkish prison; again, quoting from the screenplay. Rad, they both say together. Are you sure, one of the pilots queries. Yeah, says Paul; what you think, I like the inflatable pilot. I'm not that kind of guy. Besides, an innocent voice pipes in, he pops in the end. Goes all flat. I mean it's funny, but Jimmy is funnier because something might happen to him; that's more interesting than what does happen to the rubber pilot. This, again, from the little red head who looks for all the world like a leggier version of the Disney cruise director [with the drop-dead mom] in the commercial. I mean, she adds, in one case it's predictable and in the other case who knows what might happen, you know, like if Jimmy was up there all by himself with Captain Over, you know, like on a flight to Paris that took all night long. Who knows what might have happened to that little boy, the girl says in a way that might be called one percent dramatic. He was up there with Wilt Chamberlain, Paul adds without saying any more for the moment.

Lo, the poor editor, as was once said, Lo, the poor Indian. Un-agented, unsolicited, as far as she [and I will always refer to editors as `she'] knows cute. She has, for the first time, ever, to read all this glib wit. Then to decide if there stands an artist over the ear.

So many things he could be. All the sizzle in the world, yet she knows that not everyone grew up in a vacuum. Knows that it is likely there can be, out there, somewhere, a mustang artist; as they say in the horse trade, out of Texas, by truck. Then this self-same editor has to find if it's true. This dude really out of Texas by truck, or is he a fraud? Brilliant research won't help. It turns out he's not out of Texas by truck, and yet he is. For example, he taunts his reader in a way that is so remedial it is beneath the sophomoric. He says something as hidebound and cliché as Sex, sex, sex: now that I've got your undivided attention…

In so saying, the writer perpetrates a vicious but not exactly Texan joke on the reader. However he tries to disguise it, making perhaps fair use of his hundred thousand hours of practice, he cannot disguise it. No one can say he needs a hundred thousand more for he has used sex; rank, raw and unvarnished as bait and switch He informed you it was subterfuge even though he disguised it as kewly as Mr. Barnum did his Two hundred pound man eating chicken. He has in fact set you up with a fourteen year old boy, his adoring seven year old sister, and Stein and Rob. The latter actually have licenses to be where they are. Baboon and his absolute inamorata for life are about to earn… well, that would be telling. After all they are notangels. Whatever. It all amounts to a giant con. You've been as had as had can be; as had as any of Smollett's characters. To rub it in, I've lured you to my den with sex and now will pinch and poison you. How? Oh, well, let me count the ways.

Sex off the table, unless this is a much-read copy and you can flip, surreptitiously but accurately to the next juicy part, we go off our thin ice to the solid riverbank. At this point we are not claiming artistic merit: that has already been decided. We are going to talk politics. Sorry, young lovers… if you read, you will find, but even Smollett knew that and he wrote of life just over two hundred years ago. Me, well, I've read my fair share of Mr.S; like Machiavelli, a chapter or two will do; nonetheless there is a place albeit at the bottom of the heap, for the whole -- yada -- truth. Thus politics, at which I'm smart, and temporary lapses in sex, at which I'm a moron.

Politic: kids: schools. Classes from ten in the morning till noon. Bless me, I think that's a constituency right there. Let me add another: since I live amongst empire builders I may as well outline my not very humble offering. Schools, ten till noon. We just covered that, so let's go on to the military. Again, ten `till noon. In both cases, two hours a day of energized focus will very nicely do the trick. And if you think for a moment that I am tricking you by gaining two enormous constituencies by pandering to the kids and our soldiers you put yourself in the black hole of feudalism. (Feudalists tried to navigate by looking over the stern: if the wake was straight, they were happy.) Oops, Industrial Revolution. Now what? Do not ask, for the only answer is me and I come with a hard row to hoe. Probably better for you to continue as you are to your natural end, then the Chinese can come and finally fatten off our leavings. Gets my vote, because I am a patriot for human happiness, only. Optimizing every square foot of the earth's surface for the longest possible stretch of maximum happiness is the only thing I am interested in. An example of the rigors of my program is this: because urban freeways block surface streets they must be removed because the rapidly approaching congealation of our express routs will kill a city dead due to the fact the expressways, again, block all or most of the surface streets. A parallel solution is to vastly increase the livability of smaller cities and towns and especially rural areas. For example, the cities need to subsidize dirt-cheap telephony, bandwidth and air travel for the thousands of Dubuques or the Dubuquers will move to Chicago. To this extent: the Douglas DC-6 should be brought back, and vast fleets of them should serve smaller cities.

