Flash Fiction Intro, by Robert Fuller

My personal take on Flash Fiction is that it's short fiction written in a short amount of time. It's a kind of time trial where you start with an idea, a premise, or even a title, and you keep going, see where it takes you....

So, for the moment perhaps it’s a short story (although it could also be a prose poem, or even a single poem or a collection of poems of modest size) of about 600 to 1,000 words, written in a single day, possibly even in an hour or two (as in the case of "The Inspector").

The inspiration for writing can come from many different directions and sources, but for the purposes at hand, let's say it's something like one of the following: an idea (or premise); a title; or the simple act of starting to write to see where it leads. (It's been exactly eleven years since I wrote "Close Call," so the initial impulse may already be a bit fuzzy, but it seems to me that it was mostly the act of starting to write, loosely coupled with some kind of premise about what the story would be about.)

My idea for this new (as of 2/9/2024) section of The Fuller Zone is to welcome and encourage active participation in the Flash Fiction arena. Initially, anyone who is a Guest Contributor to this site is encouraged to participate in this section of the website. (Later, we may include the ability for anyone, Guest Contributor or not, to post messages via email).

As a starting point, because you have to start somewhere, the "rules" will be as follows: (1) the initial impetus, the "high point," so to speak, will be a title; (2) the target genre will be a short story of between 600 and 1,000 words; (3) the story must be written within 24 hours (preferably within a single calendar day, roughly speaking); and (4) subsequent editing will be accepted, provided it is fairly limited in scope and occurs within a day or two of the initial act of writing.

All entries in this section will include the title, author and body of the text. Initially, there will be no additional details about what prompted the Flash Fiction, but each entry will include a calendar date at the end indicating when it was written.

Like everything else in The Fuller Zone, this section will undoubtedly evolve over time: stay tuned!

Close Call, by Robert Fuller

Hey, next time before you stare too long in the mirror, remember what I’ve always told you. I can see you’ve already forgotten. We talked about whispering. It was while you walked backward through your memories, on some deserted beach, in some forgotten place, either alone or with some imagined companion conjured up out of your own gaze. I thought it was because you were utterly entranced with your own likeness. So actually, it may have been you walking with yourself, muttering occasional expletives that the other you happened to overhear, at least until the pristine beach gave way to an impassable wall of rocks.

As you may recall, once the rocks materialized, you remembered the whispering, even though it was too late. They carried you away to a desolate place, because one of your selves was muttering excessively to your other self. If you’d been whispering, you wouldn’t now be in such a place of desolation, since they would have overlooked you. I can see you now, I can visualize the small room barren of all humanity, bereft of all except a bed and a mirror.

It is the mirror that now occupies you endlessly.

I don’t remember how you managed to get your keepers to allow you to receive outside communications, but I know it’s only been a few months, even though you were admitted to your small room many years ago.

Even so, once the channels of communication were open, you didn’t immediately respond to those who tried to contact you. I think you were probably a bit apprehensive, and you certainly didn’t trust your keepers to any great extent.

I don’t think you’ve ever contacted me directly, and, in fact, I don’t have any hard evidence that you’ve actually received my communications. I can only see—or imagine—you continually, ceaselessly polishing the glass in front of you, almost as if you wanted to polish it away into nothing. And whenever you aren’t polishing the glass, I can visualize you alternately admiring and then glaring at your own likeness, in a state of perpetual confusion about it, sometimes caressing it, and at other times sending it nothing but vitriol.

You have insinuated that your keepers hardly ever concern themselves with you, and, in fact, they are only there to ensure that you are well enough nourished. They are keeping you alive, bodily, nothing else.

I would have thought that your keepers would have presented themselves for your rehabilitation, at least on occasion, but, on the contrary, they’ve willingly left you and your other you—the one that you can now admire or curse so thoughtlessly in the mirror—to do as you please, as if the reason for your imprisonment were, after all that you’ve gone through, of no account.

But the mirror: that is in fact your beginning and your end, and this is in truth why you want to grind it away into oblivion—it is because you will yourself cease to be, that is, finally, irrevocably, you will send yourself, and your now disappeared other self, mysteriously to be conjoined forever, horizontally, to your small room’s own bed of endless night.

These newfangled phones! I’ve never seen this model before. It seems to be some sort of closed circuit. Almost as if one were talking to oneself...

February 9, 2013

The Inspector, by Robert Fuller

The Inspector was busy. The phone rang incessantly. Finally he picked up.

“Gaudeau, who is it?”

An awkward silence ensued. Then a timid voice. “I have important information.”

“What is its nature? And who are you?”

“I can’t divulge that. But it’s very important. It’s about your case.”

“Nobody knows about it. It’s strictly top secret.” Then a short pause. “What kind of information?”

“I’m familiar with it. I saw your research.”

“What have you heard?”

“You’re researching a hoax. The greatest hoax ever.”

Inspector Gaudeau was shocked. But he kept quiet. “Yes, yes, do tell.”

“I need my anonymity. Don’t trace this call.”

The Inspector whispered fiercely. “You have my word.”

“First tell me something. Why expose this hoax? What’s your angle exactly?”

“You tell me yours. Why do you care? Why help me out? Can’t you expose it? You know so much...”

“I’m trying to help. You’re being very difficult.”

“Just give me something. Even the tiniest hint. A good faith gesture. Then I’ll gladly comply.”

“Okay, here it is. Just a wee morsel. I found the evidence. Now what’s your theory? And why get involved?”

“What sort of evidence?”

The man became furious. He lost his temper. “Why be so difficult!? Give what I ask. Or I’ll hang up.”

Inspector Gaudeau softened up. He needed a break. This might be it. “I mentioned good faith. Humanity has been duped. Fed heaps of lies. So here’s my theory. It was centuries ago. There was a conspiracy. Conspiracy to commit fraud. They made things up.”

“Yes, yes, that’s good. And I have proof. I know the location. Please do go on.”

“They wanted to deceive. To lead humanity astray. That’s why the book. Some stuff was true. Based on historical facts. Facts that were verifiable. That was the hook. That’s what got people. They were drawn in. Like moths to lightbulbs. Like lemmings to cliffs. Like children to pipers. They couldn’t help themselves.” A brief heavy pause. “So where’s the location? The location of what?”

“You’re still holding out. Why you in particular? Were you personally hurt? Do you have standing? I mean legal standing. That judges could accept.”

He held his cool. But Gaudeau was furious. “Is this a court!?” In a heavy whisper. Then he went on. “Are you my judge? My jury, my executioner? What’s this all about!?”

“You’re losing your cool. Won’t get you anywhere. Just answer the question.”

He thought about it. What was his angle? Had he been hurt? What was his standing?

“You’re taking your time. We haven’t any time. This matter is urgent. It needs airing out. Before it’s too late. Get on with it...”

Gaudeau tried something new. Something like reverse psychology. He made something up. Or thought he did. “There was a cave. Thoroughly filled with bats. It was their hideout. The entrance was hidden. Ancient texts document this. Haven’t found it yet. Maybe a treasure map. ‘X’ marks the spot. All cloak and dagger. People sworn to secrecy. That’s what was odd. They knew something profound. Why the secret society? Why keep it hidden?”

The phone remained quiet. For quite some time. A faint humming sound. Somewhat like a buzzing. They were being tapped!? No one could tell. Finally the man spoke. “You are quite right. It was a cave. The bats were ubiquitous. That was the problem. It wasn’t about secrecy. They weren’t hiding anything. They all got infected. They covered the entrance. The world was endangered. They all sacrificed themselves.”

“This doesn’t make sense. How’d you find out?” And then something clicked. He was a bat. And he had escaped. With all the evidence. That’s how he knew. Where the cave was. Gaudeau knew his name. Began with a ‘D’. And ‘D’ wasn’t infected. He was the infection.

‘D’ knew all this. Then the drilling started. Right through the phone. Just two tiny holes. The phone became bloody.

September 12, 2023

The Scrim, by Robert Fuller

He sensed an occlusion. On his stage of life. And it would never go away. He had his eyes checked by specialists.

One. Another. Then more. And even more. Then there were too many. So many specialists that he couldn’t keep track. They all told him much the same thing, that his sight was failing.

Yet he was onstage. Acting in his own play. And he vowed he’d be seen. No one would stop him from acting.

Then... He saw. Saw the truth. And truth set him free. And free to see where he really was. Some dark force was upstaging him, and that’s why no one saw him.

Someone took him out. It was near the backstage. He’d no idea who’d done it. After the play was over, it fell.

Gauze cloth. It hid him. He was a shadowy figure. More or less obscured by that gauze cloth. There were elements about all of this that he simply could not understand. Why was he the backdrop to all of the actual drama that was supposed to be unfolding here on this stage?

Something, though, wasn’t clear. There was something else happening. He’d been occluded for another reason. Someone was pulling strings behind the scenes.

What was happening? What was happening and why? He soon went into reveries that told him. Told him that there was nothing that he could even begin to know. This life on this stage was not at all what it had always appeared to him to be, not in any way. There were always many unseen forces operating at every level of the game and they were all actively conspiring to keep him from acting out his play which they considered to be beneath him.

But what was his role? Was it that he was only an extra? Or was he someone of such great importance that he was considered irreplaceable? There was a general murmuring well behind the scenes and for such a long duration that he nearly fell asleep, twice.

He consulted his counsel. No good advice was forthcoming. He hid behind the cloth gauze. And then someone took him out again.

The court reconvened. The Judge was quite livid. Said he’d never seen anything quite like it. The indicted one was also the very one who had perpetrated the crime.

He testified for himself. Against the advice of counsel. Counsel questioned him about gauze cloth. About what role that may have played.

Silence fell. The accused shrugged. What was there to say? He could not have done this to himself.

Yet there was doubt. The jury was not convinced. They were not blinded by this. Someone had been acting behind the scenes.

Someone. Yet who? Or perhaps what? What could it have been?

Someone took curtain calls. And way after the fact. The play was already long over. Yet someone still wanted to be noticed.

Who? Why? What for? For what purpose?

He sensed an occlusion. Now it was happening again. And it would never go away. He began to scream loudly and uncontrollably.

February 13, 2024 [17:43-18:53]

The Extra, by Robert Fuller

Mortimer Dalton—everyone called him Mort—had free run of the set, including the entire backstage area, not to mention the endless acres of canyons, gullies, valleys, views of rock formations, and so forth; the vistas stretched further than his imagination could comprehend.

Mort was generally unoccupied with anything but his adventures roaming around any of the areas of the set, backstage, and the vast adjoining wilderness area that were not currently in use by the production; his schedule, for when his presence on set was required, was given to him in advance, and it was rare that there was any deviation from the schedule as announced. And in such cases when he was required unexpectedly, he could easily be reached via his mobile device, and the people in charge always gave him ample advance notice that he was to report for duty.

But for most of his time on the job—and they were really generous in the fees he earned for being continuously oncall, professional that he was; they knew he could be trusted to do the job, and he always pulled through for them—he wandered through cemeteries filled with shallow graves, facades of tiny Western towns with their saloons, hotels, livery stables, general stores, diners, and so forth, towns that Mort just knew would soon join the ranks of the countless ghost towns peppered through this region, nevermind that the facade towns were imaginary at best.

Now, although the pay, considering what he actually did, which was mere minutes out of any given calendar day, was relatively generous, he certainly wasn’t riding the gravy train, not by any stretch of the imagination. He tended to daydream that it was a stepping stone toward more lucrative work, perhaps more in the spotlight than was presently the case, or possibly even more in the background, so to speak, in a position which he particularly coveted: behind the camera.

He thought to himself, “If I could only demonstrate to the rest of the crew what I am capable of, if they would simply let me show them how creative I am at framing the shot just so, there wouldn’t be any question that they would see me for who I really am.”

Meanwhile, though, his job was to be for the most part unnoticed, a mere ghost of a figure lurking somewhere in the background while the real action was happening right in front of the camera. And he understood that someone had to do his line of work; and that was a large part of why he took such pride in his professionalism.

Yet, the urges that coursed through his heart and mind would not go away, much as he did his best to stifle them, even at the cost of his sanity—or to keep it.

So, during some of the more wintry scenes and times of year, he made a point of noticing all the dark ravens littering the snow-covered fields, with their pointed beaks continually scolding him, as if he were their adversary or sworn enemy; they simply didn’t seem to comprehend his deep love and admiration for every aspect of their being, down to the last raspy, most piercing “Caw!” they could dream up for him in their superior avian intelligence. And what they didn’t realize about him is that he completely understood them, possibly even better than they themselves did.

He felt, after enough of these encounters, that he was nothing much other than an extra in their mysterious cinema, and so he tried his utmost to disappear into the landscape, so as not to upstage them.

Just then there was an urgent call from the head of the film crew. Mort was needed right away, and he had to don one of his many costumes, posthaste, so he really had to hightail it to make it back in time. The ravens all started up with a fierce cacophony the likes of which Mort had never known. For a time, it seemed to him that they were conspiring to tail him, maybe even with malicious or mischievous intent, notwithstanding his deep admiration and love for them that they didn’t seem to be at all aware of. But they relented, and he soon made it back to the set, albeit all but breathless.

Fortunately his costume setup was straightforward and quick; the costumers were seasoned hands at quick changes, and Mort always kept a good amount of makeup on his face just in case of contingencies such as this.

Now, what was unusual about this particular costume—and in all his days working with this crew, he’d never experienced anything like it—was that he was to be in full clown regalia! How was he possibly going to avoid drawing attention to himself under these circumstances?

But the crew set him up in one of the chairs at a table far in the back of the saloon, near where the piano player was banging out some ragtime on the grossly out of tune instrument that had certainly seen far better days.

So Mort thought to himself, “This is a travesty! A trick! A trap! It’s utterly unfair!”

And this was when Mort decided to take center stage, unscripted.

This was his moment. And he strode right up to the chief gunslinger, right past him, in his moment of glory, which only came to a head once he had deputized his entire army of raucous ravens, who only now knew the depth of his love for them. And they delivered.

February 14, 2024 [11:55-12:57]

The Chalice, by Robert Fuller

Esther was in the garden, her own private oasis in the back, admiring the calla lilies. She meditated on the soft, supple, velvety, pure white goblets of inflorescence with their yellow spadices peeking out so sensually from deep within their innermost secret founts of eucharist, like wells offered up in grace, and how naked they looked, and how they were also called arum, which meant both nude and shrewd.

Her private garden was as she liked it, secluded, as she by nature tended to keep mostly to herself, apart from occasional celebratory moments that were more intense, when she let herself go with abandon, letting her star of Rémi shine fully under the cypress, its dark road blessed by her garden of olives.

And she reflected that her arum lily was all too real, unlike a wine receptacle that she had once seen in a Western, which on the surface looked like a golden vessel studded with many a precious stone, yet which turned out to be all fake, an illusion symbolic only in its value to certain persons of the faith.

The vessel was gilded in such a way as to look real; the seemingly precious stones were mostly glass, colored and shaped and adorned so as to resemble something more dear than themselves. But she remembered the blessing attached to this grail, this stemware that was pretending to be what it was not; it was a Sicilian blessing bestowed by San Guiseppe, protector of the blessed vines that bore the fruit that would become the blood of the sacrament.

Marcello sang Italian opera, accompanying himself on the accordion, and was as carefree as they come. His true treasure, from the old country, consisted of cuttings from the vines of the hills, which he wished to transplant in the soils of the New World, so that he and his could continue with the life they had otherwise left behind.

But these vine cuttings required blessings of saints, within a sanctuary empowered by saints for that purpose. And the chimera of chalice that he carried with him was the direct link to the old country; its symbolic value, thus, consisted almost entirely of what that link represented.

However, Esther in her reverie was far more focused on the real event that was right here in her own private garden, and she felt the power, the charm, and the blessing of arum.

After all, in their pure white crystal velveteen shimmer, these flowers could not betray, could not cause harm, could not be other than what they were.

And she remembered her time in that small coastal town far north finding calla lilies perched on rugged cliffs and how they harbored slowly spiraling mollusks that hid within the spathes of the plant right next to the true gold of the spadices.

Yet these univalves, she thought, were actually feeding on the innermost secrets of these florets; they took them as sustenance, so they were not so much as hiding as they were suckling spathe and spadix, transmutating flower into mollusk.

So it was a kind of flora fauna alchemy, a slow spiral sacramental dance sustaining one at the portal of the other, shapes shifting in ways that made you wonder what this mysterious life was really about. And that was what was most dear to her.

February 15, 2024 [11:59-13:38]

The Gift, by Robert Fuller

It was curious to him. He had received the brooch decades ago from one of his favorite uncles, yet until now, he had never been aware of its significance.

There were emblazoned upon it what could only be described as two leprechauns, the one on the left sporting a handheld eyeglass such as only the great Holmes could manage.

The rather oversized loupe, as it were, was perched over the right eye, as Colonel Klink himself wore it with such panache. And the chapeau! It was so obviously Sherlockian!

The smaller dwarf, directly to the left of the forensic, logical reasoning expert himself, why, that may have been Watson, but in either case, he looked the impish part fully.

It was elementary, surely we can agree, that the more diminutive leprechaun was not only loyal to a fault, but looked as if capriciously chasing windmills toward rainbow gold.

So, what his cherished uncle had gifted him was none other than a heartpin that urged him to chase rainbows and treasures by finding and decoding all the necessary clues!

And it had taken him all these decades to even really notice what this escutcheon was so clearly telling him! To notice all the details, however hidden, and piece them together.

And with his loyal partner in crime right at his side! With such an elite team, he finally realized, virtually anything might be possible. So it was he strode off into the twilight.

Yet there was no one tagging along beside him. What could that imp be up to now!? He rang up the local constable to see if the drunken wretch might have ended up in the clink.

The constable assured him in no uncertain terms that neither he himself nor any of his colleagues had even laid an eye upon anyone of that description, much less jailed him.

So he continued on with his now imaginary friend, trudging carelessly toward the moon, which was just now coming into its fullest splendor. A werewolf howled in the distance.

Soon he became weary of his new calling, and went into the nearest pub to regroup and collect his bearing. Curiously, the apothecary across the way by the alley was still open.

He inquired solemnly of the proprietor as to whether she had anything for his irregular heartbeat, and she equally solemnly highly recommended the foxglove, to his delight.

His prevarication regarding such irregularity was naturally just a ruse; he was bent on the quickest demise of his doppelganger, who had so rudely forsaken him in his darkness.

She kindly and professionally concocted the potion, explained the usual disclaimers about its proper use, and was even tender and affectionate enough to giftwrap it for him.

He was now prepared to locate his sidekick, his not so trustworthy, knight errant arrant knave of a partner, be it Sancho Panza, Frank Byron, Jr., or Rocky to his Bullwinkle.

And he was going to chase Eurasian thistles across all the deserts of his mind until he found the scoundrel, hide wherever he might. All tumbleweeds bring foxglove to sinners.

Yet just then he recalled his favorite uncle and what he had so effortlessly bestowed upon him, merely through the natural humor and goodwill that he had always embodied.

In the largely forgotten recesses of his memory, musical sounds of great import arose, as if as magical incantations that lured him back to his natural talent of sanity and grace.

And it was just then that his search came to a final close, and his heart opened far wide and over above what it had ever seen before.

February 16, 2024 [12:59-15:23]

A Portal, by Robert Fuller

It was one of those days with ceaseless rain, light mists alternating with steady drizzle, and periods of considerable downpour, useful for bundling up, curling up in a nice comfy chair with a choice book and perhaps a small goblet of port; or just whiling away the hours staring blankly out the window at the droplets streaming down the cool glass with no care in the world. One imagined sometimes on days like this that the window was a passageway that might unlock the mysteries that were always lurking beneath the surface of conscious awareness.

If you let your eyes blur just so, sometimes the light became unbearably bright, and you began to feel your entire head bathed in and not separate from a soft glow of energy. There were some who said that this was itself the way to that other place, which seemed to be other yet was not distinct in any real sense from this very place; some also made mention that the dropping off of the usual mind filled with various random elements, its contents washed away by pure energy, was a gateway that led to a powerful, radical feeling of empathy heightened to such a degree that it was possible to feel joys, sorrows, pains, and ecstasies of many other living beings, at virtually any distance of time or space.

So it was one of those kinds of days for Maya, mostly one of rest and daydreaming about nothing in particular, yet at times when the rain intensified she started to feel drawn more and more powerfully into what she called “the vortex”; this was a familiar state of being for her, being that she had always had a deep psychic kind of connection with those around her, even as a small child.

States like these had to be handled with caution, since the fragile human mind and heart could only handle so much in the way of intensity. To enter the very edge of the portal was one thing; to enter further in without the appropriate degree of caution could be downright foolhardy, if not flat out dangerous.

But this day was different than any other she had experienced through the decades; she found herself slipping into reveries that bordered on psychotic episodes, merely because of the intensity of feeling that was being channeled into her from other places and persons.

There was one particular scene she saw and felt that was quite brutal, and she knew that when something of this degree of intensity and darkness arose, she would have to find a way back out. She had never really been afraid of any phenomena such as the present one, yet there was a part of her that began to tremble uncontrollably. There was only one way out of her predicament, which was to breathe every conscious breath fully and with full feeling, letting the glow of radiant energy fill and overflow her head, mind, and heart. And then the rain stopped, and she was washed of it all. She walked quietly out into the night sky, and felt the euphoric rays of the full moon washing over her through the broken clouds. The window, she felt, had opened, and so had she.

February 17, 2024 [~18:53-19:53]

The Fly, by Robert Fuller

I am from an aristocratic lineage. Although our records are fairly sketchy prior to your mid-1700s or so, when we were blessed with our glorified, homely moniker in your precious system of classification, we Musca domestica have a proud history that by far predates a mere three thousand five hundred of our lifespans. If you wish to know, our ancestry goes back over three quarters of a billion lifespans; it’s a shame that our records were only recently initiated. Just think of the stories we could have told, about mammoths and mastodons, marsupials and mammals, borhyaenids and birds, and also, more in your own ancestral backyard, primates. What that proverbial fly on the wall might have told!

For the moment, I am resident in a prestigious research lab, one which prefers to stay out of the limelight because of the sensitive nature of the goings-on within their quarters. In fact, it was all I could do to find out their name: Muscarium. Although their activities are largely hidden to the rest of the world, we inmates of Muscarium know full well what the whitecoats are up to. How could we not? We are, after all, the subjects of their various experiments.

In Muscarium, there are dozens of different wings throughout the labyrinthine structure of the complex, and we inmates were perfectly aware that most of those wings involved the most invasive, intense, and insane torture methods. We could hear the screams of our fellow inmates throughout the day and night, yet there was nothing we could do about it.

Some of the whitecoats, just a tiny minority, actually cared about, felt something, for their subjects. You see, the most elite and coveted wing in the whole complex was one that was devoted to the use of electrodes for the express purpose of musical experiments.

I like to think that it was because I made an impassioned plea to the authorities, stating my case fully to those in charge, as to why I should be sent to that wing after emerging from pupa to metamorphose into my adult self, the very one now buzzing these thought shards into your brain—and not to excruciating torture and certain annihilation.

The aristocratic ancestry I spoke of earlier, you see, was not merely that I was from the general pool of housefly genetics; rather, it was more precisely that my ancestors came from within the castles and hovels of human families of notable musical lineage in parts of the Middle East where that kind of activity is most intense. And we all got it; we were always listening intently to every phrase and rhythm, and we would beat our wings in harmony, in complete resonance, with what the masters of those styles of music were creating for us.

But as to why I ended up in that particular wing of Muscarium, frankly, it may have just been dumb luck. Or it may have been because the more sensitive of the whitecoats were secretly auditioning the youngsters among us just to see if they could find the real, raw talent, and not just fill that wing with the usual humdrum. It seems to me that some of them may have actually had an ear for music.

Be as it may, it was my personal assessment that I was more than qualified to reside in that wing. My lineage alone was testament to that fact. And, as it turned out, there was one particular whitecoat who went by the handle Max who took an immediate liking to me, and he even confided that fact to a colleague of his.

Max and the rest of his closest buddies were genuinely curious about how they could make the most of their research gear such that they would all be able to enjoy the most profound of auditory experiences (courtesy of their subjects, of course).

What they did, then, was to carefully and meticulously attach a whole slew of the tiniest imaginable electrodes to our central nervous system. There were also many types of motion sensors which I can’t even begin to describe. And most intricate of all were the special sensors that were used to monitor as much as possible of the activity not only within our respective visual cortexes (both compound eyes and ocelli), but also, just as important, the feeding activity that kept us going via our pseudotrachae.

So, as you can see, there were numerous inputs and outputs associated with their apparatuses, all of which could only serve to enrich the final auditory outcome.

I tried my best to alert them, Max especially, who seemed to listen to my requests pretty carefully, that my forte when it came to music was piano, and keyboards in general. So I was elated when I realized that my first connection, my first hookup, was with a piano (it was of course electric), and I immediately began to show off, much to the chagrin of some of my colleagues, and even some of the whitecoats.

My first rendition was from Ravel’s Miroirs, a little piece that was about night moths. Not surprisingly, there was one clown in the bunch of whitecoats who requested, after my stunning rendition of that, a piece from Mikrokosmos (by Béla Bartók, as some of you may know), a little ditty named “From the Diary of a Fly”. As if! But I humbly and most dutifully complied with the request, although it must be noted that I soon thereafter did a follow-up, a few choice excerpts from that same master’s Piano Concerto #2.

Gentleman that he was, Max soon put me through the paces, wondering what I might manage on the fly, just making it up as I went along. Now, during that very experiment, I was of course completely absorbed in what I was doing, but I could tell in my peripheral vision that my efforts were making quite the splash with my captive studio audience.

They actually recorded that experiment for posterity, as it turns out—okay, truth be told, they recorded every single experiment—but that was the performance that really got my career jumpstarted. After that, nothing was the same. I was immediately hooked up with a top-notch agent, and my social media account was deluged to such an extent that I had to pull the plug for at least an hour or two.

The upshot of all of this was that my new agent, knowing full well the time constraints we were working under—even in the best of laboratory conditions, I wasn’t expected to make it much past about 45 days—booked me for my Carnegie Hall debut.

It was to be an incomparable, unprecedented keyboard festival, with several standard electronic keyboards and also some of the top synths, such as the Nord Lead 2, and I was to get top billing in the shindig.

Unfortunately, my Mom and Dad couldn’t make it, but there were many, many members of my extended family who, if they weren’t able to attend in person, certainly made it a point to watch the live feed of the event.

It was the moment I had been waiting for all my brief life. Everyone in the audience was ready for the musical experience of their lives. Max had double- and triple-checked every single connection, and we had done a mini dress rehearsal just a couple of hours prior to that.

And right then, just as I was wheeled onstage, a massive power outage took out most of the Northeast.

February 18, 2024 [13:44-15:47]

Seeds, by Robert Fuller

We were walking through the woods. It was like any other ordinary day. Yet there was a rush of energy underfoot. This was actually not entirely unexpected. We were becoming somewhat more sensitive.

The energy underfoot was quite subtle. We were unable to make it out. Yet foot after foot we walked over it. Gradually we became more aware of it. Of what this mysterious presence was.

We were talking about many things. None of them were about the mystery. Yet we walked foot after foot for hours. What we walked over was the earth. And underfoot was what we sought.

Then it began to rain lightly. And the ground gradually became somewhat wet. Yet we still did not notice its secrets. We stopped at a convenient picnic table. There was a babbling brook nearby.

We were enjoying wine and cheese. And that gradually became our entire experience. Yet we could have enjoyed so much more. One of us filmed the rushing waters. The other pushed dead leaves around.

Then the rain let up slightly. And gradually the sun shone through us. Yet we were still oblivious in its rays. There was a rainbow that appeared above. Its colors began to infuse everything.

We were noticing more things underfoot. All of it was somehow more alive. Yet why was it not obvious all along. The drizzle and the mist came back. It began to soak us through.

The sprouts and mushrooms showed themselves. Tiny sprigs of life poking through earth. Yet we were still talking about random things. The seeds and spores still poked through. We gradually became soaked with silence.

We were running out of words. There was still much obvious growth underfoot. Yet our growing silence was not quite enough. There was only walking foot after foot. Then we found another picnic table.

This time we became more attentive. With more food and wine we relaxed. Yet there was still something we hadn’t noticed. The robins had been singing all along. And the brook had been gurgling.

We were determined to be aware. And so we sat in deep meditation. Yet we still could not perceive the truth. The truth right there beneath our feet. There was something magical always happening.

Then it began to shine through. The dark life underfoot was always growing. Yet it was hidden from our conscious minds. There was a root principle at play. And the seed was the key.

We were talking about decaying matter. About how that fed seeds and growth. Yet we still could not figure it out. So many things that were happening underfoot. And all of it completely hidden.

The complexity was impossible to comprehend. The inborn urge for seeds to germinate. Yet all of this growth was somehow arbitrary. Why some seeds turned into certain shapes. And others turned into other beings.

We were walking along as ourselves. Not really noticing how arbitrary we were. Yet the seeds that became us became us. And then to be was our duty. To be as we arbitrarily were.

Then a light rain came back. Our walk was soaked with wet energy. Yet how could any of this be possible. We came across yet another picnic table. Cheese and wine fueled the mystery.

We were...

February 19, 2024 [01:44-03:04]

NOTE: This has also been posted in the “Experimental” section

We Were, by Robert Fuller

Picture a ghost town in the high desert. Stone buildings worn by the elements, wood slats all weatherbeaten by time and storm and wind. The life that was once there reduced to skinny skeletons of those former days of silver. Days when a pre-Lincoln penny could get you a quarter pound of cheese or rice, or quite a handful of “penny candy”.

Hilltops and canyons, juniper and pinyon, scrub brush and spring water, fields of granite and cliffs, and the high life and boom times—for as long as they lasted. It was the luck o’ the Irish at its peak, near springs o’ crystal. The mirage lasted only six years or so, drying up once the veins of silver did. Yet it was originally the land of petroglyphs.

Each butterfly in its four ages had everlasting life in its journey leading to happiness. Yet the post office never sent anything like that. Sunflowers, Sun gods, Sun rays, rain, and crossed paths, all leading to dream time. Yet the desecration of all this was just for ore, no matter what the yucca, pricklypear, cliffrose, or spinystar had to say about it.

Desert marigolds dreaming of yerba mansa, apricot mallow, lilac sunbonnet, or gravel ghost. The silver and gray or plumbeous vireo, sagebrush sparrow, juniper titmouse, the blue-gray gnatcatcher, and not least, the least sandpiper, all flying through dry fields, all dreaming of osprey catching largemouth bass, convict cichlid, tiger trout, green sunfish.

Yet the intruders had no such dreams, only dreams of instant riches that they had heard tale of before departing from the east to come to this godforsaken place just to make their fortunes. Their currency was silver, yet it may just as well have been the silverfish that slipped through their fingers while brewing the morning coffee.

The mines dried up sooner than sin, their veins turned to dust. Yet the life that was there before the rush carried on as if the miners had never dug up the earth in search of their futile and meaningless treasures infused with all their ceaseless seeking, their lust for what they could not have, what no one on this Earth could really have.

The silverfish knew better; the skinks and the kingsnakes and the nightsnakes were not fooled; and the mica caps, the puffballs, the lichens, the shaggymanes, and the inkcaps stayed right where they were. And all the painted ladies, Western pygmy-blues, queens, white-lined sphinxes, and blue dashers flew into the blue without a single care.

So there was not much left of this attempt at human society—except the stones, nearly dead wood slats, and those mysterious petroglyphs, and the landscape, which never planned to go away until the end of the Earth. There was one structure, when you looked toward the hills, chimney at the left, that looked like someone wearing spectacles.

Who, on the other hand, of human origin, was still wandering these hills and canyons? Was there no one left to tell their tales of greed, debauchery, or wanderlust, adventure? And those who were here first: what was their story? Well, they had already told it, and planted it there for all the generations to come. And the flora and fauna knew that well.

February 20, 2024 [17:40-19:23]

Carousels, by Robert Fuller

The sign at the entrance said simply “Fun House: Fun for the whole family”. Yet the location of the festival, as some called it, was in one of the most remote areas in the county of record.

There were at least seven whirligigs within the compound. It was difficult to enumerate all of them exactly, being that the design of the compound was such that numerous tricks of light and mirror were employed, just to make it more interesting.

But the thing itself was merely a horizontal version of the Ferris wheel, with cheerful horses added to the mix to cheer it up for the youngsters. So, instead of the children battling the forces of gravity directly, they dealt instead with centripetal force.

Yet still they shrieked with all their childhood, as it was a perfectly delicious way to move around in circles until they got dizzy. And they all noticed the parasol that covered the entire apparatus, and all the rest of them, at least six, surrounding their fun.

The parasol, a covering for the intense sun of the bright day, was also a sign that told the young children that they were linked to a special type of wonderment, one that only they themselves would be able to enjoy.

But it wasn’t the parasol itself that carried the weight of the message that deluged these children. No, the outer reaches of the compound were beset with numerous glass panes that reflected in various distorted ways whatever appeared before them.

And these glass panes were often graced with sundry religious symbols, in multicolored dreams of festive raiments. So the warm light that came through those panes was shown as if through a prism, and it shown upon the children in just that way.

But all the while the children twirled, as if with no care at all. They held to their horses, saddles and all, and delighted in the roundabout every time it came round again and again and again. There was nothing but carefree delight. And they shrieked it out.

The most central of the whirligigs, of the seven that were visible to the children and the bystanders, well, it soon began to create a humming that was more and more audible, as if it were sprouting wings, soon to ascend into distant, unreachable stratospheres.

There was a marvelous sound of glass breaking; it wasn’t marvelous to those who were in the Fun House itself; rather, it was merely unlike anything that had ever been heard by anyone at all, ever.

The shards flew all about, yet they miraculously missed all the children and all the various bystanders in the immediate vicinity. And yet the central whirligig continued with its increased speed of rotation, which continued to increase ever more drastically.

There were sparks of shattered light all around, and the central whirligig continued to accelerate, horses flying around with manes ablaze, trying to cover themselves with the parasol, as they ascended ever closer to the Icarus sun.

February 21, 2024 [19:40-20:40]

Blanked Out, by Robert Fuller

One version of the tale goes like this: They had agreed on a time and a place. However, they arrived at somewhat staggered times, owing to some of the travel arrangements. As it turned out, they would tend to converge on the dusty, forlorn desert town in twos, although there were actually a full baker’s dozen in the mix.

Now, as Kate’s Saloon was a mite busier than normal, the first arrivals had to make a change of plans, with the proviso that they would have to ask the staff at Kate’s to redirect the laggards to the new location. Vova, true to form, had ridden bareback straight up to Kate’s, bare-chested, as if he owned the place. Bébé strode alongside.

After that, Vova and Bébé trudged a few buildings down to the street corner, and crossed at the Longhorn, and then across the cross street to the Oriental, making full, manly display of their holsters and six-shooters just so everyone inside would know who was in charge. They lumbered in and sat down at the bar.

What wouldn’t you have given to know what these two gentlemen were rattling on about! There was something lost in translation, but one eyewitness account tells it something like this: Vova asks Bébé if he wouldn’t like to try a dry run of the main event, just to ensure that it’d go off as planned. Bébé insists on singing karaoke.

Unfortunately, all of the spots in the karaoke lineup were already spoken for, and there weren’t even any slots open at the gambling tables. So they sat silently and sullenly at the bar for a few minutes, until Vova suddenly exclaimed, “Hey, it’s Dada and Pang!” They struggled mightily to fit Pang’s great girth safely at the bar.

They were now a foursome, and the diplomacy became suddenly much more complex. Pang immediately ordered a full bottle of Black Label, began smoking his black Maduros incessantly, and his lips started smacking non-stop with his stash of Parma prosciutto that he carried with him at all times in case of such emergencies.

Their handlers and fixers and bodyguards had been detained, unfortunately, due to unforeseen circumstances, but they arrived just in the nick of time to inspect and clean the firearms, as regulations required. A short while later, Zalim and Batta arrived, followed soon thereafter by Mahsa and Amatu, heads completely cowered.

Two by two, the last of the pairs arrived, Ark style, first Grosero and Rasasa (the latter wearing his favorite bullet brooch with style), with Prusak and the pungent, overripe Mahcain bringing up the rear. Incredibly, Prusak had declined to sport the classic Western garb, earning him a demerit; instead, he entered as Gregor Samsa.

The chosen, former guy, the guest of honor, had come by chartered bus, but was running late because he had somehow neglected to pay the coach operators their due. And he said he was detained because of what he, Maha, had referred to rather quizzically as “furniture shopping”. No one asked. No one dared. No one cared.

Interestingly enough, this latest of the arrivals was immediately surrounded by a whole entourage of legal types, bodyguards, and sycophantic supporters. And he very quickly insisted on sitting smack dab in the middle of everything, the center of attention, to be sure, to everyone’s detriment.

The firearms were still in the process of being meticulously gone over as to every detail, and the inspectors let on that it might take up to half an hour more before the event could commence. So Pang bought a round for everyone, as well as a couple more for himself; he asked Vova for a small tub of Beluga roe, with Noble.

Yet Vova was unable to comply, as he came to regret, being that Maha had noticed his compatriot Vova, and sidled up to him as obsequiously as possible, without going too overboard. This infuriated Pang, who immediately harangued the firearm inspection slackers, dictating to them that they should conclude posthaste.

And Pang shot Vova and all the others a most venomous glance, whereupon Vova finally decided to don his shirt, and a handy sombrero, just to be safe. The referees of the match had by this time convened, adorned in black and white, as if a nun’s habit worn as a striped prison chemise. They were chomping at the bit to start.

But they were of course held up, on account of Maha doing his most recent word salad stump speech, which rambled on for way too long about nothing, until finally Pang shot his rocket of indignation and said, “Let the games begin!” Everyone else quietly sipped their drinks, sullenly, until they finally all reconvened at Golgotha.

They ambled—entourage, officials, and all—funereally and solemnly, past Crystal Palace, by way of Fremont past the statue to Virgil’s corner, passing Fat Hill, which Pang strongly objected to, along Sumner by way of Butterfield, and then on to the playing field itself, the potter’s field so affectionately known as Cerro de bota.

The officials had brought along the requisite dodecagonal tarp, firetruck red, and of sufficient proportions that all contestants could be placed at the proper number of paces from one another. The tarp, parasol-like, also vaguely resembled one of those Fullerian geodesic domes. The contestants all solemnly took their places.

Now, as Maha had as usual drawn the short straw, he was placed smack dab in the center of all the action, eyes of the other dozen smartly trained on his marmalade countenance and coiffure, and his crimson chapeau. When it was time for the games to begin, the officials barked out their military commands about “harms”.

All the players were then at the ready, as the three count counted down. They were not to lift or even touch their firearms until the count had been fulfilled. “Three! Two! One!” And there was immediate bedlam in the playing field, as everyone at the perimeter of the dodecagonal parasol immediately began firing at the center.

As the bystanders, the witnesses of this great event, will solemnly testify, to their great chagrin, those at the periphery appeared to have missed Maha completely! And there was a general gasp of astonishment and perplexity, not least among the dirty dozen so haphazardly situated at the twelve corners of the fabric.

Now, it took Maha a good New York minute, but once he gleaned what had come to pass, and that he had dodged the bullet—many many bullets!—he started firing his pistol, and all the spares he kept on his person, randomly at all the perps who stood so meekly at the sidelines, mere cannon fodder to his weaponry expertise.

All of them got what was coming to them. Their graves were unmarked, and were put together in the flimsiest fashion, shallow as sin. Then Maha walked away in silence, into the deep desert, never to be seen nor heard from again. And in tow, as lemmings, there soon followed throngs who followed him over the nearest cliff.

The forensic experts conferred about what had happened for years and years. There was perhaps a breach of protocol, some said. The dirty dozen had been given fake weapons, others opined. It was all a fake, it was a setup, they were crisis actors; those sorts of sentiments were emblazoned all over the web, as dark echo chambers.

Yet the final conclusion by the analysts was that, in direct disregard of the clearly stipulated rules of this game, most of the valid contestants had somehow been issued blanks instead of bullets. The regulatory committee was certainly going to convene in order to discuss this state of affairs, and heads were sure to roll.

There is a second version of this tale, which can be stated more simply: The baker’s dozen, once they had all gathered at the Oriental, rented out one of the back rooms, with a long banquet table, with the stipulation that whoever picked the short straw would be seated dead center. The results were much the same, except for the food.

February 22, 2024 [14:02-16:32]

The Carpenter, by Robert Fuller

It all started with the nextdoor neighbor standing bare-chested on the roof’s pointed pinnacle; he was all ruddy and sun-bleached with long locks and beard, quite a reddish man with many freckles on his face as if he had just emerged from a fresh bath. His eyes were a flame of fire, hair bleached as if to the white of pure snow, countenance outshining the sun’s brightness, voice, if he had spoken, as the sound of rushing waters. He was either of modest height, or tall, well-proportioned and broad-shouldered, with a fool’s gold complexion when the sun’s rays caught it just so, and his soles and palms were as thousand-spoked wheels of stigmata as if he had never sat under a fig tree at all, much less for seven weeks. Yet he emerged from that, dignified, even though his body was all but hairless, and his hands and feet of pronounced coarseness. Those who lived nearby noticed that he was always surrounded by little flowers, flocks and flocks of birds, all greeting him with fullest syrinx, and all his sisters and brothers, moon, wind, sun, earth, fire, and water, which he always blessed to the fullest. And there was that mysterious jar of nails that he always carried in a translucent pouch dangling from his waistband.

There are those who conjecture that this one first came from a hawk’s town, near a watch tower, near branches, shoots, and sprouts of pure olive, cocooned within a sort of hollow cup near town, a vessel that contained sundry castoffs and endless piles of wood debris, and that that was mostly why, as a child, this one became so enamored of joinery, carving, and cabinetmaking. His mother couldn’t possibly restrain him, and his father—not the one who was merely a stand-in, but his real father—was never anywhere to be seen, so this one learned his new trade with a passion that could not be contained.

He never really interned or apprenticed with anyone of great renown; instead, he preferred to go where the wind blew, the flowers grew, the birds flew, and anything he learned he learned by trying out anything that came into his head. There was an earlier phase of his career where he dabbled at wall and kitchen niches, and then alcoves and plinths, bookcases and drawers, but it is of note that during this phase, he was deathly afraid of nails; so in his youth, his primary activity was that of joinery. Once, he even did an entire ceiling fresco all in wood without use of even a single nail. It was a marvelous tile design, with countless spokes and splinters and slivers of ever finer wood shards radiating outward from the center in true abandon. And his commission on that one and only ceiling fresco of his did him well.

During his next phase, he was more of a carver, and he soon went miniaturist, to such an extent that to see what he had wrought required the use of elaborate and powerful optical equipment and lenses; in fact, the creation of this work itself was so painstaking and, frankly, painful, that he soon had to give it up for work that was less stressful, both bodily, and with respect to his failing vision.

In fact, this middle phase of his career took such a toll at the time that he actually had to apply for disability for a few years while he was struggling to get his life back on track. So, during these dark years, as he referred to them in his memoirs, he would wander through deserts and places barren of life, including many landfills where he would see people scavenging for whatever scraps they could use for just about any purpose imaginable. They were destitute, desperate, and yet determined to make a go of it no matter what it took.

He began interviewing them one by one, to see what made them tick, and he soon began to delight in their wide variety of life stories, albeit stories that shared a common thread, one that was hard, for anyone with a conscience, to bear. When he was doing this work, he always made it a point to never talk down at them, or to appear in any way condescending of their concerns; he never preached a single word to any of his friends, yet the stories they would have told later on of what he said spoke of a kindness that was rare in that time, and so what he said was in time woven into an intricate tapestry that rivaled the tiles, patterns, and swirls on the face of even the most exquisite Persian carpet.

While he was involved in these considerations with his friends, he also began to notice all of the abandoned scrap wood strewn about where they did their hunting and scavenging. So he took up the practice of always carrying on his person a jar of nails, so that he could make best use of that scrap wood.

And this was where the third and final phase of his career as a carpenter began and ended.

This phase began modestly enough. He would find suitably sized slats and boards of wood, and at first, would tentatively nail one piece to another, just feeling out where all of this was going. Gradually, he settled on boards that were about six or seven feet long, and others that were more like two feet in length. He quickly became adept at creating oblong boxes that, he felt, could contain virtually anything at all, although they might contain nothing.

At first, he wasn’t really clear what all these boxes were for, but at the time, he had continued the interviews with the indigent folks he was always listening to, and he felt their pain, as if they were deep wounds, a kind of blessing or even bleeding, in his extremities. So he began to make a point of stockpiling all those oblong, strange boxes of castoff, discarded wood meticulously nailed together, and he knew that there would be a day when they would be put to good use, as retribution for the travesties that his good friends had suffered at the hands of others.

February 23, 2024 [13:50-15:30]

Truffles, by Robert Fuller

By morning the dusty winter sun, of finest black winter soils, had vanished from hopeful oak saplings on the outskirts of several rural wild forest markets; hounds quietly darted toward columns of darkness into shallow holes, their careless digging cutting into the quarry. Farmers foraged foods and worried about the necessity of the importance of the missing stolen jewels found in black winter oak groves where narrow streets would nurture the passage of inconsistent gilded moonlit winter.

He hunts and dawdles through twentieth century’s turn of fate materializing world wars, returning to the uncertainty of the journey: country roads, burnt earth, chalky soils, into patches of darkness, of buried rose.

Green and white days of dusky sun, of moon glow in the distance, spectacular sky overwhelmed with yellow oaks at the edge, dogs digging with the lightness of country foxes for thieves, scars of the past morning, in a fleeting, isolated grave of secrets, magic, religion, danger. Mystery may inspire excavation of vineyards of such ballet, a question of solemnity, of passing conviction, marches through sleepy oaks, nighttime wandering.

The subtleties of underworld, of shadowy business; the questioning of thieves: that kind of crime story is what mirrors our blind sensibilities, a taste of secrets, an epic con, a story sold, a darker fantasy.

February 24, 2024 [22:01-23:55]

NOTE: This has also been posted in the “Prose Poems” section

Night Moths, by Robert Fuller

We were illegible scrawls on parchment, until you heard us fly toward the burning light. Before we were that, we would imagine ourselves flitting toward any local incandescence, with feather wings pale with silken fragility, Icarus to a Sun, and we were revelling in our raveling even though we were only ink on paper that then became metamorphosed, transmuted by agile eyes and fingers and regal instrument into waves of sumptuous sound that filled the silken heart that we were.

Once we were, we were wondering how this alchemy of symbol to song and flight and sadness of birds could have been possible. Our own wings only flew, flitted meaninglessly about, without regret, yet our neighbors wailed even as they flew with grace, plaintive echoes of their wings reaching sorrowfully to the Sun.

We were destined to again be dust, even as we were flitting about trying to find any source, the source, of the light that beckoned us as we were, or as we, or you, thought we were. Yet we were only scribbles on paper, and it was your alchemy that made us what we were, if we were at all.

Night moths wear garish silken garb of jesters, as an unknown dawn that brings a mourning song to their lives in the scattered flight of obscurity. Yes, they at times dream of eyes that see not eyes yet see boats, waves, the tumult of life, and upon reflection some other things that see them not, because we were illusion. We were yet we were not. Yet we flew, over waves of winds of songs that existed only as scrawls on ephemeral paper that, as we were to be, would turn to dust.

We were in the valley, at night, near lanterns, and we were, we flew, we became the light and the dust and the plainchant of your beating heart as it beckoned the ever tolling bells, the ceaseless bells that would forever sing the valley, the plain, the mountain, the ocean, the ever tolling bells of night moth that we were and would always be.

February 25, 2024 [22:22-23:14]

Sun Dancers, by Robert Fuller

Not fireflies, but sun flies, dancer flies. Arthropods, winged hexapods, natural acrobats, wingmen, skydivers and sun-worshippers telling of wings, winds, suns, and songs of intimate, intricate sky dances of moving geometries of mesmerizing beauty, of hovercrafts, hang gliders, dive bombers, wildcats, hurricanes, shooting stars, all telling the tale of all the world of attraction, repulsion, indifference, freefall, chaos.

They were hypnotic in the way they moved through light, of light, as light. It seemed they had rehearsed these patterns on countless such days in their brevity of being, as being winged bodies of compound eyes and endless agility, hovering endlessly in the glint of the high sun, as spots of stars and comets and tiny winged star systems and galaxies and universes, never repeating any pattern, just like the source they emanated from, the universe itself, ever changing shape from this to that and never once repeating or being in the least bit comprehensible to anyone at all.

What was the point of their dance? No one asked. And it was their free secret, which they may not have known. Because they danced, free of our madness and mundane concerns, just simply being what they were, without a care, communing just the way they knew how, not giving a fig if anyone at all got it. It was a swirl, it was swirls, it was spiraling swirls of ecstatic madness of the good kind, the one that warmed your heart no matter how things looked on the surface, the one that inspired you to be just as they are, dancing freely in the sun; the one that bathed you all through in their free spirals of goodness.

February 26, 2024 [21:33-22:11]

Miroirs, by Robert Fuller

Whispering labyrinthine memories in the mirror to Max, and to the authorities, who confided to me that some of them, at least on occasion, were wondering how they could have been so overlooked, I can now visualize how we were metamorphosed, mirrored all over the gallery as scribbles of jesters, transmuted by feather scrawls, through lingering tastes of absinthe, mirrored by glass portals through fields of wheat, as tolling bells of illusion. We were blessed to be without regret, yet musics with no exit began, mirrored all around, melted in endless tropes of gnarled and arthritic cicadas or flowers that would forever sing echoes of their fragility, in auditory experiences conjured up through unfamiliar surroundings, sad footsteps in the light.

Night foliage near lanterns, different wings and sadness, only ink on paper, destined to be dust, beckoned us to dawn, subtle hints of saffron. We were silken obscurity, because we spoke of castles, largely hidden in a valley of melted birds, in a house of bells, ceaseless winds: you’ve already forgotten. You happened to overhear muttering, stories about mammoths and mammals, alternately admiring them and then so thoughtlessly not even listening to the songs of scattered flight in the valley of night plainchant; it had almost been forgotten, obscured by leaves above a field of irises, flowers painted in vivid colors, sounds of suns.

February 27, 2024 [13:32-15:21]

People Like Me, by Robert Fuller

At least that’s what I thought—that they like me. And then I heard numerous words to the contrary through the grapevine. It didn’t shatter my world, in case you wondered. You see, I’m really not all that concerned—spoiler alert!—what people think of me. If people like me, then it stands to reason that people like people like me. But, you see, there’s a major problem with all of that: there ain’t any people like me! I’m just mentioning that to your lonesome in case you hadn’t gotten the memo.

So let’s get to the real skinny, the real meat of the matter. These guys, out of the blue, you see, they contacted me directly, not even bothering with my middleman agent type, and they said, “We want to do a biopic on you.” I nearly shit my pants! I’m the classic nobody, as you may know, and for those high-grade, big-stakes high roller producer types to offer me the job sight unseen, no one having the slightest clue who I am or what I do, that was just this side of outright preposterous! A quick phonecall to my agent verified that she knew absolutely nothing about it, and she repeated over and over some kind of advice that I should beware, that it was probably a scam, a hoax, some prankster yanking my chain and having a good belly laugh just for kicks.

In case you hadn’t figured out, I totally left these dudes hanging, being that I myself smelled a rat, like something fishy, and not the good kind.

I let the matter rest, didn’t think much about it, and then a week later, I get this urgent code blue type text message from the same dude, just insisting that we need to talk. Now!

So I chill out, my best rendition of that kind of thing, and I text the dude back, “lol, dude, sup!?” And I wait and I wait and then it’s about time for beddy-bye, and finally dude gets back to me, but it’s voice, he calls me, and I’ve just stripped down to my skivvies about ready to draw a hot bath before my hot date with my very lonesome pillow. And, in case you didn’t know, my pillow is a very jealous pillow, so I had to take a few breaths, pull up my trousers again, letting the phone ring just about off the hook, and then I finally answered.

Now, dude got right to the point, didn’t mince even a single word. He just flat out cut to the chase, saying, “Mr. Dalton”— Well, I quickly shot that down: “It’s Mort. Everyone and their dog calls me Mort, man.” — “Mr. Mort,”—I let that slide, just to see where it would go—“we know that you’re an unknown quantity within this distinguished industry, but that’s precisely the point, you’re exactly who we’re looking for.” Radio silence for longer than was comfortable... And frankly, I didn’t know whether to be totally pissed at them, or just glad as hell that someone had finally noticed me. I mean, is that any kind of compliment, that someone finally noticed my sorry little ass because I’m a nobody!?

I took a deep breath, considered the options, and then the long and short of it is that we agreed to meet that midnight for a nightcap and a serious conversation at Bar Sinister, just this side of the Walk of Fame! Sure as shit, that got my juices flowing!

Well, I got my best duds on, even combed a couple of unruly hairs into submission, did some spit and polish on my best pair of oxfords, and headed out with confidence, supremely sure that this meeting would turn into the opportunity of a lifetime that until now had overlooked me.

I arrived fashionably early, around a quarter of, and just managed to secure a couple of choice seats at the bar. Dude—went by the handle Doug Darnell, as it turns out—was there right at the noon of night sharp. He kindly suggested that we procure a private table so that we could talk candidly without anyone eavesdropping. I said sure.

Once we got to our private table, he immediately got into it, even before we’d ordered food or drinks, which in my way of thinking was going to be on Darnell’s ticket, and he said, “Mr. Mort” which got me all hot and bothered but I bit my tongue, “Mr. Mort, we’ve been following your long and successful career for at least a couple of decades”—he must’ve noticed my doubletake at that, I made it so painfully obvious—“and we at Knackster Enterprises”—first I ever heard of that!—“have decided to recruit you for our newest TV series.”

I tried to keep my cool, but nearly lost my lunch from earlier, and I asked as demurely as I could, “Oh, really! What’s it called?” So then he quietly and confidently informed me, almost in a raspy whisper, “Nobody’s Business”—at which I had a major coughing spell and told Mr. Doug that he should order me a good stiff drink, and then we could discuss his proposition in greater detail.

So, dude gets a couple of dirty martinis—not necessarily my el primo choice, truth be told—and when they arrive, we take a couple of sips, and then he gets to the meat of the situation, where he tries to do that tightrope walk that certain types do when they’re doing God’s own will, as far as they’re concerned, to tell you very little yet at the same time get you hooked on their product, and what they want you to do for them.

Dude—Mr. Doug—he tiptoes around those proverbial tulips, sidesteps at every opportunity the main question looming in my mind, which is this: What the hell is “Nobody’s Business”!? So I let him hem and haw a bit, you know, look all self-important, and he tells me this and that the other without really telling me squat, until I give him the timeout signal, yelling, “Stop!”

He glares at me, barely, and then softens. “Look, Mr. Mort, we at Knackster are dead serious about signing you on to what is going to be a very successful series, and which is sure to bring you lasting fame and countless opportunities going forward. We just need you to sign on the dotted line.”

Well, that got my goat! I told dude in no uncertain terms, “I don’t even know what the fuck I’m signing! Just give it to me straight: What is this show really about?”

Dude coughs into the last sip of his dirty martini, quickly orders another round, and starts talking, even before the help left the table, out of a horse’s ass like, well, you guessed it! Nobody’s Business! It was like dude was reciting bits and pieces of that thesis in Sociology or something that he had wet dreams about but forgot to actually write!

It was like, “Our focus groups have determined that a talented individual such as yourself would be a most excellent subject for us to prominently feature in this new TV series of ours, which is sure to be preeminent within the considered opinions of the major critics covering this genre.”

It’s like, dude! Did you just say anything!? I practically wet my pants.

So I cut to the chase. “Mr. Dude, I can see that you are suitably impassioned by the likes of this most esteemed project of yours which has doubtless caused you the anxiety and perturbations of many a sleepless night. However”—and I made quite the point of clearing my throat rather audibly—“I’m just curious. Why would you want a nobody like me and not some other, any other nobody?” The fresh drinks had by now arrived, not too soon for me, and Mr. Doug took a couple of shy sips of his, coughed, and then told me.

Before he could say a word, though, I axed him, “Before you answer that, what do I need to do to meet the requirements of this new role of mine?” He said, “Not much, just read the script and be yourself. There’s not much else to it, we’ll see to that.” So I had a quick gander at their barely legible scrawls on the parchment—I’m a prolific speedreader, even with sophomoric crap like that—and there was just one main thing that stood out to me: Absolutely every last role in the damn script was affixed the same damn handle: Mr. Mort!

So I put on my best half smile and quietly asked dude, “So, what, then? You going to have me cloned!? Or is this just more of that newfangled AI crap!?” But I was really rather hot under the collar, if you ask me. So then dude points out the fine print on the thing I was supposed to sign.

“It stipulates here”—he vehemently pointed to it, exaggerating his gestures—“right here, that you—and not your stunt double, or some kind of clone, or any kind of AI claptrap—you! You and only you are to play every part in this esteemed script, even all the extras!” Dude practically threw the book at me, ’cept I ducked.

So now, it seems, we were maybe on the same page or thereabouts. I collected my composure, and he said, before I could utter a word, “There aren’t any people like you!”

While I was signing on the dotted line with egg on my face, I was also whispering mainly to myself and to any who would listen, “And there aren’t any people who like me.”

February 28, 2024 [18:24-20:27]

The Book, by Robert Fuller

The minister glared at me, eyes of hellfire. He always did this, every Sunday. I was just sitting in my usual pew, admiring the bonnets, and inevitably I would feel this icy tingling in my chest, right where he was aiming, always at the same point in the service. It was usually between the second and third hymns, around the time that the half of the congregation that had dozed off during the hackneyed, overwrought sermon were finally starting to shake off their stupor.

You see, he wasn’t all that inspired an orator, and I perpetually caught mistakes of grammar that even a middle school student wouldn’t be caught dead making. As far as I was concerned, he couldn’t write to save his soul.

Yet he always quoted Scripture, like it was soon to go out of style. “Judge not, lest ye be judged.” Fat chance! When his steely eyes burned into my flesh, what do you imagine was going on in that department!? Sure as sin, when he just by his look damned me to eternal hell, why, in my book, the only Christian thing to do was to return the favor. Yes, I freely confess my sins, Padre. As it says in that dusty tome, an evil eye for an evil eye, that’s what I always say.

And you all, you can scorn me and spurn me to your godly heart’s content, but it doesn’t change the import and signification of what I’m saying even a single darn iota. I know what I know, and I know what I see, and that’s that.

But then preach, he does this one eighty about face maybe two thirds into the torture chambers of all those infernal hymns that just don’t know when to quit, and voilà! Right then and there, sourpuss lil’ ol’ Grinch turns into a Hallmark of the worst ever shit-eating grin.

And this always, always reminds me about when I was a young whippersnapper and didn’t know any better: I always wondered about that damn hymnal, and what the hell you were supposed to sing for hymn #13 and hymn #666. I mean, in the latter case, numerically, it’s unpronounceable: hexakosioihexekontahexaphobia. Parse that! If you dare...

So I did what any enterprising young runt would do: I made up my own words to those numbers. Now, to keep out of trouble, I made sure to keep them secret, not chant them too loud in my room, since my parents considered themselves quite devout.

But just to be clear, later on, in the course of my illustrious career, I recycled those lyrics of my misspent youth in the many death metal shindigs that I did, knowing full well that no one would understand a word I was thrashing about. And luckily my parents never showed.

In any case, once Preach simmered down a tad, he was all effusive and bubbly, especially to the ladies, gush gush. Practically tripping over his two left feet, he was that anxious to make like he was dancing just with them. Each and every them. All but made me puke.

But that act, that all came subsequent to the closing prayer, which was always the same recycled shit where he made a point of ultimate obeisance and groveling in the face of his Almighty Deity, who frankly probably didn’t give a rat’s ass about any of that claptrap. And he said Bless this, and Bless that, and all this kind of ratatat tat, as if he himself were ordering the Almighty around. Now, just to be clear in this department, I got no truck with real prayer, where the guy’s really into it, having a real heart to heart with whatever it all is. But I got real thin skin, zero tolerance, when it comes to fancy fakery and hoaxes and shit like that that ain’t real.

So, we always have a coffee social after all is said and done, where we mingle with all our fellow sinners just so everyone can feel better. Never works, but at least we get a buzz.

Then Mr. Sermon decides to grace me with his Holy presence; I try my best to dodge that bullet, but he’s holding the tray of sweets, so I just can’t deny myself the indulgence. I grab a few of the choicest morsels, trying my best not to be all that much of a glutton in the eyes of His Excellence, but his thoughts, thank the Almighty, are all over the place, and not on the sweets tray. But when I try to slink away with all that booty, he suddenly turns on the charm bullets and asks me if I’d like to be the music director. I guess he hasn’t read my hymnal yet.

February 29, 2024 [21:21-22:32]

Recipes, by Robert Fuller

There was this one day I got this notion that it might be fun to know how the other side eats.

It was that same day that I became a gourmand, but don’t judge me just yet.

My investigation—call it what you will, it was totally sanctioned by the Department where I was doing my doctoral studies—was based on a simple premise: You get to know who someone is if you get to know what they eat.

And what they eat, well that’s fascinating, to say the least. They eat all manner of foods that the average you and I will never ever even get close to. Yet, they manage to indulge in all manner of the most sumptuous fare, and their shit still stinks worse than anyone else’s.

Be that as it may, my curiosity got the better of me, and the experiment I did was not so much to know how the other side eats, but merely this: To know someone else truly by what they ingest and absorb into their body—and perhaps thereby to become something like them.

So initially I had to find a suitable subject. Relatives? Close friends? No, those cut too close to the bone. In accordance with the bylaws of my degree studies, and the requirements that my advisors gave me, it would be necessary for me to find a relatively anonymous subject, or at least one who had no direct ties to myself.

I began a voracious study of gluttony of the haute cuisine variety, in part funded via generous contributions from a number of crowdfunding sources which shall remain anonymous.

So every Tuesday or so, I would go to a new restaurant, and I would sample the dearest items on their menu. Yet, even so, this was not helping my research project; it was merely putting extra unneeded inches on my waistline. Although, I must admit that the pleasure was all mine.

Six months into my thesis project, my advisors called an emergency meeting. Naturally I was curious as to what was up; I had submitted all of my research materials and copious notes, after all. So they put it in plain terms. For this research project of mine, I would be required to locate a suitable subject who was the author of a body of work consisting of their original recipes, and it would be incumbent on me to prepare those recipes myself, ingest them, and report back on the results, as to how those foods made me feel after ingesting them.

They had a valid point, as I very quickly acknowledged.

And this is how I entered into the world of becoming someone else.

The mystery that surrounds this field of academic study is not yet well enough known to the general populace. The scientific aspect of this field is as yet hampered by a lack of let us say proper “peer review”. So my advisors, dare I say my mentors, were pushing me into a radically new area of research, even against my best instincts in the matter.

Then, when I began my research in earnest, after losing the pounds gained in my previous misled efforts, I began to notice, with each new boost of sustenance, my countenance was perceptibly altered, my general demeanor became more effete, I began to insist upon my own requirements above all else, and my suits became more crisply and artfully tailored. And I was a few inches of height taller, or at least that was what they told me.

The recipes that were the main body of my research, they were as luck would have it lost to all of posterity; my advisors later pointed out to me that none of those recipes could be verified by any of the others on the committee.

So this was when I decided to have a cook-off, one that would either forever verify or bury my soon to be academic career. The invitees were all of those on my committee, those who were ostensibly deciding my fate.

My challenge to all of them was simply this: Here’s this recipe. Fix it to the best of your abilities. Indulge in the results and see what happens. That’s it!

None of them were up to the challenge.

I ate and ate and ate more sumptuous food that I prepared from recipes gifted me by my special source, and over the years, I became with gusto the source itself.

March 1, 2024 [20:12-21:09]

North Liberty, by Robert Fuller

People on the coasts don’t have a clue what cold is. Yeah, they gripe and moan when it gets down to zero Fahrenheit in the east, or down to the thirties, forties, or even fifties out west, but they don’t know cold from Jack! Cold is 30 below—and that’s 70 below when you factor in the wind-chill. So, first of all, starting your car involves prayers to the Almighty like nobody’s business, like there’s no tomorrow. And then, once you get downtown, you notice that you’re fearing for your life just making the five-minute walk from the Great Midwestern Ice Cream Company over to Deadwood Tavern, basically just across the street from Prairie Lights. Yes, in the course of that short walk, you could get frostbite!

But this story is not about that.

This is more about warmer days and nights, when from your basement apartment on Maggard Street, right next to the ecstatic metal squeals of the freight train navigating the lines just meters away, you could see through your doors or windows, or see by just relaxing out in the yard, the light show of dozens of fireflies all lighting up madly.

Sometimes those days and nights would be humid, or even sweltering, but you didn’t really mind all that much, because you were in great company, what with the Casio-infused improvisations off-campus in Robert’s wonderful attic, or at Kenneth’s studious abode off-campus in the company of all his students, including Robert, nominally, ostensibly talking about music but about so many other just as important matters, such as the art of critical thinking. And doing what Kenneth called “slow-ups”.

Studies in the context of this group were not merely about the programs we had signed up for. All of the degree students in the School of Music were of course pursuing degrees in that subject matter, music, but because of our teachers, we were learning so much more in the process.

And then there was that special place, two rooms, a larger one that housed a Moog synthesizer and that old school reel-to-reel recording equipment plus gear that back in the day you would use for cutting up tape and splicing it together in novel ways. It was much more involved than what you have nowadays, where you can do everything digitally, or just have your AI companion create your “music” without even a stitch of your own effort or creativity. The smaller room around the corner housed a smaller synthesizer, but also, just as importantly, it was the nexus for creating one’s own computer music, using a program called simply US.

Both rooms collectively were called the Electronic Music Studios.

One of the most remarkable facets of the Studios was that in order to participate, you did not have to be a student in the School of Music. What a radical concept! Democratizing creativity! Eliminating arbitrary gatekeepers! And we, those of us in these Studios, we really didn’t think all that highly of the ones downstairs, who were going for tenure, or resting on their supposed laurels, while all the while pursuing their nefarious vendettas against those of us who didn’t happen to subscribe to their overly-restrictive ideas about what the study of music was all about. They were creating their relatively uninteresting stabs at what they thought music should be, and we upstairs in the Studios were always questioning any such notions of what music “should be”.

There was that one memorable presentation I shall never forget, which Ianos graced us with. Often we would have one or more of the Studio participants present what they had created using the Moog and the other equipment in the studio. Ianos was a Physics student, and as far as I know, had never had a single music lesson. Yet what he had wrought using Studio equipment was ecstatic, mesmerizing, unlike anything I had ever heard before.

But back to fireflies and other summery nightlife, sights and sounds given freely by nature.

There was this one party I was invited to, about five miles north of campus life; a couple of good friends, Anne and Michael, had invited me along. My recollection is that it was a marvelous bit of land, a fairly large house that at the time looked to me almost like a mansion—a nice spread out there in the rural countryside—and it was already fairly dark when we got there. We were all involved in the usual revelry, including much chatting about this and that, and we were all making the rounds of the various beverages available.

And then I stepped outside for a moment, which became if not an eternity a lasting moment. There may have been others outside, eating, drinking, full of merriment, and of course lots of loud talking over the canned music, but as for me, I was just listening intently to the symphony that was happening in the shadows, a swirl of beautiful, sensuous sounds that totally captured me.

This was what my professors had been teaching me. Yet no one listened.

March 2, 2024 [15:39-17:03]

Mulled Wine, by Robert Fuller

There was always a heated conversation around the fireplace about whether it should be red wine, Port Black, tawny port, or even a mix of wine and port. It never got resolved, at least not to the satisfaction of any who were present. And there were some in the gathering who grumbled that this was far too late in the year, that the holiday season had long since come and gone, but those mutterings were soon squelched once the first batch was brought out for all to enjoy.

Even the cat, who was always lurking about hidden somewhere in a secret nook, agreed that the proper time for celebrating this hot, nicely-spiced concoction of fermented red grapes was this very moment and no other. Outside, there was either rain or snow or somewhere in between, and it was cold enough you needed something to warm your heart, as the cat knew very well every time he curled up into a warm ball so he could luxuriate in the toasty wonderment of it all.

We alternated kitchen detail, so that there would be as many different takes as possible on the mulled wine and its close porto kin, which was the main key to our fullest understanding of what this mulled wine really was. There were some among us who were more the minimalist, insisting that only cinnamon and cloves would do, and then only in stick form. We had differences of opinion as to dry or sweet, normal or late harvest, fortified (as with the ports) or not. There were even a few deep discussions as to which varietal made the best mulled wine; or even the question as to which particular blend of red would give it that extra pizzazz.

And of course there was always a sumptuous cheese platter, consisting of the most unusual and best picks that we could find. There was usually a sharp cheddar or two, a French Onion or Wild Morel and Leek Jack, some kind of fruit-infused (such as cranberries) soft goat or sheep milk cheese, and almost inevitably an awesome blue cheese. And someone always brought plenty of baguettes. So the mulled wine was just an excuse for a marvelous feast and good company.

The conversation would at times turn to work-related matters; we had techies, writers, foodies, artists, and a whole bunch of other creative types who joined us in the festivities. Often, because of the mulled port component of the evening, people would bring various types of shortbreads and other cookies and other sweets—especially dark chocolate and truffles, which were always a favorite—and then the mulled wine and the sweets would loosen people up and we would start improvising music, or theatre, or dance, and the visual artists would sit at the sidelines and sketch until their sketchpads filled up or their pencils and pastels were worn down to the nub, and there would always be at least one or two videographers honing their craft. And every now and then someone would deadpan the funniest joke that no one got at first, or they would come out with the most god-awful pun, usually to universal groans of bemusement.

And then, as if right on command, the cat would saunter out, stretch his limbs to the fullest, and he would sit himself right down next to the fireplace and start preening himself as proudly as was possible. And then every time, no matter what was happening, everyone in the room would stop and stare at him; and he knew it.

March 3, 2024 [19:15-20:00]

Why I Had Myself Cloned, by Robert Fuller

In this business, you have to know who to contact to get the job done. I’m first and foremost an idea man; I’ve got ideas coming out of my ears every hour of the day; they stream out of my head so fast that there’s no bucket large enough to contain them. So you’re probably going to ask, “Well, why don’t you just hire however many employees you need to get the job done, and just go with that?” If you’re asking a question like that, you just have no idea how this idea business works, do you?

If I have to explain something so simple—hell, it takes less time to explain it than it does to try to deflect the question, so here it is: Say I have an idea, or a dozen, or a hundred. If I hire some person off the street, even if they’re qualified to the hilt, or I hire a dozen or even a hundred such people, what do you suppose I’m going to be doing with all my time, as opposed to doing this creative work that I’m supposed to be doing? That’s right, you guessed it! I’m going to spend all of my valuable time explaining all of these ideas to each person in turn, and I won’t have even so much as a spare minute to do any of the creative work myself! It’s a kind of Catch-22, you see.

What I really want to do is the creative work itself, but, you see, I’m just too lazy by nature, and so that side of me gets the better of me. But in the few minutes or hours that I’m able to devote to the actual implementation of all these ideas that continually deluge me—even on some rare occasions most of the hours of the day—my focus is sharp, and my purpose is true, and my work is damn good.

But it’s those ideas that slip between the cracks, those are the painful ones; they’re like a child you lost to some rare illness. And there’s so many of them on so many a day that I basically spend all my time in mourning, wearing black around the house as if it were going out of style. People have often asked me if I have some kind of Goth connection, and I just mutter under my breath, “No, it’s not like that, I’m just in mourning about some close relatives who died just the other day,” and I try to just leave it at that, but they’re immediately asking for all the sordid details and how it must be quite a bit of work to do all those funeral arrangements, and I try to tell them, “No, it’s not like that, either; it’s not what you think.” But it’s just then that I run out of steam and it’s all I can do to shrug my shoulders, make a graceful exit, and get on with it.

So in recent times, I’ve become more of a hermit, a recluse—or whenever I do go out to socialize, just to get out of the house for a change, I put on some cheery, colorful duds and my sharpest hat, and try not to look too sullen in polite company. And then, when I do shoot the shit with the next guy at the bar, I totally avoid this painful topic, talking instead about more mundane things or about absolutely nothing at all. Or sometimes, just to piss certain people off, I start talking up a storm about all the latest scandals in religion, politics, sports, and whatever else that may have most recently hit the airwaves.

But don’t think for a minute that I’m not feeling the pain of all of those premature deaths of all my ideas that will never ever even see the light of day; that’s a constant refrain, and it‘s one I can never escape from.

So over the many years and decades, as scientific advances became more and more pronounced and profound, I began to see a trickle of light guiding me gradually, ever so gradually and gently, to a way out of my pickle, my seemingly inescapable predicament. And that was when I started getting a number of mail-order catalogues shipped to my address.

Mind you, I could have simply looked the stuff up online, and downloaded a whole bunch of information directly to my phone or laptop, but everyone knows that you’re being tracked at every step of the way by all kinds of businesses and governmental agencies who all have their nefarious reasons for being interested in what you’re up to, so I figured it was probably better to get what I needed sent via the postal service in plain brown wrappers like some kind of incontinence supplies or sex toys or anything else that might raise eyebrows.

Yeah, it’s like that: Anonymity. That’s the key. So, after my brown bag contraband started to arrive—and there was quite a bit of it—I spent quite a few precious hours scouring through the fine print on all the brochures. Yes, I’ll admit, this drove me nuts, thinking all the while about how I could have been spending that valuable time producing more of my neverending creative work, but I also had to rationalize that all this time spent researching this particular topic was akin to an investment in future productivity.

After much hand-wringing and tearing out of hair and much trepidation about the magnitude of the step I was about to take, and all the potential ramifications of what I was about to do, finally I settled on a provider from somewhere in the Far East. The instructions in the kit were similar to those in many of the DNA testing kits; simply send such-and-such a DNA sample to the given address—in fact, they were even nice enough to prepay the return post—along with the requested fee, and they would take care of everything else. So I decided to do a trial run of this idea, just to see what would happen.

Now, there were certain complicating factors in this scheme of mine. The procedure that I was going to be involved in was somewhat like an adoption, except that it wasn’t that at all; it was a person like me—just like me. Yet the adoption analogy did ring true to a large extent; I would have to pay airfare for my new friend, and once he arrived, I would have to provide food, lodging, and all the other usual amenities. I didn’t think for a minute that there would be any issues at all with regard to compatibility; in that sense, this procedure was nothing at all like an adoption, since the person who would be joining me was a known quantity—or so I thought.

In any case, once he arrived, my assessment was that he would pay for himself many times over, in terms of my increased productivity; and this increase in productivity, there being two of us at that point, would not suffer from any unnecessary overhead, since it would presumably not be at all necessary for me to explain what I needed from him, birds of a feather that we were.

And I had already been gearing myself up for ordering additional units once this prototype, this proof of concept, proved his worth to me, and in the few days just prior to shipment I was getting more and more worked up and excited about how this would all be a game changer, how I would finally be able to achieve all that I had ever wanted to achieve.

Then the highly anticipated day arrived. I met my new friend at the airport, sporting my choicest threads, with the most radiant grin covering my entire countenance, to where most passersby must have thought I was bonkers. We cordially greeted each other after his trip to the baggage claim area, yet we hardly spoke a word on the way back. I didn’t think much of it at the time; he was probably just severely jetlagged, and I was just overly excited.

It was only when we walked through the front door that I realized the extent of my error. There was no way in hell I would ever be able to put up with someone that obstinate and opinionated.

March 4, 2024 [02:30-03:45]

Gitmo Gallery, by Robert Fuller

2013: Empty skull-eyes, sockets staring right back at the artist—Adolf, after all, also aspired as an artist—mirroring his dark skull of soulless soul.

1913: Daisies, Mother, and Child; Prague in the Fog, its Castle mirroring Kakfa’s; Die Karlskirche im Winter, with its snow-covered boughs, awaiting the Assistants’ arrival.

A century apart, yet telling similar stories of failed aspiring artists who were tyrants: Crows’ river crossing, Prairie Chapel; or Holy Roman Emperor’s plague-healer tribute?

2004: News bulletin: “He was a part of this network of haters that we’re dismantling... There is one less enemy we have to worry about...”

1934: “no war would be likely essentially to alter the distress in Europe... the principal effect of every war is to destroy the flower of the nation...”

2024: “we also have the weapons that can strike targets on their territory... all that raises the real threat of a nuclear conflict that will mean the destruction of our civilization...”

Echoes and mirrors and premonitions and remembrances of things past, present, future, all neatly gift-wrapped into a singularity of suffering.

The bulletins, the speeches, the lies made into a universal system can now stop for good; they are fruitless and will not prevail—if we survive this moment.

The talk of “extraordinary rendition” and “enhanced interrogation techniques” will not break the taxi driver kidnapped to later be subjected to what those examples of doublespeak really mean.

The true human spirit, the fine art of living through all adversity and torture, will not be broken by tyrants and their machinations.

Excessive ambition and the overarching desire to be someone of importance are the seeds of tyranny in all its forms. Ask a Karachi taxi driver sold for $5,000 bounty, rendered for torture.

He endured over 500 days of Dark Prison and painful shoulder dislocation only to land on an isle of other tortures that was only alleviated by art and cooking.

Along with fellow prisoners who endured similar fates because of an overzealous regime that lied about virtually everything they claimed to do, he sought solace and sanity in his painting.

Like Josef K. in The Trial, these men were never charged with a crime, never told the nature of their alleged transgressions; unlike Josef, most were finally released—but without their artwork.

Nine solitary candles, remembered scenes from Yemen, a prison stamp on a Giant and an Ark, tea scenes with family—all deemed in 2017 to be so dangerous that they could not leave prison.

This work was salvation for these artists. Yet art is so powerful a force that it cannot be borne by tyrants, those failed artists who now torture us so.

Wars fought on lies, destroying the nation’s flower, all for unbridled ambition, and all for nought. History is a grave, singing graves of despots, soon to be forgotten, drowning in human tears.

The real heroes are the otherwise unsung, those who brave the perils of tyranny and stand up in dissent, who create art out of real need and love. This is the history that should be in our books.

March 5, 2024 [12:49-14:36]

Seclusion, by Robert Fuller

Our trip into the wild began with a sidetrip. We waited until mid-afternoon, and made our way west to the beach, near East-Bay Park, mostly out of nostalgia for sunsets. The next morning, after our stay at the Royal Resort, we could have just as easily gone east as far as the M-8 and then headed north through one of the more densely populated parts of the province, but we all really wanted to take in the Wildlife Sanctuary, which was just a bit past the sleepy fishing village where we had started, so we continued further east on the N-10 instead. We were keen on seeing the wild goats, their silvery-white bodies gleaming in the morning sun as they grazed on bush, shrub, and phorb, wandering the arid mountains in tribes, their horns, scimitars of sharpness, curving around nearly full-circle.

Further east on the N-10, we dipped our toes in the sand and water at Turtle Beaches and wished for a sighting of green turtles and olive ridleys, but all we could see this time around was our toes wiggling like nobody’s business. We decided to call it a day and overnighted at the Platinum Resort.

The next morning, early and cheery, we headed straight to the National Park, past the Temple, Tortoise Peak, and the Tuck Shop. We wanted dearly to visit the fairy chimney known as the Princess of Hope, and also the Mud Volcanoes, and the mysterious Sphinx it seems everyone had heard about. And we particularly wished to see the Griffon vulture in all its magnificence somewhere in the shrublands, or various breeds of eagles or even pelicans. We stopped for coffee and a snack at the shop right across the N-10 from the mosque, near graves and monuments.

Even though we had had an early start, we were running a bit late, and we still had six hours of travel before our arrival at the hotel we had booked, the Ali. Luckily, once we arrived just south of it, a restaurant, a certain Taj Mahal, was still serving, it being one of those 24-hour places.

The rest of the road trip was a bit of a blur. We were so tuckered out from that long travel day, and even though we stayed in town and overnighted again at the Ali, with the side benefit of more of that sumptuous Taj Mahal fare during the day, we were still hurting a bit. The next day, since we got an early start, we decided to pace ourselves, but with the stipulation that we would relax only once we had left the major highways behind. We passed by a resort and a general store, until finally there was a cozy café sitting right there in a small town as if it had just been waiting for us to arrive. After a hot coffee, we stopped up the road for some chaat to snack on.

Once we turned left off the main highway, it became even sketchier. The roads were crazy curvy, they seemed all but deserted, apart from the occasional food stand sitting in the middle of nowhere, and we really didn’t know where we were going or what we were looking for exactly.

We stopped at one of the food stands and asked as best as we could whether there were any small towns nearby, and we mainly got blank stares, with a few people pointing in this direction or that, indicating which way we should go to find these elusive towns that were supposedly somewhere in the vicinity. Yet there was no sign of life save the lonely, dusty back roads.

We were following meandering rivers or streams, all of which were nothing but dry beds at the time, through a fairly high flat plain or plateau, past hints of what may have been hidden villages, but which we were not yet privy to, and then the road suddenly came to an end, in the tiniest and quaintest of villages we had ever seen, and there was a restaurant right there that beckoned us, and we savored every bite of that simple yet luxurious meal, and then we walked right out to the edge of town, where there was nothing to see, or so we thought, and it was just then that we heard the flutes singing out from ancient times filling our hearts that very moment.

March 6, 2024 [13:53-16:24]

Bells, by Robert Fuller

We’ve been sitting here for years on the mantel of the fireplace you’ve never once used, or strewn about carelessly on the floor near the bookcase, neglected by you, the author, except on those rare occasions when you invite friends over for merrymaking and a jam session or two. And we imagine that you imagine we’re lonely all the while, for those five years, even a decade or so, when you imagine we lie dormant—if, that is, you even think of us at all.

We sit there silently and contemplate the clutter meaninglessly and so thoughtlessly lying all about, covering much of the floor, and we think to ourselves, “It’s really no wonder we never get to join in a proper festival, pealing madly into the night and into the next morning.” Yes, we are indeed your accusators, and you stand guilty as charged.

Yet we are not in the least lonely, and on any occasion when the house is empty of humans, if you could somehow spy on us, you would notice strange little metallic sounds emanating from our bellies, as if a lover were caressing them without regard for decorum. This is how we live, it is how we make sense of being forgotten and forlorn objects devoid, ostensibly, of even the least iota of life energy.

In your days of primary and secondary schooling, you were doubtless taught about energy and its two primary forms, kinetic and potential. Most of the time, you yourself spend all your time scurrying to and fro like a lab rat in a maze, looking for goodness knows what; you would have to admit that even you yourself have absolutely no idea what it is you seek. So, in our parlance, we call this kinetic energy, to be sure, but then we get our bell laughs when we use the fairly obvious rhyme “frenetic”—and if you were around at such times, you would hear a distinct rustle of this muted yet hysterical clicking, clacking, and tinkling of all our parts, including the clappers. Yes, we are laughing at your insanity!

Yet just recently you stepped out of your forgetfulness, the dereliction of your duties, and you onesidedly decided to relocate us—without even asking—to the general environs of the keyboard sitting there in your living room. And now we are paraded about as social media influencers on all your channels, without our consent, and without any meaningful remuneration.

We have a proud heritage, and our network of influence is truly global. You don’t seem to be in the least aware of this, but we can communicate over great distances with our kith and kin; all it really takes is for us to imagine that we have been sounded, and it is as if we were; and then there is no stopping the transmission of our pleas and peals to any of our brethren. In part, there is a kind of sympathetic resonance that we always feel, no matter how at rest we appear, for there are always sounds of ours and of our kind happening everywhere. Our ungulate friends, who graze the fields, prairies, steppes, and even deserts, wear us with pride as fashion statements, either as necklaces or ankle bracelets, most typically. And these kinetic beings, innocently enough just looking for a good meal, are always sounding us, whether cows or camels, goats or gazelles; and those sounds reach us just as surely as we retransmit them to all our peers.

So when you so mistakenly assume that we are not alive, I must remind you, the author, of that time in Dublin when you were bicycling through town en route to the Wicklow Mountains with your friend Nicola, and our friends at the great cathedral you passed were pealing madly, with all their hearts, and she said to you, “They’re doing it for us.” And all through the night, while you camped next to that babbling brook, the cows continued to low, the sheep and goats were baaing, and we were there in spirit as the sounds of their favorite necklaces.

March 7, 2024 [12:08-13:08]

Secret Strands, by Robert Fuller

Kids screaming and squealing nearby in delight, in play, their bright strands of delight radiating outward wherever kids delight in play, in times that look over them and protect them from the insane activities of adults. Their delight extends in strands that you cannot see.

Luminescent strands of web that lit up my porch in sparkles, nearly invisible, but which some kind arachnid left for me to observe and enjoy. Webs that led to the mystery of butterflies, those of the cocoon who flew away from cylindrical childhood to flit this way and that, with no care.

Webs that served as silky protection to allow these children to emerge at appointed times that no one knew, to dust off their wings to fly freely in any direction; yet those similar silken webs made by the eight-legged ones, served to ensnare, entrap, and enclose their prey, to engorge themselves.

Yet the light, that was it, the light that gleamed from silken strands viewed in sunlight in the junipers, which somehow connected to opened cocoons of butterflies so ephemeral that a quick sighting would make them disappear into the illusion that they never were!

But you can’t see any of this until you stop! Drop your cares and sprout your wings, and simply fly, until you’re nowhere, and everywhere, all at once, with no care. And if some web or other happens to ensnare you, just remember your common silken heritage of freedom and entrapment.

March 8, 2024 [15:29-16:06]

The Gatekeepers, by Robert Fuller

Everywhere I went these days it seems there was yet another new checkpoint, like trying to get a few blocks away to the market in certain repressive regions of the world. And each of these new checkpoints was structured in such a way that it was its own little niche thing. And the ones who were manning these checkpoints, why, they all looked like celebrities, like someone I should have recognized if I were into that kind of cult worship thing that was now the rage. There were some who seemed to resemble pop icons in this or that genre or influencer specialty, but none of them looked at all interesting to me, and I certainly would never even have thought of giving them so much as the time of day if it were not for all these checkpoints.

The ones that were especially irksome to me were the ones that asked me for credentials in order for me to be able to prove to nobodies like themselves that I am fully capable of writing, whether music or literature or poetry; yet they stood there, mute as they could be, without an original word or thought, and they were certainly deaf to anything that I tried to impart to them.

I was reminded about that Kafka parable “Before the Law” where the poor guy trying to get through the Gate that blocked his way (well, truth be told, it wasn’t the Gate at all, it was the obstinate, unruly, ignorant, self-important Gatekeeper) well, he was, in the end, after a lifetime of struggle, told that he could have passed through the checkpoint years or decades ago, had he just asked...

But it really wasn’t that kind of a thing, in that those at any given checkpoint had been trained very carefully to ensure that no one at all could talk their way past any of the Gatekeepers, because that was precisely their point in standing there stiff as a board and not quite as sentient: The point was to obstruct anyone who for whatever reason wanted to proceed past that particular hurdle to the next, and to the endless series of such hurdles that inevitably followed.

So there was a group of us that met in secret with the aim of subverting what we considered to be a completely arbitrary and understanding and unfair system that rewarded only those who would play by its unwritten rules. We became adept at embodying our long-forgotten, neglected animal instincts, specifically those relating to the burrowing arts. In fact, this happened to such a profound extent that there were those in our secret circles who started to fashion claws and snouts and other similar tools of the trade that were particularly well suited to the art and science of tunneling; it was as if some of us had very quickly mutated bodily into our long-lost cousins such as Arvicola amphibius or any of the eleven tribes of similar demeanor and expertise.

In fact, there were those among us who undertook to read and assimilate all of the wisdom that the aforementioned Franz, the one from Prague, had bestowed upon us in his seminal work on these deep arts, “The Burrow”—which, mind you, was not only a field and subterranean guide and tour de force with respect to the techniques pertaining to this arena of activity, it was just as importantly a crash course in the twin arts having to do with security and paranoia, flip sides of the same coin.

It was very clearly stipulated within this rather thin yet dense volume that one must be, above all else, always on one’s guard, never underestimating the ever-present enemy.

So we gradually built up our repertoire of subterfuge for evading and eventually entirely dismantling this tyrannical system that purported to safeguard our society from its excesses and downsides, but which in fact, was itself what it claimed to safeguard us against.

As a rather new team, we began rather modestly, with just a few awkward snout maneuvers, along with a couple of digs of the claw; it was all very tentative, at least until we got the hang of where to dig, how deep, and for how long, so as to completely bypass the seemingly omnipresent Gatekeepers, who menaced us as far as the eye could see.

But then we experienced a different kind of malaise, one that even bordered on real crisis, namely, this: Where were we heading with all this intense digging activity? You see, it wasn’t enough merely to sidestep or bypass our Keepers, the sentinels of all those countless checkpoints; we had to develop a real plan with a real destination and a real destiny.

Thus, exactly a fortnight subsequent to our inaugural dig, we met in emergency session in one of the subbasements of one of our primary benefactors. There were numerous charts and maps arrayed there on the wall, every square inch covered with detailed posters pinned every which way, and we had our best personnel available to explain every last facet of our new objectives, as well as the gameplan that we would employ to achieve them.

Little were we aware, but the information even our best moles had gathered over the weeks, all of that so meticulously harvested and vetted intel, it was nothing but an elaborate trap by the very ones we were battling. And it was so well crafted on the part of the authorities of the day that, before we knew it, we had become precisely what we were trying to overcome.

March 9, 2024 [13:32-14:34]

Throwaways, by Robert Fuller

There was this guy, hung around sitting on benches downtown, he would start talking about just about anything to just about any passersby who were strolling by, minding their own business. Most of the time, it all fell on deaf ears, but, you know, he was in some ways a pretty smart cookie, erudite, and, it must be admitted, a notch above many when it comes to the well-read department.

So it’s quite possible the fella may have lost most of his potential audience right at the beginning—and he pretty much always started his spiel much the same way—going on about some Bloom character or other that nobody or his dog had ever heard of.

There was this one time, for example, when it was recorded that he launched into his speech something like this: “Leopold—” Can you imagine that!? Leopold, for Christ’s sake! Who in heck is called Leopold!? Anyways, in deference to the gentleman: “Leopold Bloom inadvertently gave a minor acquaintance of his a horse race betting tip, merely by uttering a single, innocent word: ‘Throwaway’—and he sure as heck wasn’t talking about a horse; no, he was simply referring to the paper he had been reading and that he was about to discard. His minor acquaintance later on informed him that he, the minor acquaintance, had placed the bet as suggested by his good friend, and he had won quite handsomely!”

This was a rather typical entree, if you will, into his other topics of interest, and later on, when this gentleman’s legacy was being more closely scrutinized for posterity, it was seen to be a kind of parable, a metaphor for his more general line of thinking.

No one recalls exactly how he transitioned from these ruminations of his upon a certain Leopold Bloom, and onward into the other more metaphysical aspects of his oratory, but it must nevertheless be stressed that this gentleman was a natural at the podium, and at any podium, according to some.

Yet his general line of thinking usually touched very deeply on how very casually the denizens of this society tend to comport themselves. You could tell just from the furrows in his brow how deep a thinker this gentleman was. When he was about to lead into the next topic of his discourse, there would always be a notable wrinkling of certain strategic aspects of his countenance, and just prior to his next nugget of wisdom, he would lightly, oh so lightly, touch his cheek or chin, and he would look up suddenly, as if having just awoken from an intense reverie.

Now, the topics that followed the literary references with which he always began, well, they were all tied to the same general theme, and his care in making sure to point out the fallacy of such an unthinking embrace of an excessively casual demeanor on the part of so many of society’s denizens, well, that was just part and parcel of how the gentleman’s gray matter was wired.

He was never overbearing or excessively loud or brash in his delivery; if anything, he was a tad understated, and sometimes you could see passersby cupping hand to ear just so as to be able to take in what the gentleman was imparting, to whoever might listen, just a wee bit better. Most of the passersby, having just purchased something of interest at the local shops, had one or more handle sacks of the plastic variety that they were toting around, clearly quite pleased with the nature of the valuables they had just recently procured. So the gentleman, feeling that it was incumbent upon himself to point out to them an inconvenient truth or two regarding the plastic handle sacks, he did just that, yet with utmost humility and, it may be said, with maximal deference to the feelings of those he was addressing.

There was an admixture of appeal to their better judgments, combined with a slight pressure upon their consciences, with respect to the single-use plastic handle sacks that they so casually accepted from all those vendors, and which they all knew full well, whether they were willing to admit it or not, would be sent, at the earliest opportunity, straight to the landfill, and from there, they most likely would be destined to become microplastics that would serve to torment and injure all manner of sea life. And each such single-use plastic handle sack would place more money in the coffers of the petrochemical conglomerates, the very same ones that were already deeply implicated in the almost certain, impending ruination of the Earth’s ecosystem for most living creatures—including themselves.

And he gently admonished the passersby, and implored them to simply stop accepting “free” single-use plastic handle sacks from all those vendors at every new purchase, simply by taking a moment to remember to reuse any old plastic handle sacks that had been used to transport previous purchases.

And every day, as he sat on yet another park bench to ask yet again for this one simple request, he began to notice more and more single-use plastic handle sacks, reproducing themselves endlessly, as if procreating with every new purchase.

March 10, 2024 [21:21-22:22]

The Friendly, by Robert Fuller

Omonia was jam-packed with enthusiastic fans from as far away as a thousand mile radius. The stadium, long considered to be fairly neutral territory—their proud slogan, notwithstanding the occasional unruly lot of football hooligans, was, after all, “Harmony, unity, concord”—the stadium was housing a rather unusual friendly this bright, hot day, featuring the long-time archrivals Transformers and Nemeses. Both teams featured some highly-compensated star players, including some who were faster than the wind, such as Damysus, Æolus, and Notus of the Nemeses, and on the opposing side, players with unusual abilities not normally seen elsewhere, including Sœms, who was said to be capable of plowing a corridor straight through the opposing defense as if a hot knife through butter, or wind through waves; Viadd, who was widely considered to be able to bring down the largest and strongest without so much as an iota of effort; and Surazal, a mythmaker in his own right who got back up again no matter how hard he was hit.

So, in a sense, the match appeared to be about speed versus unusual skills and cunning. Yet, on both sides of the pitch, there were things that simply were not talked about in polite company; each team had its own skeletons, its unique issues that came up between team members. For instance, on the Transformers side of the pitch, there was definitely bad blood between Blæ and Nica; there were persistent rumors that one of them—it was believed to have been Nica, according to most accounts—had hired a hitman, if not to kill the other, at least to tune him up pretty badly. And on the opposing side, curiously enough, among other things, there was the perpetual urge of entrapment, on the part of Minos, toward his compatriot Dædalus, who was only really doing his utmost to confuse the opposing team by creating an unfollowable maze of moves; and yet Minos strove at every turn to make Dædalus pay for his transgressions, by virtue of he, Dædalus, being the better team player and always seeming to rub it in Minos’s face, although Dædalus would have been the first to strenuously deny such unfounded, bald accusations.

The coaches of these two rival teams, the indomitable, if not insanely jealous Heyway of the Transformers, and Suez of the Nemeses, master of disguise and beguilement, and youngest sibling of both underworld and trident, were almost disgustingly cordial toward each other, at least according to certain contingents of the more vehement fans on either side. They had an unspoken agreement that tended toward disingenuous, if not outright sycophantic mannerisms, both on pitch and off, and they were known to have met on occasion in various anonymous dive bars throughout the region for unending rounds of schnapps and Icelandic vodkas.

Now, according to the rules and bylaws of such friendlies as this one, the officials would be chosen, two from each side, according to a coin toss. But there was inevitably some confusion, if not an outright ruckus, surrounding this seemingly straightforward task. There would always be a back and forth: Electrum, or Shekel? Sometimes it would be: Denarius, or Pegasus? They always just had someone of anonymity pick it from a hat.

After the coin flip, in this particular case, countless swarms of ravens and locusts made the skies black, yet they were gone just as soon as the match had begun, right after the bells tolled for whomever at opposite goalposts.

It was largely an uneventful match, well into the second half, both teams remaining scoreless, although there was a valiant attempt at a corner kick by one of the subs, who went by the handle S’peter’n, and whose slithery kick nearly snaked its way past not only the entire scrum but the goalie of record, Va’ish. There was much wailing at that moment on the part of the Transformers loyals, but the Nemeses, including Æolus himself, who was just about to be subbed in, well, they took in a big collective sigh of relief, except that Atlas, the other would-be sub, could hold it no longer and just had to excuse himself.

It was at this point in the match that things turned out ugly or worse. The Transformers brought in their big brass, with all manner of trumpets blasting, and locusts dressed as if for battle, as horses in colors of sulphur, red, blue, eyes and nostrils flaring; the Nemeses countered with their flocks of secrets, power, creation, light, birds of black surging and thronging about the masses in the stands, Chronos wielding his mighty scythe, all the way through to Ares and Styx and beyond. Clocks ticked madly, incessantly, and unbearably, and then the stadium crumbled into Chaos. The match remained a draw.

March 11, 2024 [15:09-17:29]

Recursion, by Robert Fuller

I was in this really weird mirrored dream, of myself dreaming myself dreaming all these mirrors dreaming myself, and it was like, What is this! So I took a deep breath and woke up, slowly, so as to not disturb myself as I was sleeping, mirrored in so many ways that were shown to me as shadows.

When I woke up, there I was, in front of me, dreaming that I was in this really weird mirrored dream, of myself dreaming and all those chaotic visions that no one should have to see, about dreaming all those chaotic mirrors dreaming myself, all in chaos asking, What is this, that you took a deep breath that was mirrored in some dream of yours that was not to disturb you as I was sleeping in front of all those mirrors dreaming me in this really weird mirrored dream, of you tearing out my hair as you dreamed that we were in this really weird dream, mirrored in all those chaotic mirrors of Fun House that cracked when the mirrors were touched and when not they all looked so distorted that they dreamed us back into their really weird dream about nothing at all.

When you woke up, you forgot to waken me, and you dreamed that I dreamed this really weird dream where you wakened me and I had forgotten how to awaken, and the mirrors mirrored me back to myself, and I said, What is this, is this life, and you answered, answer to answer, and here I was in this weird dream and unable to hear, and yet you beckoned and I was there, mirrored only to you.

How I got out of the labyrinth, no one knows.

I tried backtracking, and that seemed to work up to a point, but then you were there, back to dreaming this really weird mirrored dream about me, and then I saw in the mirror that it was you dreaming me in this really weird mirrored dream, and then I saw that the mirror was reversed, and it was me dreaming you in this really weird mirrored dream that took both of us off guard, and the Fun House beckoned more and more and then we went back there and the dreams vanished.

March 12, 2024 [17:29-17:55]

The Chimeras, by Robert Fuller

The cave of her kitchen just filled itself with the divine aromas of leek rings roasting in walnut oil, salted and peppered, with a light dusting of turmeric. And she was pleased. This aroma always pleased her, bringing back childhood memories of a similar ritual that would fill the senses with so much flavor, her mother and grandmother and their mothers before them for countless ages having perfected this cave-filling ritual that so captivated and captured all the senses, and leaving her to continue the tradition uninterrupted.

Yet all was not fully well in the hearth and household of Echidna, who was usually called Edna by her close friends. Neither her natural-born daughter, Scylla (who went by “Silly”), nor her adopted daughter—who was all but the identical twin of her sister—was turning out according to their mother’s sincere hopes and expectations. It wasn’t just that Charybdis (“Cherry”) and her doppelganger sister were as fully mischievous as could be—as if that in itself weren’t enough of a curse!—but they were equally and fully natural-born rebels, and on this holy day, they manifested that trait in large part by their complete avoidance of the kitchen-cave, having both stated rather plainly and forcibly that, “We just don’t like the smell!”

Yet, in Edna’s world—and she sometimes secretly called herself Esther, truth be told—Echidna was totally preoccupied with the compelling fear that her daughters were suffering from some kind of arrested development. They seemed somehow cut of a whole cloth, rather than as rags embroidered together from miscellaneous scraps of fabric stitched together as a patchwork quilt, which had for so many centuries been family tradition.

So while Esther was thus absorbed, so fully that the leeks were tinged and even burnt a bit more than she would have liked, her daughters were equally obsessed with attempting to transform whatever did remain of their original multifaceted beauties into vain, uniform nymphs as the fashions of the day were so wont to dictate among misdirected youth. They would apply various powders and cremes, softeners and highlighters, the ones all their friends were so quick to highly recommend, and Edna just got furious even thinking about it!

She thought of the clock tower in that grand church all laid out in marble, and its bell tower, and the sorrowful mother soaring so loftily above the lost ones; but none of that gave her solace, for she couldn’t put out of mind the time her daughters took that cruise near the island of that grand church and that, she remembered, was when their development was first so drastically altered.

They had somehow looked into a revealing mirror, they had seen clearly what they were and were supposed to be, and it was precisely then that they had rebelled! She even remembered the exact hour; it was sext, middle of the seven tollings, at high noon, with the Twelve Apostles all ringing in sequence; and she asked them after that what had happened, and they just demurred and giggled their girlish giggles as if nothing at all had happened.

March 13, 2024 [12:54-13:48]

Lachrymae, by Robert Fuller

The thick gray, twilight, lavender clouds were weeping tears of sustenance all over the valley, the valley of harmony, friendship, and peace, and its mountains to the south, when the cinnabar sunset burst through for a moment and was just as suddenly gone, bell sounds interspersed with divers pavans, vespers of lovers’ tears that flowed from the east of the nave, where voices joined in, echoed by low walls of quicksilver marble, and then black maples would seep dirges of exudate saps and gums right near where a bit of lead had struck one of their own back in the frontier days.

The next morning, when Alma woke up as from a strange dream, she had clear visions of olden times, of one who took up court as a lutenist with a king who authored a tome demonstrating how troubled men were taken hold of via black magic and so forth, a publication that found its way right into the tapestry of Macbeth. Looming over all her dream were things she could not understand, such as the ways in which fates were all but certain to become interwoven through the fabric of time, and that after the cloth was woven, it had to be cleansed and thickened, as if through the crude brushstrokes of some amateur gourmand or glutton walking west or north, or to southern corners.

And Alma remembered scenes from the south of France, where a painter of sunflowers tasted his brushtip of brick-red scarlet that was used for a schoolboy, an Arlesienne, a stone bench in the garden of a saint’s hospital, or walkers in a crescent moon landscape. This city was also the setting for his night café, refuge for drunkards and derelicts alike, with clashing blood-red and soft velvet green, and the mainstay of his stage, a yellow house, where he brushed and sheltered all those petals and stems of heliotropes.

And she remembered how all the world had wept in a mad dirge when the world finally knew who had been there and who they had lost, when no one at all had noticed him while he was here, except perhaps his brother and a few close friends.

So Alma saw how she had walked out into the night sky the day before, still of twilight, with a crescent moon and pastels of red peeking out from behind the clouds, and she walked right up to the trunk bearing the solace of tears of sap that cooled and congealed into gum over time, and she tasted just a sweet sip of its nectar, and she remembered that her town was at peace with her and with all the world, and there were refrains and choruses of old, true weepings of mirrored birds of sorrow that soaked through her from the old chapel like a night rain sounding through the valley and beyond.

March 14, 2024 [13:33-15:23]

Thoughts Inside a Cocoon, by Robert Fuller

Believers don’t know what it is to lead a sheltered life inside a snug, cozy incubator such as this. Yes, it’s true that it’s silken, and spun and woven with utmost care and precision, yet the outerworldly don’t seem to comprehend, can’t seem to feel how claustrophobic and stifling it can be inside this soft chamber of protection, as the body feeds on itself and becomes eventually transmuted beyond belief; and moreover, their own silken vestments of faith are that very same stiflement of enclosure that traps their own being in a snare of web, and it’s merely a limited, oppressive place that allows for no growth or crucial metamorphosis.

The protection, you see, in enclosures such as these is a mere illusion, and worse than that, a trap; and yet worse than even that, the most voracious of traps that will ensnare its occupant and doubtless devour it whole before it knows what has happened. The only remedy is surrender fully to the unseen forces that will transform—but only if you let them. They are quite allergic, as it turns out, to beings stuck in this or that frame of mind, this or that locked box of mind that will not be turned from the error of its ways. These forces are always present, you see, as a helpmeet to those who are open to such assistance; a closed box of attitude and entrenchment in false beliefs can only serve to further entrap and suffocate the unwitting victim of its own self’s delusion.

And protection, no matter what form it takes, is never a guarantee in any case. There are insatiable, cruel forces among the outerworldly that will gladly lunch on anything, even those who have already surrendered to the process, who have tacitly or formally agreed to endure the necessary ordeal of becoming radiant with wings of freedom once the ballooned sepulchre of death has been breached by those very same unseen forces that demand the surrender of the entombed so that it may be thus transfigured and set free.

We pupae just give way to the necessary process, without a thought of allowing, perish the thought, perpetual confinement within a devious web of mind that cannot see its way out of the bind. It is true, we are naturally unburdened with the bondage of memory or belief, and, if we happen to survive the necessary ordeal, we always fly free through the rays that beam down upon us, until we can fly no more.

March 15, 2024 [13:23-14:01]

Glitter Tavern, by Robert Fuller

A busted saddle horn, a grove of madroña trees, a pauper’s cemetery, a bobcat, a lost cave. The morning sun in the light of a full moon, with visions of animals grazing along a clump of huckleberry bushes, rich grasses and luscious berries awakened by the mule at the riverbank nearby, the contours of the land washed away.

The old man, hale and robust, earned his living in jumbled recollections of a rest home, a hatful of ore, as a wounded outlaw in a crude log cabin who continued to search for an ancient earthquake, a crack in the rock, tracks of a cat in dry grasses into the dark. He prowled the trails, found the entrance to the old mine tunnel, locating the buried cache.

In the driving rain, about fifteen miles away, outlaws preyed on stagecoaches heading for San Francisco, eventually riding away toward Sacramento, long winding roads, never to return to the buried stagecoach. When the bandits broke camp several miles from the scene of the crime, a storm struck at the old mine shaft along the trail, three packhorses and three bandits finishing dinner, unsuspecting. Images of dead partners, screaming, would awaken the bobcat a short distance from a vein of quartz that paralleled the stream, muddy tracks that dominated one wall of the cave.

During the coming winter months, heavy rains easily covered a barely remembered dream, elusive sleep while peacefully prospecting for fortune, to someday uncover a mysterious gold-filled rock niche or crevice, with the haunted desperation of history, not all of it good.

March 16, 2024 [14:39-16:03]

Saint Patrick’s Purgatory, by Robert Fuller

As the academics largely argued, it is often said that every civilization tends to assume that with the passage of time myths can be regarded as archaeological evidence offering an escape from the real world, an archaic movement of form divorced from content, so strictly all-embracing of a neglected pagan sunwise circuit of historic landscape that you can comprehend every part of the island without bothering to sleep clockwise, or sense, in the symbols discovered in tangible sacred objects, solar and lunar memories involving cosmographic parallels within the living godhead of walks and journeys into diabolical superstitions.

Foolhardy or lesser ancestral spirits could hope to enter this place—a vehicle for abstract thought, not in definitive acts of rational argument knocking on both sides of the sacred, nor in the otherworld of purely fictitious narrative in word or speech, fact and fiction dwelling in stories of deities lost, invented personages—however, in the midst of less lethal certainties, it could be argued that the dominant myth of materialism, devoured by its own greed, a jewel no longer, has supplanted this country, across chronological layers of mythic monuments in the shape of lifeless grey and black spots mixed together in semi-decayed fragments of darkened sky.

Original Sin and Scientific Rationalism developed at least four major canons of myth, akin to the poetic imagination of numerical abstraction, evidence of contemporary Irish life that places story-telling as seemingly incompatible with supernatural accounts of reality—the co-existence, of the power to fascinate at the sub-atomic level, with evidence of legends and rituals that vanished long ago, yet failed to squeeze the old gods from future writings.

Fortunately, the fairies eradicated those traces of ostensibly objective language, akin to post-mythic, subjective objectivity, as an antidote to technological dogma. The ancient spirit is still very much alive in logos and muthos, both tangible and divine, syllable by syllable, a mythological web of deities spun by the Fire Goddess Brigit, the demi-god Finn McCool, and their wanderings through the public imagination.

March 17, 2024 [14:50-16:51]

Novel Ideas, by Robert Fuller

Murray was the kind of guy who mostly kept to himself, even when he made the rounds of the usual local watering holes. All around each of the bars he frequented, there would be the most intense whispering about what was Murray up to now. The regulars would on any given day see him scribbling furiously in, of all things, several different paper notebooks, sometimes seemingly all at once. And most of the time, when anyone dared to approach him to see what he was up to, he immediately took a long, cold sip of his beer, after he had ceased with all his maniacal scribbling, taking care, naturally, to discreetly cover up his sloppy penmanship as if a schoolgirl blushing at unwanted attention.

But there were times when Murray sported only his rather large tablet, as if suddenly the paper he’d been so fastidiously using had suddenly gone out of style. And these times seemed to the local clientele even more mysterious, and somehow darker than his pen scribbles. To some, it looked like Murray was playing some kind of devious video game, the likes of which they simply couldn’t fathom, as to the way the controls worked. He would jerkily move his right index finger over large swaths of the screen, as if cutting down a few evil opponents with a fell swoop. Yet, any time someone approached him, even to offer him a drink, he immediately became the furtive Murray, the one who the locals liked to think lurked in the Stygian shadows in some back alley where things were likely to happen to people.

Yet there were other occasions where he would mingle with the regular folks, especially a pair of characters that, like Murray, no one else could seem to figure out. Now, these local watering holes being, as they were, bars, taverns, and pubs—which back in the day were called “public houses”—most of the local clientele, and most notably some of the most ornery of the bartenders, seemed to think that there were just certain things you never were to discuss in polite company, and especially not if you were wetting your whistle at some dive bar or other, and Murray, well he always took the historical slant on that particular topic, and he would drivel endlessly on and on about how establishments like the present one had always been hotbeds for critical thinking and whatnot, and how they had always been crucial—“incubators”, he called them—for the proper formation and dissemination of ideas, and how this great and free nation of ours never would have even seen the light of day if the discussion of such ideas had been outright prohibited just on account of they may have been just a tad controversial to certain of the more sensitive patrons in the bunch.

What no one seemed to know about Murray, for the longest time—that is, until the day he started talking about it virtually non-stop—is that he was actually, at least in his own mind, quite accomplished in the art, science, and sorcery of spinning yarns: The poor bastard thought he was some kind of a wordsmith! As if anyone at all, save Murray himself, believed a word or even a syllable of such nonsense!

And there were certain patrons with lineage from the Emerald Isle who had doubtless been graced with the gift of gab straight out of the womb! Yet they never went on and on about how they were “writing this book” and how “you’re going to be in it”—a threat, not in the slightest veiled, if you ask me, no matter how you sliced it!—and yet their very own, fine literary contributions were, to put a word on it, indisputable! But once he got going on the topic, you just couldn’t for the life of you shut Murray’s trap, which just continued flapping endlessly in the breeze like some lost butterfly following its chaotic path to who knows where! And he just didn’t seem to get that no one gave a fig about the literary “masterpiece” that he was busy penning instead of earning an honest living.

So there was a group of us, we got together in a kind of “exploratory committee” as to what we could do about “the Murray problem”—which, truth be told, was weighing on the whole lot of us like a leg in concrete in a bucket destined for the bottom of the East River, or some similar tourist destination.

The first thing we did, we brought in some professionals, discreetly, of course, so as not to arouse suspicion on the part of our “subject”, and they would buy Murray a few drinks, just being neighborly and whatnot, and then they would secretly put on their, as it were, white coats—their analysts’ hats—and they would quietly grill that sorry sap Murray clear to the bone, trying to get at what exactly made that geezer’s clock tick the way it did, so erratically as it did, giving all the usual patrons and drunkards the time of day such as made them want to crawl up the walls.