Smokers. Look, morons, I've got vast constituencies by virtue of programming two hours of school and two hours of status quo military training per day. Add forty million smokers and, well, I think we need be prepared to weigh the lady.

You thing I'm funny? Gentle Jesus, count the numbers on your own fingers. Returning kids to their childhood's -- at whatever cost. Returning the military to a select career. Ditto with the kids. That is, ditto to the military from the kids. Add the five thousand years of tobacco use; its overwhelming role in life as we know it -- reason on all alternatives -- and come to your own conclusion. How funny is funny, but, then again, how many is many?

I do not want to pull any punches. I've lured you with sex and am now industriously setting about handing you your collective heads. Now, why am I pissed? Is it your obesity, your gambling, your peasant-level ripping greed, your hot tubs, your SUVs, your platinum cards or your lack of bookshelves? All of the above? Maybe it's Columbine where such cowards betake themselves of school that they let two geeks wander about for hours without making the least attempt at an assault. Book, printers, chairs, tables -- weapons galore both offensive and defensive, and they cowered and cried and dialed nine one one. Their fitting memorial was piles of trashy plasti-cone flowers; you know, the ones that look nasty as soon as you take them out of the shop. Certainly they were fitting for dead Di, but a hundred jocks who never lifted a finger? I guess so. Seems odd, though, doesn't it?

When you come to get me I don't want any lack of motivation in my opponents so I will add this taunt: [Author has added this note: Why taunt morons. Then offers his answer: Because daddy never even offered a T-Bird, I have to look elsewhere for my fun, fun, fun. Ed.] Lure em with sizzle I say, then clop em up side the head. Oh, well, we all have our fantasies. Personally, though, I've got a knobby fourteen-year-old, a sleek seven-year-old, and two Nordic kick-ass soccer dudes in a cockpit on the slow bounce to Paris. (As the jet rockets burn the kerosene the plane does a slow upward bounce across the Atlantic. Nuff said.) A truly vast sexual tableau. Well, not in square feet… yes, you're not interested. As a vast composer, as distinguished from artist, at this keyboard I could take advantage of raw talent and reduce the just mentioned tableau not to square feet but to square inches. As remarkable as it may seem, I've already told this joke. (Sod, if you don't remember you must begin again.)

[The writer here breaks off, bemoaning the fact he has no editor, sponsor, agent, mentor, secretary, or girlfriend. On the bright side, he has a nest of trusts and stuff. See how quickly an artist changes his stripes? Where is the girlfriend for such a guy?

In determining artistic merit reviewers must answer simple questions. Are characters well delineated? Do the characters find themselves in interesting situations? Does the story seem to be going somewhere? Are there midpoints and nonlinearality? Is the conventional used as ballast but not over used? Does the writer seem like a nice person? If he has talent, does he display it with modesty and humility? Does he try to use personality in his work? Is there comic relief? Does the work have something to say? Finally, and most importantly, are we able to maintain an interest in what might happen next?]

THIS CONCLUDES A SAMPLE OF FICTION TITLED `ANNE' AND SUBMITTED IN SUPPORT OF MY APPLICATION FOR HARVARD DEGREES. TOM EMERSON

Acknowledgements.

Mr. Emerson once commented that Mr. Thoreau's technique is easily seen. I worry about that in myself. Transparency, accessibility, predictability; perceived manipulation, exploitation; that kind of thing. If I tell the truth about my inspiration for this application to Harvard… if I say I owe it all to Bill Gates because MS-Word 8.0 crashed over one hundred times during the structuring of this document, it may be seen as ironic, given my proclivities for the cheap laugh. [The one at your expense, ha, ha.] It is not.