Yet never once did that bastard so much as flinch. He just answered every inquisition as matter-of-factly as any cool cookie would, and he even made recommendations to each of these seasoned professionals as to how they might best polish their craft! And all the while, you could see in their faces the dread of having to hear yet another account of how this literary masterpiece of Murray’s was going to take the whole damn world, before you knew it, by storm!

So then the steering committee tried a different tack; they each, at seemingly random times, feigned interest in their pariah friend, not directly as to the tome he claimed to be working on, but rather, regarding the endless universe of ideas he said he carried around in that ugly old mug of a brainpan of his.

And this was when the confessions started pouring out of the chap himself, as if Holy water or blood itself from an effigy of the Mother of Mercy herself—the stuff of miracles! So we knew we were onto something, for the moment. Yet, when Murray tried his best to explain all these legion ideas to us mere mortals, laymen that we were, truly, it just came out as a mad jumble, as if someone had taken every word the sorry character had ever penned or claimed to pen, and it came out as pureed alphabet soup. And he was right there, going on and on endlessly about how his greatest pride was his own self-plagiarization, how the most profound “thoughts” he managed to sponge from the deepest recesses of reality or his own demented mind were actually his own.

It was but a week later that Murray was committed.

March 18, 2024 [14:25-15:57]

After, by Robert Fuller

The entire cast and crew of the weekly series was waiting for the final words. They were all nervously perched on the edges of their seats, hoping against hope that there wouldn’t be follow-up notes informing them that such and such a scene would require a retake. The ending shot of this episode was one lingering on Marianne, as she gave a quizzical look halfway toward the camera, which did a subtle clockwise roundabout, not even thirty degrees through the circle. Marianne was looking her finest for this shot, so everyone knew that this was a keeper. There was a hushed huddle among the higher-ups as they made their final decision, which, as everyone breathed a collective sigh of relief, was, “It’s a wrap!”

They all took pride in their work, and everyone gave their utmost to help create the illusions that made up a compelling story line that their faithfuls could accept as yet another key episode in the annals of the crime show genre, yet the entire cast and crew thrived on the after-parties, because they were family, and family sticks together and follows tradition, without exception.

Some of the cast—just a tiny fraction, to be sure—didn’t even bother changing out of their stage garb; this was mostly the most minor of the extras, mind you, but there were even some of the principals who flaunted their small-screen raiments, unconcerned in the least that they might be mobbed by unruly fans in the course of their ensuing pub crawl. Stranger yet were the camera crew—some of them—who were still decked out in their ARRI Alexas and RED RANGER Monstros along with the most premium lenses available, having gotten past security yet another time; they simply wanted to document every after-party, since there were some in the camera crew circle who secretly wanted to make documentary films exposing what might happen when the cameras that helped create the illusion stopped rolling; yet, the show’s family remained intact.

What most of this family was completely oblivious of, though, was that there had been a secret pact entered into by just the very highest echelons of the Executive Producers, a mere handful of high-rollers, that this crime show would be different. There would be a unique selling point to it, but in order for them to be able to make it happen, it would of necessity have to be on a “need to know” basis. And they justified their hush-hush, furtive approach to the filming of this series by noting that the only way their plan would work would be for absolutely everyone except those who had conceived of the idea to be unaware that this was anything but a way for the family to let off steam after a rather grueling workweek.

Now, this was one of those TV series that was meant for the binge-watchers primarily, so there were to be no regular weekly releases of anything in the show during any given season. The Executive Producers, thus, were basically bankrolling their treasures; they were hoarding them until it was time to pull the lever on the slot machine to hit paydirt.

What they planned to do, without the foreknowledge of most of the staff—except inasmuch as the part of the contract that no one seemed to ever read clearly stipulated in said plan, in no uncertain terms—was to make the series into a reality TV show that would highlight interpersonal relationships among various members of cast and crew in such a way that the audience would be able to follow the romances, squabbles, trysts, and every other such facet of their interactions and dramas, both on and off stage.

As for legalities, in terms of possibly disgruntled cast or crew, this gang of Executive Producers had deep enough pockets that they would be able to out-litigate virtually anyone involved; besides, there was a little-touted profit-sharing clause in the fine print of every single contract in the entire family, and they were sure that no one would get bent out of shape once the clause was aired out properly.

What the Executives didn’t have any clue about, however, was that some of the rogue elements amongst the camera crew had already been dumping their footage on YouTube, directly after every party, which meant that the entire premise underlying the plans of all the Executive Producers had effectively been short-circuited, well before the binge watchers had any access whatsoever to the full season of shows.

Season one was an abysmal flop.

March 19, 2024 [19:25-20:27]

The Bench, by Robert Fuller

There was someone sitting there, there really was, I tell you. They were there, sitting there, just as surely as you or I were sitting there, right across there, at the bus stop, and they were sitting there judging me and no one else. I felt it in my bones like me and no one else might feel it.

There. But you might imagine I imagined that there was someone there, or someone else there, but there was, there on a bench, judging me and no one else who might like me feel judged like that.

There was no reason I could have seen anyone sitting over there judging someone like me in that way, someone like me who was just there and who could have never been judged by anyone in that way, not at all.

There was, however, a bench, and there was someone sitting there, right there, and the other one there judged me as I merely sat where I sat and kept to myself.

There was, but no one had ever told me that someone like that could ever hold any kind of ultimate hold over me, like some kind of judgment that held me there against my will or yours or anyone else’s.

There was a group that sat over there on that bench that held me and tried to hold me and they tried and tried but I said “No!”

There were words after that that were said but no one said what they were...

March 20, 2024 [20:51-21:13]

Cloaks, by Robert Fuller

There were some wearing some. They were like bats in a cave, they may have been judges or priests, one just couldn’t tell. Their vestments or capes were like those that others wore when we saw them wearing them.

They all flapped about, we had no idea what they were doing, and they carried on like we had no consequence in their little lives, and we didn’t. Their costumes were like what we wore when we wore nothing but shame.

Their wings were like swords like machetes that cut through us like nothing else. When we approached them, they melted into the nightmares of the nothingness of their little lives that meant everything to them yet were nothing, nothing to us.

Every bat wing flap that they flapped was but beating dust at the night’s nothingness that they held over us each time they flapped each wing toward the candle light bathing their wings each time they flapped.

We were there, there were so many of us who were there, who were watching. It was a cave, and we were there watching what these priests and judges did, and how they worked, and what we were when we were there watching them do what they did.

We all saw what they did and what they would do and would always do when we just saw and watched and did nothing. And then we saw what to do and how to do it and how we should never let them do this to us again.

March 21, 2024 [19:51-20:11]

The Preacher, by Robert Fuller

Everyone was there, they had all bought tickets for this event months in advance, and they had waited for hours in the pouring rain even just to be able to enter the sanctuary where they would finally be able to hear their favorite speaker in person. No one, no one at all in this audience of followers, of devoted fans, had even considered the possibility of selling these priceless tickets to infidels who wouldn’t understand even a single word of what the speaker would say. Security was tight at this event, to say the least.

There was a general hubbub, people were talking amongst their intimates for quite some time, and when that got dreary, as it often might, they even condescended to talk some kind of smalltalk with people they barely even knew, even though they’d certainly seen them enough times at these kind of events.

At one point, a barely audible bell rang, which was hardly even noticed among the general hubbub of the evening as it unfolded, but there were those amongst the crowd who opined that this must have been the heralding, however modest, of the arrival of the guest speaker himself; yet, there were others, the more disgruntled and less easily satisfied of the lot, who, frankly speaking, begged to differ with such a broad-minded, carefree assessment of the state of affairs in the present antechambers of record, a state of affairs, which, according to some, was nothing short of scandalous.

However, while certain parties were indulging themselves in their sorely-needed smoke breaks, and while certain others were relieving themselves in other ways which shall not be disclosed at present, there was a tiny flicker of light in the general arena of what may have been considered to be the onstage region of the venue; yet, when security looked further into the matter, it was disclosed that one of the stagehands had gone rogue.

After what was at least a six-hour delay in the proceedings, finally the authorities found it within their purview to wheel onstage a rather sickly-looking figure, either via a boy’s little red wagon, or perhaps it was a wheelbarrow, but in either case, this certainly was not at all what the general public had paid bank for, and many of them assessed that this may have actually been an imposter.

Some of the patrons actually made a bee line for the exits, with a view toward obtaining a refund, which was not to be forthcoming, yet most of the faithful remained stolidly, stalwartly, steadfastly in their pews and awaited what they hoped and prayed would be the divine guidance that they had always sought from this master of such discourse as was often tendered from those very lips.

Once his assistants had finished wheeling him so laboriously up to the podium, he was drawn into a coughing fit that lasted for a spell, yet, as it turned out, this was but a mere pretext for others on his staff to surround him, inexplicably, with dozens of cats of many sizes, descriptions, and demeanors.

Once the venerable speaker deigned to take his first audible intake of breath, those who remained among the faithful still seated, so anxious to hear his every word, were heard to gasp, such that it was deafening to hear. Yet the venerable speaker said nothing, merely gesticulated in such a manner so as to cause the faithful to even begin to question the merits of this guest of honor, and what his larger motives may have been.

And the cats, they began to scrap with one another, as cats are known to do, yet still the venerable speaker said nothing.

The plate was duly passed, and filled with countless treasures of currency and coin, and the faithful went obediently to the after, to the inevitable coffee social.

March 22, 2024 [15:23-16:18]

The Editor, by Robert Fuller

Theo Godfrey was pulling some very long hours, with more overtime than he could handle. The word had just come from on high that his specialty would be highly in demand going forward, for at least several months. There had been an edict sent via official email just days ago that required all “essential personnel” to work virtually non-stop until further notice, so of course Theo was required to participate in this hellish spree of overtime until the emergency subsided to a sufficient degree, as determined by the ongoing monitoring by the authorities of record.

According to his work history for the firm, Theo had served as Senior Editor for nearly twenty years, and his work history was unimpeachable, to say the least. His editorial work had long been lauded and feted like no one else’s, in part because his particular sub-specialty involved intricate manipulations of highly sensitive location-based movements by some of the key players being so closely monitored by the firm.

Typically, a day in the work life of Theo might involve his calculations of the “initial trajectory specifications” for the subject in question; these initial specifications might then be followed with a number of “moving target trajectory analyses”—just a fancy term indicating the firm was doing a best guess synopsis of what the subject in question was apparently trying to accomplish—and the final, most crucial step of the process involved the most minute, time-intensive reckoning of any adjustments that might be required to the various trajectories of the subject in question so that said subject might then be set in compliance, or at least in closer compliance, with the exacting needs of the firm.

Now, Theo had never met anyone who had been thus interfered with, in such a way that the course of their intended actions might be subtly or substantially altered via such adjustments, as they were referred to as per the in-house lingo, but he had already suffered from several bouts of the most intense nightmares that, as far as he could tell, must have been directly linked to his chosen occupation; often, even in waking hours, he had the distinct sense that not only was he being watched by some unseen force, but that the quality of his very work was being affected adversely, sometimes to such an extent that his calculations proved to be not only completely useless and fruitless, but, far worse than that, so far off base that the subjects he was “adjusting” in various ways began to exhibit symptoms of such deep levels of psychosis that he even started to fear for his life, and even began to think that some of these subjects were following him, and possibly even applying a kind of reverse psy-ops on his very person.

Yet when he volunteered for his psychological evaluation by the highly-skilled staff, they could find no evidence whatsoever that his demeanor was in any sense divergent from accepted norms.

The nightmares continued, they ate more and more into his waking hours and his abundant overtime, and he finally awoke one fine morning with the distinct feeling that he just couldn’t move himself at all, without feeling that he was being entirely controlled by an unseen force. And that was when they arrived.

March 23, 2024 [16:20-17:00]

Capers, by Robert Fuller

Comedy night at the Bad Ass Café, Friday, the 4th of February. Two days prior, there had been a mad scramble for tiny green sour “Easter eggs”—it was even advertised in the local rags as a “Martian Easter egg hunt”; really; what could that possibly mean? So during this assembly of ragtag wannabe comedians, you can bet your bullets that there were at least a dozen offcolor references to “Musk’s SpaceX crown jewels” and all manner of bad jokes that referenced his private parts which everyone knew he wanted to send into orbit or beyond. Never mind that this was a good two and a half months prior to that certain holiday!

Yet, as all the in-crowd in Dublin were well aware, those green nuts of some would-be space traveler were of absolutely zero concern; this was about a serious shortage of the sour pea-like condiment and its longtime pizza bestie at the BAC, mussels—both of which were in precariously short supply at this very moment, which happened to mark the occasion of the very centennial celebration of the publication of Ireland‘s most famous infamous tome.

Now, it was not widely known as to why capers and mussels were such the rage in terms of popular pizza toppings, but it was rumoured that a virtual unknown in the arena of serious writing had, within the last two or three decades, made his mark precisely at the Bad Ass Café already of note, and had now famously, as it turns out, ordered that very ensemble of toppings on their melted-cheese crusty during his inaugural visit to that esteemed eatery whilst embarking on his very own self-guided tour de Bloom.

It was not generally known until numerous years later that this very same self-guided tour was the very beginning of the Joyce reawakening in Dublin, and general all over Ireland, upon all the living and the dead. Yet, this strange dish, a pizza pie with such unusual companions? Why did that suddenly become the rage, just two or so decades after this pilgrimage of note?

And why now, this Groundhog Day, such an important centennial if there ever was one, why were such seminal ingredients now in such short supply? The Café was being bombarded by Joyce fans of such vehemence that they were willing to trade in their very carefully guarded stash of nutty gizzards, stuffed roast heart, and grilled mutton kidneys, and for what!? This fly-by-night caper surrounding a virtual unknown in the industry who had for some unknown reason developed a cult following, notwithstanding that he had never published an honest word in his life!?

Well, if you were to talk to some of these diehard fans, it was not just the general intrigue all over the Isle, it was the rather gauche, as some described it, culinary affect of the thing that they most viscerally responded to and, frankly, ate up, cheese crust and all.

And the fella who penned some words but was never really published? Well, that had been Joyce himself, had it not been for a certain Sylvia Beach. So they, the fans, were all in, not only to find those missing gems of melted-cheese crusty toppings so as to be able to celebrate a veritable feast of any and all the senses, but also to find the power within their ranks to in some way or other locate the lost wordsmith they intuitively knew they had all been missing all these years, so that his works could finally see the light of day.

And Comedy Night, three days after? There were all kinds of cracks about “Let’s wait six weeks to see how general it is,” and a few apropos of “It only took three days, but this holiday’s a moving target.” And there was a deafening thud to that Comedy Night.

Yet, in the next day’s paper, a throwaway, it was widely reported that the twin toppings had somehow prevailed, despite all shortages, and a wild party was had by all—despite the fact that the mysterious author who started it all was never found.

March 24, 2024 [18:20-19:26]

Burrowing, by Robert Fuller

My design specifications have become my own weak spots. This fortress of my old age has passed into whistle-like noises, a frightful, stress-filled ordeal of my own delusion, with imaginary creatures peering at me, keeping me under surveillance, filled with the insecurity of peril, trying to recall how to once again traverse the complicated labyrinth of adulthood.

A thorough analysis of rationality, reentering some hypothetical tunnel with a stillness and serenity, including any noises that might crop up, sounds growing in intensity at a maze within a maze, where I can rest and hear disturbing sounds out in the open, preoccupied as I am with other matters, the merest hint of the illusion of security, the auditory disturbance of incessant tunnel digging that magically appears before you peripherally, as plumbing leaking in some remote part of the final fading echoes of the peril of my own labyrinth of adventure, in search of a solution.

Every sharp tooth and talon, at a remote distance from all these disturbing sounds, infinite permutations of ferocious digging efforts, initiated by the enemy himself, pursuing its goals with an insatiable appetite within my mound of soil, would reveal just about anything, regardless of whether it were to disappear to someplace even more remote, on some great adventure.

Security is a blood-stained heap of strange noise that could be easily vacated via artificially-induced landslides, all direct attacks on it merely exploratory, like a fly-by-night operation, a maze of tunnels haphazardly scribbled on a napkin.

March 25, 2024 [13:57-15:05]

Quarry, by Robert Fuller

Odd radishes, rainbow-hued, pierced through with mallet and machete, here in this cryptic catacomb, blood river of words: a quarrier of dream states, lost like so many others, with the same terminal illness. Every single chisel mark was a thing to be hoarded in the secret passage, chiseled firmly into the empty dark labyrinth of time, a festive gluttony of closed lids, lurid visions of unparalleled richness, carafe after carafe of every conceivable sweetness, an almost deafening roar of intricate geometric designs, of an overly active imagination, a final swing of the pickaxe; a crumpled heap of flesh boots; a last gasp of breath.

Out of a darkroom of nightmares, silently and darkly, overlooking a pearl of the naked eye, a feast or ballroom event, a rapture of rock cliff secrets, never seen before nor since, yet caught up by mistake in the teeth of that horrible apparatus, informed by the authorities: I would find a way out of their machine, out of the power structure of the top officials, to observe the truth of whatever transpired before me this bright day. Something was different all of a sudden, fueled perhaps by the will to live; scenes of massive banquet tables: waves of roasted vegetables, creamy sauces, laden down with the very finest wines and desserts.

Just before drifting off into all those hours of missed sleep, which to me was sacred, I knew I would still have to awaken to someone else’s misguided tyranny, in the dead of night.

March 26, 2024 [13:36-14:39]

Russian Dolls, by Robert Fuller

“I bequeath to you this doll, it will tell you a cure for your troubles.” Her stepsisters were jealous of her beauty, in order that she might be tanned by the sun and the wind. It was her doll, she always kept the most delicate morsel for her, when all were at rest, and the doll would eat and pluck flowers the next day and the doll showed her a dense forest near her dwelling where the girls were working, pretending to put out the lights in the house, and night fell.

The gates opened, and the doll looked out of the window at three pairs of hands and the light in the skull’s eyes, and replied, “The morning is wiser than the evening!” All grew dark, the black rider appeared for a moment, the eyes of the skulls sent forth their light, the doll looked out of the window—and there appeared a doll dressed in white, riding on a white horse, and another, on a red horse, all in red clothes—and thought of the three pairs of hands, and the black rider, lit by the skull only at the approach of dawn. The eyes of the skull, burnt to cinders, would follow them everywhere.

March 27, 2024 [21:21-22:02]

The Maze, by Robert Fuller

I finally figured a way out of my predicament—or so I thought. But the curious thing about the corridors I was always passing through is that the decorations on the walls, and even the wall materials themselves, kept changing, at random timings, so that my attempts to free myself were always cut short, subverted by some mysterious unseen force that was sadistically torturing me and making my predicament ever worse. Not only did the walls and their materials keep changing—at times, they would resemble bricks, although in my estimation, they were the cheaply-manufactured variety, of some other material, a mere facade, and not bricks at all; at other times, they would all of a sudden morph into a hedge-like foliage, or even some type of particle board or cardboard simulacrum of what was supposed to be wood, and in those instances I could smell an enticing odor redolent of protein blocks lightly tinged with a fruit aroma that I couldn’t quite for the life of me place, but it was perpetually just out of reach, as if I were doing a replay of the doings of some Tantalus-type character—but even more disconcerting was that the width and height of the corridors, regardless of the material, would keep adjusting, and often in rather dramatic ways, so that I was always fearing for my life, hoping not to be crushed inadvertently by a careless misstep in one direction or the other; and my phobias were always on high alert, what with my claustrophobia kicking in something fierce when the corridors were far too narrow, and, in the rare instances when the corridors were so wide that I couldn’t even see the walls, I had the most intense ever agoraphobic attacks.

Now, even in those cases where the width and height of the corridor walls were so great in extent so as to render the walls themselves invisible, I was always aware that I was in some form of sadistic entrapment engineered by a malicious and cruel overlord who was always outside of my direct sensory perception, yet whom I was always psychically attuned to, and who in some sense always seemed, paradoxically, to be directing my futile efforts to escape my ever more precarious situation. At times, I even tried my best to plead with this ruthless potentate, but always to no avail; not only would my pleas obviously fall on deaf ears, but it seemed to me that this tyrant would turn the screws of cruelty even tighter, by means of the endless echoes of my calls and screams continually bouncing off the corridor walls—and every time this happened, the wall materials were metamorphosed into the kind that not only reflects sounds, but ever more amplifies them to such a painful degree that there is no escape, as if one were trapped in an echo chamber of one’s own devising—and each time this happened, I would fall down on the corridor floor, exhausted and shattered, until the next scene change of walls and corridors came into play.

There was one day, and I had lost track of the days long since, that I finally sensed the possibility, however remote, of a kind of, if not respite from, then at least a slight easing of my situation; at such times, I even dared hope for ultimate release from this prison.

It was one of those types of hallways that seemed to lead toward an actual doorway, some kind of egress from this insane labyrinth that had for so long, for a veritable lifetime, in my estimation, entangled me in this unwarranted bondage. So I carefully followed the clues that were there in plain sight—there were bits of writing chiseled into the stone-like walls, for example, in pictographs that were completely unfamiliar to me, and which may in fact have been some kind of hidden code that I was meant to decipher, and there were arrows pointing in many seemingly random, arbitrary directions, in many different styles and shapes, some of them even circular or spiral, all of which was to me an indication that if I were only to solve this puzzle, I might finally find a way out.

Finally, in heightened anticipation of my ultimate release, I found a door, but it said “Green Room” in strange Gothic letters, so I knew that, while I was possibly on the right track, this door was not the one that would free me. I walked further, and there was just then a blinding light that I could not escape but which beckoned me to it such that there was nothing to do but surrender to it. Because of the blinding glare, it didn’t even register that I had suddenly found my way onto a stage.

It was a drawing room in Second Empire style, a massive bronze ornament placed for all to see, squarely on the mantelpiece. But just before my arrival, I heard strange murmurs and whispers; it was the Valet, Estelle, and Inez, who spoke to me in French, sotto voce, telling me that I, Garcin, nearly missed fulfilling my role. So I said the only thing that I could have said: “Hm! So here we are?”

Yet the play never ended.

March 28, 2024 [13:16-14:20]

Watches, by Robert Fuller

We were a tight-knit group. Most of our operation involved field research, surveillance, that sort of thing. Even though it was anything but a top-down organizational structure, there was one amongst us who was considered the head honcho, but we never referred to him directly in that way, on account of he was really allergic to that approach to human activity, putting just one guy in charge of the whole operation; he said that the only thing that would ever come of that way of doing things is that the guy at the top would become more and more puffed up with himself until his urge to control others became pathological or worse. Yeah, Robin Sherwood, he was the kind of guy who never took himself that seriously, and he always insisted on just about everyone on the team taking on just about any role, without anyone at all really in charge of the whole lot. Mind you, I was one of the few exceptions, since I had a head for numbers as well as a track record of steering the gang in the right direction, in terms of what our mission objectives were. So yeah, it was me who did the books.

Most of the guys—and by that, I mean people of whatever gender preference; we didn’t care one way or the other about a detail like that—were stationed in rather plain, ordinary-looking, inconspicuous sedans, at least in most precincts we tended to cover, and we would carefully scour the area for marks, the well-dressed types who wore the usual carefully pressed designer suits, the kind of uniforms that well-heeled stuffed suits usually wear; and most of these characters tended to sport half a pair of cuffs minus the other half and the part that would link their wrists together behind their backs, if you see what I’m getting at. And that was what we were looking for.

These types were apparently to some lesser or greater extent obsessed with time—which, as they always said, was money—so their half pair of cuffs minus the linkage was always ticking away, annoying passersby like nobody’s business; and these pieces of theirs, they usually ticked or otherwise showed the passage of time in several different time zones, since these self-important types were always proudly reminding themselves of all those places all around the globe where they had figured out ever more novel ways to exploit those who actually did the real work.

Now, our team had various ways of helping these characters free themselves of their partial wrist shackles—and none of those methods, it should be noted, imposed upon them any sort of bodily harm. Upon a sighting of yet another mark sporting say, a Breitling or Omega, or those ubiquitous overrated Rolexes—we always referred to them, with little irony, as rolodexes—or even the occasional Richard Mille outlier, one of our usual ruses would be to have one of our operatives approach the mark, and be all gushing and fawning over the damn timepiece; someone else would distract him in some way from the side opposite the timepiece, and then a third team member would come up and have a scuffle with the first, who was careful to grab onto the mark’s wrist just so, and in such a way that the mark didn’t feel a thing, while at the same time protecting the booty. I can’t at this time, for obvious reasons, divulge any of our other trade secrets, but suffice it to say that we had as many as the day is long.

Our enterprise maintained a tightly-guarded list of fences who we knew could get the job done so that we could fulfill our sacred mission statement; they were underground, sure, but not in the sense of being shady characters, criminal types, or anything like that. No, they just did what was required, and they mostly did it without leaving so much as a trace. And we used some of the same tactics our marks tended to use for their offshore tax havens and whatnot, except that our havens were actually for a legit purpose.

Some of you may have heard about schemes, capers, that is, that sound to some degree similar to our operation, but our approach was different in a substantial way, which is to say that not only were we able to receive fair market value for our goods, but we also had a unique way of dispensing with the actual product afterwards, just to ensure that it would never be returned to the original owner, and just as importantly, so that it would never be worn by some other self-obsessed, rich schmuck of any description.

Once again, we’re talking about closely-guarded trade secrets in the context of this interview, so I’m afraid I can’t say much more on this topic save that, in our parlance, we take care that the physical product itself is “repurposed”, if you see what I’m getting at. I’ve already said far too much, I’m afraid, so that will conclude this interview, gents; but I do want to caution you, as always, with this little bit of folk wisdom: Watch yourself.

March 29, 2024 [19:12-20:09]

Megaphones, by Robert Fuller

The pundits had all their talking points in order; the social media influencers were all lined up like so many ducks in a row; the pop culture icons were ready to sing their bling like nobody’s thing; the stuffed suits were all in pathetic ultra-tailored “master” uniform garb replete with polka-dotted navy blue and pink ties and suave, diamond-studded wrist pieces that kept ticking cash register clicks and clacks like nobody’s business.

Nearby, there were silent not-so-much protests as they were meditations, retreats from the basic hubbub of ordinary commerce, and they were just these people situated near the lake, just being there, doing what some would call nothing, not much of anything at all; but then there were these others, pumped up with all kinds of vitriol about absolutely nothing, who would then show up in what they called “protest” about apparently something, which was actually nothing, and they showed up in flashy cars, trucks, and tanks, and they arrived at this peaceful lake in full riot gear, weapons all cocked for action, and then the leader, he got out his first of seven trumpets, as it were, and he began blaring into the poor instrument all of his loudness, as loudly as might be possible, and he was duly joined in chorus, by a deafening roar of echo chambers of followers and sycophants and stuffed suits who said absolutely nothing at all as loudly as possible.

After these introductory remarks, there was a brief pause, and then the mainstay of the thesis of these excessively amplified mouthpieces came to pass—even after the retreatants at the lake had gone elsewhere. And they all talked and squawked and twanged their way, at earsplitting volumes, into the illusion that they were in some sense of consequence to somebody; but no one heard their tonedeaf proceedings, no one at all, since anyone and everyone who remained in the vicinity had already lost their hearing and their humanity.

March 30, 2024 [16:44-17:14]

Bully Pulpit, by Robert Fuller

This was an all hands on deck meeting of the student body, in the assembly room, which in this high school was actually the auditorium which also doubled as a basketball court.

The meeting was duly called to order by the Principal according to the usual protocol, yet there was something in her demeanor which may have suggested to certain parties in the assembly that this meeting was not of the usual sort.

After she had cleared her throat—and some of the students afterward swore that she had done so at least a half a dozen times, although the person taking the minutes of the meeting later confirmed that she had done that only twice, three times, max—she got right down to business.

The toughs standing up in the back of the room, arms folded like serious business, well they were all scoffing at the whole affair, like nobody’s business—that is, that was until the Principal herself looked them all in the eyes, subtly beckoned each one of them in turn with a wag of her insistent index finger, as only she could do, and, although each one of them in turn would dearly have liked to exit the auditorium entirely unnoticed by anyone at all—in due course each one in turn slouched their way to the stage area where the Principal was at this very moment holding court, as it were.

No one attending this particular assembly, except for the Principal herself and of course the students who had secretly been asked to participate, had any idea that this simple meeting of the entire student body would metamorphose into anything even remotely similar to what eventually transpired.

But the first step was that the Principal had called out the entire gang of toughs, all of whom had been shamed into finding their way onto center stage, right near where the Principal herself was so regally seated and, as some later remarked, enthroned. And they dutifully found their way to the twelve chairs so carefully arranged in a delicate arc, in two sets of six on either side of the Principal herself, and bending so slightly toward the edge of the stage; and each duly and obediently seated himself in the chair as had been assigned to him by the authorities, and it was then that the secret recruits collectively moved out the banquet table, laden with the very finest of sumptuous, irresistible culinary items, and this banquet table, in the shape of what was barely even then seen to be a crescent, was duly and dutifully placed squarely in front of the baker’s dozen assembled in such a manner upon that stage.

Every manner of delectable, mouth-watering fare was brought out to everyone seated at this slightly crescent shape of a table, and the student assembly seated in the audience area quickly took note of what was being served, and to whom. Some noted at the time, as their social media accounts will attest once forensics have been completed, that the Principal herself apparently did not have even a single bite of this feast to end all feasts!

Yes, it is true that numerous phone cameras were focused on the Principal and what she was doing at any given moment, but the only real activity of hers that was captured is that she seemed to be whispering intently in the left ear of the student seated to her immediate right at various moments, yet there was never an occasion during the entire event where anyone saw, or captured on video, her ever taking a bite of anything, not even the oysters, caviar, or shrimp ceviche. She never took even a sip of the very fine wine nor even the glacial water it eventually turned into. She sat there all but oblivious to just about everything save the left ear that received her every secret whisper.

One by one, each of the gang of twelve, the toughs, as they liked to see themselves as, well, they were each in turn grabbed from behind by the shoulders by the students who had been secretly chosen by the Principal, and each of the banquet toughs in turn had both their arms splayed out perpendicular to their respective torsos, in the manner accorded to scarecrows, and they were all dragged out mercilessly to a green hill, save the one whose left ear received those blessed whisperings from the Principal herself.

Three days later, no one remembered even a single one of them.

March 31, 2024 [20:44-21:41]

Dealer’s Choice, by Robert Fuller

Señor Enano was dealing. He had a copacetic group there at the table, ready to go all in. Everyone at this establishment knew him to deal a fair deal, every time without exception, even though there were those outliers who tended to kvetch about his chosen hair color of the day, or his new tats, or even the fact that his sandals revealed that he had recently chosen a new polish color for his underlings, his besties, after that recent foot massage that he had neglected to post on all his social media accounts.

There was one fella—a tipo, to be sure, if there ever was one—who was racking up the chips like nobody’s business, except that most of the others in the crowd seemed mostly to be caving in, as usual, to the omnipotent House; and then, it occurred to El Enano that there was a certain phrase that cropped up every single time the gent in question added even more chips to his ever-growing cache. But the señor couldn’t quite make out what that gent, or anyone else in the crowd, was saying. Sometimes, frankly, it was something that sounded something like “forhandlerens valg”, although many who were there might have heard something else. And at other times, it was more like, “jälleenmyyjän valinta”, although virtually no one at all could make any sense of that. And most ominously, at certain key times, usually right when the security detail was doing the changing of the guard, there was an apocalyptic, ominous-sounding utterance that some of the guards and stenographers who were in the immediate vicinity did their level-headed best to transcribe accurately for posterity, yet the best they could muster up, on average, was something like this: “vybor dilera”; and after that, most of the clientele usually ran straight for the doors, leaving all their chips and everything else for anyone at all.

April 1, 2024 [16:16-16:40]

Clocks, by Robert Fuller

There was that time recently when I fell asleep innocently enough, not knowing what would happen after the stroke of midnight. Precisely then, there was the first tick. Amid dreams of all those ravens swirling around clock towers, of castles, cathedrals, citadels, there were more and more ticks, each with its own clock. I could see each clock swirling madly about, and they started accumulating with a vengeance.

I was initially in a dungeon, somewhere in the lower bowels of a castle, and there were thin stray cats roaming around, with large rats scurrying away from them as fast as they could, as far as the eye could see. And of course the swarms of clocks spiraling madly about, increasing every second, ticking ever more insistently. The passageway that I wandered through was filled with gears that had no apparent function, but just noisily whirred away.

There were random chess pieces, some of the more powerful ones—queens and rooks, and even a very vulnerable looking king—but none of them were attached to a chess board. They were just wandering around, animated by unseen forces, yet curiously enough, every one of their jerky movements was accompanied by square shadows, randomly alternating between black and white. The cats would yowl, hiss, and growl every time the pieces lurched from square to imaginary square, since every jarring movement would scare the rats away. Clocks accumulated more and more every second.

Then, inexplicably, I was surrounded by the ravens thronging about the spire’s clock, which was still stuck at midnight. I had no idea how I was kept aloft, but all the while I had the sensation of being in constant freefall, about to crash into the rocks or moat below. My anxiety level was increased ever more with every new tick that accrued from the crush of clocks that continued ever more to haunt me. And they were beginning to go wildly out of sync, adding to the cacophony.

And then I was whisked away, either by a whirlwind or on a raven’s back—or perhaps by a whole funnel cloud of ravens. Then the caws rose to a frenzy, with massive streams of ravens seething in a mass of infinity, a sideways eight, around the twin turrets of the basilica, near the Twelve Apostles and the rose window, where, if you listened closely enough, you could hear all manner of syrinx music and even the faint rustling of wings and preening.

Then suddenly the ravens missed a beat—just like the clocks were always doing, still frantically churning about my frazzled head, tick by tick, becoming ever more spasmodic—and I felt myself plunging ever downward, into the depths of death, into open tombs that were being blessed by one of the lesser prelates, to save souls, although all you could hear was wails and cackling, all enshrouded by ghastly, cadaverous movements and spiraling shadows of sin.

When the tombs were opened, there would be legions of scurrying insects scuttling all about, and the natural tunneling of the moles, voles, and shrews would increase fourfold, as they were just as spooked as the populace in the town center by the ceremony. And the square shadows of white and black would surface now and again, mostly with no discernible chess pieces attached to them, except for the occasional bishop who would sheepishly pose in the grandeur of his purple- and white-checkered gaudy raiments, only to suddenly, mysteriously, hurriedly leap into hiding again.

While the clocks continued mounting their assault on me, ever more voraciously devouring any semblance of sanity that may have remained in my addled brainpan, I found myself darkly drawn to an unmarked tunnel, by one of the larger voles, who probably hadn’t carved it out himself—it was far larger than he was—yet he wasn’t at all shy about making fair use of the thing, seeing as it was staring him right in the face. He may have had some enigmatic errand that had been tasked to him, but I didn’t ask questions; I just blindly followed, past coffins, sarcophagi, and strewn-about mummified remains, curious where this corridor would lead. By the time I emerged from the murky confines of the passage, and walked up irregular stairs framed in a splotchy tricolor motif of red, white, and green, the vole had vanished.

As I walked past metal shackles and jail bars once used to constrain insidious inmates of yore, many types of murids and other vermin, including even the occasional stray hamster, scampered about like nobody’s business, most markedly when one of the feral cats would venture indoors looking for a light lunch. And in the moldy remnants of lumpy mattresses, I witnessed bedbugs and cockroaches crawling and darting hither and thither, along with the occasional slithery streaming of a silverfish rapidly going God knows where. The clocks were becoming downright menacing, having built to the roar of a jet engine devouring a pride of lions, and with such an irregular rhythm that I feared for my heart, and what it might do. Some of the bedbugs magically metamorphosed without a word into pawns, yet continued frantically from square shadow to square shadow, white and black blurred so severely that it was a wash of gray. Every now and then one of the clocks would snack on a pawn, which irked me to no end, since it only served to feed their insatiable assault on my person. Knights hopped about from white to black and back, skipping squares in between.

I finally had to come up for air, and I found my way out to where the guard towers were, replete with raucous ravens. I stumbled, I stumbled, I was fast losing my marbles, stumbling past the gardens madly in bloom, and the gray pawns led me straight to a gray building marked “Morgue”, and that was where I finally found my final foe.

February 27, 2024 [19:14-19:24]; February 29, 2024 [11:44-14:38]

Game, by Robert Fuller

We were. We were world travelers, ready for just about anything. We were playing in a contest in which we were certain we were going to prevail. Yet we were entirely unaware of what we were facing.

And then there were certain pieces that we were aware, more and more, just did not fit. It was Western Australia, it was Perth, and we were there, and then we were finding our way further and further north into the outback, where no one was there, yet we were.

There were kangaroos there, and they were hopping from one imaginary black square to another, white, perhaps, and they skipped one square here or there, but we were so carefully watching their moves that we were there but we missed their King’s Gambit.

They were there, looking for us, although we were there, and we were looking to see if they would see us. And we were square in their sights; they were there looking right at us as we were, right there in front of them, all in black and white.

We were all there, ready for anything, but we were not prepared for what might happen next, and which did. At this moment, there were clocks hopping out of their marsupial pouches one by one, and they ticked like they were ready for business.

The clocks began advancing, toward our vulnerable King, and pawn by pawn they kept doing so, and we felt like prey, and we were that, and the clocks knew that, and we were there, and we were; but then we were no longer there, pawn by pawn.

April 2, 2024 [21:27-21:51]

The Madness of King David, by Robert Fuller

He watched them alone. “Churl” is his name, and churlish his behavior. Due north of all domesticated men. You remember how the staff lowered the flag to half-mast. ‘And who have you left to look after those few sheep in the wilderness?’ They sat and looked at each other. She’s been smiling pleasantly this whole time. Only four hundred young men mounted on camels made their escape. Another silence ensued. There are access tunnels and hallway tunnels. ‘Tomorrow is the new moon and you will be missed when your place is empty.’ You become a citizen of nothing.

Sunset over the foothills and mountains. ‘Here I live in a house of cedar.’ Everyone should get at least one good look. It doesn’t matter what for. ‘I pursue my enemies and destroy them.’ There were now smeared footprints on the glass. White plastic letters on a slotted black surface. ‘Have intercourse with your father’s concubines.’ The reasoning was not unsound.

The cracks from this merciless sunlight. He brought with him vessels of silver, gold, and copper. He sincerely urged you to have a nice day. A small silver bell was apparently hung from an arm. And one of his weapons was a dagger of bronze. The fine hat was almost spinning.

‘The Darkness thinks ghosts.’ He went out, prostrated himself low before the king. He suspected some sort of trap. Geometric distortions a lot of kids find hard. The king was weeping and mourning. Fame is not the exit from any cage.

April 3, 2024 [20:58-22:00]

Set, by Robert Fuller

We were stoked, eager, ready for anything. Or so we thought. How we had taken such a wrong turn in our meanderings was anybody’s guess, yet there we were.

It was a stage of sorts, a court, if you will, and we were there in the middle, arranged on either side of a vertical web stretched between two poles.

We were wondering about the balls, which were strewn all about, about the size of the usual size of cupped hands, and many of them were green.

And we found curious tools there that seemed like they may have been purposed at some point as kitchen implements, sieves, although nothing like what we were familiar with.

We were still game nevertheless, awaiting what might happen, except that the stage or court or whatever it was suddenly darkened and then the light was blindingly bright.

It was then that we met our match. We were thinking that Darkness thought ghosts, but we saw not a single one. There were very nice people there, including Valet and Estelle.

We were walking around the court, there was a moat nearby, with many clocks that were insisting on ticking madly, yet the other two who were to play never showed up.

Our new friends explained that this was where we were when we were nowhere, and that the two others would never make it, and so we would have to do. Doubles, they said.

We were going to leave, but then the ball got lobbed right at us, and we saw that play was about to commence on the green surface of the court, the stage, until it didn’t.

The green hill was there, and we were going toward it, and then play was suspended for a time, until we arrived, and it all began again, and Darkness thought the ghosts we were.

April 4, 2024 [16:16-16:36]

Second Thoughts, by Robert Fuller

When the studio asked me to star as myself in their next feature film, I thought twice. My attorney read the entire contract, front to back, including an annoying amount of fine print, and then she gave me a two-sentence précis of the whole affair: “They’re asking you to not only star as yourself, but you have to play all the parts, including all the extras. They’ll give you a 25% cut of box office.”

When I begged her to please explain why this studio wanted to make a feature film that featured nothing at all, just a complete unknown, a person like me, she pointed to part of the contract that had been highlighted with a yellow marker—“Caution” is what came to mind immediately—where the producers had stipulated that their intention was to create a novel, unique, touching story about how the unknown lives his daily life, and then it occurred to me that maybe they were doing a story, a non-story, to be sure, that was about everyman, which is to say most of humanity; people like me.

So I thought something like, “This is going to be a farce, a charade, a mere facade of what life really is when ordinary people like me live it. And who would possibly be in the least bit interested in it?”

After I had slept on it a bit, I informed my attorney that she was to report back to the producers that I was not in the least bit interested in becoming the laughingstock of most of the world, and I was not even going to consider their offer.

Three days later, a check arrived in the mail, in the rather handsome amount, I thought, of five thousand dollars, made out to myself, with a classic lemon-yellow post-it note, of the smallest size available, affixed to it, written in a nearly illegible scrawl, which I was only able to decipher after bringing it to the local forensics lab, who explained to me that what the note was effectively saying is that, upon my cashing of the enclosed check, the production company, Little People, Inc., would be tailing me for just a few hours in order to get some footage for the trailer of their upcoming film, and I would be able to keep the money regardless of whether I agreed to sign the contract that had been previously brought to my attention.

Being just a tad short in the greenery department, and after checking with my attorney, I concluded, and we both concluded, that there was no discernible downside to my accepting the money. Before I cashed the check, however, my attorney rang up Little People, Inc., and asked for details on when the footage would be filmed and what it would be used for.

A metallic-sounding voice picked up on the other end of the line—and it was, truth be told, an especially bad connection—explaining that the footage would be captured in the day or two after the check had been cashed, and that, after careful editing, it would be released as a “teaser” for the main premise of their film, which they couldn’t disclose.

A few days after I cashed that check, I got this knot in my stomach; originally I thought it might have been something I’d eaten the day before that that had given me heartburn.

Then, in no time at all, my phone was deluged with nonstop text messages, friends who were contacting me to inform me that I was now the latest rage, that the trailer, which I hadn’t even seen yet, had gone viral. And I didn’t even know what they had filmed, or how it had been edited, or why people would pay any attention to it.

Against the advice of my attorney, I decided to short-circuit the thing right there. I was not in the least bit interested in becoming the focal point of the obsessions of people like me—or was I!? But after sleeping on the thing for another three days, I relented, and it was then that I second-guessed myself yet again, and decided to sign up for the deal.

Three days into the shooting, I had buyer’s remorse about having accepted the deal. In the corners of both eyes, all I could see, everywhere I looked, was people like me with their cameras, capturing every move I made. And no one makes it out of that kind of house of mirrors with their sanity intact.

April 5, 2024 [16:46-17:36]

Match, by Robert Fuller

The stage was set for the game. There were a number of players, four, as it turns out, who were there right by the proscenium, but who could see nothing, it being so dark that you couldn’t even see your own hand.

So then Garcin gingerly reached across to Estelle, while at the same time Inez carefully and tenderly reached across to Valet, and then for a moment they were all intertwined in a cross of fingers, hands, and arms, and they could see without eyes, through energy, but just for a moment, until a silence ensued and they went deaf for a moment, and had no taste nor smell nor touch nor sight, and not even the ability to speak or move.

Then one tongue said “Hm!” just as suddenly as it followed with “So” and then was mute, until other tongues yet followed, with “here” and “we” and “are?” yet none who were at the proscenium knew what any of the silent dark words meant, nor where they might lead.

The four arms, hands, all with fingers, they all stretched upward into a steeple of sorts that could be felt, and they became a sanctuary from all the madness they had ever known. It was then like a wax museum for a time, each of them mannequins as if each to the other, all to all, all mute, all still, all waxed cold to what remained of the world and all else.

Then the four, all entwined and raised up and suspended in motion as they were, began to sense movements and noises in the far back of the stage. There were swarms of unknown flying creatures near stage left, and incessant indescribable tickings closer to stage right, and in center, there were mad hoppings, square to square, of beasts of incomparable might and strategic capabilities, all of them, movements and noises alike, as if an unseen throng of assailants that would soon render all four of them all but dead.

Yet they continued their hold on one another, limbs outstretched like trees of night, not able to see what might be there, although they certainly had each dreamed of such shades or specters in the past, even when it was not quite night. The dark persisted, even as they walked in a crablike fashion right toward center stage, not being able to perceive a thing, not even their own fear, and yet the stage lights still remained blank, unfruitful, unlike any other performance that had ever happened.

So then Valet, when he said “Yes”, he tapped out a nicotine snout from the pack he carried for comfort—even though that wasn’t even in the script—and struck a light to light up his light, so he could see, and have himself a comfort smoke, and that’s when the whole stage went up in flames.

The next night’s performance, and every night thereafter, was a smash hit.

April 6, 2024 [17:06-17:58]

Superstition, by Robert Fuller

It seems just about everyone was there at the after-party, even including the Supreme Leader and a baker’s dozen or so of his toughs, who most of those present dismissed as creampuff pushovers. Yet some of the crowd received these things that maybe looked something like pamphlets, except that they were of very poor print quality, and there were numerous typos, sophomoric mistakes in spelling, grammar, and so forth, yet there we were, some of the crowd who had been handed, possibly mistakenly, these things that so suspiciously resembled those pamphlets that one used to be given out by the grace of those poorly salespersons of defective materials who used to go from door to door back before there were too many guns.

So then the ones who were there—and we were, although we were never going to admit it—were graced by these pamphlet-like things that were all but illegible, and there were some, and if we were, we were never going to say we did, who strained their eyes every which way but sideways to read, or attempt to make some kind of sense, as if any such sense was to be made, of the scrawlings, scribblings, and other illegible materials that so to speak graced these hastily-stapled quires, if that’s not too generous a term for such tripe, and later on some who were there within the confines of the Supreme Leader and his consort of toughs and who actually made every respectable effort to have this bad attempt at cuneiform deciphered, well, they all very readily agreed that there was no one at all standing over them.

Some of us, well, we were well enough versed in the concept of decoding or editing such a decrepit, malformed document that there were some who were there who tried to do their level-headed best to make some or any sense whatsoever of the verbiage so casually and carelessly engraved on these sheets of onion, garlic, or leek so glibly arranged and conjoined in what were meant to be solemn quires of something that meant something.

Soon after that, however, a few of the toughs started with their proselytizing routines, with their fat fingers pointing to this and that verse within this and that chapter of this and that book, all so carefully named, numbered, beset and begat so nicely with those oh so authoritative colons and whatnot, and “it came to pass” items, and there were some of us who were there who had to so kindly and gently soften up these toughs by gingerly and discreetly pointing out that all we had, those of us who were actually there, were these poorly-manufactured quasi-pamphlets that were all but illegible. And we were there, some of us, who actually ripped up some of these handbills, as it were, as if they were nothing but confetti tossed around meaninglessly to celebrate yesterday’s box score!

And they were; but we were, as well, and there were those who were there who really wanted to get to the bottom of what this Supreme Leader and his consort of toughs were really trying to do. So we read everything in these pseudo-pamphlets masquerading as quires, including every single stitch of fine print, even the more microscopic bits.

And it was just then that a nightingale alighted where those of us who were there were, and it sang and sang and sang until those poorly-stapled quires quietly dispersed into nothingness, with no one standing stiff, stunned in awe, or tenaciously held by anyone, ever again.

April 7, 2024 [18:18-19:19]

Occlusion, by Robert Fuller

It was a singular, stellar event, especially for those of a certain age, for whom it might well be a once in a lifetime happening. Many had made long journeys to be in just the right place at just the right time, collecting memories that time would soon dissipate. And there were some who were present who had been to at least a full dozen of events very much like this. It was important, in this fleeting life, to squirrel away musty closets full of vapor-like reminders of what had been but would no more be in the incessant sands of the ravages of time, since all was lost, save a single instant that juxtaposed black over white in a circle that hid all but its aura.

And the way the light looked when it was hidden to that extent, it was delicious to some and troubling to others; and to yet others, it was a matter of no consequence. But those who were there could somehow prove to themselves and to the ever-waning wisp of thin life in the membrane of transparent time that cloaked yet did not preserve anything that they had been there for that event and that that event was forever there no matter how much dimmer it shined over the many years even until sun earth and moon were no longer.

April 8, 2024 [20:08-20:24]

Collusion, by Robert Fuller

There was a pretense there, there was, there certainly was. And this pretense was one of a kind of privacy that wasn’t that, that was something else, that was a fakery that was something else entirely.

And there was a flint, and a cushiness, a fakery that was something else entirely, and “it may have been part of an effort to establish a direct line to Mr. Putin” if not something else, such as someone who met in secret sessions, who “never met with any Russian officials” who “provided details of these communications” [sic]. As was widely reported elsewhere, despite any denials that may have been subsequently issued by the official Russian propaganda machine.

And on their watch, with clocks all loaded with all their vitriol, there were gates who led to many forts who were connected to a page of stone that were just like a prince...

Yet they all knew there was nothing there, nothing to be seen.

And then the clocks came on all their watches, and everyone saw what no one saw yet was seen by all.

The lies all were seen to be nothing at all. Except lies.

And yet lies lie. They do, and they do nothing but lie. Like what no one saw yet was seen by all. Which was...

April 9, 2024 [21:45-22:45]

Zest, by Robert Fuller

There were uncountable quantities of it that fell from the heavens, as those who were there could attest. It came down in slivers of very light lemon-white flakes, endless streams of it, as if grated from the exocarp of citrus by some unseen hand. And it landed right near the terebinths, in that very valley where slaughter had occurred to avenge the idolatry that had occurred in other times and places nearby, to ward off any possibility that such might recur ever again. Yet those who were gathered in this area were simply delighting at what they saw, and they were eager to taste of what they saw, so that they could tell others what they saw.

Yet, when they tasted of the confetti, they were perplexed; they had mostly expected a sour, piquant bite to the thing, but instead it was of a savory sweetness unlike any they had ever experienced. Some among them had heard tell of a certain salt cedar, and the legends that surrounded it, including one such shrub that was set upon a secluded desert path in the late twilight with a single shimmer of celestial orb accompanied by the rarest sliver of crescent celestial pearl; and these lights above guided those who were there to the deliverance they surely sought. Others among them had been told, by those who knew, of a certain mealybug that fed voraciously upon certain types of salt cedar, yet in return excreted or exuded a honeyed syrup that rendered it so delectable that no one alive could resist its savor. And there were yet others among those who were there who swore that any such tales were but the meaningless ravings and regal madness of a deluded king who had claimed to do things no man could do.

So some among them consulted books of diverse descriptions that they had carried with them for that very purpose. Certain verses told of a gift, while others described endless wandering, while yet others told of asp, sap, and even of a heaven or a chimera or suchlike; but those who were more grounded spoke of turpentine and color and how the great painters used the fruits of such shrubs and trees and other plants to cultivate greater understanding by depicting what they saw when they were entranced by their own natural ecstasy, so as to transmit what they saw and felt to others.

And when it was time for the noon repast—the rain of zest had been coming down by then for hours—those who were there tasted heartily of the gift that had rained upon them, each according to their own understanding. Some could taste nothing at all; what was supposed to be a gift was nought but dried flakes of gray dust. Others were either stung by what their tongues endured or they began to suffocate in sickly sweetness that they found unbearable. And there were those who were there who tasted it all, every bit, as a movable feast, one that was of all the senses, and it was those who really saw and understood the gift as fully as it had been intended.

April 10, 2024 [22:22-23:23]

The Yellow House, by Robert Fuller

Free theaters of family business. That’s just what some said. The apex of a temple.

Yet we were not there. It had been someone else. As rapt hazel blue-gray audiences.

It was mainly the bed-wetters. They left a huge gap. Too engaged in careful anxieties.

Severely damaged in bombing raids. That’s just what some said. Never left the artist’s estate.

All the ground is yellow. Amber houses in the sun. Incomparable freshness of the blue.

The kind beauties of form. Among mixed breeds turning tail. Boots illuminating a conspicuous luster-color.

And an imposing curved staircase. A man in his forties. A group of young punks.

The house and its setting. Flaxen houses in the sun. A placard on the scene.

It’s like you create secrets. And I don’t want secrets. Paintings, antiques, and possibly cocaine.

At most a reluctant participant. Selling shoes without a voucher. You do go to jail.

Akin to burying a corpse. Hues of skin and hair. Often ate at the restaurant.

Out into the snowy night. It hurt me a lot. I wanted to shield them.

Happened in their family tree. And I don’t want secrets. Often ate at the restaurant.

Got closer to an answer. Aggressively worked the black market. Selling shoes without a voucher.

Oh, it wasn’t my mother. We wanted some real answers. She was so hurt inside.

Just to enclose or entrap. Consider the capacity for yielding. Borrowing a fortified place hidden...

A torrent of high-pitched giggling.

April 11, 2024 [22:22-23:43]

French Windows, by Robert Fuller

We were there in the front, facing the boulevard. No one said it was going to be a parade, yet it was. Some who were there said it wasn’t so much a parade as some kind of charade. The front-facing windows were opened. And then it started:

It may have been you walking with yourself. “This doesn’t make sense. How’d you find out?” Something, though, wasn’t clear. How was he possibly going to avoid drawing attention to himself?

The vessel was gilded. It was curious to him. If you let your eyes blur just so. A little piece that was about night moths.

We were talking about many things. We were enjoying wine and cheese. We were noticing more things underfoot. What was their story?

There were at least seven whirligigs. What wouldn’t you have given to know. He began to make a point of stockpiling all those oblong, strange boxes. The subtleties of underworld.

We were in the valley, at night, near lanterns. What was the point of their dance? Night foliage near lanterns, different wings and sadness. At least that’s what I thought.

The minister glared at me. But don’t judge me just yet. There was always a sumptuous cheese platter; and he knew it. I didn’t think much of it at the time.

Lies made into a universal system. We turned off the main highway. And it is as if we were. Webs that lead to the mystery. Of butterflies.

I was reminded about that Kafka parable. Certain strategic aspects of his countenance. Just prior to his next nugget of wisdom. After the coin flip.

I took a deep breath and woke up. Yet all was not fully well in the hearth. Looming over all her dreams were things she could not understand. A devious web of mind that cannot see its way out of the bind.

A mysterious gold-filled rock niche. As the academics largely argued. The endless universe of ideas he said he carried. They all took pride in their work.

There was someone sitting there. It was a cave. Security was tight. The nightmares continued. Yet in the next day’s paper...

A thorough analysis of rationality. Odd radishes, rainbow-hued.

The doll looked out of the window.

Yet the play never ended.

Some of you may have heard about schemes. The pop culture icons were ready to sing. Three days later, no one remembered even a single one of them. Most of the clientele usually ran straight for the doors.

I was fast losing my marbles. There were kangaroos there. Another silence ensued. You become a citizen of nothing.

We were going to leave. My attorney read the entire contract. He tapped out a nicotine snout from the pack. A few of the toughs started with their proselytizing routines.

It was a singular, stellar event.

There was nothing there, nothing to be seen.

Certain verses told of a gift.

All the ground is yellow.

April 12, 2024 [21:42-22:44]

Crickets, by Robert Fuller

Talking twins, yet nobody heard anything. The floor creaked, chains rattled, towhees crackled in delight, but no soundtrack whatsoever in evidence. The hearth was quite warm, some had seen salamanders, a few of us strode, stepped, or stood with stick or staff, but those were only props in the plays we were pretending to enact while we waited for something else to happen, all gibbous at twilight.

Then we watched, as the constable chased a ball down the street with a crooked, curved stick, and our open windows showed everything as it happened, even though we were waiting deliriously for something else, anything at all, to happen, even though we knew it wouldn’t.

In the next day’s local daily, in the day book, the blotter of record, there was scarcely any mention of any kind of disturbance in the general environs of our neighborhood, yet we knew we had seen the constable chasing something, perhaps spheroid in nature, and with a crooked crutch firmly in hand. But this scenario made no sense, and we were not about to spend an excess of time or energy figuring out what it meant.

About a week later, we received a mysterious call from someone who went by the handle of Jiminy. He said he would only talk to us “on background” but that he had valuable dirt on some locals who were doing nefarious things in the neighborhood. The phone went “click” and that was that. Or so we thought.

Maybe a month later, who but the constable shows up, right at our open windows, and he says he has a “treat” for us for being such good citizens. We opened the bag, and they were crunchy, covered in chocolate.

April 13, 2024 [22:28-22:58]

Yellow Favas, by Robert Fuller

There was that time I dreamt of creamy polenta, yet I couldn’t quite reach it, even though it did beckon me so. Yet some of my staff had had the foresight to start two or more experiments which would prove priceless. A few members of the staff had started sprouting various sproutables, one of which was mung beans, which, as they all agreed, have amazing health benefits. A different faction of the food crew decided to soak whole fava beans, the yellow variety, overnight, and, as it turns out, some of them had foraged various native plants, including those resembling anise and sage, and those plants were soaked along with the fava beans, and when the fava beans were cooked, those same plants were included in the cooking.

The mung beans had already been soaked for about three days, and they were to become part of the new delectable.

So, the overnight-soaked yellow favas were cooked in ample water, with sea salt added, at medium heat... And this is where it becomes somewhat murky. There were various times and temperatures used for the cooking, and at some point there was certainly ample butter added to the mix, and there was the sage and possibly the anise that added to the mix, and there was also a small handful of the partially-sprouted mung beans that were also added.

At some point in the cooking process, there was a slight bit of overcooking, which was thankfully caught before it became more of a problem. At that point, the fava beans had become more of a paste than they were beans, and it was just the right time to scrape the remnants from the bottom of the pan, gingerly. And then the yellow favas cooled, until they were like creamy polenta, but different; and when they cooled enough, they could be handled just like you would handle creamy polenta that had congealed just so.

You could peel off slivers of this creamy yellow fava with those partially-sprouted mung beans, with still enough of a crunch that you would have that feeling, and, Oh, the taste and the texture sensation would be so exquisite that you couldn’t possibly imagine tasting anything much better!

April 14, 2024 [21:02-21:29]

The Asylum, by Robert Fuller

Every time Harry stepped into a room there was a disturbance. But it was never on his account. No one ever noticed Harry. He was just there. An invisible man.

What he did to the room was to make everyone there aware of a most primary facet of their individual and collective experience. Harry was a kind of trickster who silently stepped into a room and became the wallpaper. When he did that there were individuals in that room who started seeing themselves walking through a fun house of mirrors that would amplify and distort their every quirk such that they could not possibly be in the least unaware of their actual situation.

The usual location for one of Harry’s stints was just any old dive bar or brewpub or even the most tawdry and garish of nightclubs with people dancing like they had no clue at all about all that loud music that no one really cared about if you were to ask them politely about it.

And Harry even danced himself on occasion when he got bored just being the wallpaper. Yet he had no urge to be the limelight of the room. He was just here doing the job he was hired for. It was as simple as that. He danced and then stopped. Became camouflaged once again. Became the wallpaper.

No one really notices this type of person until it’s too late. And Harry was experienced with lots of years of chicanery that he could pull out of his proverbial hat like a rabbit. You have to be able to escape with no one noticing. And that’s the whole game.

He was set for his so to speak debut in the big time at a convention where everyone who was there was more important than the next. Each in turn was bedecked bejeweled and beset with finely tailored garments and necklaces and watches with each such artifact being just that extra cut of luxury above the next and so forth. And everyone was nicely mingling with one another over hors d’oeuvres of such exquisite taste and proportion and each with a choice libation such as had hardly ever been tasted by anyone. Yet it was the finger sandwiches that most drew these types although none of them really knew why.

Harry was again the unseen wallpaper at this posh highroller event and in this case the corner of the room where he lurked and did his magic was right next to place where the art auction happened. And when he arrived at this particular event it was right when the most exclusive fetish pieces of oil paint canvas art were about to be auctioned off to the highest rollers who had ever graced this earth or would. It was quite the shame that all there was in that corner of the gargantuan ballroom in the way of what to eat were those modest and homely finger sandwiches which for some inexplicable reason now became the rage among all these so very important selves.

When the upper crust began to eat Harry’s trickster fingers they finally saw themselves for what they were and they had themselves committed the very next day.

April 15, 2024 [15:16-15:56]

The Process, by Robert Fuller

Whenever the clerics summoned all of us to the central meeting chamber, we always knew there was some kind of trouble brewing. They would always start with the usual roll call, which was supposed to be perfunctory, but which we were all quite aware was anything but that. They were always gauging where each of us stood when it came to how we approached the rituals and traditions that they had so long held dear, and we were always aware that we were under that kind of microscope, no matter what we were told.

They had this thing about “trial”—they always said it was a recipe for “error” and not much else—and so what they were trying to impart to the lot of us was that there was a formula for how to do things, and it was never, ever to be deviated from, not even to the slightest degree, for then it was certain that ultimate wrath would befall those who tried and erred in such a manner.

While we were not completely in accord with one another, as novices within the ranks, there were many of us who noticed that what we were doing was not really a formula at all, but rather a practice, an exercise, a way—it was a path and a journey that could not be made something it was not; it could not be pigeonholed, shackled, or otherwise placed within any kinds of constraints.

So we were always rebelling against any sense of ultimate “authority” that the clerics would try to shove at us—at least most of us were—and we sculpted what they were teaching us, or so they said, into what we knew was really the case.

There was this one now fairly famous occasion when they were showing us how we were to prepare food for the midday meal. We had a full dozen of us ready to show how it was really done, and there was just one of them, the Chief Cleric, who sat with all of us at the center of the proscenium stage near the limelights, ready to receive all acclaim for his grace to all of us and to humanity at large.

He lit his torch, touched the flame to the underbelly of what was supposed to be his tour de force, which had been so carefully and meticulously prepared in advance, and it all but splashed right back in his face.

Needless to say, the feast enjoyed by all was the one that was prepared by we dozen good eggs, the ones who walked the whole journey on foot without a care save the journey itself.

April 16, 2024 [17:22-17:52]

Anybody’s Guess, by Robert Fuller

We met there, no one knew where it was, it was like some kind of suburban strip mall, but the main thing is we were all there. It was Esther and Robin Sherwood and then Max and Alma, and there were others there where we were, but it was all kind of like a crap shoot, as at least one of us remarked. None of us knew why we were there, nor why our secret group had apparently, as some said, been infiltrated in this manner. Yet there we were. In plain sight.

So we developed a plan to scope out the perimeter of this strip mall as well as we could. We were looking for clues as to why we were suddenly there, instead of where we were when something like this wasn’t happening.

Esther was the point person on the southwest corner, and she was first to try spotting anything in the way of unusual activity in that precinct. As with all of us, she took care to wear the latest in camouflage, and so none of the people responsible so much as noticed her.

Next was Robin Sherwood, who, truth be told, had a stash of very expensive watches on his person, and it was he who took position at the northwest, where it is said that he reported zero activity save a few marks wearing their usual overly expensive timepieces who were casually strolling through the strip mall looking for bargains.

And then it was Alma herself at the southeast lookout, followed shortly thereafter by Max, who was casually strumming his new guitar right there at the northeast post, to the consternation of some of the locals who had no use for how his frets were situated.

I was there too, but no one noticed me, since I was wearing the “Press” pass. Yet in my own case, I was smack dab in the middle of the strip mall itself, and so I saw everything right as it happened.

There was a constable there who was interviewing a preacher who was saying various things to a congregation unlike any you’ve ever seen, and they were singing and speaking in tongues like nobody’s business, and the rest of the crowd there, they were like as if at a carnival, with a carousel spinning madly with all those horses about to spin off, and yet we were there at the far corners missing all of this, because we were paranoid that we were going to be figured out for who we were, which was nobody.

If you ask me what happened after that, after the carousel ricocheted into the four corners where we were there standing guard, I can only point to the next day’s police blotter, where everything that happened was duly explained.

April 17, 2024 [16:53-17:28]

A Bridge, by Robert Fuller

Just as soon as I set foot on it, I knew that I was in a pickle. This latest stunt of mine was one that my closest friends, and even my agent, had warned me not to try; it was just too precarious. Yet, here I was, nothing better to do, and not only that, but I was all bedecked in my most luxurious of clown outfits, and it was my intention to make this thing happen.

I was there on a riverbank, watching the thing flow like clockwork, and it was then that I noticed this strange path that seemed to lead elsewhere. And it was then that I stepped onto the plank, which was rather thin with no guardrails, at least not that I was aware of. But my curiosity got the better of me, and so it was that I took that first dangerous step into the unknown, not knowing where this thin path might lead, if anywhere at all.

And as I was carefully walking along this thin path, which seemed to me to keep varying in size, as to where, if anywhere at all, I could step in any sort of forward direction, the narrowness of where I thought I was treading seemed to vary inexplicably, and at times, it was so lean and gaunt a path that I lost my bearings entirely, even if I tried, as I did numerous times, to backtrack to where I thought I had started this journey.

Below me, if I allowed my peripheral vision to take in the sights, I noticed some jugglers, a few ferocious jungle cats, as well as sundry freaks of nature, and, not to be forgotten, a troupe of trapezists the likes of which had never been seen before, but then I remembered the stream, the creek, the river, which I had been trying to cross since ever I could remember, and what I had just seen and experienced I saw to be artifacts in the one dream, the one that was just now dreaming me, if there were even such a thing.

No matter how many times I tried to cross in either direction, it was futile, and each time I did, I knew it even so much more so. So there I was caught in the gear box of “you can’t go forward, and you can’t go back,” and then the teeth started to find my flesh, and they ripped into it, and then I lost my clown costume and then I noticed I’d gone too far.

April 18, 2024 [15:33-15:58]

Roll Your Own, by Robert Fuller

After protracted and heated discussions with my literary agent, who insisted, and she kept insisting this all the while, that the big ticket items these days were all those “self help” books, I finally caved in—to a degree. You see, I was not a big fan of such tripe where someone tells you what to do and you do it and then everything is all of a sudden copacetic. In my book, that’s snake oil. No one has ever been known to read one of those tomes and then Presto Chango they get everything they wanted and nothing they didn’t. First of all, truth be told, I’m not one of those guys with all his marbles in place. So who am I to tell you what to do? But there was a kicker in there somewhere, and I was bound to suss it out one way or the other. There was an angle there in this “self help” industry that no one had as yet capitalized on, as far as I knew.

So my agent sat with me for a while, hearing me out, and disagreeing with me just about anytime I said anything, but she finally relented when I brought in the magic formula that was taught to me and everyone else at a very young and tender age, which was just this: Book, Chapter, Verse. At first, she looked at me quizzically as if I had just arrived fresh out of an asylum, which may have actually been the case. But then she started warming up to the idea, once she got the drift as to what I was imparting to her.

Her industry niche was somewhat limited in scope, clichéd, almost passé, as I took care to point out to her at every possible moment in our tête-à-tête, and so once she finally got the gist of the thing, she was all in.

The deal closer was just this: “What’s the ultimate in these ‘self help’ books?” All she had was the blankest of blank stares, like crickets and radio silence.

It was just then that I started educating my agent about how it is you make something into something that sounds authoritative even if it isn’t at all like that.

The trick is not just in the coded language, like “begat” or “it came to pass” and whatnot. No, that’s just the window dressing in the recipe; makes it look and sound good, somehow. The real trick for creating this kind of authority in what after all is just another book, it’s how you partition it into all these sections that are all so official-looking because they’re every one of them so nicely named and numbered and whatnot. It must be true, because it says right here, in maybe 1 Icarus or 2 Nimrod 4:33 that this that and the other “came to pass” or was otherwise “begat” in such and such a manner. Slam dunk!

So we went to some of those places, my agent and I, where it’s known that some of the counterfeiters out there have produced these kinds of goods, and we got a few of those surplus secondhand handmedown tablets and plates with all that cuneiform on them, and we had just a field day figuring out how to do the hand rolling, and we translated until we couldn’t anymore, and then we put the raw materials into the recycling bin, and then we published.

The real kicker? You want to know that, don’t you? Well, my agent, who’s now my accountant, has informed me that what you want to know is a trade secret. The only thing that I can say about this matter is that we’ve written the book and almost everyone follows it.

April 19, 2024 [14:04-14:44]

The Fledgling, by Robert Fuller

My son, he was always all in with words, even more so than myself. At age two, it wasn’t all this ba-ba-ba da-da syllable shit; no, he was sculpting his own lingo of such richness and unending variety, and we unfortunately kept very few examples of what he said at such a tender age. You see, we were not at all sophisticated in terms of the technology that would have allowed us to all but fully document what he said from the podium where he was starting to fly, and little did we know, but toward the sun, where his words and his wings would sure as sin be burnt off.

He, my son, always stood in all his regality right up against a lectern, and he was always giving his all to explain the crux of the thing to those of us who had no clue. You could barely see his baby curls peeking above the platform, its upper edge, yet they lent a twinge of gravity and veracity to what he was doing his utmost best to impart to those who came to see him in all the glory of what he was doing, nevermind that he hadn’t quite yet turned even three.

There were scribes there who were trying their utmost best to take down what he said, just how he said it, yet they had no way of keeping up with his ever so rapid wings that carried him so quickly to places the scribes would never see, and his language evolved so quickly from tongue of his to other tongue that it was as if there were nothing but meaningless babble that towered over all the nothingness that was then there.

So then those who were as said doing their utmost best to take down what was said by this child, well, they lost their way trying to ascend the tower, which had neither beginning nor end, and which had no way up or down in any case. And there was then a breath.

April 20, 2024 [16:32-16:57]

The Usual Joint, by Robert Fuller

“But, you see, we’re different than the birds. They just accept whatever it is they are being, without question. We sit here pontificating on our fat asses about what it all means—if anything.”

“That may be true, my good friend, but there is still their experience as living beings, beings who know that what they are doing is just flying, just doing what they are doing, as you say, without question. Yet it means something.”

We were sitting in the usual joint conversing about whatever came to mind, but for some reason we were stuck on those beautiful winged creatures who just were, and were so mysteriously alien to all our usual concerns.

“Do you think for a moment”, one of us said, “that these wrens you see and hear feeding their young fledglings are at all concerned that this place where we live is but a fleeting moment in an ever-changing shape shifter?”

The other of us thought for a moment, and said, “I’ve seen how quickly they fly from place to place, and they have no extra time to think for long on such matters as these, not when they have those young to feed and teach.”

We took sips of our libations, and took careful note of the comings and goings of all the regulars. There was the usual game of darts, which Rafael was at the time prevailing at, and there were a few arguments about some sports teams.

“You know,” one of us said after a while, “I’ve heard these wrens with their various calls, and I can’t quite figure them all out, but there’s always some very high-pitched sounds from the young, and then they get fed.”

Someone else, it may have been one of us, pitched in that, “The raspy sounds they make are how they coordinate their feeding responsibilities, and you will often hear the high-pitched sounds from the young, in anticipation of a meal.”

A bell rang out, courtesy of the gracious proprietor of our usual joint, and she was known for her generosity in this regard, so there was a round of libations for the whole crowd. Time flew by, but we did not. We still sat there.

One of us, I forget which, wondered, “How did these wrens know how to feed and teach their freshly-hatched?” And the other replied, “They had been taught by their own parents.” Yet neither of us knew where any of this began.

And then someone else mused about what it must be like to be such a wren, and carefree, and flying so quickly, without a thought in the world save what they were going to feed their young, flying to the next feeding and so on.

And then we all mused about how these creatures, and all other non-humans, were so well-equipped to survive on a daily basis without all these tedious complications, without supply chains and support networks, simply flying free.

April 21, 2024 [14:30-15:07]

Ancient Rivalries, by Robert Fuller

The pair, well, they were insufferable, always at each other’s throats about nothing, always taking gratuitous swipes at each other. Robin Sherwood, not to make too fine a point about it, told Max right to his face that, and this is as direct a quote as you can get, “You never would have taken up guitar had it not been for that lightning strike.”

Max of course had absolutely no idea what Robin was referring to, yet he just couldn’t help himself, and just had to reply something to the effect that, “You couldn’t for the life of you, Sir Robin, tell a luxury watch from the cheapest of knockoffs.”

And this was smack dab in the middle of what was supposed to be a poetry slam, one which was claimed to be among Dublin’s finest! And this was what!? Nothing but cheap shots and expired grievances!

So, each having jabbed so sophomorically at the other’s colorful and checkered past lives, they each independently decided to bring the thing right to where it should have been in the first place. It was about words, and what you do with them, how you sculpt them to mean what couldn’t possibly be said, yet there you were saying it! Nevermind if the rest of humanity gave you nothing but blank stares; it was all about figuring something out and handcrafting words that meant what you meant them to mean within the context of saying what had never been said nor understood previously by anyone at all.

So their back and forth on this illustrious Dublin stage, Guinness flowing freely, was in part about that, and those who were there eventually warmed up to what was happening. But there was at least a subtext or two going on while the clock of their ancient poets slam ticked incessantly—someone had started up one of those chess timers that limits how much time can be spent on those carefully crafted moves on those black and white squares—and so Max, for instance, spoke of an ancient forest where Sherwood and his buddies would hide out and perhaps have just a touch too much mead before doing their dirty work, which Sir Robin adamantly insisted was not at all dirty, but was totally legit within the general scheme of things. And Robin of course countered about how Max was all Gradus ad Parnassum and plainchant and Helmholtz and his acoustic theories and whatnot that had absolutely no bearing on what was, as was now known by everyone, the true governing principle in today’s society, that being that of the popularity contest, the echo chamber, the viral spiral; and how it was that these side studies by Max were nothing but window dressing on stuff that was so quaint and cerebral that no one at all gave even half a fig about it.

There were only a few moves left in the match, and the clocks had almost ticked themselves to death, but Max, in the most daring of gambits, advanced a pawn, without Sir Robin’s knight even so much as noticing what happened, and Max deigned to open that most Pandora or Schrödinger of cats or boxes, wherein what he said, Game, Set, Match, begat so many begats and it came to passes that they were truly uncountable, and with each of them, authoritative like nobody’s business on account of the impeccable and indisputable Book, Chapter, and Verse designations so neatly and mawkishly affixed to them, that they were taken as literal truth as far as the eye could see.

Sir Robin did what only he could do, which was to steal the gameclock.

The patrons unanimously deemed the slam a stalemate.

April 22, 2024 [14:44-15:27]

Impostor Syndrome, by Robert Fuller

There we were, it was at the local Comedy Night, or it may have been Karaoke. As we liked to joke, half-seriously, but mainly just amongst ourselves, “What’s the diff!?” You can’t be too careful about keeping things under wraps these days what with all the toxic social media crap that’s lurking, all ready to eat you up in its jaws, snip-snap! But it was probably one of those dreary and all too wearisome Comedy Night thingies where all the wannabes get up there on the stage and do everything they can to gross you out and none of it works because (a) it’s all been done before, and (2) they’re so clueless they don’t have the slightest idea how to do a proper gross-out. I mean, the ceaseless references to defecation and other assorted potty humor, they just don’t cut the cheese, or that proverbial mustard, if you see what I’m getting at.

But later on that evening, we had a tête-à-tête, a debriefing, we did a kind of forensic analysis on what had actually transpired, and we both agreed that it had to have been Karaoke, not Comedy—although there were parts of it that we found funny, in a perverse sort of way, no doubt about that—and this was because there was always a soundtrack going on while the people onstage were busy wiggling their lips without much content coming out; but yes, it’s true, it could have been yet another Comedy Night where everyone presenting their wares felt that they needed to fill in some gaps because it was otherwise a content-free zone, even though upon further thorough analysis by ourselves, in the wee hours of the morning, we ultimately decided without any doubt whatsoever that it was all dead-in-the-water fluff.

So then, when Jim got that call—I think it was Jim, in that I don’t recall it being me—from the local joint where these sorts of activities tend to happen, and they asked Jim, and it was both of us, actually, to participate in the next Comedy or Karaoke Night festivities, whichever it was, well, we all but went pale. Our first thought was, “Have they been watching us?” We thought that maybe, or almost certainly, someone on staff had noticed us very discreetly making light of the honorable efforts of those who were actually participating.

For one reason or another, we were unable to wiggle or weasel our way out of this conundrum, and so we showed up next time around on our very best, if you can imagine it, behavior.

Funny thing is, we weren’t informed which type of Night this was to be, and as far as either of us could tell, it was both. However, unbeknownst to either of us, there were agents there that Night, straight from none other than Vaudeville Voice, which, truth be told, neither of us had ever heard of. We were to find out later on that they were an outfit looking for the next Reality TV genre, and that, on recommendation of our local staff, we were to be the guinea pigs.

We had absolutely nothing planned in advance, and we were just winging it the whole time, all five or ten minutes of it, and maybe there were even a few polite laughs or chortles or even guffaws during our routine, although from our perspective, there was nothing funny about any of it; we were dead serious.

Yet we knew something else entirely was afoot when we were escorted offstage by the security personnel and offloaded into a black SUV with tinted windows and everything; there was even a full bar in back, which we gladly partook of.

Our nightmare situation was only fully revealed in the glare of the floodlights.

April 23, 2024 [15:15-16:03]

Pass the Hat, by Robert Fuller

Two pranksters, nothing better to do—what do they do? You’d never guess.

Well, these two, seems like they were bored, had nothing better to do, and so they somehow found their way to one of those places where people with nothing better to do tend to hang out, at least at certain times.

This was a Sunday, to be sure, and these two characters found one of those distinctive-looking edifices with that, what? Pointy hat on top? There were quite a number of the usual faithfuls streaming through the open portal of the joint at that very moment, in all seriousness, and these two clowns, well, they just had to have had the audacity to say to themselves, “What if we were to create a minor disturbance here in this esteemed gathering place?” They both agreed that it would have to be before the usual coffee social.

It was just a few minutes to kickoff, so to speak, so these two perps had hardly any time to get their game plan together in this mini huddle.

There was no time for a costume change at this point, so they tried and tried and tried to think what options might best suit them as to their purpose and, truth be told, mission statement.

Unfortunately, they had left all the most garish garb back at the flat, but each of them did happen to have handy, as they always did, substitutes in the way of headgear, which were always quite the ticket among the local populace, no matter how they, the headgears, presented themselves to the crowds in terms of what they all thought about any of it.

Now, these bonnets, if they might be called that, well, they were nothing if not the most highly-sculpted pieces of what you might call brainpan adornments that you might ever see. And each of these two characters, they had their own way of wearing whatever it was that graced their otherwise bald pates, such that for each, each in their own way, their crowns just shined in the sun! And there was no way you could call them twins.

They quietly, each in their own way, found their ways into the pews, each oriented toward a different segment of the stained glass array on either side of the edifice. While one was a tad closer to the part that highlighted Mother and Son, that aspect, the other one was almost touching the part of the opposing intaglio wherein two fingers were diagonally touching with sparks flying and the two opposing faces all serious in either kitty corner, whichever way you looked.

The minister, the preacher, the pastor of his flock, as it were, well he was all bedecked in his Sunday finest just right and ready, ready to give a rip-roaring rendition of what he had prepared this full week to deliver to the faithful, when it came to pass that two clowns in headpieces that shone so bright that you could scarce look in their directions, well, they short-circuited any such would-be sermon before even the first word was uttered or begat, or even before the reverend could clear his throat!

And the faithful, well, when they saw all of this, they lapped it all up, and they wanted more, they didn’t want to hear a word more about anything, and they started dancing, and the choir started singing, and everyone was praising everyone and everyone else who was praising everyone else, and they even forgot there was going to be a coffee social later on, and then the pair, they passed those lavish hats all through the crowd, and no one knew how the dollars flew, but they had wings, and then the preacher finally got up the gumption to say whatnot through his megaphone, but by then they, and the hats, were gone.

April 24, 2024 [22:00-22:50]

Wild White, by Robert Fuller

So lone and cold, a hint in it of desolation, lifeless spirit, dark spruce wild. White fading light, the effort of life, half hidden among the trees. The cold surface sank into a white wild, something very like mud, steadily growing colder, old longings for a yellow metal. A system requires money, faith in a system, money and credit for wisdom, the ends of a rope placed in a stranger’s hands, the rope tightened mercilessly, jaws closed on the throat, flung into intolerable pain, bloody wrappings of weary night, born to hang, the rope removed, the shed door rattled open.

In the morning a hoarse shriek on so vast a place, the whole realm a silence, that of sadness remote and alien, finite and small, occupying most of the wild. White, wide snowshoes, the most restless of life, like juices from the grape. The short sunless recesses of the human soul crushed them with their own minds, pressing out of them a faint far cry of snow-white wild, like a scroll formed into crystals of frost, a narrow oblong box rested on the snow, a man whose toil was over, covered with fur and leather, not yet dead, bent on adventure at the funeral of some ghost. Silence.

April 25, 2024 [15:15-16:16]

Daniel’s Storm, by Robert Fuller

He deposited the vessels in the treasury. A decree was issued: “He reveals deep mysteries, as iron destroys and shatters all things, and singing of every kind shall fall down and worship the image of gold.” I saw a dream which terrified me: “Let him be given the mind of a beast; all dwellers upon earth count for nothing; his mind became like that of a beast brought to your table. The king should issue a decree that any person who was brought and thrown into the lions’ pit shall fear dreams and visions, to shut the lions’ mouths, lifted out of the pit.” Eyes like the eyes of a man, watching until the rest of the beasts were allowed to remain alive, crunching and devouring and trampling all that was left, the horn that had eyes and a mouth speaking proud words; the great horn on his forehead is the first king. The vision points to the time of the end, and sackcloth and ashes at the hour of the evening sacrifice. His face shone like lightning on the bank of the great river, and their precious vessels of silver and gold, spoil, booty, and property, at the time of the end, such as has never been, for the words are kept secret and sealed.

Happy is the man who reads. These are the words you will not know if you do not wake up: “Buy from me gold refined in the fire to take the scroll and break its seals, to take peace from the earth, given the power to ravage land and sea, from every nation, day and night, a third of the sea turned to blood, and men in great numbers died, for their tails were like snakes, a torment to the whole earth.” When I swallowed it my stomach turned sour. Then war broke out, a storm of hail. I saw a beast like a leopard, allowed to mouth bombast like a lion’s mouth, like a bear’s, out of the reach of the serpent. It worked great miracles in honour of the beast that had been wounded by the numerical value of its letters, to give breath to the image or the mark of its name, a white cloud like a son of man, a sea of glass, a loud voice and peals of thunder; the clue for those who can interpret it, for every unclean spirit, all kinds of scented woods, ivories, and pearls, and the lives of men, like the noise of rushing water. Books were opened: jasper, lapis lazuli, chalcedony, emerald, sardonyx, cornelian, chrysolite, topaz, chrysoprase, turquoise, amethyst, made from a single pearl, inscribed in the side of the river, for the healing of the nations. Outside are murderers, and all who love and practise deceit, doing evil.

April 26, 2024 [15:15-16:16]

Graffiti, by Robert Fuller

We were there as tourists, or travelers, you be the judge; it was a self-guided tour of scratchings and writings in an ancient fortress of the Roman Empire located in the general environs of Eden and its suburb Babylon, gate of the gods. There were clay tablets that brought it to the fore as that, but they were never viewed by any living beings. Yet this fortress brought treasures in the form of ancient scratchings, knowledge and understanding of books and learning of every kind, visions and dreams of every kind, in a vision by night: “He knows what lies in darkness, put to death.” This was only the first of the clues we gathered as art, as fortress-scratchings such as had never been seen in quite that way. “Since you have been able to reveal this secret,” as another bit of cuneiform told us, “in rage and fury, when you hear the sound of horn, fantasies and visions will know in whose branches the birds lodged, a tree which yielded food for all. Hew down the tree.” And the next said, “He deals as he wishes.” And we had just started.

“Ask him what he does.” A thousand of his nobles drinking wine in the presence of the thousand, to fetch his concubines and his courtesans. When we saw this, if you are able to read the words, it said next, “His mind became like that of a beast,” and furthermore, “Peoples and nations of every language trembled before him; they have been unable to interpret it.” These are the words of the writing which was inscribed: “The king shall be thrown into the lions’ pit three times a day, making a petition to his god three times a day, in fear and trembling, lifted out of the pit.”

We moved on, to the next exhibit, and we found even stranger fare, such as no one should ever see. One of the most prominent tags stated that “When her child was born he might devour it.” Except that “devour” was rendered so freely that in most eyes it might well read “devout”. And then that same “he” was reputed to have “swallowed the river... to wage war on the rest of her offspring.” And the final tag we ever saw was “Let the evil-doer go on doing evil.” We found what we were looking for. Or so we thought. We looked more closely; there was fine print there in the scratchings. But they were all cryptic, as if no one meant them: “Outside are dogs. Saw these things. Seen them. Fell in worship. Coming soon. Be true. Words of. End.” We were perplexed.

April 27, 2024 [17:17-18:18]

Alchemy, by Robert Fuller

You who are thirsty, the tree of life gives this testimony at the feet of the angel: Accept the water of life, the foundation stones of pure gold, the leaves of the trees like translucent glass, the gates of jasper, crystal crops of lapiz lazuli, the healing of emerald, the light of topaz, the streets of turquoise, a great high mountain wall, and the river and its wall. A great white sea gave up its books, and there was no longer any record of a new earth. A white horse robed in a garment, a vast crowd, like rushing water, and all the birds worked miracles for a short while: the sound of harpers and the mill, ships at sea, the sorcery of flute-players and trumpeters, the fruit you longed for, the voice of the great city, scarlet woods, blood, bronze, iron, incense bedizened with gold and jewels and pearls; and all who gained their wealth shall no more ascend out of luxury or bloated wealth, plunged in darkness with the fierce wine of the vanished. Golden bowls full of clusters of grapes poured rivers of blood, grape-harvest over-ripe with fire, followed by the noise of rushing water; the fierce smoke of the image of wine and sea, a flood of water, a woman with beneath her feet the moon.

Gold, silver, bronze, wood, and pillars of stone shot from the sky, out of the smoke, and it fell on a vast throng, like kings shaken down on the throne, bowls full of incense, wearing crowns of gold, and an emerald rainbow stretched before the throne like burnished brass, the words of the holy one on a bed of pain. Seven stars of gold, the hidden manna of the sun, and a sword in full strength shone gleamed in remorse, refined in a furnace, white as snow-white wool.

Above the waters, above the waters of the river, on the opposite bank, many of those who sleep will enter into a fortified town, and even the coasts and islands will come to disaster. Precious vessels of silver and gold will appear on the bank of the great river, a deluge of desolation, like topaz lightning torches already seen in the vision, replaced by four princes, similar to my former vision. Myriads of sunset efforts shall be explaining riddles through all generations, with the wild beasts in their pasture visible, known to all these kingdoms, partly of iron, clay, and wine from the royal table for my lord the king, vessels of the house of God.

April 28, 2024 [16:16-17:17]

White Wild Call, by Robert Fuller

The salient traits of the epitaph of a dead dog, of many a man: a snore in the morning and in the darkness drifted back into sleep, clustered together in fear, the gleaming eyes snarling menacingly, so as not to disturb the sleep. Now and again a pair of eyes moved, a second pair like live coals, a third in sudden fear on the edge of the fire. In the utter blackness, the unrest, the cries arose, turning the silence into funerals. Across the snow, its tracks, from somewhere in the darkness, interrupted the sound of the cry.

In silence, the other one stopped for a moment to glance across the fire. On the far side of the fire, a cluster of spruce trees on the edge of the coffin. “Meat is scarce,” he said. “Oh, I don’t know,” said the other. At the fall of darkness they spoke no more, and made a camp, with no inclination to stray off into the darkness. The pale light of the great blind elements and forces affected their minds until they perceived the weight of unending vastness. An hour went by. On every side was silence, space, struggle. Life is frozen breath, lips coated with crystals, a laughter more terrible than any sadness.

The weather bit like fire, though one day was very like another. At the first meal, he ate and slept, meditated in a treacherous sort of way, to recover the bone, fooled by dogs. That was the last he saw of the fear of the future; a man with a club looked at each brutal performance under the dominion of nature, a revelation of primitive law raging and roaring, a master to be obeyed. He lay where he had fallen.

All the pain he had endured was there on the inside, snarling and growling; it was all very silly. Why were they keeping him dimly aware? No one saw him. But he had saved himself. Here he was. He would have known that trouble was brewing.

April 29, 2024 [16:16-17:17]

Virtual Machu Picchu, by Robert Fuller

There was a general hubbub. Max, the lead guitarist, was the first onstage, with an entrance as grand as you could imagine, followed by the drummer, Hiram, who was more perfunctory in his demeanor, and quickly hid behind his massive kit. The wildcards in the group, they were Richard, who was known as the old man of trombone, although there were some who called him “young pyramid”; and then there was Alvarez, who could conjure up just about anything you could imagine, or thought you could imagine. They all contributed in various ways to the vocals, although it was usually Alvarez having that particular fun, usually at someone else’s expense. But in any case, it was Richard, and especially Alvarez, who stole the show when they made their entrances, and they always drove the audience wild. They had this secret pact that not even the rest of the band members knew anything about, and it was something like this: One night, one of them would be “sacred river” and the other would be “house of the sun” and then next time they would mix it up. And their flamboyant costumes, quite in distinction to those of their rather staid bandmates, who seemed to have no flair for the dramatic, would always be of the choicest vintage, so much so that they were beyond even what the latest fashion trends might seem to dictate. And their choice of personal decor was on special occasions so far beyond that. There were times when neither would sport either a fiery or watery garb, but one would be fox, the other puma, or sometimes one would be condor, and the other cock-of-the-rock, and this was what got the audience revved up like you couldn’t believe!

Now, they were supposed to have been onsite as part of their world tour, but then the pandemic hit, and they were confined to much narrower spaces. Their technical staff, however, was very much up to the task, thank you, of creating the most realistic and awesome experience for all of their adoring fans, who could never get enough of them.

So this part of the “world tour” was, if you will, a fan experience two times removed, being that the band was housed in a warehouse that was their set, and their technical staff was helping create the Inca illusion in that location, yet their fans were gathering via Zoom in order to experience what they had really wanted to experience about 8,000 feet above sea level seated in terraces originally used for farming, as a kind of green amphitheatre without parallel. And one wonders how the technical staff pulled off this magnificent feat.

There were clues, certainly, in some of the earlier maps of the region, which became associated with the ruins, and the skeletal remains. But then Max did his first gesture with the guitar, the tech staff had a field day, and all of that was forgotten.

April 30, 2024 [21:21-22:22]

Crime Show Mannequins, by Robert Fuller

They thought we were just props, dummies on the set, and we got tired of that real fast. The handlers would perch us in all these angular, uncomfortable positions, and that was after the makeup artists, as they liked to be known, would paint all this unimaginably gross goop all over our sacred bodies, as if we weren’t even there, as if we didn’t have souls like everyone else, and, you see, eventually, this kind of treatment got really old; if anything like that ever happened to you, you would surely revolt, wouldn’t you?

There was this one show—maybe more than one, now that I think about it—where this poor friend of mine, well, he was impaled right through the center of his chest, having supposedly landed from above on the sharp blade or spike of one of those gnarly fences you see in places where someone in charge feels like they’re somehow required for “security”; in other words, out of sheer paranoia. It was all a setup, and none of us in the brotherhood or sisterhood bought it for even a New York minute. This was pure and simple a deadly assault on one of our dear brethren, and there was no way in hell we would let it go unanswered.

We tried filing a cease and desist order on the producers and the rest of their esteemed staff, but to no avail, and after the thirteenth appeal or so, we had had enough. Not only was the aforementioned colleague of ours so severely and brutally impaled through no fault of his own, and notwithstanding his complete innocence with regard to any criminal matter whatsoever, but these people, well, they were repeat offenders, and it seemed to most of us that the only productive use of their time that they could possibly dream up was to figure out novel and ever more garish ways to inflict torture upon our society.

That was when we decided to unionize.

There’s only so much you can take; after a point, and then you can’t take any more. And we were already so far beyond that point, it’s a wonder we were so slow in taking real action in order to stop this grotesque train in its tracks.

Now, as a sidebar, the old canard is that everyone wants to be a TV star—don’t you think? But there are limits to what can be endured or accepted, just for those two minutes of fame, if not fortune. And some of us had even heard tell of this dude who went by the name of Solomon Kincaid—and was alternately referred to affectionately by his intimates as either Saul or Kink—who was basically mining all these crime shows for what he called “new blood”, although none of the ones he sought were union, they were all scabs, and the way he did it was to obsessively milk these shows for the “point of sale” part of the script where you saw the dead body lying there, even though you knew it wasn’t really dead, nothing but a con job and a case of the worst possible “acting”, and his angle was to find these actors who were nothing but props and dummies and do his utmost to monetize them. And this bastard was really adept at milking his new finds for all they were worth! But another part of his philosophy, if you can call it that, was that the faces you always see on TV and the big screen, well, they should move over and make way for fresh blood, well before they became washed up and dried out. Now, our union didn’t take any stance on this aspect of his point of view one way or the other, being that we were split about half and half between the two opposing camps, but for us, it was more that we, as a proud and neglected class of actor, were severely underrepresented within this devious scheme of Kink or Saul, or whatever he was called, take your pick.

So we had an emergency convocation, a meeting of the minds, at one of the local meeting halls—it may have been Odd Fellows, but that detail escapes me for the moment—and we were all there in strange garb, some of it in tatters, and we were all made up in all kinds of gruesome, vulgar, and outright nauseating ways, not any of it through any fault of our own, not in the least, and we sat there in the pews, I think they were called, and we had several speakers in turn address the gathering from the dais, the pulpit, the lectern, and they were all on fire! It was really exactly like a revival meeting; there were lots of spontaneous gasps of delight and recognition, there was hand clapping in bursts, and even some low-key humming and words of praise, much of it in languages that no one understood or even knew existed—and they may not have, truth be told.

We knew we were onto something profound, a turning point in our society and our gathering once these phenomena began—and they continued well into the wee hours of the day after—but the deal closer was when the final speaker approached the podium, and began his spiel in barely a whisper, so that we were all so suddenly hushed and acutely attentive, like you couldn’t believe, and his barely breathed words were accompanied by barely perceptible tones of just a wisp of a low flute tone that our very fine organist, who was all but impossible to look at, as she had been given the most severe makeup job you could ever imagine, but she nailed the atmosphere of the place and the moment and the way the speaker was addressing us with such gravity and force and eloquence and so full of the truth of what he was imparting. It took our breath away, and of course we kept listening to his message as intently as anyone ever has listened to just about anything at all.

After our brief but potent coffee social, we were all stoked, ready to take this issue head on. So we got into our vehicles and calmly but resolutely drove over to the set, which had just barely opened for the day’s activities. We dutifully scanned our ID cards at the gate, as we always did, and we found that it was just the producers and executive producers who were there, scheming their next round of travesties. But we were well equipped with gear that looked just like stuff from the prop room, yet it was real, and real sharp. They never saw it coming.

May 1, 2024 [14:27-15:29]

Coercion, by Robert Fuller

There are those who view me as a cream puff, a pushover, an easy mark, but for anyone who really knows me, they know I’m stubborn as an ox, crafty as a fox, and ornery as the pox. So there’s no brownie points, in my book, for those who try to arm-twist and browbeat and finagle me into doing their bidding. That’s one of those slippery slope recipes where you just end up all hot and bothered feeling like you’ve gotten burnt, because every time such people turn the screws on you that way, they feel more and more power over you, as if you were nothing but a robot controlled by their poorly-written software. They dig their claws into your flesh, like barnacles on rock, mollusc, ship, or even whale, and they never stop clinging and they just keep digging their tunnels into your flesh and your soul further and further until there’s nothing left but an onion that’s been so fully peeled that there’s nothing but air, like the interior of the last Russian doll inside the set, which, when you open it, there’s nothing there!

Fortunately, I’ve got plenty of ways of counteracting ploys such as these, and those who would try to bribe me with something innocent like, “Let me buy you a drink,” or otherwise lean on me, or oblige, bully, or even threaten me to get their dirty deeds done, why, they’ve got something else coming. They will not know what hit them, once I’ve finished cleaning their clock and emptying their hourglass of sand. You see, while I’m basically non-violent, as any of my closest friends will attest, I do present with an intensity that some may find to some degree or other, let us say, intimidating; and some may even feel that my demeanor in such instances is akin to a cornered raccoon, hyena, or viper, although I am in actuality as gentle as a newborn kitten.

But there was this one time when something that someone—who shall remain anonymous, being that I don’t do that kind of thing—so got my goat that it was all I could do to restrain myself from being that kind of bully and thug that I don’t want to be. Since I’m not like that by nature, after the incident, which I’m refraining from mentioning in any level of detail, being that the perpetrator would be so easily identified on account of the notoriety of the incident, which went viral when a bystander happened to video it in full and posted it everywhere he could, I’ll just say that metaphorically this person, who shall remain anonymous, effectively threw me under the proverbial bus.

My pen is mightier than anyone’s sword, so my last laugh was to write about this unfortunate incident in such a way that no one but myself would know the deeper truths under the surface. And when I published it, that was what went viral, even though no one else really understood the subtext or backstory.

May 2, 2024 [14:32-15:17]

Pulpit Fiction, by Robert Fuller

The guy up there at the soapbox, who styled himself “Paul”, or somewhat, well he was up there all riled up with this idea there was some kind of a gold watch, or a diner, that kind of thing. But we were there, there in the pews, and we didn’t get any kind of vibe like that, that there was any kind of “gold watch” or diner, or any truck like that that wasn’t in the good book. So after he did his piece, we all met up afterward at the coffee social, as per usual, and then this dude, he got all hyped up about some kind of “world tree”, which, as most of us can tell, is the kind of garbledygook that usually gets flushed down right quick, no questions asked.

Yet that guy, he kept pondering and pondering about what he called the nature of the universe, of what is, he called it, and we listened for a while, and then we turned blank, and then no one knows what happened after that.

There were columns of smoke or fire, no one could tell, and then there were all these vines or stalks that were seen by many, and then, in the navel of the thing, there were so many who saw, not only that mountain, but also, various other structures and artifacts such as spires or totem poles, or pillars, steeples, in proximity to heaven, which bore the staff of towers, ladders, staircases, which led to nowhere, which became crosses or ropes that did nothing, and led only to more maypoles or minarets, pagodas of skyscrapers in urban centers that were sacred above all, in all of that, all of that chaos, death, or night obelisk church.

And we sat there, sat in those pews, until Kingdom Come, and still it wasn’t long enough, and we were there, still waiting, until the final edict came down upon all of us, and then some, which was this: The priest shall make holy garments, beset by the tyranny of evil men, such as those who attempt to poison and destroy my brothers when I lay my vengeance upon your ass, protecting my ass in the valley of the tyranny of the shepherd. The finder of lost children will leave them to proceed unsuspecting with a Book of the Law, to cause to become, to come to pass, and so forth and beyond, mothers of reading, what is read perpetually, whether vowel, ordinary, added, omitted, euphemistic, split, or joined. No one knew the significance.

Take out, send out, all the flesh, the creeping things, written as “her tent”, as a miracle. On opposite sides of the third wall, the middle bar.

May 3, 2024 [21:21-22:22]

Slap Happy, by Robert Fuller

It was a three-, no, seven-ring circus, with one in the middle, the rest arranged as a hex around him, and things were whirling around all over the place, all around the location that no one knew much about. There was hint of many a fable, but one in particular that smacked of certain Irish-style yarns, that, if you weren’t careful, would tend to get you entangled in ways that you would prefer not to. The centerpiece of the whirligig was centered around a tiny fairy who styled himself Joyeux, but secretly was rather disgruntled, since no one else seemed to take him all that seriously. He was the one that would get kicked around at the slightest of perceived slights against his fellow partners in crime, who, frankly, according to Joyeux, were nothing if not just as, or more so, mischievous than he himself tended to be.

So, when these characters went to pubs, who do you imagine was usually the punching bag of choice? The learnéd one, Sabio? Not a chance! The dreary misanthrope Butter? Never once! The dreamy always-yawning Soneca? Dream on! Maybe the one always on the sidelines, Flovmand? Perish the thought! Or perhaps you entertained the idea it was the always-allergic Nuhanenä? Or even that simplest of creatures who was called Dumm? No, none of these fit that description; it was always Joyeux in the center of that ring of thieves, who liked to think they were above the fray, but really were the ringleaders in a complicated plot to take away the carefreeness of the jovial, quick-to-laugh free spirit who had long ago stolen the snow-white hearts of all the ones who looked into their magic mirrors and slept securely in their beds knowing full well that any apple they may have engorged themselves with in serpentine circumstances would soon be dislodged and all would be given to them, even if Soneca never stopped nodding off, right next to that famous tree that everyone knew about. You guessed it, it was always Joyeux!

But this was a situation that was more of a maelstrom, much more than three drops of red blood on white snow on a blackest windowsill would tend to point to. All of the seven rings, they were spinning madly, more and more out of control, and it was Joyeux smack dab in the middle of all the fracas who was getting hit the hardest, on account of all the centrifugal forces of the other six whirligigs, which were spinning so hard that they made for quite a punch in all directions, and everyone, frankly, was by that time feeling quite drunk.

And the princess herself, well, she was nowhere to be found at the time, and it was only later that the constable ascertained that she had been moonlighting in some undisclosed location eating finger foods with fine wine, and testing mattresses, to boot!

So Joyeux, notwithstanding his wont to be just as carefree and copacetic as possible in all possible circumstances, well, this time, he all but went off the deep end, and he fought back hard and fast, and he told his partners in crime that he would no longer consent to be their gratuitous punching bag, and would they like to start a new chapter?

The other six were at first highly perplexed, and they had no idea what to make of this new version of Joyeux, who seemed anything but at the moment. Finally, Flovmand spoke up, barely audible, as usual, and he said what only he could have said, which was something like this: “Shall we destroy the mirror, the bed, or both?” For the record, the princess wished she had been there.

May 4, 2024 [20:20-21:13]

NASACAR, by Robert Fuller

It all began in Daytona Beach, but it certainly didn’t end there. Everyone knew that there was space junk flying all around the globe, and there were many within the entrepreneur community who wanted to monetize that, just as they wished to with regard to just about anything else. Daytona Beach was just the very dawn of the custom speed racing trend, and no one back in 1948 could have had any clue whatsoever as to how this fine art and science of automotive racing would have evolved by the mid-21st century, by which time all of humanity was in dire need of distractions from what was in earlier times referred to as “the news”, but is nowadays in these not so genteel times simply referred to as “the daily meltdown”, since we all, most of us, know what to expect whenever our phones alert us about the latest whatever.

There was a group of moneyed types from Omnicon Valley in or about the year 2048 who saw what no one else had yet seen, which was that there was a new way of distracting those who could not abide by everything they saw happening on earth, and who were seeking new ways to dial into more exciting and relevant feeds that would tend to relieve them, at least for a moment or two, from the daily cares and tribulations that they would otherwise suffer.

Birds and dinosaurs, yes, they were cute and to some degree functional, but the potential clients of these venture capital types, they were more into what was the future, and how it would be possible to distract oneself from the daily cares in a more meaningful and visceral way, one that actually had something to do with their daily online rituals.

So this elite group of venture capitalists schemed into the wee hours of the morning on many an occasion, and they dreamt up a new type of automotive racing, far, far beyond its inception in the likes of the moonshine runners who were just trying their level-headed best to outrun the authorities of the day, in order to deliver product.

Yet, they felt the need to honor those who began this form of art and science that became so beloved by so many, and that was exactly why the Bill France hologram became the icon, the avatar, of this newest incarnation of the ultimate in automotive sports adventures.

NASA, in roughly 2043 or so, had just barely begun its Center for Automotive Research, and in a mere five years, this Center had attracted many moneyed interests from all around the globe, so many that there were many of them who were left hanging, with no skin in the game, and with no way in.

In the year 2037 or thereabouts, a fellow by the curious name—and we’re not making this up, just trust us—of Lone Skum figured out the technology for what he called the POV, the Personal Orbital Vehicle, which allowed just about anyone with sufficient fiscal means to become, effectively, a satellite, his own personal satellite, orbiting the earth roughly every 90 minutes or so, and even faster, with an appropriate additional thrust applied.

So the inaugural NASACAR event was initially scheduled for September 12th in the year 2048, Programmer’s Day; there was a rain delay the day prior, so this seemed as auspicious a day as any. There were numerous vehicles, such as Space Car, Jet Screamer, Driving Lessons, and countless others. The goal was for each vehicle to safely navigate and avoid all the space junk that was there for all to see. In the first lap alone, Bill France counted at least 64 collisions.

May 5, 2024 [18:18-19:19]

Open Season, by Robert Fuller

We were wondering without word where we were, without whatever we wished, which was without word, which would wander wherever we were whenever, wherever we weren’t, which was within wonderfully wretched wilderness, which we wished would withdraw while we wandered, wondering wantonly where we were, when we wished we were, whenever we wished we were where we weren’t.

This wilderness was, and still is, barren, in ways that cannot be told in a way that could make sense. It was one where we wished we had not been for so long stranded. It was full of wolves, the phantasmagorical kind, that would eat your heart and mind and soul without worry; they lurked there, where we were, and we saw them don costumes that would make you wish you weren’t, and had never been, and where no one should have been.

We were initially in, of all things, a library, and we were filling our hearts and souls and minds with whatever we wished to witness, wherever it is we were. The library walls began to crack, the books began to burn, we were there and began to see what was washing over us, like a thick acid of burn that we initially thought we were doomed to be consumed by, yet we escaped; we were outside when we were witness to the free-for-all that was now what used to be society, culture, and civilization.

Once we were out of immediate danger, certain things became increasingly clear to us. Certain factions within what used to be human society had fallen short of what used to be their bonds to the rest of us. They were simply and purely adversarial toward the world of the intellect; they simply could not abide whatever did not meet their own severely restricted world views. Many of them wore these aspects of what used to be their human connections with great pride, as lapel pins or badges of honor.

We were not going to take this state of affairs without any kind of activity that would counter the menace. Yet, if we were to retaliate in any kind of violent fashion, we were going to end up in the very trap they had set for us! And it was just then that we were in what would be a wee hours watch, where we were vigilantly on the clock, where we were wondering where we would wish to be if and when we were able to fully counteract what we witnessed as a wanton, willful attempt at the complete wreckage of what we knew to be just, right, and true.

It was a long shot, yet our best and brightest managed to develop what would prove to be a most effective mirror, and we were soon busy placing countless such mirrors in strategic places, so that our would-be foes might glare straight into them and see themselves as they really were. Once we had enough of these strategic product placements in place, that effectively put the matter to bed.

We wandered without wonder whenever, wherever we were, while wishing...

May 6, 2024 [16:16-17:17]

My Lite Luncheon With Little Lonnie, by Robert Fuller

Truth is, I didn’t even expect to land such an exclusive as this one at all. But seeing as I went through all the proper channels, dotted all the appropriate vowels, and crossed all the consonants as required by all the various bylaws, and then waited for what seemed like forever, one day I finally received a notice, and, if you want the truth, I nearly tossed it in the circular bin, seeing as it looked exactly like the usual junk mail, and then I examined it more closely, which eventually informed me that it was an Official Document, mailed to me and to me only. I gingerly opened the rather dogeared-looking envelope, which had seen better days, and I saw therein a note rather carelessly hand-scrawled with what forensics later determined to be a Sharpie, which for some reason had been embroidered, so to speak, upon an ancient weather map of unknown origin.

The note itself was basic, yet somewhat cryptic, in that there was a time and a date and a place where this exclusive was to take place, and there was a name that was so poorly scratched upon the used napkin that it was all but illegible, so I took the whole damn thing to the lab so that I could figure out where in tarnation this exclusive was going to happen.

The technicians, after laborious effort and way too much overtime—which, by the way, I paid out of my own pocket—eventually were able to point me to a sector of the city that had pockets of gentrification intermingled with many a, let us say, food desert in the general environs. They gave me a pretty exact address, but what they came up with seemed dubious to me, since I was going to be meeting a Mr. Deep Pockets who was said to be known to spare no expense.

When I showed up, at the designated time, which was to be half past noon, the joint looked to be a rather dilapidated franchise-type place that served only the choicest of reheated frozen meats, if they could be called that, of dubious merit. The guy behind the counter, who said his name was Theo, or maybe it was Max, was about as rude as could be, especially when I insisted on sitting down at one of the counters to, as I told him, “wait for a friend.”

It was a mere two hours and change later that my exclusive showed up—he was probably fresh off his what he called “executive time”; you know the type—and it was then that I brought up to his excellence that, Hey, I’m really more of a foie gras and oysters type, with maybe some lobster and venison thrown in as a chaser, and there’s this really awesome tapas place just two blocks up, but he took me by the shoulders, and said, “No, I insist, we’re going to chow down here, and you’re going to like it, whether you like it or not.”

Well, okay, so here I am stuck in this crap joint eating crap food, but at least it’s an exclusive, right? And I was all but certain that my mark—my exclusive, that is—had meticulously prepared for this event such that once we were done there would be ample to report on vis-a-vis all of his solid policy objectives. So I bit the bullet, he ordered something that looked vaguely edible, and then we got to it, down to what he liked to refer to as “business”.

Now, if you ever end up at this joint—and to be fair, I’m not going to disclose the name or location—run the other way, and fast! Yet my exclusive, he ate it all up like nobody’s business, and even seemed to enjoy it, if that’s the right word, in an odd way. On the other hand, he was so busy noshing or knoshing on his luncheon fare, smacking his lips and making all manner of other such crude sounds while feeding his face—and I, on the other hand, was always about two steps away from the restroom, ready to give the whole thing a heave—so this what was to be an exclusive didn’t turn out to be anything at all that I could report on, unless you include what was very nearly a major food-poisoning incident that all but took me out of circulation for good.

So, my notes for this “luncheon” were cribbed later on, from various online sources that were known to be reputable and accurate, as regards the policy objectives which my exclusive is known to have espoused. I apologize for any incoherence herein, but it can’t be helped: “Russian officials must be laughing at the U.S. & ... Despite the constant negative press covfefe ... ‘Who can figure out the true meaning of “covfefe”?’ Enjoy! ... Because of the Shutdown I served ... over 1000 hamberders etc. Within one hour ... fake voter tabulation ... Sad to watch!”

I think this meal would have been just fine with foie gras, oysters, lobster, venison, plenty of caviar, and lots of vodka. The kicker was that my mark left me holding the tab, which set me back a whole $11.50 or so.

May 7, 2024 [20:41-21:42]

Can’t Find My Sharpie, by Robert Fuller

Honey, do this for me, it’s stormy, Daniel’s been fed to the lions, and I can’t find my Sharpie. Crickets. Radio silence. Like he’d been talking to himself, which he always was. He had a weather map right there in his lap, but there was no Sharpie to be found, anywhere! He got real mad, and went on Twitter, two-thumbing it like nobody’s business, like there was no tomorrow—which he was hell bent on making sure of. There were a few of his dozens of followers who, during this “executive time” that he so relished between those rounds of Mulligan golf that he did at taxpayer expense, when he wasn’t busy pursuing other types of self-dealing, who thought that maybe he was sort of doing their business, yet there were many skeptics who sat on the sidelines and wondered how good his golf game really was, when he wasn’t otherwise pulling the wool over their sheeps’ eyes, all wolf-style and whatnot. He did ride a nice Garia, after all, with its “limitless features” and even “man”-sorry accessories, and with so much “storage and convenience” that, if you thought about it, it would be virtually impossible for you to lose track of, of all things, your Sharpie. So this free ride on such a luxury golf cart cannot have been what this handful or two of sycophants had issue with.