Those crashes were like the drop of a hammer in a forge. Constantly recasting sentences, paragraphs and even pages is the best training in the world for a writer. Each re-write left out words. There's just something about it as sort of the ultimate fine tuning. Patience, plugging, endurance. Massive persistence. It teaches everything, this 8.0. Re-booting a hundred times for forty-one pages. I guess one could say it teaches everything but a sense of humor.

If you've read your three thousand -- mainstream - books and spent your hundred thousand hours thinking, traveling, living and typing, use of this product might shot peen your work. Burnish it. Since I had no obvious talent until I was in my forties, don't worry about that little item. It may take awhile to find your voice, but when you do it is worth it. Another piece of vital advice to you wanna-bees: lie down. Couch, bed, whatever. When I wrote the pirates, sitting in a reasonably comfortable chair, it was rare to put in six hours at the keyboard. Now that I'm forced to write in bed, it's rare that I log less than sixteen. If I give credit to Mr. Gates and his fully human fully alive 8,0 and more credit to my phlebitis it seems I may run out of any for myself. Bull's-eye. Inherited money, cable, a word processor that's still engaging after thousands of hours at the monitor, all those crashes, being semi bed-ridden, neighbors for the finest company, the Wamasa next door and that beautiful raggae. It all counts enormously. Also, three websites: Boylinks [RIP], ASSGM and ASSTR. I've read approximately one thousand of their selections. If this gives me any right to comment, I would say this: The porn would sicken the heart of a saint, but of all the stories at least half are of powerful enduring relationships -- to such an extent that I would drop to pity mode if I knew of anyone who was too uptight to at least try a dozen. (Stories, not relationships, which should be quite limited in number.)

As far as subject matter goes, assuming you might want to try your hand at the writing gig one day, not to worry. You are destined to live, as the Chinese say, in interesting times. I might add that how long you are able to write about all that's happening, and how many are left in some condition to read your work, probably depends on whom you follow. Of course, if everyone wants to lead that might be a plan. Or maybe you'll opt for a thing called a Sheck. It's an apparatus that can litigate several days on how melted a certain container of ice cream was or then again was not. It became an expert on DNA. Someone stuck a camera in the face of the apparatus and it questioned, for many hours, its own lifetime of study based on certain blood being in a certain plastic bag for as much as two hours.

See, that's what 8.0 can't teach though it crash on every word. Or maybe it's not funny, and so doesn't, in the end, prove anything. Sheck: the ultimate it. The It Jew. A-wunnerful, a-wunnerful. (And how great he got boxed with the slut that killed the kid so she could sound her plumy brit-tones for the cock of the nose singers in `Rent.' Think he'd rather have her or me as a houseguest? For sure, I'm sexier, but when I light my stove I bang on it before I ignite the gas so the tropic bugs won't get singed. Not much lawyering in that.)

My final acknowledgement is to my siblings. Their generosity in letting me serve eighteen years as family lightning rod was part of the forging process.

THIS CONCLUDES MY SUBMISSION

All rights reserved except as noted in the text. Specific permission given to the chief of security at Harvard University to permit review by any law enforcement agencies he might think appropriate. Protect my privacy, keep this document at Harvard, and go get Mr. Gee.

THANK YOU

Thomas Cochran Emerson, 1996 Rivas Estate, Dangriga, Belize, Thomas@btl.net, 1 501 5 23793, January 1, 2000

My New Year's story. My friend Roman watched with me as midnight approached London. We talked about Greenwich Mean Time. Then I remembered he's going into the Belize Defense Force. In the military GMT is called Zulu, I explained. Zulu, Roman said. He is a Zulu.

• 30 -

That's the letter. I'll post it and see what happens. Brings the page count to over 300, so I guess we're in official novel territory. As for me, I'm going to mosey up on Cripple Creek and see what's happening with the Ramba Theater and the characters in "Ropeyarn."

I know I've gone off and left you without telling you what's in Brad's backpack. His two secrets. A whole list of other themes and subplots. Well, much of the outline is here in Chapt. 19, so you aren't exactly being cheated, but I know what you mean. Let me leave you with this on the lips, you don't know what erotic is, though, if you've read all 312 pages with due diligence you may be getting an idea.

Posted by Thomas@btl.net

xxx