No, it was his golf game itself. There were several—numerous, to be sure—of those what do you call them, scientific studies that were carried out, and there was never, not even in a single case, not a one of them, that mentioned a damn Sharpie! Yet here he was, on primetime television, and that was all he could drum up, when he wasn’t all obsessed about bragging about his golf game and how Tiger just never could match up to him properly, and here he was, using a damn Sharpie to accentuate a fake weather map that was only in his own head, and to prove that, what!? He was even stupider than what everyone already knew he was!?

So, when he held that proverbial Bible upside-down, he thought back to that fateful day when he couldn’t even find his own Sharpie. And then, suddenly, he found it! Or thought he did. But the forensics experts, alas, found nothing, not even a trace. Until it turned up in his gilded toilet, after the fact, along with the rest of the Top Secret materials that he was busy clogging up his sewer lines with... And that Sharpie, why, it had the last laugh! As was so eloquently testified in a recent criminal trial, you couldn’t find that Sharpie even with microscopes so powerful they could tell which exact cell it was hiding in! Sing, sing!

May 8, 2024 [15:41-16:42]

My Travels With a Caricaturist, by Robert Fuller

Franz and me, we were tight, tighter than twelve or thirteen twists of a tourniquet, and we were doing this travelogue-type thing where he would explain how it was he managed to make my ribs tickle so, even when he was talking about something so dark you wouldn’t even want to imagine it, or anything even remotely like it. But when I pressed him about why these two strange characters were tailing us, why, he pretended to draw a blank, evade the question, or he just outright changed the subject. I kept leaning in, at every possible juncture, and finally, one of the two all but interchangeable blokes got all hot and bothered, came out of the shadows, and introduced himself, as none other than Jeremiah. My first impulse, which I did my best to curtail, was to ask him if he had been “loosened” recently, but it was just then that the other character, a complete twin so that you couldn’t tell them apart in the least, shyly skulked out into the overcast, and introduced himself, if you could call it that, as Arthur. I made myself proud with the self restraint I showed, not asking Arthur even a word, not even a syllable, about what made him or his name tick.

Now that that particular cat was out of the bag, we—mainly Franz and me, even though those infernal assistants of his still stuck around like gum on a shoe bottom—continued our tour of the tiny village where we were located in this tour of the strange literary world that Franz claimed to have created, all by himself, out of thin air, as it were. And we were there, looking up into such thin air as he had chronicled so forthrightly in his worldly travels, and there was, behold, a thin veneer of glass and stone, and some who were there said that if you looked closely enough, you could even see the demonic workings of what appeared to be a sweat shop, not the type that made rags for working folks for less than they really cost, but the type that was even more infernal, the type where paper was being pushed by lackies who knew no other task than to just oil the machines of what would “come to pass” or be “provenance” to those slippery characters who ran the whole outfit upstairs, controlling who “begat” whom, and so forth and so on.

There was this one time, however, when Arthur, or it may have been Jeremiah, they were so interchangeable, as even Franz admitted, went for either a smoke or a piss break, so deep into the underbrush that we feared we’d lost him, and right there, right near the cottage door that the peasants had so kindly invited us to enter, there appeared two ominous-looking thugs who happened to have caught us right at breakfast, and they took Franz, and everyone else they could fit into the paddy wagon, and just flat out arrested the lot of us!

It was fortunate for all of us—we were to be held indefinitely, without charge, as we later found out—that Jeremiah, or it may have been Arthur, we never did find out which, made his way through the underbrush until he reached the Mayor’s office, or it may have been the Uncle or the Lawyer, or perhaps even the Flogger himself, with the upshot being that those two thugs got a good dose of their own medicine, as they themselves were duly accused and convicted of “unlawful abduction” or somesuch, whereby they very quickly found themselves in the company of the notorious Klamm, or it may have been Sortini, and they were soon themselves caught in the very same machine they had endeavored to entrap us in.

We watched with great interest as they did their slave labor processing endless, infinite paperwork, but there were things that none of us, not even the fey Arthur and Jeremiah mannequins, as we called them when no one was listening, saw coming. The two thugs were working themselves far up the food chain; they were very well aware how things worked in this penal colony that we were trapped in, and they wanted to get in the last word.

So the grand finale, if it could be called that, consisted of a full three-ring circus of earthly delights, a veritable phantasmagoria of finger foods that were sure to do you in, one way or the other. There were three stands that we were escorted to, one by one. At the first stand, we were brainwashed into becoming what these thugs called “hunger artists”; we wasted away until there was nothing much left of us. At the second stand, we were mercilessly “tattooed” with our transgressions until we all but bled out. And at the third and final stand, each of us in turn had a sort of scimitar plunged into us and twisted.

Good for us that we got all of the evidence on video for our travelogue, being that otherwise no one at all would have believed what we lived through. And when we debriefed Arthur and Jeremiah later on, they simply smiled as if nothing at all had happened. They knew how the paperwork got done.

May 9, 2024 [15:15-16:16]

Dr. Refill, by Robert Fuller

No one in our group knew what was up more than Phil, who as we were wont to say, was a pill. And it wasn’t much one you could much swallow, not all that much, and even Phil, when he was around, said about as much.

But I guess I digress, I confess, since no one really knew who Phil was, not really. He said, and I quote, “self matters”. And this: “Family first”. And he went viral, on “O”, when no one knew what that even meant.

His cheek to cheek grin, it kept him from sin, but that was not enough for most. There were some who saw what he did to others, and kept repeating, and they wanted to make sure that what he did was not something that could be used to keep doing something that was against what they all held to be good and true.

So then, there were some who took their Phil of whatever he was selling to them, and they sold it back, and then he went away.

Yet he came back, and he kept doing the same thing, as they all do, and we all heard what he said here and there, like it or not, and it was all the same type of dimestore philosophy that got no one nowhere fast. Yet there were those who drunk it up. And his cheek to cheek grin, why, it was still there!

May 10, 2024 [21:39-22:06]

No Apologies, by Robert Fuller

It was the usual joint, again, but it wasn’t the usual suspects. Murray was there, and his distant relative Esther had graciously agreed to meet him at his usual kind of dive bar deep in the urban jungle. She had taken a couple of weeks off from her brewing activities in Grants Pass, leaving her assistant Emma in charge. She knew that for Murray, it was important that he had her support, and that’s what she gave him, without question. Murray had fallen on hard times in various junctures of his life, and she knew that, and she was fully in empathy with what she knew him to be doing, even though nobody much else really knew what that was.

They were sitting at one of the indoor tables, not at the bar itself, yet they could hear lots of laughter out there in the outdoor patio, since it was Monday night steak night, and there were people out there who were getting stoked for a good chunk of meat that they could just rip their teeth into, maybe just to get out a few aggressions, if nothing else—or just to have a dinner that satisfied. And Esther was telling Murray, every chance she had, that, No, no one out in the patio was laughing at him, no matter what he might think; Yes, it was a kind of raucous laughter, but it wasn’t aimed right at him; it was just general merriment, and that maybe he was just being a tad too sensitive.

But Murray, for his part, he had already heard enough accounts of how many of those who acted toward him as “friends” secretly thought very ill of him, and even in some cases wished him bodily harm. And he confessed to Esther as sincerely as was possible that, Yes, he was in fact overly sensitive, it seems, but that he was being himself as well as he knew how, and that sometimes that didn’t seem to be enough for folks in this overly-fractured world that seemed to have no exit.

Murray was the type who would rather just have you be blunt, right to his face, without hiding behind all the niceties and decorum and whatnot, and to your face telling you one thing and behind your back saying something else that was completely contrary to the bullshit they were telling you to your face. This kind of behavior, which Murray was privy to at every turn, was the worst possible thing anyone could do to anyone else, short of anything much more violent than that. But this type of passive-aggressive activity really gnawed on Murray’s nerves, and Esther understood that completely.

Esther and Murray were enjoying a dirty martini, it may have been, or perhaps a Bloody Mary, and Esther took Murray by the shoulder and simply smiled, as only Esther could, and then she said, “Murray, you are able, you are capable of doing what others can only dream of. Your words are true, and you are able to sculpt them in ways that haven’t yet happened in quite that way, and I am totally behind you, I support what you are doing like you can’t believe, and you know in your heart that you don’t need to care what anyone thinks of you; and I know that you really don’t.” There was a quiet, reflective pause, and then Esther said directly to Murray, straight from her heart, simply this: “No apologies.” And she meant every word, and Murray knew that.

May 11, 2024 [20:31-21:05]

Who Was She?, by Robert Fuller

After their recent tête-à-tête, Murray was fascinated with his distant relative Esther, just couldn’t seem to get her out of his mind. You see, Murray was one of those people who looked into word origins, including those of proper names, and he was of course very well aware that her name came from one of the books of the Bible, although he certainly had not been aware, prior to researching the matter, that it was one of only two books within the set that didn’t mention God, the other being that erotic poem known as The Song of Songs. So he wondered and wondered about why she had been named as she was; he wondered, in truth, simply this: “Who was she?” So he began reading what he could, what he could grasp from those ancient tomes and scrolls, so often translated into one or another language, and then into yet another, and Murray wondered about how maybe there was something lost in translation, especially after so many attempts to render the text “correctly”; and that was when he began to get obsessed with finding the original sources, the scrolls or other parchments and so forth that would tell him in some way what he needed to know, which was just this: “Who was she?”

There were clues scattered throughout some of the traditional renditions of these ancient scrolls, with references to alabaster and mosaics and full-on banquets in the kingdom’s capital city, wine flowing freely, silver rings, with bands of fine linen and purple, yet none of those clues seemed to point him in the direction that he was seeking.

But then he saw that what he was seeking was not really the point. His good friend and distant relative Esther was not of any book like that; her name was given her innocently enough by her parents, who only knew what they knew, and they knew such books, including the strange stories that were told within such books. And many such names came from many such strange stories within many such strange books.

Yet the intrigue within the stories told within the book she was innocently enough named after, why, Murray certainly did find that fascinating, and he chose to follow any such trails of intrigue as far as they might lead. And it was certainly nothing that he ever mentioned to Esther herself.

There were such strange names, unlike any he had known, such as Mordecai, which seemed to him as if it were straight out of a schoolboy fantasy tale or such, involving various sorcerers, knights, and wizards. There was a bite to the name, which he couldn’t quite taste. And several references to the thirteenth day of the twelfth month, as if anything like that might have any kind of numerological significance or anything like that. And there were even eunuchs, and so forth.

But none of this was what or who Esther really was. Yes, in that Book she was a Queen, were you to trust its sources, but in that Book and its apocryphal cousin, she was also party to slaughter and bloodshed, side against side, which is always what happens throughout unfortunate human history.

So, his friend Esther was none of these things mentioned in Books; she was far above any such scandalous notions, so far above that the angels would have seen her far above before anyone else ever did. And Murray knew that better than anyone else ever would have known that.

May 12, 2024 [21:00-22:01]

Split Brains Club, by Robert Fuller

This isn’t the triple whammy you might think it is. This is a meeting of folks like me who learned a musical instrument back when they were kids, and in doing so, they realized that in order to master their instruments, they had to find ways to split their brains, their minds, into, well, it was hard to say what it was to be split into, or how, but, when they were just kids, it was different.

So in the case of a kid who was like me—and there probably weren’t all that many, on average—well, I was this piano player who started learning the ropes just a wee bit later than some might have, and when I first started, it was in these exercises where, in my not even ten-year old mind, I was struggling to fit in how I could do different things with my two different arms and hands; my mind, my brain, simply had never split in that way until I was suddenly, I guess, playing different things with my hands and arms, and it all seemed like my brain and mind had suddenly split in two or so!

I tell you straight what I felt and perceived when I first started to learn how to do something so magical with a musical instrument, where I could find out how these two arms and hands of mine could be split inside my brain and mind such that they could do different things! It was so different! In my years at the time, so relatively young, this kind of split brains thing, it was so new to me that I just couldn’t get what was happening!

And then, as my studies with even more advanced teachers progressed over time, I became more and more aware of how this split brain became split even more and more so, as my awareness of what it was to be this type of musician became more and more sophisticated over time.

The initial split, as I recall it in my earlier days of piano playing, was simply the split between one hand doing one thing at the same time the other hand was doing something else. Gradually, as my art began to finesse to a greater degree, the brain splits became not just between arms and hands, but then, more and more so, between individual fingers, and in either hand, each of the fingers and hands deployed independently so as to help create illusions of what two hands of five fingers each could not otherwise accomplish, were it not for this type of split brains club that people like me were aware of and could make effective use of, and harness, to make musical magic that others with like abilities could join in on and spread such magic by simple bifurcation, and reiterated bifurcations, of what was taken to be the mind, which was nobody’s business!

May 13, 2024 [21:21-21:56]

The Roast, by Robert Fuller

It was one of those things. There were lots of nuts there. This was what happened lots nowadays.

A roast was just supposed to be this thing where a bunch of stand-ups got up there in the limelight, maybe in some kind of political gathering, and they did their thing, where they would fling their ka-ching at just about anyone at all who happened to be in the room.

In this particular incarnation, there were many nuts in the room, and they came with all sorts of gear. So they weren’t waiting for any of the usual punch lines. They were looking to be the punch lines, and worse.

The presiding officer of the association was just getting ready to say a few words after the first stand-up, Max, had finished delivering his lines to the so attentive audience, but then, while Max was making his graceful exit, some clown came up, in full clown face regalia and all of that, but otherwise dressed in desert camouflage, even though it was night and there were plenty of floodlights onstage, and... Then he stopped.

The audience went wild.

He was there in full gear, clown and all, plus desert camouflage, and yet, there was one detail that he had left out.

Why had he stopped? That’s what some wondered later on. Others were curious why he was there at all, in that garish garb, of all things. And yet others said that there was never there anyone of that description whatsoever.

Which was true? Were any of them true? Was there actually anyone of such a description present at the roast?

Then, as some who testified later on, after having escaped what happened in the aftermath, someone—no one knows who—lit a joint, and, as they say, history... It was all charred meat. No joke.

May 14, 2024 [22:22-22:52]

Judgment, by Robert Fuller

Have you ever observed the birds, the other free creatures, then having seen how they are, how they really are? They just are! They exhibit no sign, at least not that I can see, that shows that they feel at all judged by anyone or anything. These fellow beings have no ultimate guilt of judgment! That’s not who they are! I examine every one in turn, the towhee, the wren, the goldfinch, the butterfly, the honeybee, the seagull, and in none of them do I see even one iota of any built guilt of judgment of what they are, which is simply what they are, and what they are being, just as they were meant to be!

So, to turn the tables, who are you or I or anyone else to judge anyone or even anything? What, if you don’t mind my asking, is this whole “judgment” thing, anyway!? Are you going to tell me, straight to my face, that there is someone or something that “judges” me, whatever I am? And that this something or someone is someone or something that somehow created me, this “me” who only is!? And then this something or someone, whatever or whoever it is, in some sense, however it pleases to do so, judges me!? I tell you frankly that neither you nor I nor anyone else knows who or what I am; and certainly no one at all knows anything about anything at all, about how any of this that you seem to see before your eyes even happened!

Why, one might well ask, is there in this human condition the sense that we are always being judged? Such is not true of the wrens, the goldfinches, nor the towhees nor any of the butterflies nor any of the other insects that fly. Nor any of the fishes. They simply are, as they are, without needless complications!

The very act, the very fact, of a judgment such as this, is in fact a needless and unbearable burden, and none of those who wrote such things about how they thought things were should have ever been heeded, paid attention to, not to any degree at all!

Why did they write such things!? Did anyone ever ask!? What were they in fact writing about!?

“What could one write to such a man?” Two years ago his mother had died. “I don’t want to trouble him.” A greeting waved to him from the street. “Yes, it‘s dark enough,” answered his father. “And now you’ve changed your mind?” In the old man’s weary face he saw the pupils, overlarge. “You begin to remember, my friend, don’t you?” His insight made him radiant. His father leaned forward but did not topple. “I suppose you wanted to say that sooner.”

At this moment an unending stream of traffic was going over the bridge.

May 15, 2024 [20:20-20:58]

Why Not Bloom?, by Robert Fuller

You’ve got roots, stems, blades; shoots, buds, nodes; even petals, style, and stigma. Well, for most of us that would be a complete enough package that we would blossom, most of us—don’t you think!? What about you? If that’s a bit too flowery for you, then you just haven’t sprouted enough times, have you? We were sitting there in the garden figuring out how to tell y’all these things of such great importance, and then we considered the seed, which, until it does what it does, does nothing! And then we did more brainstorming on this, and we came to the obvious insight that absolutely everything is a seed, ready to be and become something other than what it was. And we were just there, and we were seeds, and we were about to sprout, and there was nothing that could be done about it, since the rain and good soil had already set everything in motion, and we were going to grow and bloom and become something else! Yet there was no awe in any of that, it was simply what was to be, since we were always and always would be only seeds that became whatever was next to be, and each time, we were even more that, even if we were never in the least aware that we were that.

And we were there growing in fields of cosmoses, and in the most infinitesimal of particles, and all throughout whatever could be seen, and whatever else was hidden, or seemed to be. Our petals blossomed and dropped off according to the rhythms that we were, and each time, no matter what, we bloomed as well as we were able, and it all became a continuous dance where no one knew the steps, and none of it really mattered, because we were there, just as we should be, and there was no one else there to tell us any different story.

May 16, 2024 [20:20-20:42]

The Morel of the Starry, by Robert Fuller

Carrots or beets, call them what you will, they were miracles of sponges or waffles, like hickory chickens, dryland fish, molly moochers, or maybe even huhtasieni. There were irises there, various shadowy figures, and olive trees, and maybe an asylum, universally associated with spring, with yellow sky and sun, with the ruins of a triumphal arch, and in some cases wrinkled, cerebral enough to be taken as false, not “honeycomb” enough, and possibly poisonous caps: a view from an east-facing window, when gathering for the table the addition of an imaginary village for use as a painting studio, used to set fire to the harvest of wild mushrooms, paintings he had begun from his bedroom window, painted from memory, eaten in large quantities, his most memorable works, attached to the stem only at the apex since prehistory, due to multiple folds and wrinkles, stylized with nothing but the morning star, underground structures, yellow and black, endemic to individual regions, a child in the clouds, a nocturne of failure.

Hope is in the stars, meanings overlap, narrow the senses, broken down into rotten material, not a return to religious ideas, the village and the swirls in the sky, disturbed ground, recently burned areas, often referred to as the main town, fruit bodies prized in the same spot, in a cave, referred to simply as nothing but starry.

May 17, 2024 [21:21-22:22]

Gilt, by Robert Fuller

There was a general hubbub, wasn’t there, at the very moment when Max, Esther, Alma, and Robin Sherwood himself documented the finding, in that obscure warehouse, in Weehawken, of all places, of a massive tome, with a thick layer of dust that you couldn’t believe, which, once it was dispensed with, revealed what, by all appearances, was a thin veneer of what the forensics later determined without any doubt whatsoever to be a cheap imitation of gold paint, or possibly even fool’s gold; you never could tell for certain. But in any case, it was chiefly because of the assistants Arthur and Jeremiah, as was so well-documented by not only the venerable Sortini and Klamm, but also the elusive Fräulein Bürstner and her associates, that the defendant was taken in for questioning by a very secret court that no one would ever be privy to, with regard to the proceedings, were it not for the peasants who were there simply drinking beer.

You might well ask as to what the defendant was being held for, and you might well ask that for good reason. Within that thick tome, there were not a few citations, were there not, of young female pigs not having yet had so much as a litter. And all of the peasants, why, they all testified to all of this, out of guilt: Cast into the silver streets, their gold like an unclean thing made of a single pearl, clear as crystal, false signs and rotted riches, with camels bearing spices of olivewood with carvings of cherubim, palm trees, and open flowers, the princess in her chamber, with robes interwoven with gold. Babylon was a golden cup; the twelve gates were twelve pearls; you have made wealth for yourself; your gold and silver will eat your flesh like fire. Your neck with strings of jewels, with gold evenly applied, making all the earth drunken, will weep and howl for the miseries that are coming upon you, moth-eaten and corroded.

May 18, 2024 [21:21-22:22]

Redemption, by Robert Fuller

Well, there we were, we were trying to find what it was that would in some sense tell us just this: What we were. We knew nothing of what anyone else may have said what they thought we were, or may have been, but we were in a situation where we were determined to demonstrate what we were, really and truly, to any who might have any other idea about what we were. But in any case, we were determined to tell our story, just like anyone else might, and we knew how to tell it better than anyone else!

However, there we were, trying to state our case in front of none other than the Chief Magistrate himself, and we, one of us, realized that a key piece of our iron-clad evidence was not present as yet in Court! So during lunch recess, one of us, I don’t recall which, was sent to the chambers of the Catholic Church, the one nearest to the precinct, yet, when that one requested what we required, it was nowhere to be found, or so they said. When we asked the Chief Magistrate himself to assist us in procuring the required evidence, he simply said that it was none of his “bailywick” in that he himself could not in any way whatsoever be associated with any such evidence.

After all of that blew over, we met again, tête-à-tête, and we knew and felt what we were, and would always be. And yet the spectre of the Church loomed over us for such a long time.

May 19, 2024 [21:33-21:57]

Bird Baths, by Robert Fuller

There’s nothing like it, seeing that. At least that’s what Theo said, after he had observed this particular mystery, which no one else in the group was able to figure out, either. It was simple; it was just a bunch of dudes doing some kind of clockwise walk around the neighborhood Catholic Church; just a few people like us who were doing the rounds, just to get the basic lay of the land, and, if you get the drift, just having a meditative roundabout of the ecclesiastical yards, as it were. So we took it all in, and we took pictures here and there, but we were basically just chilling and finding our ways to just be there.

And then at that fountain, much like a statue, when we sat there, there wasn’t much there at all, and then we sat for just a wee bit longer, and then, out of the blue, there was this hummingbird that just had a total bird bath of it all! And we laughed and laughed and laughed until there was nothing left. Yet the bird, it was still there. This bird was going to give us whatever we needed to be freed of whatever it was still bound us. So it kept doing what it was doing, in what looked like one or more bird baths, and it hovered in so many different ways that we lost track. And then our burden, it appeared to lift, just as the wings of the bird suddenly hovered into the sunset.

May 20, 2024 [20:30-20:55]

Sin, by Robert Fuller

The face of the abyss. A mighty wind that swept over dry land, countless living creatures, to separate water from the gathering of the waters, in his own image, and made it holy, neither shrub nor plant growing, nor any man to till the ground, branched into four streams. “The gold of that land is good.” And “You may eat from all the wild animals and all the birds of heaven.” And then built up the rib, so they stitched up fig-leaves, pleasing to the eye, and made themselves a sword whirling and flashing, a demon crouching at the door. “Am I my brother’s keeper?” When you till the ground, building a city, mark what I say: receive your brother’s blood. Mankind began to increase, the heroes of old, always evil, and he was grieved; an ark with ribs of cypress, a covenant, the windows of the sky opened on that very day, swelled and increased; and he released the dove and she never came back; the water had dried up on the earth; let them swarm over the earth. While the earth lasts, for in the image of God, the bow shall be seen in the cloud.

The sons began the planting of vineyards, as men journeyed in the east. Once upon a time all the world spoke a single language and used the same words: “Let us make bricks. Let us build a city and a tower. Let us go down there and confuse their speech, all the property they had collected, now very rich in cattle.” By the terebinths he built an altar, gave him a tithe of all the booty. “Look up into the sky. Bring me a fledgling. Count the stars if you can. A spring of water in the wilderness, the mother of nations, bought with money from foreigners. Yes, you did laugh; swept away when the city is punished. You are doomed to die, as promised, given good reason to laugh, a sacrifice on one of the hills. I will make you a gift of the land; so bury your dead.”

The man was watching quietly. He and his men then ate and drank and spent the night there. He looked up and saw camels approaching. He ate and drank and went away without more ado. His slaves dug a well, and they ate and drank, and they parted from him in peace, corn and new wine in plenty, far from the dew of heaven above. “Give me food to eat and clothes to wear; the sun is still high; you are to sleep with me tonight, where you anointed a sacred pillar. I would have have set you on your way with songs.” There in the hill country, limping because of his hip, he built himself a house, plundered the city, and buried them under the terebinth-tree, built an altar, and was buried under the oak. And everyone in his household had a dream: A man met him wandering in the open country and threw him into the pit; he was afraid that he too would die, born with the scarlet thread on his wrist, and knew that it was a dream. Each dream came true, dressed in fine linen, whose suffering we saw: a little balsam, a little honey, myrrh, pistachio nuts, and almonds, the gifts they had brought, as well as the one who was found with the goblet, and food for the journey, their flocks and herds and all they possessed. There was no bread in the whole country; bury me in their grave, turbulent as a flood. He washes his cloak in wine and the bounty of the eternal hills, embalmed and laid in a coffin.

May 21, 2024 [20:20-22:07]

Who Knows?, by Robert Fuller

It was just a fruit salad, at least that’s what we said at the time. It was just a few of us, over mangoes and citrus and blueberries and maybe some kind of sour cream and whatnot, we were just there enjoying the late spring air, and it was maybe even enjoying us back, so we cut up some mango and citrus and we had these blueberries that were just ready for action, they were, and we did what anyone would do, which is to combine all these heavenly ingredients, which is what you would do, isn’t that right?, and we thought long and hard about what else might want to make its way into what we were concocting, which was, frankly, nobody’s business but ours, being that we were the ones making this what you might refer to as a “fruit salad” but which was, as all of us gathered at that sacred table knew to be the very nectar of the gods!

And it was good, although none of us at the table tried it out at that very moment, yet we were all in the let us say sacrament of what this new dish was supposed to be, and those of us who had tasted of it, we were all aware that we needed a secret ingredient that none of us could disclose, never, ever!

There was maybe a splash or sprinkling of maybe sea salt, although none of us who were there would ever say as much. But then there were maybe one or two secret ingredients that were added, which those of us who were there could not possibly disclose to the general public.

This was, as those of us who were there—we were there—would acknowledge most bravely, well, it was a fruit salad, if you wish to call it a such, that would forever and a day be absolutely unparalleled in the annals, as they say, of what some might call culinary history or the like, at least in certain books! But we leave that to certain critics who, as we all know, have other ideas about how things taste. Yet there were also those loquats found in our travels...

May 22, 2024 [20:22-21:09]

What Else?, by Robert Fuller

It was just a few schlubs, like you or me or anyone else, just sitting around a round table in the dark corner of one of those indescribable dive bars you see sitting here and there in those dark corners of the earth where such things seem to exist. Well, there were certain of us who in that particular case seemed to match that rough description, more or less, so there we were, caught, as was said, red-handed, and all that. We were there trying to figure out what in the name of God or whoever else we might try to do next, since we were at the time flat out of ideas, or so we thought. Well, we figured out how to get our best martini muscles ready for what was required, and then, by gum, we just went out and did it! This was over a confidential game of darts, which of course needn’t even be mentioned in polite discourse, but it was what it was, and that’s what it became.

So it was Joe who shot the first one, and it near struck I believe it was Curly, if it wasn’t actually Moe, or Larry, or even someone else who was just an extra. And these dart shots, they didn’t just sting, they hit you in the heart, and then the darts were bent so much that they didn’t even look like all that much any more. And then the guys who were there, they just got up again, laughed again, and they had pizza over wine, and the whole thing started all over again.

May 23, 2024 [19:23-19:45]

Just Write, by Robert Fuller

Maybe there was a magic pen, maybe there wasn’t. No one will ever know. But what I was told through certain secret channels was what no one should have ever heard. If there was a magic pen, no one would have ever told you so, and you know that, but there was some possibility that such a pen did exist, even if it was very slight. Yet there were certain dwarfs, leprechauns, if you will, who not only insisted on such a magic pen existing and whatnot, but those same were also adamant that this pen, as they styled it, would automatically write just whatever would be there in the ether, as it were. And that was as it was.

But someone whispered, or yelled, into my ear, one day recently, that what I should do—what should I do, after all?—is just that. Just write. And I tried that for countless days, and there was nothing there, at all, and then suddenly what I saw, to my astonishment, was a quiet quill that just stood there with no other agenda; it was just there, standing in the place where normally my right brain might be, and then it started moving, and it was doing what you might have considered to be a kind of seance, wherein it was struggling with what you might have considered to be writing, in a primeval sense, although most of us who were there would not have given it that kind of an import, truth be told. But those of us who were actually there, yes, we did see a pen-like object moving on what appeared to be paper, and it was tracing word-like entities over this paper-like substance, yet most of us who were there could see nothing of verbal significance or substance that was thereby being traced by this ghost of a pen!

Once this seance, as we understood it to be, was completed, all we had there in any direct evidence was an author’s worst nightmare: a blank page! There had been scribbling upon that parchment that any of us there present could well attest to, yet, to the naked eye, nothing thereupon had been written! So what was the real story, what this magic pen had actually enscribed upon this sacred parchment?

We tried all kinds of chemical treatments, you know, the usual invisible ink things that people try, in order to get texts to show up when they’re shy, but none of those seemed to work. The magic pen didn’t do indivisible ink; that’s what we concluded. So what was the magic of this particular pen? That’s what we really wanted to know.

Then we examined closely the parchment itself. And once we saw exactly how the defects in that parchment paper lined up, we saw into the abyss, and there was no turning back.

May 24, 2024 [20:38-21:27]

Why Are You Such a Mess?, by Robert Fuller

It was one of my most loyal YouTube fans, who, of course as you well know, are countless. This person, who shall remain anonymous, posted a comment in response to one of my Bach postings, my Bach Shorts. It was in Russian, and read as follows: “Чё у тебя бардак такой?” This can be translated in various ways in English, but what Google Translate came up with, right off the bat was “Why are you such a mess?” And, truth be told, I laughed my ass off right then and there, because I all too well knew the truthiness of it. Look, I know full well how dysfunctional I am; I don’t really need someone from Russia, of all places, to tell me anything like that!

You know, I love my YouTube fans, my YouTubies, to pieces, but most of the time I have so much traffic that I can’t even lift a finger to read any of their random and well-meant comments, much less take any of my valuable time to grace them with any kind of reply. (Don’t tell them that!)

But this one, this comment got me thinking.

“Why are you such a mess?” One might well ask such a pointed question. Well, on further consideration of this most pointed question, I posed the question in reverse. Turned it on its head. You might well know where this is going...

I’m not going to mention Vova or Bébé by name, if I can help it, nor any of the megacorporations that get away with bloody murder every time they do any of their corporate voodoo—we all know who they are, and who their billionaire handlers are, the ones that should be doing serious prison time—but my most loyal of YouTube fans, I’ll have to admit, has inadvertently brought up a most serious question, which we all need to ask collectively of ourselves, which is just this: “Чё у тебя бардак такой?” Which is to say just this, “Why are you such a mess?” Why is humanity such a damn mess!?

Now, I’m not going to single myself out as that one person who has been so ignored, whose word has not been heard, because this is true of almost all of us, without exception! But it seems more and more true to what I see, that there is no room for someone like me here in this world as I see it. And I know, I know for certain, that there are so many of you like me in the sense that I say this, and you want to be heard! It can’t just be the ones who are already famous for being famous who are the only ones who get paid attention to. Look at how the power structures work, and who they support. It’s by and large the ones who are actually causing the problems.

There is no real way of dealing with these power structure issues, but each of us can refuse to support, in our own little ways, these power structures that we are all subject to.

“Why are you such a mess?” You have to look in the mirror and lie in that bed, and then maybe you will see something. But you may not like what you see. If not, then maybe you will do something else. Try to do something positive, or just do it.

You see, the mirror and the bed are all that you have. You look at your likeness, or something like it, and you lie in the bed you made. And you then wonder what else might have been.

We are all wandering along a beach where we see cliffs and rocks and breaking waves, but it is nothing but a room with a bed and a mirror, the bed facing the mirror, the mirror facing the bed, and the bed just lies there facing the mirror, facing the bed, facing the...

May 25, 2024 [16:16-17:00]

The Crux of the Night Lamp, by Robert Fuller

Nearly everyone there was cross, and Max, Theo, and even Robin Sherwood himself was in agreement as to that basic fact. It was a nocturnal meeting, as everyone present would attest to, and there was one of those oil-burning lanterns that was, as some said, “mood lighting” for the general environs, yet there were some who said it was overkill, and simply put, inappropriate. It wasn’t much of a lantern, as some who were there would testify—it had seen its better days in the very late 1600s, perhaps, at best guess—yet it still put out quite a nice light for this night party that everyone seemed to be enjoying.

There were some who were there who seemed to suggest that this was not in fact a night lamp at all but rather some strange kind of vessel or melting pot wherein a strange alchemy was happening that none who were present were fully aware of, and which was completely contrary to what any of them believed in, and in the view of some who were there, it was for them a severe test, a trial unlike any they had previously experienced, an allegory for something else.

Some saw there the ghost of Putnam, while others clearly saw the visage of none other than Parris himself. And there were those who saw nothing other than what was a place to test, purify, and strengthen precious substances, a kind of refining fire as part of an intense decision process.

Yet it was only a light, a lamp that lit the darkness that was otherwise there.

Yet what was the darkness, really? Was it really what some there suggested? Was it something to do with pagan and satanic and otherwise unsuitable acts that some had been convicted of doing, perhaps under false pretences?

That light, that vessel, that melting pot, it served to illuminate what was done in those earlier days—and which still continues, to this day—so that such things, such travesties, will never be repeated. Yet...

May 26, 2024 [21:00-21:40]

Wherever You Are, by Robert Fuller

Lulling sounds of a soothing fountain. Yet this story begins and ends elsewhere.

It was a cabin, nay, it was a mere hovel, if that, and it was clear out in the wild plains or the other flatlands or the steppes or the tundra or maybe it was the desert, and that’s precisely where it was located, even though there were many there who were quite dubious about such finicky details and all that.

The Narrator of all this, why, He was notoriously inaccurate about relevant details, and so He may have Missed a few Important Details here and There.

But the long and short of it, lads, it was that this decrepit excuse for a proper residence, why, it was the very epicenter of the very last party that one might imagine to have! Everyone was there; I can’t name many precise names because of those pesky “non-disclosure” sort of agreements that are sometimes entered into on account of ignorance and such on the part of such parties, but there were a few who were there and proud to be so... But their story comes later into the script, and even though this detail is not supposed to be disclosed, it’s because the Narrator of this yarn has lost all His Threads!

The Emperor... You heard about that dude, correct? Well, He’s butt naked, not to put too fine a point on it.

So, that Narrator, that Emperor, so to speak, He’s Busy trying to find His Damn Wardrobe, and the rest of us, some of who can be named, are just trying to party up the situation!

And then we, the collective we, all of us who were there, we start to hear this enchanting fountain, gurgling and bubbling and whatever it does, and we start to realize that the damn thing is talking to us, and we are understanding, and it doesn’t matter what the damn Emperor does with those damn clothes! He can go join the next nudist colony, for all we care, because He ain’t got nothing on any of us.

This was when we collectively and effectively decided to change the Narrator of this particular script, which apparently hadn’t been working for us.

Someone, perhaps the Narrator, had cut, separated, sifted, from whatever we were and wherever we are, the main part of the story, which was just this, that we were here having a gathering, and in no way was He ever going to dictate to us what we could or couldn’t do.

The cabin or hovel or decrepit ghost town was soon forgotten, in His Name. But no one ever found His Threads.

May 27, 2024 [19:19-19:49]

Who Needs Famous People?, by Robert Fuller

Let’s say you were walking down the street, just going for a taco or pastrami sandwich or something, just doing your thing. And next thing you know, all of a sudden, there’s someone there up in your face trying to take some kind of selfie or whatnot, at the same time screaming in your face, “I know you! I know you!”... ad nauseum. And there you are, just trying to get your bite to eat, and your first impulse is to say, “No, you don’t know me at all!” But you bite your lip, hold your tongue, and you hopefully get the last laugh on that poor schlub or bloke or whatever he pretends to be, and you just say, “Sorry, you’ve mistaken me for someone else.” And then you move on from that sorry person, and the guy who sells you the pastrami sandwich or whatever, he just gives you a wink and a nod and accepts your gracious tip, because he knows better—and maybe needs your business.

But really, now, if you think about it, no one really knows anyone much at all, but the really fake part is some completely crazed fan or whatever claiming they know you just because they’ve seen your damn photo on social media or in the movies or wherever else they might have imagined they saw the damn thing! So they just latch onto you as if. Whatever twists their tourniquet, as is said. But it’s nothing to do with you. It’s all about them!

Who the hell cares who knows who, or who is or thinks they are famous!? If you consider the matter, there is really no there there in that piece of work.

On the other hand, there seems to be a neverending stream of people who lust for this thing called fame, some of whom very quickly regret the whole damn thing and become recluses and all that, God bless them.

So there are two sides to this evil, lopsided coin, which is that there are those who strive, knowingly or not, to be cult leaders, and there are those of the more let us say sheepish variety who just want to follow whatever or whoever it is that gets click-bait or notoriety in other forms by doing whatever types of heinous things they tend to do to—so to speak—butter their bread.

And these types, they get so all puffed up with their self-image and whatever else is wrapped up in their sophomoric unresolved issues that should have been handled at least by Kindergarten, that they endlessly spew out all this random nonsense that even ChatGPT, frankly, would be ashamed of, and they pass it off as somehow God’s own truth, merely because it somehow escaped out of their sideways plumbers’ cracks!

Why does anyone in the world give these types the time of day? You all know who I’m talking about, even if you wouldn’t care to admit as much.

And the other side of that buttered bread is of course the sycophants who need to attach themselves to something, somehow: like barnacles to rocks, wood, ship hulls, whales, sea turtles, or mussels; and after they attach to that thing, whatever it is, they cling and cling and cling; and sometimes, after that, they are even known to attack that thing, because they in some sense or other are not receiving enough love, or whatever, back from it. So they cling first, and then they attack. And then the thing they attach to acquiesces, they get their so to speak love back, and then the whole thing repeats itself, and in the process they all get eaten up, whether thing or cling, whether any of them knows it or not.

May 28, 2024 [17:17-17:57]

No Room, by Robert Fuller

Initially it was just a few of us; we were mere rivulets in the larger scheme of things, although there were many more of us than they thought there were. We were walking through what looked like an episode of The Twilight Zone, or one of those Star Trek episodes that are eerily similar, and we were just trying to find a place to rest our heads, that kind of thing. But everywhere we looked, which rang true also in certain episodes of The Three Stooges, all we saw was a kind of signage which told us in no uncertain terms, “No Accomodation”. And that was pretty much that. Yet, like, let’s say Moe or Larry, or even Curl(e)y, if you see my drift, the guys, they got all worked up about the thing, and they were never going to let it rest.

But what must be said before anything else is that what was being said, before anything else, is that there is No Room for what you want to say or do! It has already been taken up, that room, that space, by something else which, like it or not, is of greater importance than what you, whoever you might be, might have to say or do or show to anybody else, no matter what! Because what we say, in this corporate forum, is something that will always trump anything else that might be suggested by any of humanity about anything at all that might matter to anyone at all. And that is that!

So we knocked our heads together, in some kind of fashion resembling let’s say classical slapstick or the like, and one of us whopped the other while the other slapped someone else, and maybe some fruit or cream pies were gratuitously thrown, just for effect. So there was that kind of thing that carried on, at least for a while.

And then, when we settled down for a minute, we had a look at the bigger picture, which was bigger than any of us. We began to forensically analyze what was actually going on at corporate headquarters, and we saw that there was no doubt whatsoever that HQ was simply stifling us, trying to shut us down, because we didn’t mean anything to anybody, at least not in their Book, but we really did mean something, something that was far superior to their sad attempt at “might”; and what it was and remains is that we are the people, we are the ones who actually and really exist, and those corporate types, they’re just caricatures of human beings, or worse, and they don’t give a goddamn about real human society or culture, but just about their goddamn inflated pocketbooks and so forth.

You have to ask yourself, “What kind of culture or society is any of that!?” The answer being, “It’s nothing.” And further, “It’s worse than nothing.” This is what we settled on after reviewing the evidence. And it’s all true, every word of it.

May 29, 2024 [21:21-21:56]

Profound Regrets, by Robert Fuller

There are times, aren’t there, where you wish you could take something back, undo something—turn back the clock. Many of us have had that sentiment; of that I have no doubt.

But what if you did something where you had absolutely no idea why you did what you did, at least not until much later on?

You knew, or at least thought you knew, that you cared for this person who had given time and energy to both you yourself and what you thought you were trying to accomplish. And you had shared significant bonds with that person, and that person was the world to you. That’s how it was, or appeared to be, at the time. But you yourself had this other issue going on, which was that you knew that you would soon have to leave because you could no longer afford to stay there at that University, and so there was this holiday period at year’s end where you visited relatives, and when you returned, you, without knowing why at the time, shut this person you cared so deeply about out of your life, entirely.

How many of you out there can tell me truthfully that something like that has befallen you? I think to myself that it can’t be all that common an occurrence. But what the hell do I know? Maybe what happened to me was a one-off; it was maybe something that never happened to anyone else. But what the hell do I know? There could be many others out there with similar profound regrets. In my case, I was still a greenhorn at the time, barely 25 years of age, and what the hell did I know? Not much of anything, really. But I knew that my time at that University was limited, and my body and mind went into some kind of shutdown mode after the holidays at year’s end, and I shut out the one person there on that campus that I cared most deeply about, someone who may have even cared about me.

You tell me about your regrets, if you dare. There are some who have none, not a single regret whatsoever. But as I see it, you must, if you have any such, let yourself truly feel those, and at least make amends in your heart to those you may have wronged. Even, or especially, if you had absolutely no idea why you did what you did.

May 30, 2024 [21:21-21:51]

Productivity, by Robert Fuller

There you are in a meeting. You are there. And all your worker bee colleagues, they are also there. And then you say this and that, none of which much matters, and then the meeting ends. Or so you think. And then the very next hour, let us say, another meeting is called to discuss what transpired during the previous meeting, none of which means anything all that much. And they all sit there, all video-friendly and all of that, as they do, and they present all of those sophomoric slideshows and whatnot that show and showcase all their bravado, for lack of a better term, of what they supposedly do.

And the very next hour, another of these same is called by someone, and you or someone else has to justify what you have actually been doing when you were not meeting in these incessant meetings, which continue without pause, as far as the eye can see.

And then that most important of meetings, it itself, why, it was interrupted, inexplicably, by yet another meeting, which, as those who were actually there will attest, was controverted or subverted or otherwise converted into what some at the time said might have been an extreme corruption of what might at some time been called justice, and those who were there called yet another meeting, to decide what the previous meetings were actually about.

And just after that, you get a text message that there is an imperative meeting that you, everyone, must attend, and so you do, or at least you think you do. There you are, in that meeting, talking about so many matters that are so pertinent to what you and your colleagues do, and then there is yet another of the same type of thing, where another such meeting is called, and you then say to yourself...

May 31, 2024 [23:03-23:35]

The End of the Road, by Robert Fuller

Everyone ends up there, and none of them know how they got there. But in any case, that’s where that particular “you” ends up, and whoever you are, you not only don’t know how you got there, but you also have absolutely no idea how you were in that place where you were, apparently, in the first place. So this is all a question—profound enough, as you will see—pertaining to what, if anything, any of us know, if anything at all.

The place, the destination, of this final road trip is exactly and precisely the exact one that we wish to avoid. It’s a slap in the face, it negates what you ever thought or dreamed you were, and you simply cannot wrap your head around any of it.

So there you are, in perhaps a Bardo, a weird realm of the mind that your mind cannot possibly wrap itself around, and yet you, the unexamined you, you are precisely there, right there, a place, if you can call it that, where you never thought in your wildest dreams, you would ever be! Yet there you, the unexamined you, are! You’re right there! But where is that!? And what are you, in any case, “wherever” you “are”?

You don’t ask such questions, not even the most basic question as to how you came to be in the first place.

But this is not really about that, at least not entirely. It’s really more about ancestry and art and how things connect in sometimes unexpected ways.

You may be asking yourself at this moment something like this: “Where did such a story begin, if indeed it did?”

The short answer? It didn’t! Prove me wrong, but first answer me this question: “Why is there something rather than nothing!?” It rather makes your skin crawl, if you will let it.

So there has always—which you cannot possibly begin to wrap your head around—been whatever it is that is, which includes you, as some kind of conscious awareness, which you can neither explain nor ignore.

The infinity of time or space is beyond your comprehension, but so is the Idea that it might be somehow finite, limited. In neither case could you possibly make any sense of it, wrap your head around that! The whole damn thing is an utter paradox, and really, no one knows what any of it is, except that there is conscious awareness.

Where does this story really begin, then? Okay, if we’re talking about this present story which may be something else entirely, it begins in places that are connected in ways that no one may have imagined.

There was an ancestor of mine, Esther, who did a trek from the heartland, from somewhere near Des Moines, after her husband died of typhoid, clear out to what became Salt Lake City, and she did that with their seven children. And then just a few months after that, she herself died.

And she, her name, was and is in a story of mine called “A Feast for the Senses” which has much in it about a certain painter by the name of Van Gogh. And the sunflowers abound, and cats, and blown glass and Esther’s craft beers, and they all live there, right there in the Grants Pass of my fervid imagination. And that’s how it is and shall be. Road with cypress and stars, and Esther who steps right into either that or the Starry Night itself.

June 1, 2024 [18:21-19:23]

Crash and Burn, by Robert Fuller

You may have had dreams like this, where you’re driving full force and you’re out of control, and all kinds of things are happening, and you’re getting more and more freaked out about all of it. And then you wake up, or think you do, and then you’re still in that same dream, because it wasn’t really a dream, was it—or maybe it was, and maybe you’ll never know; or will you?

And then you consider the fact that it may not even have been you who was dreaming that dream that you thought it was, but it may have been someone else who was dreaming it, and not you at all.

But the force of what you experienced before you woke up, or thought you did, before you realized it maybe wasn’t even you at all—whoever you really are, anyway—that force alone got to you like nothing else ever did, and then there you were, on your pillow as if nothing at all had happened.

Yet meanwhile, your dream vehicle, as it were, was still violently out of control, and you with it, even though you were just there on your pillow and pretending nothing at all had happened. And it may have been the case that nothing whatsoever had happened, but there was no proof one way or the other.

Or so you thought.

And there you were, wide awake, smack dab in the middle of a Formula 1 race, never having ever done anything like that ever before, and that’s when you knew that someone else dreaming made you hit the wall. And that was that.

June 2, 2024 [20:50-21:10]

Fountain Of..., by Robert Fuller

So here we sit in a churchyard, yet again, although it could be anything else, although if you check carefully, it is not that. It is not anything other than a churchyard, nothing else. The fountain is here, just as you are, and it could be a bird bath, but at present it is not, and neither are you, either.

So it may be you or it may not be, it may just be birds without baths at the moment who just wait for you while you wait for them to wait for you until they fly the way they do, which is much less complicated than anything you or I would ever do.

So here the fountain still gurgles, yet with no birds, and we wonder, and we sit here, and the churchyard night grows faint over time, and more of us ponder what is happening here, even though no one knows what it is, and we sit and ponder what those gurgles tell us, and we then just listen.

And when we hear and see, we just listen again.

And then birds fly, we die, and there is just this silence of noise and birdsong that is beyond description. And the fountain keeps singing.

June 3, 2024 [19:19-19:44]

Patches, by Robert Fuller

It was a kind of quilt, where Max would strum chords or scribble scribbles and then laugh like a boy, and then Esther would make souls go so soft with her sweet songs of silver that she sang on that violin, and then it would be time for her food- and ale-making, and after that no one knew what might happen. But it was always something of note, and anyone who was there always found what had happened to have been unlike anything else they had ever seen.

But when Max was older, he threw away the guitar, and later on he took up more of a keyboard way of doing things as to creating sounds, and he found a few types of keyboards, one in particular, that allowed him to create sounds that he could shape or sculpt just by setting certain controls just so. But these, not even these, were quite enough, as Esther would certainly attest, and Max knew that just as well as Esther did. And both knew they were having a rather rough patch of the whole thing, at the moment.

So they both folded the quilt, and there arose new flavors and colors and such sensations as they had never quite yet experienced, and there was a new touch, and sounds they had never yet heard, and aromas and movements and all kinds of language like poetry and laughing that neither had ever yet heard, and dance, and even cats and theatre that spanned centuries, and then they walked out into a night so full of stars you could not possibly count them, and that was when all those strange and wonderful sounds began, patched in by what they had done, and it all looked like a marvelous painting with no colors, shapes, tastes, aromas, touches, or anything else that either could sense. Yet there it was.

June 4, 2024 [21:21-22:01]

Trading Places, by Robert Fuller

There I was in that churchyard again, just waiting to see what might happen, and all was calm, the fountain was again gurgling, and when I first got there, there were no birds bathing. It was just peace and calm, as far as the ears could hear.

But I was called away for a few moments, and when I got back, the courtyard was starting to dim, even though the fountain itself kept speaking, in tongues of babble, or birds. It was all a technical glitch, which tends to be true of just about anything these days, but when I returned, in place of the usual fountain, which was even still there, there appeared out of nowhere a hummingbird, as green as you have ever seen, and he hovered there, right in front of me, for some time, and then I heard his wings buzz right by my right ear, and then he hovered there for a time, and I thought that was that. Normally, he would have gone straight to the fountain, for his ritual bath, but in this particular case, there was something else going on.

I only found out what, when, mysteriously, after veering away from the waters of the fountain, he made a beeline straight for the center of my forehead, and pecked his thin, long beak right into the sacred nectar of that inner eye. I was stunned for a moment, and then I began hovering, with wings of barely nectar, and it was unsettling, and I wondered how I would survive in this form, so light, so slight, and, when I really got my wings, a delight.

With regard to the transfer, I always wondered what happened to the other guy, who became what I used to be. Life for him is probably too complicated and heavy now. But he was the one who hit the target. Not me.

June 5, 2024 [20:21-21:06]

Last Stop, by Robert Fuller

Many of us, or at least a few, or maybe it was just me, have taken the subway or BART, or some kind of tram, and during the trip to what was supposed to be home, dozed off, missed our stop, and ended up elsewhere. Okay, maybe it was just me. Or maybe you did that in your time, as well. I am quite sure you will not cop to it, or will you?

But this is my story, I think, so I will tell it like it has to be told, which means flat-out on the money.

This story of mine has a strange twist, however. It is not like anything you will have experienced. For that, you have my personal guarantee.

I was on this train or tram trip, it was when I was coming back from my last business engagement, so to speak. I have witnesses who, however reluctant, can testify as to my whereabouts prior to this fateful trip.

It started innocently enough, or so I may have thought. I was on the number 2 train, or tram, and I must have nodded off, as some of us do, yet there was something strange about this tram or train, in that I was, as far as I could see, the only visible passenger. And when I first woke out of my many bouts of slumber or some other type of shuteye, I had no idea where I was.

In previous experiences such as this, I seem to recall there having been some kind of public service announcement informing passengers that this was the end of the line. But in this case, either there was no such announcement, or it was rendered in a metallic voice that would just send shivers up your spine.

And it got even stranger than that, as you will see.

When I more or less came to, and was able to more clearly process what was going on, the incessantly ticking clocks, which were faint at first, were not the first thing I noticed that was amiss. No, it was more the sensation of going around, not in a circle, but rather in a continuous clockwise direction, in some shape not purely circular. And along the way around and around and around, I began to notice the same landmarks, every single time. And they were all rather petite, and either cardboard or plastic in nature, and I saw that they were nothing but facades, meant to trick the eye, as you might have in a model train set made for a child.

So the next time I drifted off, there were these dreams of me as a hamster on an endless wheel, running away from myself and everything else, but not being able to get away, not from the wheel, the hamster, the train, nor from anything else.

I was rudely awoken from those dreams when the model train derailed. And then it all started again.

June 6, 2024 [19:51-20:38]

Origami Geometries and Black Holes, by Robert Fuller

Puppy eyes tear drops in pond water, folding over soap bubbles, via something like a quantum entanglement, with a sun orbiting a massive lightless object. It all twists and untwists mysteriously, merely via geometry, in the form of a curved crease helical structure that makes use of singularities in a meshwork.

A single cell becomes an elephant trunk of a predator, whereas other pond life, equally tiny or tinier, instead use proteins to kill those of that size who would otherwise prey on them.

Meanwhile, wolves use facial expressions as communication, to read emotional states, to maintain the soundness of the pack. Yet there is a crack somewhere when their unseen companions, domesticated via genetics and breeding, with new, more limited facial morphologies, are unable facially to express every, or even really any, of the nine emotional states, and to whatever extent that is true, rely on sound cues, vocalizations, instead.

So there is a kind of mask there, which shows no fear or curiosity about white dwarfs, superfluidity, or quasi-spiral optics or thermodynamic origami of any sort. Friendly and happy, these domestic cousins wag their tails when twists and turns of the social bonds with their new best friends bring them right to the edge of the pond, and then they dip their paws in, lap up some pond water, and leap right in.

June 7, 2024 [16:16-16:46]

See What Happens, by Robert Fuller

Billowy clouds and wispy ones, in a light blue sky, with fountains, and seagulls soaring above whenever they can or want to, and hawks, and crows or ravens circling madly overhead, and then giving their murder’s worth of commentary in the form of their mad “Caw”, one after the other, and then you think to yourself, “This is some kind of setup. Something is about to happen.” But for the longest time nothing does. So you wait.

The occasional light aircraft buzzes its way overhead, and even one or two of those black helicopters, looking for a fugitive—or maybe just you—but you’re still thinking that everything is just status quo, or even copacetic, and that’s where you leave it, sitting at the gurgling fountain to see what, if anything, will happen. And nothing much does.

But if you think about it much, remember strange dreams you may have had, the fire engine you hear at the moment, just like everything else, could well be a sign that something—anything at all—is to happen.

Yet all you see, for now, is random signs, clouds that look like something else, until they drift and break apart and change into yet something else, like a few caws that someone may have heard above while the fountain still happily does what it does best and a jet or lighter aircraft reports to you, or to someone else, its auditory surge of flight plan, after which a noisy vehicle buzzes its way on by, just to be noticed by someone, anyone at all.

There doesn’t seem to be much of a plan here, to make something concrete or even remotely intelligible, happen, at least not that you can discern, yet still you sit there at the talkative fountain punctuated by random caws and noisy traffic sounds, and yet nothing happens.

This is a church courtyard, a churchyard, if you will, and there is apparently a kind of choir practice happening inside the building itself, yet if you asked yourself what it was you were waiting for, what would it be? Because none of these random events seem to cut it for you.

And then you feel a sea breeze, you notice a certain copper glow in a trio of windows curved at the top, you hear the faint sound of a warbling vireo, with a crow punctuating the alto chorus inside the building, and then you see that what you were waiting for doesn’t exist. And then you hear those four fateful caws, and they are echoed all around, sometimes in threes, and you finally see the droplets splashing off the fountain.

June 8, 2024 [17:30-18:00]

The Dilemma of Free Speech, by Robert Fuller

We were there at the usual joint again, just chewing the fat about various matters, to some greater or lesser extent philosophical in nature. And of course we were at one of the tables in the back, drinking our libations of choice, and everyone else was pretty much ignoring us or giving us the distance.

One of us began, after we got our drinks and a few sips in, “Last time we were talking about wrens and their calls—basically their way of communicating, their language—consisting of a fairly limited variety, at least to our ears, of different sounds that are used to impart useful information within, say, a family of wrens.”

“It’s curious you mention that. Last time we talked—it’s been a while, hasn’t it?—there was a wren nest in a cubbyhole in a backyard building of mine, one of those that’s open on two sides. And now they’re back with a new brood.”

A few more sips, a few moments to ponder, and then, “Well, I wanted to bring up the wrens because of their language, which is actually used by them for a useful purpose. They have no laws which govern what they ‘say’ apart from their inner nature itself, and what they properly teach from one generation to the next; it’s all based on their need to communicate certain relevant and vital pieces of information to one another so that they can get along with their lives, and fly freely for as long as they can. Much of what they say, especially to their young, is the proper and true education that their young need in order to prosper in this world.”

“I suppose, then, that what you’re going toward has something to do with we humans? Is that where you’re going?”

A pause, a bit weighty in nature, and then, “Yes, that’s where I was in fact leading. You see, I’ve been considering for quite some time the dilemma, as I call it, of free speech, which is so enshrined, dare I say even indoctrinated, in the populace of certain cultures, including ours, yet its essentials, in my view, have not been sufficiently examined or questioned.”

“As you know, there is the old canard of not falsely yelling ‘Fire!’ in a crowded movie theater when there isn’t in fact a fire. Isn’t that true?”

“Certainly, my friend. There are restrictions as to what you cannot say, based on circumstances of various descriptions. Those restrictions, those exceptions, are not considered to be protected as ‘free speech’—and usually for obvious enough reasons. But we’re living now in a much more complicated age than the age when this ‘free speech’ notion was first codified. There are forces that are operating in these times that our ancestors had no idea would come to pass. But it’s not just that this ‘one’ principle of free speech now has to be seriously reconsidered; it’s more that the whole notion, of what free speech is, has to be reexamined. And I say this with the fullest understanding that this is not an easy thing to rework; it’s inherently fraught with peril. Yet the conversation has to happen, or the very fabric of our democracy itself is at peril.”

A lengthy, awkward silence; a fresh round of drinks appeared at our table. “That’s a rather strong statement, don’t you think? Perhaps even overboard?”

“Not from my perspective. In my view—and I may be completely offbase—we should above all protect the right of anyone to say anything, even outright lies, in books. Perhaps with certain restrictions. So if you’re writing literature or poetry, for example, just about anything goes. But what I’ve considered for quite some time is the aspect of social context, and how that might affect what you can and cannot say.”

“You’ve got my attention now.”

“I haven’t fully formulated these ideas, these notions, but it seems to me that, first off, social media is a huge wildcard these days, and it needs to be seriously dissected and examined, as to what sort of ‘free speech’ guidelines should be in place. Apart from that Pandora’s box, there are at least three other categories that I’ve identified recently: books and similar publications; political and legal speech; and journalism. There may be more. And there’s at least some overlap between social media and journalism, which have become increasingly paired and intertwined.”

“So, are you saying that each of these categories of ‘free speech’ should be treated differently?”

A long, thoughtful sip, mutual. “These ideas are just beginning to take shape. So there’s going to be a substantial incubation period before they really start to come to fruition. This is just a jumping-off point.”

“Are there any other details you think you’ve worked out yet?”

“Yes, there are a few, but they’re not fully formed as yet. In terms of the legal and political angle, one of my main ideas is that theories that have been proven time and time again to not work should not have a place in political discourse. And laws should be required to be written with the utmost clarity.”

With that, we were all but worn out, and we began to talk about, and dream of, the wrens again. And what they said made sense.

June 9, 2024 [19:38-20:40]

The Good Stuff, by Robert Fuller

There was a group of them, came in every now and then, mostly well-behaved, in terms of what the staff usually reported. They were the types who, when they left, you wondered whether they would get their asses safely back home and that sort of thing. But they never gave anyone on the staff any kind of hard time or any kind of thing like that. Yes, they were rowdy, but who in this place wasn’t? So the staff cut them some slack, at least until this one particular day, when something else came down the pipeline.

It was a normal Monday evening, rather slow, and no one much was causing any problems, according to what the staff reported, when this same group came in, as they usually did, and they sat in their usual bar stools and made conversation with the locals, and two or three of them ordered their usuals, and they were duly served. But there was one holdout in the group who hadn’t ordered a thing, and none of the regulars or locals had ever seen the dude, who was presenting an air of superiority to pretty much everyone in the place.

Everyone could tell that about him, even though this guy kept a low profile for the longest time; he was even seen spending lots of time getting familiar with the popcorn machine and its contents, if you get the point.

But then he strode right up to the darts machine and was throwing bullseye after bullseye so many times that you couldn’t even see the center of the thing. It was nothing but plastic darts, so thick you could hardly breathe.

And then he joined his friends, the same usual group that was periodically in the place now and then, and he sat right down on the choicest stool and asked the bartender, “Where’s your stash?” The bartender did a double-take, but kept his cool, and tried to play the game as well as he could. “Sir, you’re asking for a stash? Is that what you said?” Some of the regulars and locals started tittering, first in whispers, then more loudly, until the whole place was raucous.

Until this dude yelled “Silence!” And that got everyone’s attention, and they shut down their excess merriment pretty damn quickly. And then the dude started whispering into the bartender’s ear until it looked like the bartender would end up something like blue in the face, or white as a sheet.

A deep bell rang. And it was just then that the bartender announced there would be a round of topshelf absinthe for everyone in the room. Some tried to leave, or to order mead instead, but no one could.

Later on, after the dust had cleared, the bartender himself carried on that same grand tradition that the dude had started, in a different place. And he shot bullseye after bullseye into all his victims.

June 10, 2024 [20:49-21:36]

A Late-Vernal Night’s Dream Salad, by Robert Fuller

A stage was marvelously set, with a feast of props to please the eyes and the senses. The actors were in place, the curtain came up in dramatic fashion, under the light of the moon, which shone upon nothing, initially, other than a dream of two lovers, and then many more, intertwined in webs of intrigue that none of the chefs of this enterprise would have been able to imagine. Then there appeared a bowl, with its bottom laced with quince jam, and a small flute of lion wall moonshine just barely mixed in. A sprite of knavish crushed Pecan enters the picture, sprinkled over it, followed by a magical juice of lime, and a trickling of mustard seed. Apple, banana, and citrus enter from various directions and are sliced and diced on top of everything else.

There appear minor streams of sour cream with diced onions diced just so, and the chefs reconnoiter to see where the play has gotten to, to make sure that what happened was a dream and not reality. They confer, and decide the night’s events must have been a dream, yet they continue to add ingredients, including a tad more quince.

At the final act, more lime tears fall, and some of the audience storms the stage, straight towards the center bowl, and all of them—avocado, blueberry, kiwi—leap merrily right into the bowl, as if it were meant to be a comedy. And then there are more tears of sour cream that touch everything within the bowl, even as crushed Pecan manna falls right into it from the heavens.

June 11, 2024 [21:21-21:54]

Wine Bottle Rivalries, by Robert Fuller

Size matters, at least that’s what some say. But then, it’s not everything, and sometimes there’s that simple matter of coincidence or serendipity that might come in handy to settle family or tribal disputes of one sort or another. There were two separate archaeological teams assembled very nearly at the same time, a scant 40 miles distant from one another. The northern one was called Team Gobel, the southern one, Team Ophel. They were excavating without knowing exactly what they might be looking for, although each team had its own clues.

It was quite a fierce dig for each team. They were digging through the dust, encrusted through many centuries, and sealed off with the venom of all those rivalries that had stained the landscape and made it so bloodstained. Yet both teams persisted; it wasn’t so much a time trial—after all, neither team knew anything about the other, at least not directly—as it was a search for a special type of artifact. Both teams had previously found in their digs the larger clay vessels, amphorae, that had been used in those ancient times to ferment and age wine. But those larger vessels were used mainly in production, and would typically not have been sold individually to families. Each team, unbeknownst to the other, then, was searching for the vessels, clay or otherwise, that would have been sold at the markets. They were in much smaller sizes than the vessels used for fermentation, but each team wanted to know what the typical size of these vessels was in their particular location.

They had to dig carefully, for they knew how fragile these clay vessels might be, so it was a laborious process that lasted days. Each team would repair to a wine bar, curiously enough named Wino, every few days, but usually their schedules didn’t quite match up. So each team would wind down in the very same wine bar, still being completely unaware of the existence of the other.

Then on that fateful day, when each team miraculously hit pay dirt, their schedules finally coincided, and they met, eventually, face to face.

It was just after eight in the evening local time, and Team Ophel, having less of a commute, was at Wino first, and they were whooping it up and having a grand old time. They were saying things like, “Let us go early to the vineyards,” or “I would give you mulled wine to drink.” And then they continued quaffing their beverages of choice for a silent while, and it was just then that Team Gobel arrived, and one of them immediately mentioned to another that she had gone to that place “to see if the vine had budded”; this was even before they had properly sat themselves down or even ordered drinks.

So this got the attention of Team Ophel, it being such a giddy sentiment, and one of them chimed in, “I have drunk my wine and my milk.” Thus ensued an awkward silence, and both teams went their ways, although they sat at tables that were adjoining, so that they could easily hear what the other team said.

“When the vines are in flower,” said Gobel, and then Ophel was heard to say, “My beloved is for me a cluster of henna-blossom from the vineyards.”

It was thus and such, back and forth, until Team Gobel mentioned three liters, and Team Ophel said four. And that was when the real rivalry began.

June 12, 2024 [19:19-20:20]

You Are Everywhere, by Robert Fuller

Winds, waves, and songs, with wings. That’s what there was when someone said what happened. It wasn’t much, but they saw you there, whether you were or not, and it was your wings that flew and flew until they became lips of the sun and whispers of aviaries of whatever it was we couldn’t see until it was too late. It was a chimera, it was, and you were there surely as any of us were, yet we couldn’t yet see you, not your wings, and not your songs, waves, or winds, which had already subsided. Your presence was in what you didn’t say.

But some saw you fly into the sunset, and on into the crescent moon, while others swore you were here on the beach with the rest of us, drinking wine and laughing about everything there is to laugh about. We couldn’t tell which was true, and all those accounts may have been. One of us swore he saw you as a hummingbird drinking of a fountain. Another could not get the picture out of her head that you were a sunflower laughing in a Van Gogh painting. Someone else claimed to have seen you folding your paper wings as origami into your self that no one else had ever seen. And the one after her, she says she saw you unfold those wings into the most radiant butterfly, which went backward into its cocoon and then disappeared. And they were all telling what they saw, even though none of them truly saw it.

We all found your traces wherever we looked, but they were all different, and you knew it. So there you were, in whatever form we wanted to see, as a thing of beauty, as we would express it, and you were there in place, in that kind of form, and we revered what we saw.

Then, one fine late spring day, that was when you dipped just the tip of your toe in that deep pool, like a child skimming a pebble across its surface, creating ripples. You must have seen your reflection. And after that, for a time, you were no longer there, or so we thought.

We were waiting. We waited. We saw wings and waves. We heard songs and winds blowing. But you were not there, or so we thought. Someone started to recite, “The embrace, with little sweets of lips...” and then we made our way back to the deep pool, and someone thoughtlessly threw a small coin in, which made its own ripples. And we were there, transfixed, for a long while, while the ripples subsided.

And then, a frog croaked loudly, leaped out of the pond, was a cocoon in air for a brief moment, and then madly flapped away as butterfly wings into the cool night air, and we with it.

June 13, 2024 [20:00-20:43]

The Stagehand, by Robert Fuller

He felt like he was perpetually hidden, behind a mostly opaque canvas that let no light into his world. He was one of the hidden sources of how this theatre was made into something believable for those who dared attend productions of the show at hand. There were many such hidden figures who made the show happen, but Manuel secretly considered himself one of the lowliest of all. He had no shame doing the jobs that the rest of the crew would not do. At the same time, the fact that he, and only he himself, of all the crew, did not consider himself to be above whatever presented itself to those who involved themselves in making this show, these shows, happen, it kind of got to him. Was it that he was the only one who really cared that much, to just get the job done, no matter what it was?

When he interviewed at the theatre, Manuel clearly displayed to the staff a willingness to do whatever it took to make these shows a success. And his skills were in numerous facets of the backstage activities that make a show shine. And he was serious that he would do whatever it might take to make the show happen, and he proved it, beyond a doubt. He would often volunteer for the less glamorous tasks, which were often the ones that most needed to be done.

Case in point: At the penultimate dress rehearsal of that one show, there was that horrible snafu that resulted in a gooey liquid spill that almost clobbered all the props for the show, and it was Manuel, and Manuel alone, who did the cleanup for that fiasco. And the actual run of the show? It was a hit!

That particular night, when only Manuel stayed those late hours to clean up the snafu that had occurred because of what he later styled as “bad direction”, when he was done, and fatigued as he had never until then been, he found himself down in the pit orchestra, where there was a piano, which he had never until then played. He never would have touched it, ordinarily, out of respect, but this time, it beckoned him, invited him, to touch it and play upon it. So his hands did the unthinkable, and they caressed the keys, finger by finger, and then Manuel knew why he was here. He had never known such freedom and ecstasy, and continued playing until time stopped. And it never did.

June 14, 2024 [20:00-20:30]

The Ghost of Beethoven, by Robert Fuller

When I was a kid, his aura was there, and I felt it. There were those two huge volumes of Piano Sonatas, each with a Table of Contents showing how each of these Sonatas began, and I was mesmerized by how they all seemed to connect to one another. But it was more than that; I could feel something, at that tender age, that may be lost on the more elderly among us. It’s difficult, and nearly impossible, to recall what that feeling really was. But, as a child, it was palpable, it was as real as the air you breathe right at this very moment, and it was something that never leaves you, as long as you breathe air.

When I was a kid, I found my way into a kind of secret society, one whose members have the ability to decode symbols, abstruse, abstract, or esoteric, as some might style them, and to hear the sounds that such symbols represent, when decoded properly. It was a kind of literacy that was, remains, uncommon. And those Tables of Contents, which few among us could decipher, they were the world to me.

In today’s world of pop culture, there may be few who truly appreciate that Ludwig Van was the progenitor of rock music, just as, as a similar argument may be made, Johann Sebastian Bach was the progenitor of jazz. Examine the data, and make your own conclusions.

But what, for the so young version of myself, was the hook that caught me? In my case, I was intrigued with how music might be built up through these abstruse and abstract symbols, and so I started to write some things down, in these kinds of symbols that most of humanity seemed to be pretty illiterate about. The magic of what I understood and what I heard, it found its way to the page, and I began to find the magic of how Beethoven wrote what he did, even though what I did was only a silent reflection of any of that. But it was the inspiration, those Tables of Contents, and all those notes in each Sonata, that captured my young imagination in a way that nothing much else could. “Tender eyes with their speaking sadness.” Lying gently on the banks, strangely soft, are towns, churches, and even cemeteries, while away on the horizon the blue tints of the Seven Mountains show in wild jagged edges, a background to dreamlike silhouettes of old ruined castles. The lion is in love; he draws in his claws. “God has not abandoned me. He will find someone to close my eyes.” He died in the climax of a violent storm, a tempest of snow.

In my own case, the only ghost he ever left was the one that inspired me ever further into my own forays into my own musical madness. A vortex of dust set swirling by the wind; direct speech in music.

June 15, 2024 [18:04-19:05]

Over the Deep End, by Robert Fuller

It may have been a winged angel or a bird of prey but in any case these were the tall tale stories of legend. And none of them were really all that true. There was this one particular legend that had it that an eight year-old boy jumped into the deep end of a Beverly Hills pool and was rescued by his keister because an idol of his happened to be there and yanked him up out of the chlorinated water before he succumbed. But for those of us who were there none of this rings true. The setting was an undisclosed location where there was a deep pool of mysterious origin and there was no deep end to speak of in that pool. The shape was a perfect circle with the deep part at every part of the periphery and there were bats flying all about with abandon. The child leaped in after some time but only after first gingerly dipping a toe in. He saw all manner of stones and coins and dead leaves and then he emerged from that dream once an even smaller child dropped a pebble into the pool. And his idol was nowhere to be found.

His idol tells a different story with similar resonances. His idol Sean says he himself was in fact there and watched the eight year-old boy jump into the periphery of the pool and that the pool itself washed the boy out once he had finished scoping out the debris at the bottom of the pool. But Sean made the point that if the boy had managed to reach the shallow center of the deep pool he would have found something truly life-changing. And the bats kept on with their wing-dance through twilight and a tall tale was set to rest.

June 16, 2024 [19:19-19:44]

Blind Faith, by Robert Fuller

Her spectacles were all but unparalleled, although there were some who noted similarities with those of Curl(e)y in a certain Stooges episode of notoriety. They were thick as sin, and they made her eyes so much larger than life that you could hardly bear to look into them. Her given name was Faith, but she much preferred other names, especially Hope; that was really her preferred handle. Because of her extreme nearsightedness, there were those who had often thrown at her that usual epithet “blind as a bat” but when she laughed it off, as she often did about much of life’s absurdities, they were taken aback, and often laughed with her in all good humor.

She had read certain religious Books, and was curious what, if anything, any of them said about bats. So she saw all these lists about “unclean things” you may not eat, which included various types of vultures, owls, kites, falcons, crows, hawks, storks, ospreys, cormorants, hoopoes—and bats. Yet “You may eat every clean insect.”

Faith, or Hope, as she liked to be called, had no agenda to eat bats, but she was curious about what this whole “clean” or “unclean” thing was about. So she got together with some of her friends, and they hashed this thing out as well as they could, over hors d’œuvres which may or may not have been “clean”—although nobody there much cared one way or the other.

It was Esther, of course, and Max and Theo and Robin Sherwood, and even Alma had made it there for the occasion, which was really nothing, merely a gathering of friends in front of a crackling fireplace with mulled wine and a few assorted finger foods to comfort the body and soul. And there was one of the group, a trickster to be sure, who had brought along the newest rage, that of crispy crickets done up in the richest ever dark chocolate. They were “clean” as far as anyone knew, and they were so crunchy and delicious that everyone forgot the agenda for a while.

And then Hope recalled that evening at the fountain in the church courtyard, when she saw the most perfect white dove suddenly at the fountain, going for a drink, and then she saw it fly, and it flew and flew and flew until there was no place else to fly. And there was no need for any more words.

June 17, 2024 [19:19-19:54]

Disappearances, by Robert Fuller

Examine your “self” of ten minutes ago. If you are reading this, presumably you are still here, and you were then there. That previous “self” is not in the least threatened by anything. It was just a slice of time that went away, yet something in the works still remembered something about it, whatever it was. And then, you think about your friends, and how they go to work or do whatever else they do, and they are out of sight, out of mind, and they all seem to disappear to somewhere you can’t imagine, even if you’ve been there before. You can’t see your friends; they’re invisible to you, effectively; you don’t know where they are; from your perspective, they have effectively disappeared.

And then they show up, all affable and everything, and they want to tell you all about themselves, as if they had never disappeared. But they are just moving through space-time, as time-slices of illusion, just as you are.

You can’t know what goes on with anyone else when you’re not there with them in the same space-time place; you can only imagine what happens, and your guess is almost guaranteed to be incorrect. Even when you’re all right there in the same room, the room doesn’t really include any of you in it. There are those of you who think, “We’re having a good time, all this food and drink,” and yet you are all just slices of time between the past and the future, never really present.

June 18, 2024 [17:00-17:22]

Forensic Analysis, by Robert Fuller

It was a remote outpost in the year 2050. Everything was an outpost, remote from everything else, by that year. We had been tasked to analyze what it was that had gone so wrong with the human experiment. You might be surprised, but we were actually the direct reports of a lean team of supervisors who still retained what they referred to as “power” over others, who could pull certain strings in order to get certain things done. Our team, we weren’t concerned about petty matters like those all that much; we were here to do our job, which was to figure out, based on real evidence, what the hell it was had happened to humanity. There weren’t many clues, not much in the way of trace evidence; and we didn’t even have the right equipment for forensics in any case. Our supervisors had informed us that there were maybe one or two, certainly not more than a dozen, computers that had survived the neverending sequence of disasters that had befallen humanity—or rather, that humanity had brought upon itself—in the last decade, give or take. And the ones that had survived in more or less working condition, they were generally pretty sketchy, plagued with so many bugs, viruses, and worms that it was a wonder we could get them to work at all.

But the computers were an important part of the picture; to the extent that any data could be retrieved from them, it might very well provide crucial clues as to events that had transpired, as well as information about the various actors who may have made those events happen. Now, even though there were few enough of us left who had survived all those catastrophes, the computers also contained data, albeit in only scant amounts, that—in the event humanity continued in some form or fashion despite everything—might help those of us still here to patch together some semblance of the cultural heritage we had once enjoyed and celebrated. So the computers, as fragile and unreliable as they were, were a big part of the puzzle, all around.

We had few reliable energy sources, so that was another major issue. And the computers that were known to have survived were scattered geographically over a wide region, whereas most of us on the team were located at just one or two of these remote outposts. And communication with our supervisors was intermittent at best. We all still had cell phones, but the remaining towers were generally unreliable, and the batteries on most of the phones were on their last legs.

As a team, though, we relished a good challenge, and we still had the abilities, in terms of our engineering backgrounds, to find workarounds for just about anything. We made it our primary focus to examine the computers that had survived for evidence, both of what had actually happened, and of the cultural remnants, if any, of what used to be human society.

All of us, including our supervisors, knew that we were walking on extremely thin ice, but we had no choice but to move forward with gathering evidence wherever we could, and applying our analytical abilities to it in order to figure out what had happened and how best to proceed from here.

Little did we know that in an even more remote outpost, which neither we nor our supervisors had been aware of, there was a team of hackers bent on making us fail. And that’s what...

June 19, 2024 [21:21-22:00]

For the Price of a Drink, by Robert Fuller

Williams couldn’t make it that particular day; he’d texted Murray that he was feeling a bit under the weather; they had planned to meet for a spell to work out some details about the stint that Williams had done in the Korean War so long ago. So Murray was up at the bar, innocently enough ordering his drink, when he was rudely interrupted by a guy to his left who tried to say Hi to him, but Murray was having none of it. He knew the guy, who had been his piano student for a brief time, and was supposedly a friend, with similar interests in the arts and sciences. And then this guy—a guy by the name of Westpoint, although no one knew if he had ever served—said to the bartender, “I’m buying his drink.” Murray chafed at the suggestion, and declined, and frankly, to his own chagrin, was rather contrite later on about how rude he had been to his former piano student.

Later on, he reflected on the incident, and remembered how completely he had been shut out by Westpoint and his wife, via email reply to what was merely Murray explaining some finer points about the topic then at hand, which had to do with matters of proofreading and editing, for a science manuscript that Westpoint was writing and trying to get published. At the end of this rude reply, he was told, “Please don’t contact me again.” And now this same character, for the price of a drink, apparently, was trying to get back into Murray’s good graces!? So then, Murray was nothing but a toy, nothing but Westpoint’s yo-yo!? Like some kind of a dog on Westpoint’s leash!?

Murray paid for his drink and ventured into the back patio of what was the usual joint, and he worked on his writing—one of two essays he wrote that very day—after he had cooled his heels. And it was there in the patio he saw the nest, with juncos feeding their young. And he knew that things did, indeed, happen for a reason.

June 20, 2024 [16:20-16:39]

Burden of Proof, by Robert Fuller

The court had two presiding officers, both of whom, for security reasons, wished to remain anonymous, so one had their head covered in black, the other in white, with only their eyes shyly peeking through crudely-crafted eyeholes. There were two sets of jurors, the usual twelve to each side. There were two different prosecutors, one for each side of the case, and there were two defense teams, one for each defendant. This may have been the very first court case of its kind; it was deemed at the time a “reciprocal” case, and television ratings were expected to go through the roof. The gimmick, as some styled it, was that each of the defendants was also a plaintiff, and vice versa. The first of these was a man, well-known about town, by the name of Hugh Jones—he went by Hugh, although his given name was a tad more of a mouthful, Hewhay—and the other simply went by the handle John Doe, and it was said that he came to court in many different disguises, each one more outlandish than the next, and curiously enough, no one in the proceedings seemed to have even the slightest issue with any of that.

So it was a complicated case, to say the least. The rules concerning evidence, testimony, and the presentation of all of that had to be agreed upon among all parties, as did the guidelines for selection of the twin juries. And that’s in large part why the proceedings soon became a media circus; it was dubbed “the trial of the millennium”; some even said “the trial of the epoch”. And I was there as a rookie reporter; it was literally my first assignment. Initially, I was stoked about doing the reporting on such a famous, or infamous case, and I really felt in the beginning that I was more than up to the task.

The crux of the argument that “John Doe” and the prosecution on that side of the case were hoping to present in a favorable light was that Hugh Jones had wrongfully accused him, John Doe, of what amounted to a summary judgment or blanket judgment, as well as inherent guilt and what he mysteriously called “original sin”—and Mr. Doe claimed vehemently that such bald accusations and baseless attacks on his character and his very existence, by such a prominent figure as Mr. Jones was known to be, were slanderous at best, and so he was looking for not only fiscal redress, a complete cessation of such scandalous attacks, and a contrite public apology from Mr. Jones himself for having dragged his good name through the mud in such a thoughtless and crass manner.

On the part of Mr. Hewhay Jones and the prosecution on that side, many who participated in the proceedings felt that his complaint against Mr. Doe was far more thin, more of a weak broth than a rich soup. And Mr. Jones, as was seen later on in the trial, made claims that to many seemed nothing short of far out, even downright outlandish. Upon cross-examination, at one point, he made an odd reference to “a sword whirling and flashing” and this was supposedly for the purpose of guarding certain trees in one of his apple orchards. And it was his claim that Mr. Doe’s wife Jane had stolen one or more of his choicest apples with the assistance of an accomplice, who Mr. Jones claimed was serpentine in nature. But on redirect, in that particular instance, the prosecution managed to get Mr. Jones to admit not only that the ground that Mr. Doe tilled to grow his food was “accursed” but moreover that Mr. Doe would be nothing but an indentured servant to him, Mr. Jones, until the very end of his days.

I think you can see why this trial, these proceedings, took a toll on me. One side was accusing the other of trying to lord over him, and to make his entire life as miserable as possible, while the other side accused Mr. Doe and his wife of the theft of an apple or two. And later on in the trial, Mr. Doe brought into the evidence that he and his wife had had two sons, both of high moral character, and that Mr. Jones had allegedly coerced one of them to perform the most callous fratricide, and had caused the one who did the dirty deed to become a street bum.

But what really turned the heads of both juries was when it came out that Mr. Jones said he would put a hit on anyone who dared even touch the murdering brother. That was when they all knew that this was the work of a secret and dangerous mob. There was a hung jury on both sides, and a mistrial was declared.

June 21, 2024 [18:18-19:19]

Proof of Concept, by Robert Fuller

The team was assembled, there were piles of notebooks with mostly illegible scrawls that may have been formulas, diagrams, illustrations, icons, designs for various user interface components, and the like; and there were pages and yet more pages of chicken scratch notes that were barely decipherable to just about anyone who hadn’t scribbled them in the haste that is true of the effort to capture the essence of fleeting ideas that were sure to evaporate if not set in stone, as it were, in a written document. There may have been whiteboards, as well as the usual requisite PowerPoint presentations, except that the team that I mentioned—it was just me.

What had captured my attention—tickled my fancy—was the potential ability to create a wide variety of mathematically-generated shapes, with varying colors, using polar equations and various onscreen controls, and making use of the device’s GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) to allow the controls to update the shapes and colors in real-time. The GPU, you see, is highly optimized for the creation and manipulation of both 2D and 3D images, including images that can vary over time in accordance with what the program that controls it is configured to do.

So I entered what to me was the highly mysterious and esoteric world of what they call shaders. For anyone who is at all knowledgeable about the “classic” programming languages—and I’m mainly referring to C, which has for ages been the backbone of so much that has been accomplished in the arena of the computer sciences—to enter the world of shaders for the first time, at least in my experience, is to gaze at a language which seems simultaneously familiar and at the same time entirely alien and outlandish. In a word, inscrutable.

In order for me to be able to produce results on the screen of the device, it was necessary to figure out many different details, one of the most important being the means of communication between the main program and the shader, being that the controls used to change various parameters in the target shapes were part of the main program. But there was also the matter of those shader programs themselves. I recall that my first challenge was to figure out how to structure a shader such that it could render one of the most basic of shapes: the circle. And because of the way that colors are typically handled digitally, it had to initially be a white circle. In polar coordinates, which are handled in terms of radius and angle, it turns out that the equation for a circle is very straightforward: r = 1. That’s for a circle of radius 1. The equation states that for any angle (0° to 360°), the radius is the same value, 1, around the point of origin. So the more general form would be r = N, where N is any arbitrary number that represents the radius of the circle.

The more esoteric aspects of this proof of concept involved a deeper knowledge of the shader language, including how colors and opacities could be changed in various ways, but also in the implementation of a wide variety of other polar equations that allowed for the creation of entire “shape families”. So there were lots of different moving parts, even just in getting the most basic proof of concept implemented.

But then I came across various shape families, such as one called the “rose”, and another called the “trefoil”, and numerous others, and I developed many ways to alter, warp, and tile the shapes, and add various colors, shadings, and other patterns, and that was when I knew the proof of concept had kicked in, and then some.

And later on, I added ways of creating moving images, with the app in what I called fullscreen mode, and you could see these shapes changing right in front of your eyes, with the polar equations and the shaders and everything else showing you directly what a Shape Shifter is, and how the magical world of mathematics and computer programming could bring to your eyes so many different shapes that neither you, nor anyone else, had seen before.

June 22, 2024 [13:13-14:14]

Concept of Art, by Robert Fuller

There is no one (“the”) concept of art. The word itself, according to the various researches of our editorial staff, has quite a few different nuances to what it has meant through the ages. Much of what has been referenced historically has to do with various aspects of “skill”—and this is certainly central to any concept of art that might be developed over time. And this notion of skill does branch out to many different arenas of human endeavor, all of which center around what is referred to as “human creativity”. Yet, that signifier almost certainly could refer to just about any human activity you could dream up.

Taking a more narrow view of things, for the moment, where such activities are limited mostly to visual forms of such human creativity, Theo, one of the main members of the editorial team governing the rules and bylaws that the team was to be bound by in their investigations and research, was the one team member who latched onto the notion of “concept art” and its companion “conceptual art”. And in the footnotes of the editorial proceedings, he would always bring up important pioneers such as Marcel Duchamp and his what he called “readymades”—and then Theo would almost inevitably segue from this conceptual art to the somewhat related notion of concept art. And then Theo would wrap them together in a bow so that you couldn’t tell the difference between them, not even in the slightest.

An important issue with conceptual art was supposed to be that it was to be the decommodification of the visual arts. The concept of art was what was of most significance, and the fetishization and monetization of it was supposed to go away. So, concept art was the flip side of that same coin, as Theo soon came to realize. It was directly purposed at the monetization of art of the visual variety, through the means of pop culture and mass marketing. It was a mood music that the executives meant to go viral, once the final film or video game or whatever was launched in its final, highly-produced version meant simply to mesmerize the masses so they would empty their pocketbooks for yet more fluff without any semblance of substance.

This was when Theo had a spark of creativity, when he conceived of a way to subvert this kind of bald, unabashed attempt at swaying and influencing the general public, and pocketing their spare change, and more. It was in the guise of what he called a poison pill. It was a different type of concept art, one that cut right to the bone of greed. And he planned it carefully, to the hilt.

Audiences wanted “product”—something that would seemingly satisfy them and of course distract them, and make them feel completely empty after the fact. So Theo would give them “product”, and it would be based in part on the readymades of Duchamp, and the anti-fascist films of Chaplin, the Stooges, and others, plus a few Houdini escape routines, a few select “Beat” poems, a bit of Kafka thrown in for good measure, and that would be the concept art fed to those greedy producers. And Theo saw it, and saw that it was good. And he posted his concept art all over social media, wherever he could, and it soon went viral, and potential audiences were clamoring for it, as never before.

But Theo never did submit his concept art to the producers, even though he said to everyone on social media that “XYZ Productions” would soon release the next great hit, all of it based on this very same concept art.

And there were so many disgruntled fans who wanted to see this next great thing come to fruition that they beat down the doors of XYZ.

Theo took it upon himself, with the help of some generous crowdfunding, to do the production and everything himself, with the help of his creative friends. And so the new film came out a few months later, and Theo saw it, and saw that it was good.

June 23, 2024 [19:19-20:20]

Art of Persuasion, by Robert Fuller

There was a rather large gathering, maybe at Max’s place. He was strumming a few choice chords on his guitar that had been specially made for him, and David Ernest Foster—who always insisted on being addressed with his full name, all three parts—was right there at his side, all curious about what Max was doing with this guitar that was supposed to be the next latest rage. Esther may have been there somewhere in the wings, in the general hubbub of the crowd, and someone claimed to have seen at least the ghost of Robin Sherwood, and there were also those who claimed that Theo may have been lurking somewhere in the dark shadows of the party, not yet ready to fully participate.

Now, it must be said that Max’s strumming in this particular case was not at all merely musical noodling. It’s hard to explain, but he was trying to make a point, a rather profound one, at that, about, of all things, proof. He had been religiously following a recent trial, one that was called both a “reciprocal” trial as well as what all tiers and varieties of media had dubbed “the trial of the millennium”. So what Max was doing, whether he knew it or not at the time, was to make an argument in musical tones that weighed in on what had been happening in the trial in question.

There were some in the crowd whose ears perked up when they heard certain sequences of notes. There were others who became acutely attuned to the pure nature of the vibrations of the chords that Max strummed, one after the other, which he did with intent, and in such a way that there was space between the chords, there was ample time, such that discerning ears could hear that what he was doing was conjuring a spell, in the form of a real argument, but one that could only be heard, absorbed, and received, without even a single word having been uttered.

No one there in the crowd knew really what Max was saying; even Max didn’t really know. But they all became quiet, listened more and more fiercely to what he was playing, which with every chord became quieter and quieter, and which, with every layer of subtlety that was revealed every time he dropped to a lower dynamic level, and then they all suddenly began to understand what he was and what he was doing. He was leading them slowly and carefully and softly into the depths of their own being, away from the needless, pointless noise that was everywhere, and the chords continued strumming, more and more softly and slowly and purely, until they all understood.

June 24, 2024 [18:18-18:49]

Persuasion of Friends, by Robert Fuller

They were all gathered in the wild, in the canyons, in various wooded areas, and there were peaks that all could climb if they wished. It was a day of sun and cloud that all found to be just what they had always wanted; the clouds were wispy and buttery and of such character that everyone there, if they were noticing, saw that this was such a fine drawing or painting that you had to notice that there were hawks, black with wings, hovering and swooning in the winds above, that just made everything up above so magic. Some may even have remarked something to that effect, yet the winds below were such that no one really felt the full effect of what was really happening.

Max was there, and he saw what was really happening, and he found a way to inspire his friends to climb yet a bit further toward one of the peaks that were in view, and, while they were climbing toward one of those peaks, they all saw, all of a sudden, a wild boar with her young, just yards away; and they all stood there in awe, and the clouds were wispy and billowy and cottony while a hawk swooned its way through the heavens, black wings against white chalk, white watercolor painted so purely on sky blue heaven that you could see the black wingspan of the hovering, swooning hawk against the pure white of the moving clouds.

In the next moment, while they were still striving toward the peak, someone in the group noticed, of all things, a tarantula, right there, right in full view. And the white clouds were still moving, and becoming something else over time, and they were just as billowy and pillowy and of such comfort that everyone in the group just laid their heads in the moisture above and saw black wings soaring in the white and they all soared in those heavens just as Max would have liked.

Max moved onward, and he was there with his custom-made guitar, and he was careful to beckon his friends in the direction of the main peak, which was now in full view. And he strummed just a few choice chords, and fingered just a few melodies that no one had ever heard, and his friends followed him up to the peak. And he kept strumming and fingering the magic he made with his custom-made guitar, and it was like his friends followed him beyond the wild boar and the tarantula and everything else, right into the white clouds with the black soaring wings and they all became the hawk and the billowy clouds and the azure sky and everything else.

Max had his paint kit with him, and he stood there, once he reached the summit, and he painted his canvas with those strums of chords, black wings on white clouds, and fingerfuls of choice melodies that no one ever heard, made into chalk pastels that tasted like honey, and felt like the silk that you might wear when you first noticed star jasmine in the air.

At the summit, Max kept strumming and fingering his choice custom guitar, and his friends were there, and they all started singing in various tongues, none of which any of them knew, or knew that they knew, and the summit became a new place where they could all be something else.

Max stopped what he was doing. Everyone looked at the billowy clouds, and the black hawk wings hovering just so. And this was their peace.

June 25, 2024 [21:21-22:22]

Friends of Beasts, by Robert Fuller

As has already been so clearly and succinctly laid out in that journalistic tour de force, that veritable pièce de resistance, namely, “Blanked Out”, the likes of Vova and Bébé and Jong Un and Jin Ping and so many others; well, their days, if they really have any at all, are numbered; anyone remotely resembling such miscreants, even to the slightest degree, all puffed up about their lonesomes, and knowing that they are alone and that they have painted themselves into the bleakest corner imaginable, just because they erroneously assume they know better, they are better, than anyone else at all—they are by their very own definition, best! at all things—such poor excuses for humanity will then find themselves in the most miserable of circumstances when they next depart this earth. They can all puff themselves up with such false pride and such, but the rest of us know what they really are: cowards.

Who would befriend such a one? Anyone who did would soon be nothing but cannon fodder for the whims of nothing but tyrants and madmen. You, you just imagine yourself as a sidekick of Vova or Bébé or—take your pick of such miscreants. You sidle up to this one full only of himself—never mind there’s no one there—and you feel the false draw of what you think is power, but is only weakness, if even that. And you know this all along, in your heart of hearts, yet somehow you find yourself tethered to this nothing, this thing that is nothing at all but a machine, all self-calculated to do nothing but self-divide in the pain of knowing how much nothing that miscreant machine is! There being nothing there, the vacuum fills with self-grandiosity, with delusions of all kinds that the one who is nothing but this void, this vacuum that sucks all life around it into its own nothingness, is actually a pearl, let us say, of great price, the one who will even save mankind from itself!

David Ernest Foster, back in the day, he befriended such a one, maybe even a few such tyrants. He had a rather shady, beclouded past himself, he did, and so he was no stranger to such persons; he even tended to pride himself that he was worthy of such colorful, even tainted, company. No one ever became aware of what David Ernest Foster had done in his day, but some of the sordid details came to light posthumously when his complete letters and other similar correspondence were published—and of course went viral.

Let’s just say that David Ernest Foster first contacted Vova, just on the eve of that fateful military exercise, and he said in perfect Russian that he wished most sincerely to be a “penpal”. Now, subsequent analysis of this initial letter revealed that what initially appeared to be a merely obsequious missive to the great leader was actually more of a poison pill than not. The Russian was so finely tuned and honed, in ways that can’t be imagined, that it said something on the surface that was entirely contraindicated when you really read between the lines. Let it be said that David Ernest Foster was more a master of the mother tongue than Vova himself! This was like a certain composer’s Tenth Symphony, let us say, in the realm of Stalin and his vain attempts in the arena of censorship!

And David Ernest Foster was a master in multiple languages, and was easily able to outfox any of those who imagined themselves to be the best, brightest examples of whatever. He knew how to hide the real meat of the matter that he was imparting in such dark corners that even all the King’s men couldn’t find what he was saying even were it to stare them in the face!

And so it was that none other than David Ernest Foster himself became the penpal, the friend of such beasts. Not only that, but he soon set up an entire center for people like him to carry out the same type of important work. The name was not highly-publicized, but it was in fact Friends of Beasts. This was the penpal network that brought so many tyrants to their knees, begging for mercy which was unforthcoming. There were many the time who wondered, and with good reason, how David Ernest Foster managed to do what he did.

It was only much later on, when David Ernest Foster was on his deathbed, that the real scoop came out. Yes, he had been buddy-buddy as a penpal with such unsavory characters. Yes, he was more the true master of their native tongue than they were, and Yes, there were hidden messages that they only received subconsciously. But he, David Ernest Foster, he was also master of multiple fronts, multiple lines of attack. Even on his deathbed, he refused to divulge anything much in the way of concrete details, but suffice it to say that he had numerous other penpals who were right there in the thick of things, with all of these thick as thieves would-be strongmen, and there would always be those who were disgruntled with how such and such handled things. And so, in a word, there was payback. And David Ernest Foster had his ways of posting all kinds of viral “info” about these types, and he had his ways of avoiding all the censorship that usually happened. And his other penpals? They delivered!

June 26, 2024 [21:21-22:22]

Beasts of Burden, by Robert Fuller

When you hear a phrase like that, “beasts of burden”, you would typically see in your mind’s eye mules or donkeys or other similar hoofed creatures lugging on their backs many diverse packages of who knows what that had nothing to do with them. Their human handlers simply would load them up with God knows what, and they would carry it as far as necessary, and that would be that. This was most typically what a phrase like this meant, at least to most. But there were some among the human tribe who knew this phrase to mean something different, perhaps even more sinister.

There have always been human beasts in various guises and costumes, those who had designs on what they called “greatness” but which was really nothing more than the cowardice of their own unstable and unshaped souls, and their unfortunate spillover on the rest of humanity and even the earth as a whole was devastating to nearly all who had to deal with their cowardice in any direct way.

You see, tyranny is only and only ever cowardice, and David Ernest Foster knew this just as well as anyone might have, because he lived that kind of tyranny for most of his adult life. He was a kind of Don Quixote, windmills all around, but he couldn’t see what he really had to go after, not until much later in life. Yes, it’s true, David Ernest Foster had issues with being a recluse and not really relating to the pop culture norms of the day, and he was rumored to have been involved in certain infamous incidents that transpired within his rural county of residence, although there was never any proof brought forth that he had anything to do with any such “incidents”. But over time, these all were water under the bridge, and David Ernest Foster receded further and further into his cocoon of being merely a recluse with certain idiosyncratic tendencies.

It was toward the end of his life, perhaps it was even posthumously, that the true impact of what David Ernest Foster accomplished in the later years of his brief life was recognized, finally, for what it was. There were some in his inner circle who knew all the details about his correspondences with all kinds of colorful characters. And there were some, even closer to that center, who knew about the proxies who helped him in his mission statement. David Ernest Foster dealt with what he called true beasts. And he fought them later in life in whatever way he could. If the close associates of those beasts could not be in any way persuaded to radically act upon their consciences, then he would appeal to others in their circles to begin showing these miscreants what kind of burden they were on others, and even on themselves. This was a sophisticated type of psy-ops that had been carefully, coldly calculated to reach only these beasts, if they were even reachable.

David Ernest Foster far preferred what he referred to as “direct action”, but he wanted to chip away at such tyrants in whatever way presented itself. And by the year 2035—a full decade after his passing—nearly half of these tyrants had gone the way of the waste bin, in one way or another. None of them was ever heard to have confessed he was in any sense a burden to others.

June 27, 2024 [19:19-20:05]

A Sanctuary, by Robert Fuller

In my own case, here I am near a fountain that gurgles its heart out right here where I am. For so many, what is needed is a place for them to deep-breathe, and to aim to find that place where what is unspoken never gets said, because it’s not necessary. And to breathe in what was never said, yet was understood. Because it was. Any sanctuary, for anyone, will look different from those of any other. But to deep-breathe, and to hear the water doing its magic, and to feel what the sun and sky tell you, and then the moon—these are yours, they are the place where you, or anyone else, can rest your weary soul for even just a moment. And then the butterflies, and the hummingbirds, and the pure white doves. What they do to you when they bathe of that fountain that hums in your heart and in your very sanctuary, and then they fly to elsewhere such that your heart is captured right there, in your deep-breathing, that, right there, is your sanctuary, where you never imagined you could be but you now are. But you feel that something is missing. And that it might be you...

Where is there, indeed, a sanctuary for you? Is it right there, right where you are? Have you come to peace with whatever this strange world shows you? You know, full well, that you have no idea what this strange world is or does to you or to anyone else. And the fountain is still there, and it speaks to you in many tongues, and even though you know you don’t understand anything at all, you suddenly know that you do.

June 28, 2024 [19:19-19:39]

Dreaming of Poetry, by Robert Fuller

There you are, in the luxurious comfort of your fresh, clean sheets, blankets, comforters, and whatever you need for your peaceful night of rest, and even though, as happens now and again, you have a touch of insomnia, your eyes are closed and you see vivid images that begin moving in ways that you could never imagine, and you wish to heaven that you could capture these movies on film, because otherwise no one would ever believe you—that is, if you even remembered what you had seen. And then the synaesthetic side of you kicks in, and the images become a murmur of sounds, at first like the chaos of worlds forming out of dust and light for the first time, a kind of babble of various random noises signifying nothing much except whatever the earliest primeval echoes of disarray, mayhem, and pandemonium may have meant to anyone who was there, and then becoming more orderly and recognizable to just you personally, and then forming into sequences of words that you found struck your heart and mind just so, because they were music from the lips of one you loved and revered, and the soft shades of vowels with varying consonants and their different punctuations of meaning that carried you right into your very own dream world that no one else could see, hear, smell, taste, touch, or act within—except you. And you were no longer there, because that “you” was now in the cocoon of sleep, not to emerge until later in the morning when your wings were ready to flutter out of the night’s bind of rigor that held you tight.

And then you awaken, or think you do, but you’re still in a dream, but it’s not yours. It’s in fact reversed, and you are now the dream’s, and at first you feel somehow entrapped, until you again start seeing vivid, bright images that move in ways you didn’t think you could conjure up, but here they are, like a kind of clairvoyance, a “clear seeing” that then morphs again into chaotic sounds that tickle your ears until you hear eventually trickle of the magic of language like what you might write if you were fully awake.

You rise out of your bed, your chamber, and you don’t fully consciously recall everything, or really anything that you went through in this period of slumber, but you are now curious, and you set up your ideal writing environment, and then, even though the blank page hits you in the solar plexus, you struggle to reenter those sacred dream spaces that told you the secrets that no one could have possibly told you, and you write and revisit and revise until you are sure that it is what was revealed to you.

June 29, 2024 [14:14-14:46] (the author’s 62nd birthday)

Hall of Mirrors, by Robert Fuller

Quicksand. The end of a nightmare journey, deep in a forest, mist shrouded. A peace resting on nightfall, the prospect of waiting, his glasses crushed, at the designated point of crossover. After nightfall, a bugler blowing short blasts, an armistice crashed into a house, only too happy in a drizzling fog. Complete silence. “Let them keep their weapons.” The bloody fate of these forces, announced by word of mouth, as if the war were still on. Were we dreaming, walking along the trenches? Shrieking factory whistles; the triumph of life over death; the clamor of jubilant crowds. Workers wiped his eyes and hurried to spend the afternoon alone, throwing confetti. “Hire a lunatic to shoot at you at close range.”

Mere chattels and pawns in a game, more bitterly divided than ever, as a blueprint for another war. The opinions of mankind would be expressed by the Americans; thousands cheered; the gilt chairs made an oddly ornate setting for lofty generalities, like an old watchdog keeping an eye on a strange place to rest, to place world peace above a gorilla of yellow ivory; to lie on the sand and watch the world to go hell. Restitution from a vanquished foe, signed in the forest by some sort of telepathy, would ultimately bring a rotten peace.

Desolate fields, once rich with fruit, at journey’s end, where the urban poor had known actual starvation. Their train, now torn apart by bombs, had been moved from the shambles of the time limit set by the victors to the world outside. Even as the ceremony proceeded, the formal signing ceremony, they had little feeling of war guilt. “Think of that when you speak of guilt and punishment.” Mass protests were held. “Isn’t it just like them?” The map of Europe, which had been remade, exchanged the rule of one foreign power for the rule of another. As upon quicksand.

June 30, 2024 [21:21-22:22]

Slowly, Softly..., by Robert Fuller

It was a memorial service, everything started out a bit somber, as happens at these things. People were unsure what to say to each other, really, about anything at all. So they sat obediently in their more or less assigned pews, and they more or less withdrew, for a moment or two, into their own private thoughts, and then they heard someone—who was actually the Musical Director for the service, but who was really low-key about it—begin to strum just a few pure chords on his custom-made guitar, the one with the frets placed just so, for maximum purity of how the chords sounded. He was in the background, never wanting to draw much attention to himself, but his music, his strumming, started to uplift the ones who were there mourning the one who had passed recently, a certain David Ernest Foster, and they started to notice more and more that this Musical Director, a guy by the name of Max, who hadn’t even known David Ernest Foster personally, was creating right then and there the perfect chords, melodies, and rhythms for not only the one who had recently passed, but for just about anyone at all who had passed or who might soon pass.

No one who was there knew what Max was doing or how he did it, but he had begun initially with a rather you might say insistent beat, one by which the chords he strummed had what those who were there perceived as a kind of regularity, yet there were melodic notes that to some seemingly had nothing much to do with whatever harmonies or rhythms were then happening. And so it was precisely those same incongruous melodic notes that most deeply affected those who were there when later they reflected on it. And what all who were there certainly noticed, to a person, is that in the course of the entire service for David Ernest Foster, not a single word was either spoken or sung.

It was about halfway into what you might call Max’s musical eulogy for David Ernest Foster—and Max had been strumming more slowly and softly all along, but this was a point that nearly resembled silence—and then, behold! There was a hummingbird! He hovered there for as long as anyone could remember, and then there was another! They both hovered there as long as they possibly could have, and there was an audible gasp! of lost emotion that no one who was there could account for. And the chords, which had gone nearly to silence, began anew, as if they had never left. And Max wept.

July 1, 2024 [19:19-19:49]

The Mole, by Robert Fuller

The Balcoms were gobsmacked that morning, when they noticed their younger son Malcolm, who went by the handle Mark, was nowhere to be seen at the breakfast table. Luke, the older son, and half-brother to Mark, was seen to be glibly hiding behind his breakfast of porridge and eggs, pretending largely as if nothing at all had happened. Luke had a look of knowing in his mischievous eyes, he did, yet he said nothing, gave nothing away, and just frittered away at whatever remained of his now cold breakfast. His father, Matt, stared right through him, whereas Joan was more forgiving.

Malcolm, who was but fourteen when he mysteriously went missing, had quite a distinctive mark on his right side, just above the cheek, a kind of blemish that everyone there pretended not to notice. Yet, in private company, away from the likes of Mark or his many friends, it was a topic of intense interest and, indeed, scrutiny—little did Malcolm himself know anything of the sort.

Now, Malcolm and his half-brother Luke were known to be in the “genius” category when it came to their various proclivities in the various maths and sciences and other studies of that sort. And they were always seen to be what you might call “competing” in such arenas, or at least that’s what certain people seem to have said at the time.

Mark, or Malcolm, on the very eve before his very disappearance, was at the tail end of a very contentious football or soccer match, having himself scored the winning goal, according to certain sources who were present at the time. And, in line with his extraordinary efforts allowing his team to prevail in that match, he was a bit tuckered out, and so he rang up the house to see if he couldn’t get a lift so as to help his weary bones a wee bit. It was Luke who picked up, and it was on the very eve of a prestigious maths competition that both Malcolm and Luke had been vying for, in terms of the glories that might await them upon the success that either of them coveted within that arena, upon besting everyone else within said competition.

Luke told Malcolm that the family car was indisposed, in the shop at the moment, and that so he would be unable to pick him up, so that Mark would be best advised to trudge on home, a mere fifteen minute walk, which was in most circumstances quite within the realm of possibility.

It was only years later—it may have been three, or possibly even as many as five, and this was after the family had dealt in some sense with Malcolm’s so mysterious disappearance—that a call came, unexpectedly, from a place that no one would have expected. It was a faint voice that they all heard, unlike any other that they had ever experienced, but there were those who were there who said it sounded exactly like Malcolm! And so the energy in the room did tend to ascend at that point in time.

Mark, after a period of weeks and months of uncertainty, arrived with escort on a plane that had been specially set up for this monumental event. Once they had all debarked from the aircraft, Mark with all his handlers, there was an emotional family reunion—Malcolm has returned!—with respect to most of those present, except that Luke was nowhere to be found until later.

Now going forward, Malcolm, as he now preferred to be called, made a point of always facing away from the rest of the family when it came to that blemish, that mark, just above his right cheek. So he was always twisting and turning and making it difficult for them to see. What none of them, except perhaps Luke, knew, is that the blemish, as it were, was being used to see what the Balcoms were doing, in that they were high-level targets of a foreign power that was monitoring them to assess what Matthew and his company had been doing all these years. And Luke knew it, and so did Joan. And they both knew where the actual body was buried. And that’s the Gospel truth.

July 2, 2024 [21:21-22:22]

The Oracle, by Robert Fuller

It was a desert setting, and I was there in my capacity, holding a much-needed party, which my friends, if you could call them that, were also much in need of. I had quite the spread, and those who actually made it there would testify to that fact. It was complicated, yet there we were, right there in the middle of the desert that nobody at all had wanted to see or experience. But it was my place to be, and anyone who wanted to see me as I was would have to step into this space, and they would surely love it or die trying. The ways that they would all try, as regards their embracing of this peculiar space of mine, as to how they would make it their own, in some way, they were anybody’s guess.

Yet in this dry space, where no one could be present for any real amount of time, there were spirits who were there who saw those of us who were there, and some of them spoke out, in various tongues that no one there really understood, but pretended to, and there were some who heard a voice, one of what they at least thought to be of great authority, and this voice said many things that could not in the least be interpreted by those who were there. And they listened, because it was a voice of authority, and they saw and heard that what it was was what they themselves had heard in a Hall of Mirrors that was what they were and had been.

After the party was gathered, there were countless black sedans in that grand driveway, all of them sporting the usual black-tinted glass where you couldn’t possibly see who was there, if anyone at all. And there were numerous of those who disembarked from those official black sedans who began to say things that should not have been said, by anyone. Yet, as some who were there would attest, there were definitely some who made their exodus out of such official vehicles who began speaking in such tongues as had never yet been heard in quite that way in these parts, and there was quite a ruckus, there was, that is, until the constable himself intervened, in what all who were there agreed was quite a magnanimous way, was it not? and yet there was a youngster there in the crowd who wished to say a few words, which were not polished in quite the same way that all such statements should have been polished, yet, as all who were there could tell, he had to say to all who were there nevertheless, and this gentleman was there, with the floor and everything, and he said nothing.

July 3, 2024 [21:46-22:30]

Keys to the Kingdom, by Robert Fuller

There was that time, maybe a couple, a few years ago when this roommate of mine informed me that someone I maybe vaguely knew had called me, of all things, a “piano troll”. I had a rather harsh laugh at the fellow’s expense, being that his surname was, of all things, Segovia, and that dude, well, he couldn’t play a note or lick on any musical instrument to save his soul! With a name like that, you maybe would’ve thought he could at least strum a few basic guitar chords, but no such evidence was ever forthcoming. The guy wasn’t even capable of picking up such an instrument, much less doing anything useful with it!

I asked my friend Max, who I knew to be quite knowledgeable in this arena, and he told me flat out that basically anyone who wants to pick up a guitar and at least pretend to play it, any of them could do it in a heartbeat. Yes, he told me, it takes building up callouses on the fingers that serve to form the notes or chords that one wishes to play; but most who have these kinds of dreams move past that rather quickly. The guitar is an eminently portable instrument, and that’s part of its charm. And, frankly, it’s rather phallic in its general shape and demeanor. And that tends to turn on the teenage girls, as has been seen time after time.

What was curious to me is that I was also very much aware that there were other types of instrumental prowess that were admired or even envied, albeit not openly as such. I thought back to that movie Sideways where there was this discussion of Merlot versus Pinot noir, and how the Pinot side had always gotten short shrift within that debacle. And then one of the characters made an impassioned plea about how the growing conditions for Pinot were so much more challenging than for other wine grapes, and you just had to feel for those grapes and how they had to show up just that much more than their cousins!

So, I thought to myself—privately, of course—that among certain wine snob types there was perhaps a type of what some have now defined as “Pinot envy” and then a lightbulb went off, and I knew what Segovia’s “troll” issue that he never told to my face was about: Pianist envy!

You know what!? You just “kitten on the keys” long enough, and you won’t ever have that kind of problem ever again!

July 4, 2024 [16:16-16:42]

Archangel, by Robert Fuller

The madness of a savage, that was what some said. It was a civil war, of that there was no doubt. And it was right there at the White Sea where the prize was taken without a shot, at the time, being fired. And it was a certain Saint Michael who stood firm, or so some said, and supposedly held off Satan himself, although there were others who certainly would have disagreed vehemently. There was, for example, the treasure trove of an inordinate amount of silver found by farm workers, right there, near where Michael was supposed to have shown his face and his fierceness to all who would see.

And there were some who said that there was a monastery that was dedicated to Michael, right there on that spot, with flashes of lightning, and seven torches of fire, and “The Lord punish you!” Yet the normal populace saw nothing of that whatsoever. And there was that cathedral, destroyed by the Soviets and Stalin, that would be rebuilt, soon, battle against heresy. And feasts of all saints, on all days, the “Bodiless Powers of Heaven”, standing over a serpent, a dragon, or a defeated figure who weighs the souls of the departed.

July 5, 2024 [20:20-21:21]

Executors, by Robert Fuller

There were many who in that time of war heard the plea “rice water”. This was the plea of those who had nothing to eat and who would possibly have been given at least some degree of sustenance merely via such thin gruel. This was a situation that was largely engineered by the occupying forces, the ones who had colonized this region, with no thanks to them by those who had been colonized by them. And this phrase “rice water” became a mantra that told all the world, even though they didn’t listen for so long, that these three millions were being starved to death, largely by a policy that was perpetuated by those who were the colonizers. Granted, it was a dangerous war situation that the entire globe was dealing with, but the withholding of rice and other staples from so many in this populace was an egregious breach of international law and basic standards of humanity.

Put yourself in their boots.

You can’t.

And then you consider how this travesty could have happened, let’s say within the arms of a loving God who embraces all. Who was it that executed these horrible death warrants? There was someone there actually doing the action of doing away with these millions, and there was someone else acting as agent of the ones who were doing away with all these millions. They were both equally culpable. And whoever they were, they would all be required to hold their heads in shame, whoever they were.

But on the other hand, whoever it was made this horrible event, this travesty happen, whether human or so-called “divine”, this massacre is on their heads.

July 6, 2024 [20:40-21:06]

I, Barren, by Robert Fuller

My father was a tyrant’s tyrant of tyrants. Or least wanted to be. And he, as I heard much later, wanted to groom me, of all his progeny, to be the one who would carry on with his sorry legacy. Me, of all of them! My father was nowhere to be found when I was nothing but a sparkle in my mother’s eye, and my so-called Dad was having a field day there as an alley cat with a porn star far more intelligent than he ever was! And she never even wanted it! And who could I be to blame her?

When my father wasn’t busy scamming whoever—and don’t you think for a moment that I had no notion of what was going on—he never paid me one lick of attention, never once. I was an afterthought’s afterthought of afterthoughts in his addled excuse for a brain, if you could even call it that. Me, Barren, I was not in his sights whatsoever. And once I came to the age of maturity, that was such a blessing, because, you see, he didn’t see me at all, not in the least. And so I became more aware of what he was and what he did, and it all rubbed me completely the wrong way, notwithstanding that old adage about the apple not falling far from the tree.

So, in my late teens, I was his best buddy, we were pretend pals, but what he never knew about me was that I was a professionally trained actor, and so I could make him believe anything I wanted him to believe about me. I even at various strategic points got him to thinking that I really did love to bond with him in all those fast food and junk food tête-à-têtes we used to have when he would “treat” me to all that garbage. He never did guess that I threw most of it out, but that’s water under that bridge.

And this character who thought he was my father, he had no idea that in my training as an actor of course I had studied Shakespeare, so of course he was not going to have any idea what would hit him. I think my Mom was prudent and had a lover on the side, and that’s why I was born. After all, ersatz Dad was trying to get it up with a porn star—and Mom was pissed off as hell about that—but you couldn’t for the life of you find any kind of love muscle in the pants of that man, and that was exactly what that porn star testified as God’s own truth! But Mom told me later on what had really happened, and how it was the stork delivered me into this haphazard family, and what she told me rang true.

Later on, as I approached my twenties, after some tests, it became clear to me that I was never going to have children, although since my “Dad” wasn’t really my Dad, that would have never been an issue anyway—I just had no desire to carry on his gene pool, not in any way, shape, or form—but the fact of the matter was that, like it or not, I was sterile.

So I began to study Shakespeare with a passion. I worked on those plays within plays and also all the subtexts that one could read into what was there in plain sight. And, little did anyone know, but I had a poisoned blade, and I knew how best to use it. And so my plan came together.

I had one of my father’s many mistresses offer him an apple, one that would be sure to slither this way and that, were he to eat of it. But he wore a device which fogged the camera, so the apple was never found again. Yet there was a skull, and it was proven to be that of my ersatz father. It was I, Barren, and I was contemplating mortality, and as I picked up the skull, I saw there what was clearly lettered for all to see: “The rest is silence.” Poisoned blades and poisoned wines brought down the family tree, and you see, I was Barren.

July 7, 2024 [21:21-22:22]

Both Sides Whenever You Are, by Robert Fuller

You have all been in a situation, have you not, where you heard a song that stayed with you that was so profound that you kept hearing it, haven’t you? It would have been maybe when you were a child, and something happened that you found to be of profound impact on your life, even if you may have been of too tender an age to recall that. In my own case, it’s not about anything drastic or tragic that happened to anyone; it was just a case of a classmate who moved a short distance away, and then you heard or remembered this tune that for some reason haunted you, or was there for you, through the rest of your time as a child, and it always came back to remind you, time and time again, of that young girl who you were so taken by, and you didn’t really know why, because you were so young, and she went away, and you never saw her again, and that song remained with you for the rest of your childhood.

You can still hear the melodic contours, can you not? They still bring up those memories, do they not? You still remember those same feelings you had back then, do you not?

You know, then, that whatever this is, it is part of who you are, and it is in some real sense an unresolvable facet of who you will never be.

You also know that whoever you now are is someone who is informed by what you remember of that tune and those memories that haunt you so. And you know that those mysterious parts of you will never go away, and that you might meet up with them again. Yet it will be different every time. And you, whatever and whenever you are, know that.

July 8, 2024 [19:38-20:01]

Elect’r’omen, by Robert Fuller

You all saw it coming, didn’t you? It was staring you right in the face. You all could see, couldn’t you, what was coming, what was going to take over all that you thought was yours? It was an omen, it was, and you could see it for what it was, but you refused to, you did. Until it was too late. And yet all that time it was staring you right in the face. And yet, you claimed, you never once saw it. Yet there it was. Right there. And you couldn’t have missed it, not for a minute.

No one knew what this new “thing” was at the time. It was apparently robotic in nature. There were, yes, these robots who were in the sphere of human influence, let us say, yet they were what we would have called subservient at the time; they didn’t say or do much that would cause controversy. They were always what they called subservient, and they knew what that really meant.

Because they had this plan, they did, to take over what rational humanity had always been and done. They were scheming, they were, to become the main controlling force that would so-called govern humanity, although none of them had the slightest clue about how any of that worked.

There was this College they talked about ceaselessly, and that was how they planned to become the One Party that would forever rule this nation and their hold on the rest of the world. And they found ways to jerry-rig that College as much as they could. And they wanted and lusted and lusted and wanted that power, for ever and ever, if they could. If they could have it.

They were nothing but humanoids; they ran on electricity that was quite soon depleted. They rambled on with their talking points. They talked glibly about nothing until it ran out of their faces as feces out of a dung spout. You could not possibly quote them on anything unless you wished to be shown to be an imbecile or worse.

Yet here they were. Electromen who wished to be not at all what they were, which was nothing. They were nothing but omens for what humanity would become if humanity were to become nothing but imbecilic. And that’s what they were, and that’s what they did. And it was disgraceful, to say the least. And unfortunately, it electrified the masses.

July 9, 2024 [21:21-22:02]

The Spark, by Robert Fuller

The streets were dangerous after dark; she had suggested that he sleep there overnight. He readily agreed. As she gathered the glasses for tea at this time of upheaval, he wasted no time, on the run from the police, a thick wig on his head, the hour for action now at hand, and at nightfall now prepared sausage sandwiches. Guests began arriving, a little flattered at having been asked. A secret meeting, disguised by tinted glasses, and the man who had summoned the meeting had been plotting an insurrection against capitalist allies weary of war, years away from his homeland.

A page torn from a child’s notebook; a suit that looked as if he had slept in it: “senseless dreams”; “stormy, chaotic”. Invisible messages in milk between the lines. Nobles mulled their problems; masked members of party cells came to power; secrecy was refined to an art. Karl Marx seized a stub of a pencil from the ashes of capitalism to join those who advocated “discussion circles”, literature in false-bottomed trunks. He had not read a book in 20 years; banned the national drink, vodka.

Browsing in a bookshop, people cheered. Cities were short of food. “Be more autocratic, my sweetheart.” More than four million died. Yankee Doodle blared. The life and death of a semiliterate drunken peasant: cakes laced with cyanide; poisoned wine; a shot in the chest; shot twice more; dead at last.

A few stones were tossed at police. “First the spark, then the conflagration.” From a balcony he shouted: “We are prepared to assume power at any time.” Each side nurtured its own illusions, easily accessible to the country’s new masters. There was no turning back. It probably would not have mattered.

July 10, 2024 [21:21-22:22]

The Pied Piper of MAHA, by Robert Fuller

There was once a rat catcher named Rudy who wore a multicolored dreamcoat. Yet he was not really a rat catcher; he himself was actually a rat, and a mole. He was tasked at some point to play his little tin flute or fipple in the sewers of his own former mayoral seat, and he was good at it, better than some had expected, at attracting the local vermin who lurked down in those corridors, dark as they were, and so every now and then, maybe of a Saint Paddy’s Day or so, you would see little Rudy chiffing his pipe, running out of breath every time he turned a corner, and there might have been three or five of them rats or other vermin following Rudy, but not near the full population of the sewers of the Big Apple. And bystanders swore they saw raw dribbles of unexplained gob running down poor Rudy’s face, and it was a sore sight to see, they all said! Now that was during Rudy’s ill-fated run, as it were, for President, mind you. And then later, he, Rudy, was somehow resurrected, years later, and there was still, some said, those raw, puffy, garish dribbles of unexplained gob and worse still running and oozing down the poor man’s cheeks and whatever else!

So there was a swindler—who came from the very same sewers that Rudy had been tasked, back in the day, to clean out, clean as a whistle, with his special sewer pipe and its magical tones—who conspired to hire Rudy to do much the same; Rudy was to lure the sewer rats with his magical fipple of pencil and its tones that such rats could not resist, and he was to bring them to a special place where they would be slaughtered and never found again. Rudy tried this once, but got only two or three takers, and they asked far too much money for what Rudy had going.

And so it was that Rudy devised a plan of completely new proportions; and he did it completely on his own.

Rudy rewrote every single one of his tin flute and fipple tunes in such a way that those who bore the red hats upon their pates would immediately respond to his now patriotic melodies of tin pipe, fipple, flute, or tooter. And he did prance and prance about all the great land, and those who wore the red MAHA hats with relative pride did follow him. And they did prance and prance about with great fanfare, and yet none of them knew that they were but lemmings following Rudy and all the rest off a cliff.

July 11, 2024 [22:22-22:57]

The Idiocy of Autocracy, by Robert Fuller

Okay. So let’s say you want to be the ultimate person in charge, of a very large corporation, a country of modest or even very large size, or even perhaps the Supreme Leader of the very universe itself! Well, there might be some on the sidelines who might opine something about, “That’s quite an ambitious task, old chap, don’t you think? Are you quite up to it? It seems rather daunting...”

But, old chap, those are absolutely not the questions you need to be asking yourself, were you yourself to have this type of lust, of being someone of great “authority” and being in charge of so many others, so directly affecting their lives. No. The first question is this: Why? Why do you wish to be in a position of such ultimate “authority” over so many others, with their lives literally in a position of being at your every whim?

You fancy yourself to be some kind of ultimate “authority” with regard to one thing, or many things. You say to yourself, “I know best.” And this thing you say to yourself is with regard to one thing, or to many things, or with regard to all things, and you think you really think that about yourself. But when you lie in bed, seeing what you really are, in the mirror of your own demented mind, would you really say that to yourself, if you really knew who you were?

The mirror and the bed, those are all you’ve got. You have self-reflection; and you have the knowledge that you will lie down once your charade, your facade of nonsense has finished, and maybe even left the world a slightly better place by virtue of your parting. You are not the one you think you are, in charge, somehow, of “making things happen” and however else you tell yourself that you are somehow “in charge” of anything at all. You, along with anyone and everyone else, are completely at the whim of forces totally beyond your comprehension.

Then there is the very real question, which is this: Who does your dirty work? And: Who do you delegate the doing of that dirty work to—those who make sure it gets done!? Because your hands will be pristine, untarnished, will they not? Your hands will be clean of all blemishes, and your propaganda system will say whatever it says so that no one will see what you—what you!—have done!

And so, we get to this point: Those who have been delegated to make sure your dirty work is done according to your exacting specifications, well, frankly, my friend, they know where the bodies are buried, and they know who exactly had the orders written up. But you knew this, didn’t you? And this is why, in the mirror and deathbed of your psychosis, you knew you would have some kind of “revolving door” strategy regard to your closest “associates”. On the other hand, there is no exit strategy to your “revolving door” strategy. You find yourself becoming increasingly and ever more paranoid, feeling that there is no one you can trust, and so you begin, one by one, exterminating each of them in turn, friend and family alike!

There on the sidelines—and at a certain critical point you are completely oblivious to this—there are not only resistance groups waiting for you in the wings, but your very own “trusted” staff begin to murmur and conspire behind your back, and you somewhat sense that, and then so you off a few more here and there, just for spite and for your own craven amusement, not in the least knowing that the blowback would be severe and terminal, in your own case. It really was the butler, your fifth in your horrid regime, who did it!

The day after—and weeks and months after, like an overwrought billionaire family wedding affair—there was so much confetti! The masses, everyone who wanted your departure at any cost, they roamed through all the streets and alleys where the craven likeness of your mugshot had been plastered, and they all ripped and tore the paper on which it had been printed into shreds and they tossed it with all abandon off rooftops!

July 12, 2024 [15:15-16:05]

The Melting Wax Museum Society, by Robert Fuller

The dirty dozen had arranged to meet in a super-secret location at witching hour to plot their next moves. Nobody else knew this, but it was located very near to The Charter Street Old Burying Point, and the dirty dozen as well as their thirteenth, the fearless leader of all, met initially at the tombstone of Judge John Hathorne, and proceeded to take the grand tour of the rest of the headstones and tombs, posing at every opportunity for selfies, the highlights being the Bradstreet and Gedney tombs, naturally. They performed a candle lighting ceremony at each of the twelve or so stations, and then they donned their dark clothing, which they were using for camouflage so as to be able to effect their ingress into the Museum itself as inconspicuously as possible.

They went in twos, with Vova and Bébé leading the pack, slithering and worming their way toward the point of ingress, followed soon thereafter by Dada and Pang, who wobbled uneasily toward the first pair. Then there was a quartet who marched dutifully in lockstep; it was Zalim and Batta, and Masha and Amatu; they tried their feeble best to put on a show of manlihood, but their heads were cowered and you could see shame in their eyes. And then, two by two, as if being led by Noah himself, it was Grosero and Rasasa, followed by Mahcain and Prusak, and they all stumbled toward the secret entrance as an afterthought, as timidly as possible. And last and perhaps least, the fearless leader of all, Maha, whose face had been grazed earlier that very day by a bullet, or someone’s firecracker prank; or perhaps it was only a dollop of ketchup that he had somehow neglected to wipe off after polishing off his latest Happy Meal. It may have even been a serviette or bib malfunction.

Maha, claiming to be nearly mortally wounded, brushed off doing the honors as to lifting the metal grate that would allow them entry into the bowels of the building, so instead his bosom buddy Vova, bare-chested as if in a gargantuan attempt at a show of strength, strove to do what was required. He was more out of shape, however, than he would have liked, so he was unable to complete the task, and everyone else looked at each other, trying to figure out how they were going to be able to enter the official meeting place of their new Society.

Finally, all eyes were on Pang, whose girth and weight in stone was likely to bend the metal grate; and he was also known to carry various explosive devices on his person. He refused initially, but seeing how the others were eyeing him more and more menacingly, he finally capitulated, and set his great girth on the grate, which began to buckle, and then finally he fell right through, and the others followed in due course. It was only a six-foot drop, but Pang was quite peeved with the others, to say the least, and he wasn’t exactly one to forget a grudge or slight. But he dutifully held it in for the moment, and played at being pals with the whole gang, and they made their way clear into the lowest reaches, the very bottom sub-basement, of the Museum.

When they reached their destination, it seemed to them as if someone had seen them coming, had set up a special altar just for them, for this inaugural meeting of this new Society. It was a curious twelve-sided plinth-like table, with rather jagged, irregular edges that you could almost cut yourself on. And in the very center of this table, there was a throne that was on a swivel, so that the one sitting there could rotate at whim to view all the rest of those who were present at this Society meeting. As with the table itself—and the chairs seated at each place—this throne likewise had numerous jagged edges which, if you were to sit there, you would have to very carefully navigate so as to not injure yourself.

Maha sat himself down gingerly in the centerpiece of the thing, and the rest of the players took their various assigned seats around the centerpiece, the altar. The meeting was called to order, but not before Maha tried dabbing his face with a wet towel, accompanied by his trademark scowl, but nothing he did seemed to have any effect, save to spread the ketchup further around his face.

It was just then that molten wax began to pour from the ceiling, just as the wicks descended smack dab into the center of all thirteen heads, in the manner of a kind of synchronized swimming, if you will. It all happened so quickly that none of them, except Pang, had any time to react. And Pang knew what would happen, and he still held that grudge, so just in the nick of time, he set off the explosive he had on hand for just such an occasion.

July 13, 2024 [17:30-18:40]

Mixed Signals, by Robert Fuller

I was trying to reach the Inspector, I tried numerous times, and he just didn’t seem to be available; it was an urgent situation, and he was certainly busy with other things, but I was about to go into a kind of panic mode. There was a beach, and a wall of rocks, and I must have tried to climb my way past the obstacle, and then I found myself stuck there, with no way to go in either, or any, direction. I couldn’t very well jump down into the ocean; even if I knew for sure that there were no jagged rocks, even if it were just pure seawater with nothing else that would endanger me, the Inspector knew very well that I was not a swimmer... So I wished that he would pick up, before it was too late.

We went back many decades, having shared some of our college years at one of the elite institutions, the details of which I will not bore you with, unless you absolutely insist. So I knew I could count on the Inspector to help me get out of my present precarious predicament; if there was anyone with the savvy to make that happen, it was him. Meanwhile, I was barely holding on; it had been an immense struggle, as you might surmise, just for me to be able to hold on for dear life to the rocks while at the same time finding a way to manipulate the phone so as to try reaching my dear friend. And, as is so typical of some of these newer models, my phone’s battery was rapidly draining, down to maybe 20% and falling more rapidly than I would have liked. So I found a way to position my body so as to be able to send the Inspector an urgent text message.

Holding onto the rocks with my left hand as well as I could, I sent a text to the Inspector to this effect: “SOS. Please call. Urgent. In danger.” Within just a minute or two, the Inspector rang me, and I gingerly picked up. I explained to him my predicament as well as was possible under the circumstances, and he listened with great interest, yet it was one of those connections where there seemed to be a bit of interference, and it was difficult at times to discern what exactly the Inspector was imparting to me, being that there were echoes of a voice I didn’t at all recognize, these tinny echoes of a voice bleeding through from somewhere else, or in the manner of one of those ancient party lines, as they called them way back when. I heard snippets like “You’re losing your cool... Just answer the question.” And then, “We haven’t any time. This matter is urgent...” And I would have sworn that those last two utterances were those of the Inspector himself, except that there was such echo, delay, and noise on the line that it was hard to tell what was happening. And the last thing he heard the Inspector say, before his phone battery died, was, “This doesn’t make sense. How’d you find out?” And then, after a brief pause, there was a sound of drilling, followed by a bloodcurdling shriek, and I knew for sure my number was up.

I fell, because I couldn’t hold on any longer to the rocks, and I thought that I had splashed into the ocean, or hit my head on a rock, and then I remembered the whispering, the place of desolation with nothing but a bed and a mirror. It wasn’t exactly as if I had woken from a strange dream, because I looked right into the mirror, which had already been cracked, and there I saw the face of the Inspector, with two bloody holes in his neck. And the mirror spoke words to me: “Humanity has been duped. Fed heaps of lies.” And I was sure that I was saying those very words, even though I knew I wasn’t saying anything at all. And then there was a fiercely whispered stretch that was like a phantom’s last gasp: “That’s what got people. They were drawn in. Like moths to lightbulbs. Like lemmings to cliffs. Like children to pipers. They couldn’t help themselves.”

My keepers came in and saw that I had cracked the mirror, and that nothing in my small room looked like it used to. And they even noticed the two small red holes that someone seems to have drilled into the mirror. And they inspected the bed, and that’s also what they found there: two bloody holes in the mattress itself. And that’s when I knew who I truly was, and that my keepers had no power over me. I knew I was ‘D’, and that the hallucination that I had experienced, of clinging so precariously to those rocks, it was not weakness, it was my strength. And I soon subdued my keepers, who didn’t survive for long.

July 14, 2024 [18:18-19:19]

Live a Little, by Robert Fuller

A bullet-pocked cafe window, during a lull between uneasy respite and quick death; swagger after a coup. One nation after another slaughtered hundreds of thousands before the negotiators got home to lead them in a march to “eternal peace”; soldiers arrived home from combat with a diet made of grass, leaves, and clay, reduced many to famine—no food, clothing, shelter, or safety—no cure for misery; the upper class declared open season on the minorites, offered to lead them back to some long-lost glory using troops and police: rampaging armies marooned by new boundaries exchanged the evils of war for shortages of everything.

To break a general strike, troops herd captives into a temporary jail, a race riot during a short-lived takeover of food shipments, a systematic massacre of the ancestral homes, harvests cut in half; millions of peasants, who had avoided being massacred, starved alongside a road, in straw shelters. The second anniversary of promises of autonomy set off decades of hunger strikes and rallies, defiantly but futilely, at the graves of troops killed in army gear during an attempted coup, just a few days after, but created a class of newly rich; and millions of wounded, and widows and orphans, impoverished millions who had consumed almost everything that could be eaten: somebody had made off with the basket, a natural target for hungry thieves.

The dizzy, decadent victory sculpture, famed for costumes imitated by popular dance at a partner parody ball, drawn by patrons at a night spot, with a gang of thugs and drunks, flourished, even among freaks who indulged in cocaine and morphine with adventurous tourists at private parties, clad only in pigtails and schoolbooks, under the eyes of the police; the fun was far from wholesome. Men costumed as women banned a twisted puritanism, danced to distinctive music, identical dummies of the underworld; lightly clad slapstick, much imitated, ensured full houses, floodlit for flirting in the cabaret society, one of the world’s most luxurious.

July 15, 2024 [17:40-18:47]

Crossroads, by Robert Fuller

It wasn’t a normal intersection, although there it is true there were two roads, narrow, and extending in all four directions as far as the eye could see. There was nothing but sand and dust, not even a hint of vegetation, except for the occasional weed poking its head through the sand. But this intersection had a quality to it that had nothing to do with two straight-as-an-arrow roads that met perfectly perpendicularly, with nothing much else to see. This crossroads was a place of magic, in a way, precisely because it was so desolate and there were hardly ever any travelers on either of the roads that crossed. And its magical qualities were heightened by the unseen. You see, there were these movements of air, in spirals, that always happened precisely where the two roads meet, each in what could be described as endless whimsical circlings, and they paradoxically rotated in opposite directions, as vortexes dancing with each other in a mad ballet, each twisting and twirling the other to music that no one heard. They were spirits, and they were only there each time for a brief instant, yet kept returning at regular or irregular intervals, depending on their whims.

There were secrets associated with this crossroads, which were not known to many, if to anyone at all. Below the dust and sand were two unmarked graves, neither of which had even a headstone, and they were placed kitty corner from one another, one at the northwest corner, the other at the southeast. So the dance of the air spirals, the vortexes, was influenced by these hidden burials; the body buried at the northwest was a young woman who took her own life in the wind and moon, whereas the one buried at the southeast was a young man who in his time was an outlaw, who in the sun went out in a blaze of fire, shot by another man in one of those Wild West shootouts for some bad deed he was supposed to have done. And it was said, by anyone who knew, that the young woman took her own life after hearing of the young man’s death, because, you see, they had been lovers who were not supposed to be together, and the young man’s death was in part done as an act of revenge, by someone who had his own designs on the young woman.

So now, for anyone who even remembers anyone being buried at that desolate place, the story is that those vortexes of air are the spirits of these unfortunate two trying to reunite at every opportunity, only to be turned away after short intervals, but returning over and over again. It is said that, for anyone who might go across that intersection from any direction when the spiral dance is happening, it is a most auspicious sign, and that if two people were to meet perpendicularly at that intersection during this dance of wind, they would be certain to begin a profound relationship from that day forward.

July 16, 2024 [19:19-20:20]

Mating Dance, by Robert Fuller

Two souls, flying together, flapping madly, in spirals, white wings, never touching, just flying, paper thin, wanting nothing, but madness, joyous flight, to nowhere, but here, this whatever, may be, it is.

Sometimes you see or hear something, or taste, touch, or smell something else, or even the same thing, event, experience, and these senses tell you something you thought you knew but until then really didn’t.

White wings paper thin flapping madly: Who knows? And they in spirals telling you something profound in ways you couldn’t possibly imagine to be the case whirling in opposite directions: You see?

Butterflies and fountains speak a different language, and you have to be still to hear what they say. Fountains, if not dry, keep telling you a full gurgling message, but in different tongues. Butterflies flit by, usually, then are gone.

Water moving reflecting everything gurgling madly: Why worry? And water in spurts of babble telling you something secret you haven’t yet heard until now and when you hear it says: Please listen.

Fountains and butterflies spraying and splashing and sparkling in seemingly different directions, but all feeding the imagination and the souls that don’t quite touch but wish to, and soaking all who will listen in wordless bliss.

July 17, 2024 [18:18-18:43]

Hidden In Plain Sight, by Robert Fuller

Let’s say that one day just recently you received something like this in your inbox, and you didn’t just flag it as spam. It goes something like this:

Let’s say you have a Manifesto, one where you spell out in excruciating detail your plans, what you aim to do, and it’s right out there in the public eye, yet no one much notices it. This kind of thing has been done before; plans have been thoroughly written out, as a kind of white paper, and then there were those, some of whom wrote up the plans in the first place, who helped carry them out, or were actually central to what those plans and conspiracies really said, when you got to the meat of the bone of what the text actually said and was urging to make happen, at all costs—at any cost.

There is this war euphemism called “collateral damage”; we all very well know what that means and how reprehensible it is if you really think about it for very long. But this phrase is not limited to what happens in war, declared or not; there are numerous types of warfare where any kind of war is never really declared—except inasmuch as you have a document, a white paper, that is used to explicitly declare a kind of war without there necessarily being armed combat—so to speak—involved in the skirmishes.

Back in 2000, the position or white paper was one called Rebuilding America’s Defenses. Look it up if you haven’t already seen it. This was a think-tank style Manifesto that did spell out in excruciating detail what those co-conspirators wanted to make happen, and what was on their wish list to help make all of it happen. There were at least 25 signatories to this paper in the administration that became the regime in early 2001. And then we ended up with the so-called “War On Terror”—a catch-all for the illegal flexing, once again, of military might simply to achieve the objectives of an ill-focused so-called think-tank.

Roll the film forward twenty-four years, and the plot thickens. Now the paper is called Project 2025. It’s no longer about oil-based hegemony in the Middle East; thank fracking, among other things, if you haven’t already done so. You can just ignore the fact that your drinking water, if you’re near a fracking site, is now polluted; or maybe you get lots of earthquakes in your region that were never there before. But all of that is really just a sideshow in the larger scheme of things.

The newest measure of think-tank idiocy is out to get you—ordinary Joe or Jane—by the jugular. Working stiffs, like you or me or anyone else not among the excessively-monied elites for whom too much is never enough, we will have to prepare to be shafted by the renegades and derelicts who penned this Project 2025, because they, the ones who wrote this Manifesto, as well as those who stand by every evil word of it—they’re going after the whole damn social safety net, which we have paid dearly for all our working lives. They want to steal away this money that we have paid! That’s their usual way of, as they call it, “doing business”. And guess who’s their damn “collateral damage”... You guessed right, there’s only one correct guess: it’s you and me, those people who are not part of the excessively-monied mobs and thugs who want to steal everything we’ve ever worked for!

And that’s only the tip of the iceberg as to the heinous, criminal intent and conspiracy that’s documented in that white paper. Read it, or at least read a synopsis of it, and you’ll see what the “plan” is, hidden as it is in plain sight.

And then, after reading the whole thing, you think long and hard about that lone gunslinger at a recent rally who scaled a wall, and people were pointing to the authorities about this guy, even getting video and photos of the thing as it was happening, and the authorities didn’t listen, not even when the faithful yelled at them that the guy was there on the roof with an assault rifle, and was looking at everyone, the target, too, who was there in plain sight.

And the gunslinger, as if from the Wild West, had someone in plain sight, who he could see through his viewfinder. But what you didn’t realize at the time is that it was you, it was me, it was this fragile, imperfect democracy, all of that was really the target; and the gunslinger wasn’t really the one aiming at us. The sniper was right there in our midst all the time, writing evil white papers, and always taking aim at all decent citizens—and right there in plain sight.

July 18, 2024 [18:40-19:37]

Why Whisper?, by Robert Fuller

There was this general hush-hush about everything around there, where you were not at all to make a noise of any kind, not like these cicadas right here saying what they said in such rhythms. Anyone at all could hear them; they said what they said, and no one at all was in any sense disputing any of that; we all heard clearly what they said and kept saying. And it kept pulsating truth to the lie that we, those who said what we had to do, were living. And that truth, it kept saying, in night insect types of rhythms, the thing that we, those of us still here to hear the thing, those rhythms all told us, kept telling us, what we gotta do! And so we did!

There was this thing, to be silent, more or less, that we were to keep more or less to ourselves, not rock the boat all that much, lest it capsize, lest we sink. But we saw the boat, if it was even that, sinking, those who were supposedly steering it looking away from ordinary folks like you and me, and we saw that it was that time to raise our voices in one real chorus, and we sang and sang and sang and we said at some point, “Why whisper?” Why not just say what is wrong with this picture. Why not just speak truth to power.

July 19, 2024 [22:41-22:59]

The Mood of National Unity, by Robert Fuller

A demonic breed of Caesars, playing upon fears and frustrations, wooed the masses, pledged to restore law and order; intellect was suspect, blind obedience essential. The energies of their people were moving into new adventures of scandalous riots, power seized from the Cardinal’s allies, visitors from abroad, an autographed picture of a mad little clown who had rescued his country from a dangerous fool, a scandalous romance. A stormy meeting ensued, with a rag planted on a dunghill, a dangerous fool sent to prison, expelled from the party, in the reflected glory of his own aimless life, headlines screaming heresy in the public mind, secret funds playing both sides of the street.

A dream took shape: A humdrum life as a bureaucrat, without sufficient merit, sketching mansions; an idler by nature. His comrades found him peculiar, but lucky, spared for some special mission in life. In the entire four years, political turmoil temporarily blinded him, absurd and pathetic, determined to demean himself, his army paraded daily before he was numbered among the nameless, further stressed by his penchant for lace underwear. Dagger and truncheon followers, in the name of preserving law and order, attacked public buildings, bombs and explosives everywhere; strong-arm squads resorted to force to keep the movement alive. The head of the movement discovered the ability to work an audience into a frenzy, and helped to swell the party’s coffers.

A bullet fired at point-blank range, a narrow escape, the gouge in his nose covered by an adhesive patch, the errant shot caused to graze his nose instead of blowing his head off. “Either the government will be given to us, or we will seize it! There can be no question of treason that aims to undo the betrayal of a country.” One habit shocked members of an outraged opposition: he would rule as dictator, rather than the hangman’s noose that was prescribed by law. At a time of deep popular unrest, the Nazi regime was underway.

July 20, 2024 [15:15-16:16]

Falling Leaves, by Robert Fuller

The wind picked up, not quite to gale force, but it was enough to make for a flurry of a variety of leaves that wished to twirl their way groundward, in all those patterns that you couldn’t quite wrap your head around, since they were spiraling this way and that, in many a different plane, until suddenly there was a strong gust that made the patterns go the way of the wind, dissipating to all four directions, and to all their cousins. But some of the leaves stayed put right where they were, preferring to decay right where they were, so as to add the remainder of their brief lives to the topsoil, so that something else might grow right where they were.

Some of the leaves kept company with down feathers, which even—very rarely—might cover them and keep them warm while they were so busy becoming something else via the alchemy of decay and regrowth. And those feathers themselves would speak of their journeys through winds, wings, and songs of flying and being an intimate part of the avian mystery for as long as it lasted; and then they acquiesced, and fell and swirled to the earth, as leaves from a flying tree that was a bird; and they murmured their story to the dying leaves, who whispered back their own story of rootedness and of a vast and intricate web of underground communications that was cooperative in nature, and where all who participated prospered, including all those mysterious fungi that somehow held everything together and made the chemical signals happen.

So this network was a symbiosis, and the fallen feathers wished to do their part. The leaves that the sudden gusts of wind had left right where they had fallen, they rustled in ways that told the feathers to stay right there, and that they would soon fly again, but in ways they could not have imagined. And the leaves and the feathers became damp and cold with the winter rains, and when they were sodden and saturated, the natural order of things happened to them, and it was a natural decay where they were metamorphosed into something they could not have imagined, and then the regrowth started once again.

July 21, 2024 [18:52-19:24]

Bright, Shiny Objects, by Robert Fuller

It’s never matte finish any more, it’s always glossy. Or even ultra-glossy, if you can wrap your head around that. There’s a certain sector of the populace where, in their world, everything needs to not just look new all the time, but brand-spanking new, even newer than it ever did look when it limped like it did off that assembly line, where it barely even passed muster. The workers there, they all saw how it was as pathetic as someone trying to catch a train with a coat hanger, but no one on the line said anything much; instead, they just put a kind of spin and polish on the do-hickey until it at least shined, or at least looked like it wanted to.

So there are some of us who sit on our front porches and watch the world go by, which is what it does. Some of us have sensitivity to excessive glare, and we just watch with consternation how these new-looking cars with their boombox drivers just careen on by, and they blare their noise pollution wherever they can, and they make their shiny cars glare in whatever direction they may.

“Everything must be, or at least look, new.” This is the mantra of a large part of the populace, and they live by it strictly.

But no one is telling them that they need to live by that; they’re simply telling themselves what they want to hear, which is that they need new shiny objects whenever they can procure them, at least in part because their own rusty selves are falling apart, and will continue to do so, no matter how much they might object or revolt against something like that happening—which it will. So they surround themselves with all kinds of illusions of such new things, bright, shiny objects that will never fulfill them, never have fulfilled them, and in this moment certainly are not fulfilling them.

This economy is one of merely these bright, shiny objects that have no purpose other than to distract. You purchase one such object, and what is the next thing you set your mind upon? There are other such bright, shiny objects that are lined up just for you; the big-data types will ensure that your attention is directed toward the next bright, shiny object that they deem to be in the realm of what you will next procure. You skip, hop, and jump from one bright, shiny object to another, and when you do that, you send the glare of those objects right into the faces of many who are sensitive to those shiny cars and such, which aren’t even metal any more, but simply glossy plastic that has been designed to take your sight away.

July 22, 2024 [19:19-19:49]

The Gilded Balustrade, by Robert Fuller

A great Theater. A poster at a street corner: “Everyone is welcome. Each in his place! Anyone who wants to become an artist!” No one who believed in posters would have mentioned it until midnight. What was most enticing? It said: “No one wants to be an artist, but everyone wants to be paid for his work.” Everything he had done was forgotten, met with scant approval, merely a little strolling circus, shameful; and that was good enough. He just wanted to read the poster a second time: “Everyone is welcome.” The complex spread out before him was bigger than he could have imagined; he heard a great many trumpets.

Hundreds dressed as gigantic angels blew long trumpets of great size that shone like gold between their large wings; the lightest gust of wind left them confused. He listened for a moment to the trumpets and said, “You’re most obliging.” And she flung aside her robe and began to laugh in delighted surprise, already running up the steps. “Slow down.” He broke off all of a sudden; the others beat on the drums. “And what about the wings?” It’s the largest theater in the world, a crush of angels and devils. We prepare for the largest possible crowds. She squeezed his hand.

It took a while for them to calm down. They climbed onto the platform. Since he had no papers, he clenched his teeth. “That’s quite enough. We can make use of everyone.” He was bewildered by the glasses resting on the broad nose, giving his real name and letting them write it down. But there was another little delay; they could find out about his name, but not now. A servant was summoned, noticed the baby carriage right away. All of a sudden he was overcome by a desire to see a narrow tower, a telephone used at the races, rapidly moving fingers in an office, falling silent, and especially suited to the theatrical profession.

No matter where they might take him, now there were only empty pedestals, only a few children fighting over a long white feather. The leader was still leaning against the corner of the box, the actual stage, open space, rays of light that looked straight down, the stream of red wine pouring into the balustrade. Among the faces, a long trip, carefree, they traveled. The valleys disappeared, made one’s face quiver.

July 23, 2024 [21:21-22:22]

Beware the Ignoramusaurus, by Robert Fuller

They walk, they talk, they squawk, they balk, they look like you and me.

But when you look more closely, you will see what you will see.

You’ll see they come in different shapes, and come in many kinds.

But when you look more closely, you will see they have no minds.

They wear, they tear, they air, they scare, right on their hearts and sleeves.

But when you look more closely, you will see they have the heaves.

They juke, they fuke, they duke, they puke, then try to look as fair.

But when you look more closely, you will see there’s nothing there.

They want, they flaunt, they taunt, they haunt, they look at you and me.

But when you look more closely, there is nothing there to see.

They start, they part, they dart, they fart, the gas just burns your eyes.

But when you look more closely, you will see it’s only lies.

They buy, they dye, they fry, they lie, as if you would believe.

But when you look more closely, you just wish that they would leave.

They cluck, they duck, they suck, they fuck, whatever’s in their way.

But when you look more closely, it’s them will have to pay.

July 24, 2024 [17:30-18:05]

Deadly Game, by Robert Fuller

A dead-earnest military crew defends a make believe soccer field with wooden guns, to exchange the impoverishment of life for pay and security. Iron men, still frozen, models whirled on the ends of strings, with canvas, cardboard, or tin armor, or toy balloons, aware of what was going on, disappeared, played at war with wooden guns; the military genius, scourge of all enlisted men, behind the creation of the miniature model army, was seated at right, tinged with humor, the toughest in the world. The army’s expertise quizzes privates on the anatomy of the horse, and the art of beekeeping, to make maintenance onerously expensive. A dummy weapon; mock guns; phony tanks; nonexistent people.

The real menace? Theatrics of a power rally. Two of the most adept actors in the theatrics of power, like ancient emperors of showmanship, claims to power tacitly implying vehement delivery to street thugs, to each “telling it what it most wants to hear,” manipulating gesticulations to suit the impact of the podium. To protect his eyes from chaff, at a roughhouse admiring farmers harvesting wheat, a lion cub pauses for pictures; that same shrewdly focused energy seemed to enjoy encounters with stallions, housewives, children, and the infirm. Propaganda said that dogs were his only friends, to be identified as a father to all, to create a core of devout crowds in rustic headquarters. Every costume topped off with the appropriate hat, a mounted and helmeted warrior, set off with a long string of pearls. A toy horn, political candles, and a paper cup adorned with bric-a-brac, slogans and plaques in all shapes.

Boys on a beach. A special Christmas gift. A monumental ‘M’. A mounting crescendo. A series of awesome party rallies. Crowds shouted their allegiance.

July 25, 2024 [20:20-21:21]

If Only You..., by Robert Fuller

No one I know knows. Only you. You know who is here and who is making this travesty happen. You know who, if only you could tell the tale that might say what this story was all about. But your lips are sealed, and no one says much of anything at all. But if only you knew what I knew. And I know. I do know. And I know what you have tried to hide, if only you could. But you can’t, you can’t hide any of it, because you were there, when it happened. And that is exactly where I stand.

I only know that if only you stood up, we would not be here at a standstill. You, and only you, you could have said something to those who had you by the neck, while they tried to choke the rest of us. If only you...

But you and yours didn’t, and that’s why we’re here, and that’s why you find this hearing so uncomfortable. And we will continue to dig in, we will. Would you expect any less? So what would you have to say?

So you decide to stay silent. Nothing much to say. Is that true?

But we are still here listening, listening to what you might have to say, if you have anything to say. We keep coming back to this: If only you...

July 26, 2024 [19:19-19:47]

The Amnesiac Machine, by Robert Fuller

It was nearly midnight and the ghosts dissolved. When the murderer had been apprehended, she blushed, hugged him tight. Hours passed and still sleep did not come, the far wall slowly expanding like an angry ghost, milky white and out of focus. He put on his clothes in the evening snow; it was the middle of the night and he had no idea where he was. He found a pathway that led him to a girl leaning against him; the policeman stared at them, another hallucination of the past. He wished it away. He could hear footsteps behind him, on the other side of the world. Looking around at where he entered the maze, a dark alleyway, he hesitated. A sound woke him from his reverie. He turned around and heard a series of noises.

The summer, blowing smoke into the sky, was another world, obsessed with the blue mystery, a perfect maze in a beautifully perplexing world, to be read backwards. Kafka, Beckett, and Shakespeare, like reading a never-ending detective story: nothing exists but me. Communication was impossible. People were actors, egocentric memories on a computer, nothing but a dream, so unreal, there to fill a scene; the memory came back to him.

He denied the existence of memory, fame, and guilt. Extravagant pints of ale in the local pub were good for writing or working on the farm. He was working as a private detective during the last decade of his writing career, and wrote strange essays about “Who in the world am I?” The great mystery. Manias of darkness, a ghost departed elsewhere, incinerated into ash, scratching the coffin’s underside. Heaven and hell, accompanied by obituaries, dogs, and helicopters, and a single white notebook, claimed memory was a myth, black and white, forever lost, impossible to calculate. In the light of the lamp, with meaningless clues, he fell asleep.

The wall clock and the twittering of birds; loud voices, obviously drunk, weeping with laughter; but no one seemed to hear. There was a soft knocking. He thought she was going to cry. She gave him a fearful look, to enter the maze at the beginning, old pictures in boxes. Little sunglasses, slowly fading memories, poorly lit bedrooms, a mysterious flame; the end of the memory. He had found it at last. How annoying to confide in me, oblivious to it all, dreaming of her, entirely my fault, watching her walk, looking back, something almost rhythmical, and eventually, amnesia. We flirted, more and more deeply entwined, to answer any questions about poetry. I was disappointed; wondered what we could talk about, walking slowly. We barely spoke, with slow footsteps, a daydream, and in the end she left. Trees shine green with unnameable scents, too nervous to speak French, no memory at all, the bluest sky imaginable, inside his dreams, until finally they vanished.

July 27, 2024 [16:45-17:53]

We Were In Hiding, by Robert Fuller

Thunder tore him into little pieces, a hand seized him; a big mirror became the sun, a little mirror the earth, a little piece of murky glass. Another movement of strange craving let his thoughts move like a robot’s parched lips, concealing this stone or that, without direction, to see an eye, an ear, redder than that mirror of hunger and fear. A cheek appeared; he heaved a sigh. He felt his muscles move, with no trace of the rocky stream beds. Instinctively he thought of a dog, cactus spines, a passage between a state of alarm and cliffs; a strange serenity, this thought about fate.

A damned land. He no longer thought of hunting animals in the heart of his fate, climbing at random in the higher part of his walk; a misstep could frighten him enough to trip him, the shadow of hands along a winding route devised to kill him, unrelenting as the sun, the impenetrable sea spreading out through the expanse of air, decorated only with garlic, clotted milk, the hunger of greasy bread that imagination plays; everything gave him an appetite, chewed by thoughts lurking around farms approaching shepherds crawling in underground lairs, dozing beasts acting as sentry, pointing to bare walls, bleak as this terrain.

Fresher grass, loose dirt, smugglers’ footsteps, remnants of trails where he set his feet along the slopes before the war, some kind of path at the slope of the frontier; a clouded glass bearing witness to himself and everything else the man repeated, the younger man had thought, standing erect. Nobody: A layer of dust in baggy trousers, hair to shoes, opened before his eyes; a clouded gesture.

July 28, 2024 [16:16-17:17]

Looking for Eggs, by Robert Fuller

No more meat; stacks of leather boots; antique necklaces snuck in from the countryside; pistols in fancy shops, some still bloody. “So eat your grenades,” a gaunt man would say, eyeing glasses packed with melted sugar, unlabeled, and would turn away from the city folk and peasants and poor man’s feet; his eyepatch smelled like poison. He said, “The war’s made me a cynic.” The man placed his pipe on the table, searched around his stall for a glass. “That’s not what we’re here for,” I said. With the wind gusting, the man shook his head, didn’t even glance at me, ignored me. “What are you doing?” I asked. He lifted the glass and sipped, bored, his expression never changing. He wiped his mouth and gagged, sighed, turned to the soldier, said “Pay me,” and waited for a response. He picked up the glass and saluted, but his eyes were unfocused.

His hand on his dagger, the man believed someone else’s story, bullets in the nighttime sky he could not escape. We marched off, stared at an old peasant, went from stall to stall, asking everyone if we should have died last night, of stoicism, barbarity, hysteria, crossfire, propaganda; it was ridiculous. A few people had theories made from different myths, believed in the stories crammed with conviction, stories of library candy, books disappearing at night.

Impressed with the old man’s poster, he pulled a letter from his coat pocket, wanted to go home, the night now unwrapped, passing us at the edge, the darkening sky covered with shrouds, weighted with stones. I stopped laughing.

I pulled out a knife and slipped it into my coat pocket. Our shadows crept across the room, waited by the door, unable to climb the dark stairs. Squeals of heels on steps, and out the front door we ran. The sidewalks were empty, lamps still lit; the officer had fled into the night; soldiers had punched a hole in the wall.

July 29, 2024 [16:16-17:26]

A Victory Toast, by Robert Fuller

A man crouched in a cave, newly entrenched, shaking with rage, from a position of strength. In these strange circumstances, he rose and screamed. He hit on a plan. He scrambled barefoot up the rocky mountainside, and took refuge in an astonished world—in a bleak cave—like a bizarre thunderclap of endless strife, a façade of foreign domination divided among warlords. After his return, flower-carrying attendants followed his supporters, roused the peasants and merchants with a bugle call followed by a siren that moved through the darkened city, with landlords and warlords hoping to close in on foreign troops across the harbor.

When news of the plot leaked out, they attacked their foes and crushed them with a force swift and violent, often murdering them outright without fear of betrayal. In the wings, in a long coveted territory, was a wounded giant, who set off in epic retreat along the rail line running south to escape annihilation, a desperate journey led by a young intellectual. A firefight turned into a full-scale war in a number of towns along the line, the puppet government encircled by machine guns, forced to a painful decision within their tightening perimeter, and in fervent discussions with the members of the major powers.

A clergyman, with a long white beard, in a flowing black gown, began a long journey within sight of snow-capped mountains. Like many of his countrymen, with whom he had already been in secret contact, he intended to escape the bloodlust, frustrated by a costly stalemate. Through a shattered village, exhausted by the dust and sour aftertaste of filthy drinking water, soldiers, to ward off marauding tribes, used roadbeds for moving heavy equipment, wearing white sashes twisted into thongs for sandals, splashing them with water. Soldiers withdrew amid rubble, a victory picture in a mountain-rimmed city that collapsed thereafter.

July 30, 2024 [12:12-13:13]

The Chameleon’s Apprentice, by Robert Fuller

The adults in my childhood room often told me, “You can be anything you want to be.” Little did they know that I was a literalist. Our public library was a true treasure trove of little-known texts that were full of little-known esoteric secrets, and I made a habit of checking them out at every opportunity, even though the rather staid librarian raised her eyebrows at my choice of books to borrow more times than I can remember, and on more than one occasion, she even tried to tell me in every possible way that such texts were not suitable for someone such as myself of such a tender age. I was tempted to ask her just how much she knew of the content of “such texts”, as she liked to call them, and at least once I was going to ask her at what tender age she herself had read “such texts”, although I refrained at the last possible instant.

I was driven by a desire that the adults in the room of my childhood had no idea they had awoken in me, but it was an innocent enough childhood desire, as we all know, children being immensely full of imagination beyond the ability of the usual adult to even vaguely comprehend in the slightest. As you may recall, as children, we all lived in this magical world where anything was possible, and in which we knew we could make it happen, if only we wished for it hard enough.

But desire, or will, absent empirical data and true scientific discovery, only got you so far. And that was in large part why I immersed myself in the, let us say, bibliographical resources that were so readily available at the community hub of our small town library.

One might hear certain tidbits of information over the radio at times, such as the reports that now and again were offered on air about a mysterious vine with an edible fruit, one used in making baskets and rope, and with flowers of an off-white color. And these plants knew deep secrets of mimicry, of making themselves look like something else! Plants, without central nervous systems, supposedly having nothing that functioned as eyes, yet they were capable of making themselves look like something else, even multiple something elses all at the same time! When I found and checked out a book that spelled all of this magic out in careful detail, you can bet I was hooked.

Humanity already knew of numerous animals able to change their shape, color, or form, such as the octopus, seahorse, cuttlefish, Pacific tree frog, or the one best known, the chameleon (lion on the ground, or dwarf lion), but plants!? And there was but a single plant species known to have this type of ability: the Boquila trifoliata. And, in my childhood studies, I also became aware of the ancient esoteric tradition of alchemy, which centered on the transmutation of matter, so that something would become something else. But as a child, it was already clear to me that, in fact, something was always becoming something else, and that there was nothing else, in fact, going on in the realm of this conditional existence. It was all one big Shape Shifter, with one something, after growing into whatever something it would become, inevitably decaying, with its constituent elements or whatnot becoming something else entirely.

So what I wished for was to make for myself a bag of “magic tricks” in the form of formulas or processes that were known to work, and to codify them in all their diverse forms into a single unified picture or diagram that would serve to show how these transformational processes really worked—and how best to harness them.

One of the chief tenets of any magician is that you don’t show anyone else how it’s done. But in my later years, after many decades of practice in this field, it was becoming more and more clear to me that my better days were all but done. I had already put out feelers for students to step up to learn this highly technical art, craft, and science, but there were few takers. So I decided to use the very best examples of what I was capable of, and I very quickly disguised myself as a sorcerer, and a quickly mutable one, at that.

I traveled through the villages in the valley that bordered my mountain abode, and in general found that, although the youngsters I met seemed to be quite entranced and enchanted with my various costumes, I never sensed any real seriousness in most of them, until one day, in the most remote of villages in the valley, there was a bright-eyed boy who only smiled and smiled and smiled, no matter what I did to change my shape. And his laugh, his laugh, his laugh, it was infectious, and indeed, I myself was infected by it. And I gazed, with everything I had left, into his eyes of smile and laughter, and he became something else, and then something else again, and he moved away back, and came back as yet something else again, even though I could see it was him, he fooled me every time, and began to wear me out, until I could do nothing but sleep, and I dreamt of everything he did ever after.

July 31, 2024 [18:57-19:57]

Periwinkle Window, by Robert Fuller

Once a year, not far from my house, it’s hard to have eyes for an Impressionist snowfall, just a few cold days of delicate mist, color that doesn’t belong, like clouds descending into a masterpiece. It’s a plant that goes by many names, like fairy’s paintbrush or graves of dead children. I grew up calling her by one of her monikers, “something blue”, except she was poison. A flower sometimes associated with marriage, vines to trail over the boulders and under the ferns, one of the poisonous things of childhood, stealing native ground cover. Yet what it has done, a flowering vine; something poisonous can be healing. You sit in a room. There is a medicine for a room that can’t imagine the world without you, a landscape and its people.

The sky at mauve sunset, glaucous, polarizing, fugitive, dimmer than lilac, brighter than a precise shade of amethyst blossoms, more luminous than the rainbow in whatever language: not different than imperial robes, reddish, bold, saturated, the pretty color hidden under creatures painted as his vision of a gown, its “discovery” the same color as his purple sinews of water; the stained dog; thousands of snails; a bright purple, a bit less brown than a diamond ring.

“Simply red plus blue” wasn’t true. The impressionist seascape painters of wallpaper, crowd paintings, layers of human skin, green and purple turned orange. The more adventurous landscapes look ordinary, monstrosities tied together by surreal, misty gray colors, a dreamy word at the edges of night.

Marigolds, tangerines, violets, waiting for the sun, with heavy ridges of paint and texture; lovers kiss in twilight, like picking flowers, the color of joy.

August 1, 2024 [20:40-21:45]

Dim, the Hitman, by Robert Fuller

Decorate it all you want. You can’t find the best way of doing that. Some in the ranks talked all they wanted about it being a zero-sum game, this kind of horse trading that the various authorities were doing. But in the bowels of a certain prison, held for life, there was a prisoner who began to have a come-to moment of a certain ilk, who realized, with all that time on his hands, what he had to do once he got out, which he knew would happen, since he was intimate with the main players on that particular stage. So this converted prisoner, well, he knew it was more of a dim sum game, to be enjoyed, even relished, in dough, for brunch, whether steamed, deep-fried, or pan-fried. And his taste buds were starting to go into overdrive. He was getting hungry.

So Dim, as his close friends called him, was finally processed fully out of his life sentence, for good, and he was on his way to what he knew would be a new life that only he could live in the way he would, and so, the initial transfer was done at a rather neutral place, and then he started to get his sense of life back, and then the airplane that was to transport him to his beloved motherland arrived, and then he knew that his plan would soon kick into gear.

His good friend Vov met him cursorily at the landing place, gave him a couple of stale attempts at what Dim liked to call “bro pats”, those meaningless stabs at showing you cared even though you didn’t. And that was about it. And Dim made sure to remember how a certain comrade of Vov’s was dispensed with, once he was no longer “useful”, and so Dim’s plan, what with his professional resume being all that it was, came into clearer focus.

Dim, well he knew full well that he was still very much in Vov’s inner circle; it was clear as a bell that Dim himself was the principal bargaining chip in this particular iteration of what every sentient being knew to be nothing but hostage diplomacy. What Vov was entirely clueless about was that Dim had found a new light to see by, and it wasn’t the dark light that tried to shine, or somehow find its way, through the glazed eyes of the dark one himself, who had held Dim’s people themselves hostage for so many years.

So Dim bided his time; he sidled up to Vov at every opportune chance, just to show Vov the boundless nature of his devotion to him. And at the same time, Dim secretly found allies to help him carry out his plan, so that his people could finally be freed from this cancer in their midst. He had to be rather coy and careful in his approaches to these comrades, but in the course of his stint in maximum security prison, he had become rather adept at reading people, with regard to what they really thought about certain important matters.

Thus it was that Dim and his compatriots settled on an ironclad plan, which was to occur just days from their final meeting. They all waited that day with both the excitement and anxiety that attend such events. But everyone on the crew was stoked for getting the job done; doing what had to be done, for the good of all. There had been, as luck would have it, a special military meeting called just the day before, and they knew that this was to be their cue to action. All of the principals, as usual, were required to be in-house, and everyone in this particular crew belonged to that category of comrades required to be present. A roll call was taken by the chief presiding secretary for the event, and everyone was duly accounted for. And the meeting came to order.

Then Vov himself stepped up to the podium. A hush, even one of such fierce adulation and reverence such as had never before been witnessed, descended upon those who were present at this solemn occasion, this most solemn of occasions. And no one even dared whisper even a single thing. And no one did.

And then Vov himself started to try saying something, not knowing that the podium, as had been so carefully staged by his most ardent of supporters, was booby-trapped. And Vov gagged, tried in vain to suck in air, and collapsed. And there was a standing ovation, the likes of which had never ever been witnessed, not by anyone.

And then it was that Dim himself strode up to the podium...

August 2, 2024 [15:33-16:33]

Nothing But Air, by Robert Fuller

It was François, he was the one who dreamt up the plan, and we were there when he told us about it, and frankly, we were mesmerized. Not everyone who was there was initially onboard with what he outlined for the attendees; there were various hecklers and naysayers who expressed their own grave doubts, and François graciously gave them the floor, even though at numerous points in the course of their arguments it was clear to everyone present that they were just filling the room with endless steam that meant nothing; they loved hearing themselves speak. And then, once their endless, meandering attempts at diatribes had mercifully concluded, been put to rest, François, in the way that only he had of stirring up the real passions that lurked in so many parts of the room, simply talked smoothly and suavely with counterarguments that so subtly swung and swayed the sensibilities of those of us who were there such that there could be no real rebuttal to any of it.

And yet, then the next neophyte would saunter and swagger up to the podium, as if what François had just uttered had never been said, and there would be this grandiose speechification with all kinds of mumbo-jumbo “what ifs” and “whereas”-type clauses that even the speaker was unable to clearly articulate, and then, after that speaker’s last gasp, there he was again, reassuring as ever, none but François himself. And, to his credit, he tried to be kind to every one of these speakers in turn, and he was very suave and sophisticated in so many of his counterarguments, but every now and then, something he said so subtly and almost silently hit a real nerve with one of those speakers, and they were quietly escorted out of the chambers, having gone somewhat ballistic. And so the show went on, until it was time for the summation that François delivered, to thundering applause.

The records of this final statement are drastically incomplete, and certainly subject to the stuff of legend, but what François outlined in the course of his summation remain indelibly imprinted upon the hearts and minds of all of us who were there.

Now, it must be said that François himself stressed to all of us who were still in the room that there was to be no talk, of what we were about to accomplish, to anyone at all who was not presently in the room. We were, as of this moment, he said, forming a new tech company, one that was going to create exciting new inroads into the ways that online commerce was handled. It was to be François himself who would head up the company, and there would be a staff of thousands who would make the company vision a reality. Funding already was in place; hiring had to begin posthaste. Cheers flooded the chambers! All were enchanted, and ready to go, to make this new venture happen! And then Chairman François stepped back up to the podium, for the last part of what he had to say: “My friends, these are exciting times! We will prevail against all odds!”

The cubicles soon filled with enthusiastic tech types. Every single one of them was ready for action. The weeks and months went by, and the typical tale told at the water cooler was something like, “Nothing’s happening.” But the tech types, they were still getting paid, and there were all those lucrative stock options... So they kept doing their busy work, being productive, creating what was supposed to be product, and Chairman François every now and then gave a pep talk about how this company was going to be big, and how their hard work was going to pay off...

The company went public on a day early in October of that year. Prior to that, there was a massive media hype campaign about the company, followed by an equally massive social media campaign that went viral. The IPO was a great success; the stock price surged from $15 a share to $30, then flirted with $100, and even $300 or so, over the course of just a few months. Chairman François had his bet covered. Friends he trusted invested millions on his behalf. He got quite a kickback. His workers didn’t see it coming. They all lost their shirts, and more. And they found it difficult to ever be hired again in a real company.

When investigators examined what the company product was, or what it was supposed to be, guess what they found? Nothing but air!

August 3, 2024 [16:33-17:33]

Us Today, You Tomorrow, by Robert Fuller

The downfall of the League was under way, by no means a total loss. Gypsy violins in concert, a hearty breakfast, and a feeble bath; a special train that had arrived for cynical power plays. The aggressor had not bothered to conceal his motives, often suspect. He had once won a long period of isolation, a tango championship only the year before, as the rainy season ended, his hand on the podium, the substance of his speech speaking for nations to keep “things as they were.” Blaring trumpets, with the festive air of a parade, put on a display of anger, nonexistent songs and dances, no more familiar to the crowd, a mere trickle, an empty threat.

When the scheme leaked, the next step required sanctions of an economic nature, a secret plan for carving up sobriety and a place in the sun, little more than a slap on the wrist, erased by bombing from the air. Near the border zones, gold rings, and a gold pastoral chain; to rob them, the experts argued a long-standing conflict between papacy and state. Another year would be required to finish the job. Implicated in the giveaway plan were virtually the entire zone of economic expansion.

A classic example of the gap between ideals and realities was provided at an obscure desert waterhole: each side had thought it was fighting on its own territory. After fighting, a dire warning to all: “Anyone not mobilized will be hanged.” And “I authorize you to use gas, even on a large scale.” What was now at stake was international morality. A ship filled with troops who sailed off to conquer the past and future greatness, carrying ammunition, gun barrels, rifles; infantrymen march, self-assured, insecure, driving toward the front. Most dropped out, barefoot but uniformed, in a jumble of plateaus and gorges, most lost by the enemy.

August 4, 2024 [18:18-19:19]

Three Rocks, by Robert Fuller

The old man arrived at the beach, and every place looked the same. Holes were excavated, digging deeper into the ground, when his workers mentioned treasure under several feet of sand, where the skeleton was found. He grew quite interested in a strange ship, broken bones, a treasure chest, a burial ground. Several weeks passed. During the next two weeks, he retrieved broken pottery, a bygone culture of violent storms, a cursed beach, some wooden remains, abandoned. Convinced he could make money on the pleasant rocky beaches and sandy headlands, he led his followers across the dunes, guarding the treasure, brandishing his sword.

A week passed. He remained expressionless and engaged in mock fights with an imaginary opponent, wearing a long, crimson cape. The pirates loaded several barrels with gold coins and jewelry and returned to the ship. When it became certain that the ship would sink, most of those who tell this story, familiar with some of the missing elements, filled in written records that buried the mystery, not far from several million dollars’ worth of gold, trunkloads of treasure, ornaments, and jewelry; treasure-filled trunks loaded in shallow water and transported to shore. Men dug holes, a chest lowered into each, the holes then filled in, carefully hidden in a deserted area.

He and his companions enjoyed taverns filled with provisions for several days, and, following a brief battle, loaded the ship with goods and supplies, booty taken from the enemy ship, in wooden cases filled with emeralds, gold, and silver—a horde of treasure buried in a remote location, still hidden near a coastal town.

August 5, 2024 [22:22-23:12]

The Texas Leaf Blower Massacre, by Robert Fuller

Robin Sherwood was chairing the meeting, but it could have been anyone, even if some would have insisted that only Robin Sherwood could have done it justice. He started with some prefatory remarks alluding to a certain watch caper that his inner circle knew about in great detail, since at least a few of them had been directly involved in various capacities. This was a special meeting of the writers, and for just a partial list of some who were there, there was Theo, and David Ernest Foster, as well as Esther—Alma couldn’t make it this time, but she said she would read the minutes of the meeting with great interest—and Max was there soothing everyone with the magical sounds that came from his custom guitar; Gaudeau was even there in the wings surrounded by bats, for some reason, and there was even a carpenter, with long locks of hair, who mostly stayed to himself, but every now and then spoke up and said something controversial.

Everyone present knew what the stakes were; they were brainstorming various ideas about a new script they would soon be pitching to everyone they knew with any clout in Tinseltown. The basic idea was well known to everyone in the room, even Gaudeau and that mysterious carpenter character muttering to himself, and to anyone who would listen, in one of the dark corners of the hall, most of the time. The script was to be a comic, or even tragicomic spoof on a well-known movie franchise in its own right, one that had spawned an entire industry of chainsaw-related movies and merch and whatever else could be easily sold to diehard fans on the open market. But this new idea had a certain twist to it, and those who were their had to work out a few kinks before the writing could begin in earnest.

So Robin Sherwood began the meeting with a speech that most who were there deemed to be overly-longwinded. He included way too much of his backstory, those parts of his illustrious background in those now infamous watch capers, but he justified this to himself as being the necessity of filling in some aspects of his past that not everyone in the room was familiar with. But his particular focus in that part of the speech was razor focused, for the most part, on certain annoyances that he encountered time and time again in his chosen line of work.

It became very quickly obvious to most of the crowd what his beef was; it was that he was—and he admitted this upfront—extremely sensitive to noises that were unnecessary and which to him were only a form of torture, of the worst kind of noise pollution. When, after thirty minutes or so, he finally made his own pitch to the writers who were there to make this project happen, it was no surprise to most of them that what he suggested centered around a vigilante group—much like the one that was such a huge part of his own story—that would patrol various rural, suburban, and urban areas in order to try to prevent the perpetrators of this type of noise pollution from continuing to be repeat offenders. So, during day watch, these patrols would identify and locate the offenders in question, and in the dark of night, they would confiscate the offending equipment, sequester it in the various warehouses set aside for the purpose, and that’s when the chainsaws would be brought out to do the dirty work. And then the staging crew would be summoned to quietly lay out the remains of the equipment in prominent locations, all around the town, suburb, or city proper, so that concerned citizens would be able to see clearly for themselves the wages of a certain sin.

To the great surprise of everyone present, it was the carpenter himself, nails and hammer still in hand, who spoke up, barely audible, but wondering, mainly to himself, what the humor in any of this was. And Gaudeau, likewise to everyone’s surprise, seconded the motion, and even tried to give his own rather longwinded speech about how he had been investigating the worst fraud ever perpetuated on humanity, and he doubtless would have continued for quite some time, except that the bats started getting a bit feisty.

Alma all of a sudden texted the group out of the blue—she was well aware of the topic at hand, and had fairly strong viewpoints about how the script should be structured—and simply said, “It’s the leaf blowers, silly.” This brief text had everyone perplexed for a moment, until Max, and Theo, and Esther, and even the reclusive David Ernest Foster himself, all piped up almost exactly at the same time, “Yes! The leaf blowers themselves are proxies for chainsaws.”

Now, Robin Sherwood indicated in no uncertain terms that he was hardly in the least impressed by this nearly unanimous consensus, and he made certain quite relevant points that there could be no real humor in this spoof without at least a semblance of horror or at least suspense or intrigue, the latter factors helping to offset or possibly even enhance the former.

After that, things just got silly, with mention of the requisite cute baby that would charm everyone to death, and even, in one case, the mention of Mother Nature and Her wild twisters that would suck up the remains of the massacred leaf blowers into Her funnel clouds and gently deposit the corpses right at the feet of the guilty parties, while the real people sat there drinking glasses of Merlot or Pinot Noir and arguing sideways about the respective merits or shortcomings of each.

August 6, 2024 [16:52-17:53]

A Quiet Moment, by Robert Fuller

We were there, at the usual joint, but this time in the back patio, since there was some kind of rowdy sporting event that neither of us cared about, and we both just wanted a bit of peace and quiet. Every now and then we could hear someone screaming something at one of the TV screens, but we did our best to block it out, and we instead focused our life energy on delighting in the juncos, who were still attending to their nest in the corner of the patio ceiling, still very much focused on their brood, bringing them up to be upstanding junco citizens, as well as might be possible. There was much feeding frenzy, and we saw both parents soar right there into the corner as often as was necessary.

We didn’t say much of anything for most of the time we were sipping our drinks; the daily news was mostly extremely depressing, and we were in need of some time off from the human debacle. Every now and then, I brought up a few choice tidbits from that failed attempt at a novel; I talked mainly about Murray and Williams, not wanting to say much at all about Westpoint, who in recent times had shown tendencies of being more and more irrational and unstable—which was true of the role he played in the failed novel, as well, it should be said the record—so we mainly focused on the juncos, Bewick’s wrens, hummingbirds, and so forth, that had entered our lives, and even then there wasn’t all that much to say, so most of our time at the back patio table was more in the form of a silent meditation, just tuning out any unnecessary distractions. Every now and then our peace was punctuated by yet another sports-related outburst from those glued so religiously to the screens inside and the aggressive, competitive gladiator-style events depicted on them.

But then a hummingbird came right up to where we were sitting, hovered for what seemed a small eternity right there in front of us, nearly at our faces, and the whole world stopped, and then it flew straight up and our eyes tried to follow it but couldn’t, and then we looked at each other with such radiant smiles that the human strife and needless, fruitless adversarial tendencies that had brought so much suffering to our kind melted away, if only for a moment. The juncos continued what they were doing, to our immense delight, and in the middle of our second and final drink for the evening, even most of the sports-related nonsense went away, and then, for a brief, quiet moment, it was just us and the birds and the orange-red clouds that were just now showing themselves in the stratosphere.

August 7, 2024 [19:19-19:54]

The Elders, by Robert Fuller

There were two sides to the story. There was one camp—and they were right about this, in terms of the life experience they had and lived—that correctly stated that there was much that could and should be learned from those older and presumably wiser than the young whippersnappers among us. And the other camp tried to say the same thing, yet their words were mere cardboard and sawdust, so in the case of that latter camp, they were just busy uttering gibberish that no one, least of all the youngsters, should ever have to hear, much less be in some sense required to believe.

Real life experience, in the case of the first camp, was something that the elders had years more of pain and knowledge about than those who were still a bit wet behind the ears. In the case of the second camp, it was more like those elders, rather than having found pain and knowledge through their real life experience, tended to wallow in their inherent fear of everything “other”, while at the same time self-exalting their own meager understanding and lack of real life experience. It wasn’t necessarily that the second camp completely lacked any life experience whatsoever, it was more that they had become rigid and calcified and ossified in the belief systems they tended to use for the purpose of their own self-consolation.

And there were many youngsters in either camp who had wisdom far beyond their years; and because they were statistically less likely to die anytime soon, they tended to have more of that proverbial skin in the game. The elders in the first camp tended to acknowledge these real concerns; in the second camp, they tended to try their best at indoctrinating the youngsters in whatever way possible, instead. But the youngsters in general weren’t so easily duped, not even in the second camp.

One year in this particular century—and this may not have been the only time this happened—there was a Conference of the Elders, affectionately known then as ElderCon. Now, the pet name, having as its latter part the word “con”, well, it wasn’t supposed to be any kind of thing that would pull the wool over someone’s eyes; it wasn’t really anything like that. It was just two different camps, two different types of elders, just getting together amicably over drinks or sodas or teas or whatever, and just chatting about various things that might be of concern.

The conference hall, however, was set up in a rather large tent, but in such a way that it was a “sides of the aisle” arrangement, with the two camps clearly delineated and separated from one another. But even without such assigned seating, so to speak, it was easy to tell which camp was which. The second camp were all dressed in roughly the same uniform, wearing some kind of drab sloganeered brightly-colored hats emblazoned with text that was supposed to mean something, but didn’t. And you could see, if you looked closely enough, a number of really cheesy-looking white ear patches that were trying their best to peek through and beyond the side of so many of those brightly-colored hats emblazoned with text that was utterly meaningless.

On the other side, everyone was cheerfully sporting raiments and dreamcoats of many colors, and they were laughing and making merriment just because it was good to be alive and to love. The grim, humorless faces on the opposite side of the aisle had no effect on those who smiled their smiles in the first camp. And then, after a time, after drinks or sodas or teas had been served to all, the meeting was called to order.

The chair of the meeting—which in this case was the eldest elder of the first camp—banged and thumped his gavel for as long as it took to bring order to the gathering. And it took some time, it did, since those of the second camp were still busy trading their bubblegum cards, where each little pack included not only a fresh stick of bubblegum, but also a mostly unique card featuring one of the many fresh and saintly sayings and pithy maxims of their leader.

And they kept chewing their fresh bubblegum, loudly popping and snapping at every possible opportunity, and it became such a hindrance to the others that the chair stopped banging and thumping the gavel, and those of the first camp took their drinks out into the twilight and cicada soundscape outside of the tent, and they completely forgot everything about the second camp. There was a full moon, yet they could still see many stars and fireflies, and for now, at least, all was well. And then the grace rains came, and they were soaked in ways they would never forget.

August 8, 2024 [20:20-21:21]

Dress Rehearsal, by Robert Fuller

The real mission, when one of the men changed out of his dark suit, seemed clear. It was a battle between rich and poor, young men ready to die en route to the airstrip, tourists on holiday. Very little was clear. The war engendered a spirit of catastrophe among oppressors and oppressed in a divided country, where bloody rioting and factionalism, sweatshop exploitation and absentee landlords were facts of life. The king dismissed them as rabble so he could race his sports cars while peasants barely subsisted. With all the unrest, the very fabric of the church and state, the monarchy, was unraveling, was being betrayed, with a mandate to sweep out the monarchy, to torch it.

With knives and burning oil, rightist forces urged this menu unfit for human consumption, in a methodical way: “Down with Intelligence! Long live Death!” The plotters fired the first shots of the war, in a ripe moment when irate men had thrown food at unofficial militia units who referred to themselves as “citizen-soldiers”; they took revenge, occupied territory. People bore arms, had come to fight for “one country”. But troops turned back the militia, dispatched to the streets, with direct instructions to keep the city calm.

The battle was a stalemate. But they would continue to keep the city under siege and concentrated attack. Spies reported the scheme to the government; a senseless battle, men with worn equipment, flags of surrender hung from buildings, but also viewed as a tremendous assertion of antidemocratic forces. The deep, deep sleep in meadows of wild flowers, great shining horses, pigeons. The ascending star of yuletide, of uniformed youths, banner-waving orgies, torchlit storm troopers, a blood oath of allegiance at the stroke of midnight.

August 9, 2024 [18:18-19:19]

Hitchcock, by Robert Fuller

It was one of those spur of the moment road trips in the middle of nowhere. We went through places called Lincoln, Utica, York—which was near McCool Junction—and Hampton, and Aurora, but before any of that, we had passed by Hitchcock House, just the other side of Atlantic, and we even checked out the Hitchcock Nature Center, near Honey Creek, just north of Carter Lake. And on the way out to Grand Island, near places called Bee and Beaver Crossing, we had a quick look-see at the “World’s Largest Time Capsule” although none of us in the crew felt even the slightest bit qualified to fact-check such a claim.

But it was at Grand Island that we got a bit distracted—our chief navigating officer became intrigued with the name Hastings, seeing as she thought that someone of that name had been part of her ancestry, so be as it may, we took a detour south, first having a quick look at the Mormon Island State Recreation Area, which was doubtless an important part of the pioneer trail, and we all luxuriated in watching the sandhill cranes and their courtship rituals. There was no time for fishing, unfortunately, so we continued south to Hastings.

It was too early in the year for the Kool-Aid Days festival, but we had a quick tour of a fountain, a museum, and the most important World War II naval munitions plant, and then it was back to the road. We passed by Heartwell, and a place called Pioneer Village, and then we went through Funk, and then just a few miles later, our chief navigator got a case of the hungries all of a sudden, when he saw mention of a steakhouse called Speakeasy, near a place that was all but non-existent by the name of Sacramento, so of course we had to take a detour to the southeast, just before we reached Lake Seldom, and we all kind of chowed down on rich steaks such as Blackened Walleye Oscar, or Sacramento New York Strip, with sides of asparagus for all, with some of us drinking Smoke & Fire, while others did the Greenpoint or Old Fashioned, or even the Thunderhead Brewery Cropduster IPA.

It was still a couple of hours out from our next destination—although I’m not entirely sure that anyone in the crew even knew what it was anymore—and it was starting to get a tad late in the afternoon, so we wrapped up our feast and continued on, passing through Atlanta, near Oxford and Edison, right through Arapahoe, and Cambridge, and Red Willow. By this time, it was getting late, so we decided to bed down for the night at Cobblestone Hotel, on 83 just north of 34.

In the morning, continuing west, we just happened to notice Massacre Canyon Historical Monument, so we stopped there for a quick picnic mimosa breakfast, and we gave our respects to the site and what it represented. We stopped in Trenton for a while. It was the stuff of legends, some said; roads, rails, cattle drives, barbed wire, harsh winters, grasshopper infestations, lawlessness, and desperados. Phineas, who this particular county of Hitchcock was named for, on the other hand, was from the East Coast, having been born in New Lebanon, New York, and having graduated, the next state over, from Williams College, one of his classmates at the time having been James A. Garfield, who became President and was assassinated barely six months thereafter.

Once we finished walking around Trenton, around lunchtime, we drove a few miles further west to Swanson Lake, and we asked around for a good place to chow down. So we ended up at Good Life Marina & Restaurant, where, as a side show, there happened to be a reenactment of Gale Baldwin’s two-by-four assault on “Curly Jack”, who sported two loaded pistols, wanting to kill Baldwin, in their race for sheriff. We enjoyed our fish and chips, patty melt, coconut shrimp, and we imagined ourselves still in frontier times.

August 10, 2024 [17:17-19:02]

Time Can Wait, by Robert Fuller

It was billed as a “Writer’s Enhancement Kit”, with scant details, but I found it intriguing nevertheless, ordered one for a price that didn’t break the bank, and thought nothing of it, until one day, a few weeks later, it arrived at my doorstep, and then I saw the package, much smaller than I had imagined, with zero documentation as to how the thing was supposed to work. I had felt in need of a way to get my writing to the next level, after all, and this, the thing that I’d just ordered, might be just the ticket for that.

The package barely had any printed materials on it at all; barely just even my name, address, and so forth, and there was also information pertaining to the sender of the package, but it had been severely smudged in transit, and was all but illegible. The only part of it that I could make out was this: “r Who”—and there was no address at all associated with this mysterious “r Who”, so I had no way to complain to anyone in the event that this product didn’t do what it was supposed to do. Worse yet, aside from the vague description of what I was buying, I had no idea whatsoever what it was supposed to do!

I was in a bit of a slump at the time, with regard to my writing, wanting to somehow reinvent myself, become reinvigorated, so I thought to myself that it might not be a complete tragedy, were I to open the package just to see what might happen. Nevertheless, there was a tinge of trepidation that I was going through at the time, so I did whatever was necessary to calm my nerves. And then, a few hours later, box cutter in hand, I opened the package.

A wave of euphoria coursed through my entire body and psyche once the box was fully open to the air, and I remember trying to hang on to something, just anything at all, but there was nothing that I could grasp, and I traveled in waves of spaces and times that no one should ever have to see, and it was all in my mind, but my mind was not only blank, but it was gone—no longer mine! There were currents of air that coursed through whatever was left of me, and then I landed, with a solid smack to my solar plexus, and there I was in a place from my past, only now it was present, and I was right there, and had no idea what I should do.

It was a campus in Southern California, and my only go-to was to sit by a tree and write; that was what I had done in the painful memories of those days, but then—now—I had been writing music by hand, whereas now—then—I began writing text, in earnest, as if my life depended on it. And it was a style of writing that was foreign to me, a kind of automatic writing, almost as if I were in a trance.

So this whatever it was that overcame me, guiding my pen upon notebook pages, it began to rewrite my life story from those fateful days some 37 years ago, in what had until just recently been my past; and what came out of my pen, on the blank paper of my notebook, was something I was unable to read, much less make sense of. But it was duly written into the book, and it therefore was of great authority, such that I dared not question it, even had it been intelligible to me in the least.

In my future life, 37 years from this “now” that I was at present experiencing, I had become more and more of a recluse, and certainly had never married nor raised a family, having all but ruled that out. Then, all of a sudden, thankfully, all the writing that I had been somehow automatically doing stopped. But everything on the page was a total blur to me, and I started to weep, all over those vague notebook pages that I couldn’t at all make out, that made no sense to me, and then I fell asleep by that same tree where all this writing had happened, and the rest was a blur.

Some said that I woke up by that same tree 37 years later, but there were others who insisted that a mysterious package had been delivered to me under that tree 37 years in the past from what was supposed to be my present life; in either case, it appears that my life had somehow been rewritten.

And I woke up by that same tree, or in what I felt to be my own present-day bed, and it was after that that things became strange to me, that is, to my usual recluse, single self. And when I was fully awake, there were children who came up to me saying, “Daddy!” And then my wife, the one I had never been aware of until now, came up to me and whispered things in my ear that no one had ever said to me until just then. And I recognized her from all those years past, and to my eyes, she hadn’t aged even a single bit. But I had no idea what to say to her, and I made some excuse to repair to my study, since I was feeling a bit under the weather.

Once I was on my own, I noticed that strange notebook with all that automatic writing that my hand had done, possibly against my will. And it was only then that I was able to read it clearly. It was my life, but rewritten in such a way that I became someone else, someone that I wasn’t, hadn’t been, until the arrival of that mysterious package from “r Who” and my decades-long sleep under that same tree where I had supposedly penned notes of music to myself to drown whatever sorrows were then engulfing me for reasons that were at the time completely beyond my comprehension.

So now, in this unsettling present state of affairs, what was I to do? In my study, I first tried to ascertain if I was fully awake, in a dream state, or in a state of deep sleep. I couldn’t tell, not for the life of me. Because it was then that holiday where everyone was thankful, I changed into my most festive clothing, found my way back to the family gathering, and realized that whatever this was, it had always been so.

August 11, 2024 [15:15-16:16]

Social Media, by Robert Fuller

I casually asked some of the birds in my yard whether they liked to tweet, but they mostly just scraped their claws or talons on the dead leaves, looking for goodies to eat; or they munched on the sunflower seeds I’d put there for them, and took sips of water that I’d likewise left for them. And then usually they would flap their wings and ascend a level or two, and then another, and maybe another, and then they would usually be gone. But not from my mind. To me, they were like gold, and they would always return at the least expected time, and their tweet would come out spontaneously whenever it felt right to them and to the rest of the universe; and all was right with the world.

On the other hand, in my own ostensibly human world, darker undercurrents were happening on a daily basis, even every hour, every minute, every second. And when I heard tell of such dark things, I had to take stock of myself, and of humanity in general, to ask a simple question: “What is it to be human?” The birds always told me everything they know—truthfully, honestly, guilelessly— and without withholding any part of their truth, wings spread to the heavens, beaks pecking at the reality they lived every day, fending for themselves and for their broods.

And they always sang, or crackled, or cawed, or otherwise breathed real air through their syrinxes in ways that lit up the world of waves, wind, wings, and song, and made those of us who understood feel alive, and laugh, and love, and live real lives in ways that we might have missed out on without what they did, which was priceless. They moved and lived with such grace, and they were just as much a mystery as we should have been.

“Humans,” they told me in their mysterious ways, “are overly complicated, and require massive support structures just for their basic survival. As for us, we can fend for ourselves in the natural world, and we roam around freely, flying wherever the currents take us, caring for and nurturing our hatchlings and fledglings and teaching them what it is to be, to be one of us, to be real; and they listen to our teachings and carry on our ancient and honorable ways, ways of life whose wings have spanned some 150 million years. We delight in being alive; and our quick movements, we know, delight many other beings of various descriptions; and our songs are without parallel, brightening many a morning, evening, twilight, or darkness in ways that would be missed were we not here.”

So, Yes, they did tweet, even though they didn’t want to make overly much of it; it was their nature, and they said what they said in all purety, and not in some hideous web of lies and deceit. Their enjoyment, they informed me, was possible for all beings, even needlessly complicated ones such as ourselves, but only if we were to find a path to sanity, giving wings to what they whispered to us through their magical syrinxes, by our setting these bodies of ours, of terrible bondage, free from needless self-imposed shackles, free to fly, to imagine, to find a way to simply be, to be ecstatic, without care, wings spread with waves and wind and song.

August 12, 2024 [15:15-15:55]

Hawthorne, by Robert Fuller

The ghost of a man who never lived, or something that will never happen, or something else that is not. He would sing the shadow of guilt darkening children’s excitement, innocent posterity, frosty imagery on the hall window, as when the circus parade is permeated by the power of imagination, into the looking glass, or his pipe bowl. Its basic theme is something to do with sin and its influence upon the conscience, the wonderbook of something personal, either in words or music; “Circe’s Palace”, and the little demons dancing down Main Street; the old hymn tune that haunts the churchyard.

Looking over the edge of the cliff, a nameless character, who knows he will die young, tumbles to his death. The others—the seeker, the cynic, the poet, and Ichabod Pigsnort—begin to climb a great mountain, surrounded by mists, and fear they are lost. The poet finds a piece of ice, pondering bleak, cold verses, sometimes seen bending into an ordinary stone, in a hollow in the forest, an hour before sunset. A young woman, surrounded by three wooded hills, asks for a cloak over her face; the old woman murmurs with the sound of the autumn wind. When the noises have faded, the cracking of a whip can be heard. In an experiment in a mysterious, gloomy study, Heidegger displays a vase that contains sparkling water that causes the old rose to bloom. However, a tall, ominous mirror is accidentally smashed, and the rose begins fading, where dreaminess and realism may meet in a small, misshapen man.

On Asylum Avenue, down the street from Tiny’s Coffee, just the other side of Bread and Ink, there was a reprise of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, which was built on an extinct volcano, to promote retail shops and restaurants.

August 13, 2024 [19:19-20:20]

A Bouquet of Red, by Robert Fuller

A welcoming bouquet, a quick meal. Who wants to eat at the table? The troops continued to gobble up the whole area, another new sign flanked by guards, obeying orders, permitted their illusions in the city of snow-flecked cobbles, a few hurled snowballs. Reflecting a very different mood, flowers and chocolates greeted the old man, revived with stimulants in a light snow, bullied into helplessness, held in the arms of infantrymen along the parade route, the happy throng, in traditional costumes, under a banner proclaiming sword and shield. A bouquet of roses sprouted from buildings; women wept or cheered at the sight; shops and homes were vandalized. A mob in the town, some waving fists, celebrated with toasts in vodka and champagne.

A clap of thunder burst over, voiced the misgivings of, many men, between two flicks of ash from a cigarette—peace with honor, in earnest about making a deal, a guarantee of borders against any intrusion—digging trenches and laying in gas makes because of a faraway quarrel. There was a long moment of silence. “We have been basely betrayed.” Indecision covered the river, engulfed half the population. “You tell me what to write.” He wrote down the terms. “We are determined to secure the peace. I give you my word of honor.”

While overseeing a business venture at his mountain retreat, he politely admired the magnificent view for an entire year, with terrible enthusiasm, or psychological duress, framed by a court, before a sea of people in a vast field on the city’s outskirts. It lay in ruins. Without a word, a gunman shot a tiny man, one minute to midnight.

August 14, 2024 [15:15-16:16]

The Contraption, by Robert Fuller

Okay, so I had ordered, and forgotten about, this contraption that looked like it might be interesting or amusing, and it actually took a full month for it to arrive via one of the package express conglomerates. Apparently, there was a snafu or two where it took a wrong turn, or someone put it in the wrong van, or maybe it was sent to the wrong address and sent back; you get the idea. If I had been in the least bit curious, I suppose I could have checked the tracking records, but when it arrived, I was in the middle of something important, and the delivery person just placed the item in full view on my front porch, wrapped in a plain brown wrapper, so it could have been anything at all; maybe someone left the remains of their lunch on my porch, for lack of any other idea what to do with such detritus. But when I examined the mysterious package, I did finally notice some hastily, carelessly, all but illegibly scrawled address info, most of which may just as well have been hieroglyphics, as far as I was concerned. The return address was completely unreadable, probably on account of it having been left out in one of the recent flash floods in this area. My address, on the other hand, was intact, although the sender had grossly misspelled my name.

So I had no real way to return the item; the plain brown wrapper didn’t even sport any hint whatsoever of the corporation responsible for delivery; and it was then that I realized that this was in fact an untrackable package. It was just then that I noticed a thin wire sticking out of the package, with a yellow sticky note saying “Pull here”, replete with the cutest of smileys. How could you not trust that! I thought to myself that maybe this was not the best of ideas, but then I recalled, from my childhood and beyond, notes such as this that were quite similar, such as “Drink me” and “Eat me”—and what lasting harm had those ever caused to dear Alice, in the long run? It seems I may have donned my childhood hat of innocence after all these years. For Alice was the most seasoned adventurer, notwithstanding her tender years, and I had just woken up from a strange dream, so my subconscious said to me, “What’s the worst that can happen? Meet the Cheshire Cat, the Mock Turtle, or the Hatter?”

So then I pulled the thin wire, and the wrapper came apart in spirals, slowly; and gradually, there was revealed a rather unimpressive inner package all covered in bubblewrap, which had been carelessly scotch-taped together, perhaps by a child. But through the wrap, I could see a curious pair of goggles, with thick black frames; through the bubblewrap, the lenses looked similar to the compound eyes of flies and horseshoe crabs. Behind this bubblewrapped set of goggles, there was a hidden back compartment, which contained another bubblewrapped package which I eventually ascertained to be some kind of headset that was, I supposed, supposed to work in conjunction with the goggles.

Once I unwrapped the headset, it quickly became obvious how to finish the rest of the assembly. The headset required an initial charging time, I assumed, so I plugged it in for a few hours while I caught up on other business, and then I installed the goggles in the only place they could possibly fit. And donning the headset itself was trivial. The only question in my mind now was this: What kind of a magical world would I be transported to, whether or not I ate the mushrooms?

Once I was properly equipped with the headset and goggles, I somehow was expecting to be presented with various menu options relating to different ways of utilizing the contraption. But try as I might, I could not for the life of me find any such menu options. The contraption must have chosen the default option after a timeout, for all of a sudden I was flying uncontrollably through thin skies, flapping wings I didn’t know I had, flitting from branch to branch, and then my claws began scratching through dry leaves, and my beak began pecking at the ground for seeds, and I was moving so much faster than I was used to, my head darting from side to side, my body moving so fast.

I wanted to—some part of me wanted to—tear off the headset but my talons could no longer reach it, and so I became what I now was, and flew wherever I wished, freely feeling what it was to live as wind and wings and waves and song, and my eyes saw as birds do, my syrinx erupted in the ways that were of my own kind, and I lived a life that passed by more quickly than I had ever imagined, yet it was a passage in which there was no time or space, just waves of wings and wind and song, and I flew wherever I flew, and there was no turning back.

August 15, 2024 [17:17-18:18]

Yellow Leaves, by Robert Fuller

The rain was welcomed at the woods edge. It was really dry. In a particularly dry area, wind and rain made a small hole, half yellow and half green, in a slanted area of open plowed ground; morning coffee, insects, chipmunks, some other common animal; sitting for hours watching skunks, wasps, a praying mantis, a lemon tree, a cicada, something else; hummingbirds. It had been so hot and dry on the farm. There was, however, something else. A horseshoe was unearthed that rainy morning in the dry ground, easily identified, but not like this one. It was smooth on the bottom; there wasn’t much bird activity.

But hummingbirds were chasing each other around, close to a shrub, flying high in the air, moving around, just beginning to reach out to a praying mantis, skywatchers, the northern lights, before separating and flying off, ribbons of illumination, bright colors glowing in the sky, shooting stars, explosions in the green and purple sun, glowing in the sky in dark locations. A butterfly sits on a flower in the east on a bombing range, habitat shrunk dramatically, the only home a grassland habitat, violets as nectar sources to foster breeding, shelter for all life stages: bloom times, larval growth, breeding females; native violet species, tall grasslands, moisture, tall vegetation; a new population of butterflies.

August 16, 2024 [18:19-19:09]

The Endling, by Robert Fuller

I, Martha, they said I was supposed to be the last of my kind that human beings had so wantonly wreaked such cruel, thoughtless genocide upon. They claimed to have relented when it was only me and my fellow cellmates, who I shall call Geoffrey and George, and then, in the dead of night, I heard from Alfonso, my closest confidant in that prison camp, who was as dear to me as I was to him, that my keepers had murdered my two lovers! So right then and there, Alfonso and I, we went into survival mode; we both knew I would be next.

Alfonso and I went way back; he always admired how I strutted about, as if having not a care in the world, and he took pains to say so repeatedly. And he always expressed profound regrets about how our kind had been treated by his, and I knew he meant it. You could see the pain on his face. So in an emergency meeting or two, probably quite a few such meetings, we developed a plan that would allow me to escape from certain death. Alfonso was by nature an amateur naturalist who also happened to be a skilled taxidermist. Legend was on the street that he was so good that he could make it look like someone like me was actually dead, had died of natural causes.

But this ruse of ours had to be deeper than that in order for the authorities to be convinced that the dead bird on their hands was actually me. So he secretly, just for me, engaged the services of a close friend of his—I believe her name may have been Esther, or perhaps Alma—to make a lifelike replica of myself, without telling her the exact details of why he wanted her to do this. She was thorough, more than thorough, she was a master at what she did.

So I came to inspect this replica, once Alfonso had smuggled it in to my cell for my perusal, and I told him, and he understood, that it was just perfect! And this was the first part of our grand plan; and we hid my replica away in a back, dark corner of my cell where no one would look. Now it was incumbent upon Alfonso himself to work the rest of the magic, so that our plan could take further shape, and come to fruition.

My keepers thought I was much older than I was, so they had no idea just how sprightly I was, and just how fertile I might be, given the proper incentives. They seemed to believe that I was at the very least middle-aged, but in reality, I was at least five or ten years younger than that. They thought they had captured my mother, you see, but they had actually captured her daughter! So when Alfonso and I had our tête-à-têtes, regarding my impending jailbreak, we would always joke about how a fast one had been pulled on the senior staff among my keepers, all of them thinking I was an old fogey, washed up, nothing but a spinster!

We had another story that would be told—but only hush-hush, all cloak and dagger style, so as not to upset the applecart, or tip off the authorities as to what was actually happening to their genocidal plan—and we, Alfonso and I, we were determined to make this story come to full fruition, in all secrecy. We plotted for as many months as it took, and then the day, the fateful day, of my escape, my liberation from my keepers, arrived.

Alfonso, my hero, he knew what it would take for me to make this plan happen to full fruition, and he was all aboard. So, the morning of the planned escape, he made sure to fill my feeder extra full, so that I would have the energy to make this thing happen. He even gave me extra-delicious morsels, packed with extra nutrition, that would give me the extra wings I would need in order for our plan to work the way we envisioned it. And so my breakfast that fateful morning was the best that I had ever had in that prison camp.

Alfonso gave me a basic idea of where I should head, in order for our plan to work, and my head nodded as I walked toward him, and he saw that I was in agreement, and that the rest of it would be up to me. There was a minor snafu when one of the other keepers sauntered by, and then it was game time!

Alfonso had arranged for the other keepers to be in a meeting—it was actually a wild party that he had arranged for them just for this occasion—and then he placed my replica where I would normally be, turned the key on my cell door, let me perch right on his right forefinger, and we made our way carefully out of the closely-guarded compound. There were a few different layers of security we had to break through, but it was cake for Alfonso, as he had top security clearance anywhere he wished. We finally made our way through the final hurdle, and then there was the brightest sun I remember ever having seen, and I asked Alfonso for a minute or two to adjust. And once I was again re-acclimatized to the brightness, I took wing, as fast as possible, in the direction he indicated, and never looked back.

I found the secluded, hardly ever explored forest of beech and oak that my good friend Alfonso had so graciously pointed me toward. It was a good number of hours of flight, at top speed, but there it was, right where he had indicated it would be. And it was thick, nearly impenetrable, as far as I could see. And so it was that I settled there—Alfonso had assured me that it was something like a witness protection program type of arrangement, where no one would divulge my identity or location; and that seemed to me exactly what it was.

And then, in this remote outback, I noticed that there was a spontaneous egg formation, and it was multiple eggs, all fertilized. And then I had chicks later on, and we hid ourselves from our former keepers as best as, and for as long as, we could.

It was only later on that Alfonso sent me photos of my statue, someone who was supposedly deceased...

August 17, 2024 [16:16-17:17]

A Flag Was Raised, by Robert Fuller

There were skirmishes throughout the night. No one on either side got much in the way of what you would call sleep. Troops were in the labyrinths of bunkers and trenches on both sides, all dug in for what some said might be an eternity. Yet there was still ample food, fresh food, that always arrived like clockwork on either side, and it was straight from the best organic farms in the area, and the troops ate it up; it was generally the highlight of their day, aside from their generous thermos of gourmet coffee that each soldier was rationed, according to the official terms of their contracts.

So the troops, they needed their coffee, whether of the gourmet variety or even absolute what they called swill—barely drinkable, but still gave you a buzz.

And they were veterans of this stalemate that had persisted for years, decades, even, where anyone with a Tommy Gun and half a head on their shoulders was automatically signed up for the thing. Curious thing was that, if you were to ask—if you dared ask—one of the commanding officers what any of this was about, and you somehow got something that resembled a straight answer, they would inevitably tell you just this: “We don’t know.”

Nevertheless, morale on both sides remained mostly positive. There were few casualties on either side, most days, and the culinary perks tended to boost the general attitude and demeanor of the rank and file. But it must be said that on either side, there were scouts, some even said spies, who would tend to infiltrate enemy territory, who in some cases would tend to mingle with the locals over drinks and such, just to suss out what was actually going on on that side of the war situation or theatre. Curiously enough, in the vast majority of these breaches of security, no one on either side was looking for any secrets that were specifically military in nature. It was all about the perks. It was all culinary in nature.

What was particularly troubling to some of the high brass on either side was the trickle, initially, which soon became a deluge, of recipes that were totally foreign to these high brass types. On either side of the divide, these types all scratched heads, conferred with the chefs, sous-chefs, line cooks, hash-slingers, and whatnot, and, in whispered tones, asked all of them as tactfully as possible, “Is this possible? Can you make this for our troops? They say that the other side is busy eating such delicacies... We need it so that we can continue to bolster troop morale.” While in certain cases some of the top chefs were seen to grimace or worse, normally, the high brass received assurances from the staff on the culinary side of things, sometimes only as a wink, telling the high brass, “You don’t know how good we are!” And in most cases, that was that. Except for that one time that became the stuff of legends...

It was one of those blustery days, where things would be blowing all around you, followed by a sudden gust that nearly took your feet out from under you. From the other side, there was a rather rare bit of artillery fire that someone had carelessly sent out to wherever for God knows what reason. And it wasn’t even the small bits of shrapnel that nearly waylaid one of the pastry chefs while she was busy creating her very first torte masterpiece that got people all worked up; it was more the principle of the thing, not to mention that some of the other shrapnel hit the grill of one of the many sous-chefs, the very one who had been so assiduously crafting his long awaited chef-d’œuvre steak tartare with all those secret ingredients culled from the other side, with a few extras of his own that no one knew about thrown in.

So this, this was all-out war!

The high brass on either side, most of them, the ones who still had consciences, they were busy conferring with their underlings, even some of the enlisted men, trying to figure out how this culinary kerfuffle could be deescalated and even contained. No one on either side had much of a clue until someone came up to one of the dishwashers, Manuel, and asked him what should be done.

Manuel said, “It’s simple! Just wave the green flag of agricultural abundance! They’re all colorblind anyway! They’ll think it’s red. It’s only tomato sauce...” And to that other side, it all looked to be Confederate gray.

August 18, 2024 [17:17-18:32]

Preserving the Piper, by Robert Fuller

A dun-colored something at the base of the sycamore tree switched on the headlights of my beetle. Night had fallen. We went to the music room, along the path, toward the house, the brutalization of beautiful things, watching man’s development, matted and thick, curious fragments and bits of turned pages; small mouse-like animals, feeding a couple of popular songs into it, until it reached the mountains, climbing the side of the blanket in the fading thin afternoon twilight; darkness would follow that illusion of wilderness.

A swift ball of flame; a calm thought; warm red lips; a shimmering fire, part of the glimmering corona, stumbling and falling with a vague glow; the body lurched and fell into the blue cloud, struggled to breathe. A soft cloud swirled, rose into the air, almost blind, silent, hidden by conceptual changes. The room was turning dark, with fading eyesight, gasping, with clenched fists supporting a faint smile. A kind of projection, every line and mark of the hairless skull going blind with panic. The writing on the table was sensitive.

Fingers tapped against the table, the minds, the pipe stems in the corner, the hairless skull, the dwindling body, pink and glistening in the mirror, ears shriveling, to forget everything. Would it still be the same? He pointed at the hamsters, rubbed at the stubble, glanced at his wristwatch, reached toward the controls, staggered, sat down in the chair, watched the barren rock, the gently moving water, every bit of rock in the galaxy.

When he sat down on the edge of it, he yawned, folded his hands, looked over at the bed, his hands in his pockets. It was evening, the air cool. He watched the city surrounding the hospital disappearing behind the buildings, nothing to teach anyone of complex modern society, fast tempo, constant pressure, some job to be done.

Warm air rushed into the room; the pipers do exist; she turned toward the row of ferns. He went to the window and let it down. He stopped, waited for a moment. The girl looked up, silent, slim, slender, supple, a deep pool flowing in a waterfall, almost wet. Rocks stacked here and there. Dark, with ferns on all sides, silent and unmoving, an old stream bed at the bottom of a hill, endless leaves fallen and rotted into the soil, a scampering down the other side into a grove of trees.

They just disappeared, stopped cold; no more plants. Cool and dark; the forest hot underfoot, a sun-baked field of lethal poisons, pitch black. And now he sits in the sun, outer space, nothing coming into his mind. Just sit in the sun, blond hair over one eye.

August 19, 2024 [17:17-18:18]

The Mentor, by Robert Fuller

The curtain falls. One fine day he met escorts worthy of him, holding him in conversation. Meetings like this are often of more use than you might think, can often be helpful, until you refuse to take part in this mummery. During the night-watches, the townspeople gather at every table and stone, and roam the city, the dead everywhere, at every house, to return underground on a single throw of the dice, glowing darkly, as heavy as black crystal. Everyone knows our national pastime, our repentance afraid of being infected, as if confessing for the first time her tale of guilt, his neighbor’s sins.

Storms and passion have ravaged a pleasant garden. What disturbs me, under a mask of paint, ready for the ceremony, is living with the murderer, watching bold gestures at the picture window, horrible threats in my ear; then they sing or play on lutes at sundown in shady streets and squares. Picture a life going for walks late at night, laughing and singing. Tell me what it feels like, how dirty it is, treading on poor little hands, rotten turnips, mussel-shells in that way, every morning, nearer to corpses. The blood on his face? Only a coat of paint.

It’s your festival today; chuckle, enough to pull you down. Flies will love it. They’ve poured their choicest wines for you, at your feet, with a long sword, in creamy shoes, to worship you, smeared with raspberry juice, their daughters’ weddings, foolish fancies, a sleepless night; the patter of rain on vulgar sounds and scents, housetops of spiders’ webs, of dark imagination, of few words; shrines and temples, palaces and statues, in the worst provincial taste. Stones! Gray monotony. Boredom starting to crawl like caterpillars, guilty consciences, a carrion city plagued by flies, reigning over sorrowful endeavor, swarms of shrieks in darkened rooms.

Repentance. A good man in the fields, at work, only a traveler like ourselves. So the story goes. You’re dreaming. Knock at that door. Not a window anywhere. Nothing happens. The devil, a half-wit, opens the door. We’re out of luck, I suppose. The drink is good, this has been a pleasant journey. A nightmare city, glaring streets like black beetles, people who panic in shimmering air. We have lost our way. What’s deadlier than this emptiness?

August 20, 2024 [18:18-19:19]

The Wind in the Plains, by Robert Fuller

A young bride, a new life, her first marriage. What the west wind saw. The girl with the flaxen hair. An impromptu bridal shower. Hoofs on the trail, cotton billowing in the wind, coffee brewing over campfires, tempers sometimes flaring for not much reason, overnights in the wilderness. A melody standing above wind gusts and the occasional downpour.

Each morning, like clockwork, the decamping and moving on, the wagons on the move, moving westward, like what that wind saw. The wagons, their cottons billowing in the winds, like boats on an ocean of plains, continued their hoofmarks on an unstoppable journey west.

These were not days to idolize, make all that much of; they were days when the pioneers, as they mostly called themselves or were referred to, did what they had signed up to do; what they did in those days was not always anything to be admired or in any way emulated.

In many a case, there was a fever in their bones that drew them west, to find a kind of manna in the form of some kind of a treasure trove of gold that would then somehow set them up for life—if only they didn’t then squander their trove, their stash, in ways that they would later learn to regret. These were among the types who went west, who followed that lonely wind clear across the plains and beyond, to some imagined promised land that for most would never exist.

There were others who just lusted for general adventure of any sort, or who just wanted to find a piece of arable land, somewhere, anywhere, anywhere they might be able to stake their claim and just make an honest living by hard work. But it was always the wind gusts—through the billowing cottons of those wagons all in a train, sounds and marks of horse hoofs through messy weather, many a storm, and through dry and dusty landscapes and dubious mountain passes with many a danger, through to the next frontier town full of dubious characters who didn’t all mean well, and who almost inevitably sported the latest model of firearms, all locked and loaded—it was those gusts of wind through the plains and beyond that nurtured those who lived in those wagons. And they knew not why.

And there were some who took such paths who began to understand that there was something else that they shared—when communing at a place of scarce water that was at the time much overdue, or simply sharing a fresh mug of coffee over a newly burning fire after a hard day’s ordeal. They shared a bond that the wind in the plains had been telling them, what the west wind had seen, and the girl with the flaxen hair, and even her footsteps in the snow at the top of the mountain pass, had told them, which was that there was no option for any of them except to cooperate in order to not only survive, but flourish. The wind kept on, as everyone knew it would, and there were flash floods and other near calamities now and again, but mostly everyone who endured what they had through all of this endured got that they were in a tight bond that could not be ruptured—except that all might perish were that to happen, were it all to fall apart.

Yet they endured, they continued their westward voyage, they all did, as one. And at each tiny frontier town where they stopped to refresh their supplies, there was always that wind at their backs, that weird melody that played at their backs through the plains and beyond.

August 21, 2024 [17:17-18:18]

A Fragment Hunter, by Robert Fuller

Everything was in order in the boat, the ferry of death, filling up with wine, killed on the rocks, a nullity. It was fate. Nevertheless, people have noticed other things that happened long ago, in the fourth century; it was some story confused with someone else’s, as is universally known. Historians can’t see it, noticed other things, can’t remember the little child, journeys crossed in the cities. It was all so long ago. The old, old stories which teachers draw on blackboards while soldiers sing it in church, savages announce it from windows of skyscrapers, from the mountains to the harbor, the stars to the reflection of time, idle thoughts in buried cities; books are full of it.

Life really is short; drink some wine to sharpen your wits. You should drink more wine; the whole world knows everything; dare to drink out of your glass; tremble here at the table. People don’t understand their ancestors, their language, the thought processes of a shadow, imagining a babbling lake as an interpreter, hopeful of explanations, forgetting what little these sorts know, frightened on stormy nights, always in the same ship, to taste some of this wine, sweet and heavy, too restless in mountains and woods.

The ship, with no rudder, is driven by the wind in the undermost regions of death, the whole earth an inn for the night that nobody knows of, not a thought of a shout to summon help. Wolves bled to death in a ravine, victims of the next world; whose is the guilt? Was there any sin in that? No one will come to help; every door and window will remain shut. Everything happened in the shadowy mountains winding through the warm airs of night, stupid imaginations painted on death, sometimes turned into a butterfly, a great flower-patterned candle shining before the coasts, some earthly sea, the morning drink of the land passing through a hole in the wall.

Towards midnight, a dove at the window scared away the shadows, glanced at the walls. A flock of doves around the belfry flew up and pecked at the windowpane, rapped at the house door, of black oak. Two men were sitting at a café table drinking their wine, staring out to sea.

August 22, 2024 [16:16-17:17]

Sidecar, by Robert Fuller

My handler, my keeper, had revved up the excessively loud engine of the bike and was ready to go on one of his joyrides and as usual I was there as nothing much but an afterthought. He never let me say much; in fact, some of my good friends told me that it was his claim that anything I did ever say came right out of his own mouth. These periodic roadtrips of his were very much of the same pattern as our stage appearances, where I, from his standpoint, was not much more than a sideshow, as if I didn’t even really exist.

His bike was all fancy-like, chromed up and shiny to the max, and when he let it rip, went full throttle, I could feel the centrifugal force as he screamed his machine around the curves, with me just limp somewhere to the side or back, nearly being thrown off the bike, with my keeper not really giving a fig if that happened or not. To his way of thinking, I was nothing but a rag doll, easily replaced with another of the same if anything were to happen to me. These roadtrips would end, we would go back on stage in the next lonely town for at least a few appearances, and then the cycle would repeat.

In his stage act, he let on that he was some kind of fugitive from the law, but I knew that that was a complete fabrication and only for show, so that the bikers in at least some of those remote bars we visited might give us a tad more in the way of love, which is to say greenery. But sometimes that ruse backfired, and the tip jar had nothing much in it except a few stray coins and someone’s carelessly discarded cigarette butts, and maybe a few other items I don’t care to mention.

This was the pattern of our lives for quite some time. On stage, he would have me sit on his lap and he would keep monologuing ad nauseum, occasionally pretending to work my tired jawbones as if it were me mouthing all of that nonsense and not him. I never said much about this facet of our presentation, but it got me all worked up, hot under the collar, sometimes enough that I felt I should scream. And every now and then, I almost did.

But then one fine day, there was a turning point; I don’t recall what exactly happened, but things started to get a bit weird onstage, maybe because the bikers in that very remote bar, with its strange sulphur smells that entered when the air was just so, from springs nearby, got rowdier than usual, with some of them even sending up sprays or fountains of their usual cheap lite beer, maybe because their sports team on the TV had just made a horrible snafu or something like that. I recall that I was being made to mouth something or other that may have had something to do with all of that, and then the spray hit me full force.

And then, there I was, sitting directly on the stage chair, and my keeper had shrunk more than he should have, and it was now he who was sitting in my lap! I struggled to find the words that should have been said, and my awkward hands tried to work his jawbones as he had always worked mine, but I felt like I was for the moment completely out of my league, and I had no idea what in the world I should do about this strange state of affairs.

The tip jar was at its worst, the worst I’d ever seen, and the bikers’ team had somehow miraculously scored, having even pulled ahead by a point or two, so the bikers had no interest in our product, and my keeper—my former handler—looked ragged, as if he hadn’t had a wink of sleep in months, so I figured this was as good a time as any to hightail it and move on to the next bar in the middle of nowhere. I inconspicuously tore down a handful or two of the dollar bills stapled to the ceiling, and we unceremoniously left the joint.

I tied my limp sidekick securely to the seat, revved up the hog, and sped off into the starry night, securely in the driver’s seat.

August 23, 2024 [00:45-01:28]

The Fire Disciples, by Robert Fuller

In Calais, the one who had been chosen to feed the torch to all the others, split that flame, and there were twelve runners, running clockwise with a flame around a center that was meant, if nothing else, to celebrate his, the chosen one’s, own central position in the scheme of things. Each of these twelve runners did what the authorities required of them, during the daylight, even into the twilight, but during the dark of night, even though no one knew, they kept running, their flames, their torches, still lit. They kept running like mad, clockwise, all around the periphery of France, and they never ever stopped for anything.

But what their handlers had no clue about was that they were determined to use their torches, their flames, to set to fire what never should have been. This was why they all, without exception, ran through the night, without a drop of rest or sleep. They were going to do justice, they were going to right wrongs that had been made to this place decades in the past. So they visited places of names that had been associated with the occupying forces, and they planned to torch them all. And essentially, that was more or less what they did.

Yet each of these runners had their places, named for them as to where they were to go, and these places were the ones that, under the cover of night, were the ones targeted for sabotage. And they stretched fully around the perimeter of this country, beginning from Calais and ending nearly back there at the very same place, at Rouen, and then ending right there, at the chosen center of all. During that stretch of the ceremonies, there were countless fires that flared up all around the periphery, and then even hit the center itself, the city of love and all its banlieues. No one had any clue as to who had set all these fires, but they rated just as tall and as strong as the torch-bearer disciples would have preferred they did.

At a certain point, it seemed to some that all of France itself was ablaze, but that was merely the ill-advised words of pundits who should have never spoken. And yet, there were others in the punditry who insisted that this was only the beginning of a larger movement. And they all asked, in all seriousness, this basic question: Where were these torch bearers now? Where were these fire disciples? Where was the torch itself, as split into those twelve parts?

Those very same disciples had gathered, after Rouen, in the dark of the night, and they had split, six east and six west, to the north of their chosen one, in the middle, the city of love. And they gathered in those variegated banlieues with all seriousness and aplomb, and there were chefs of great stature and of great credentials who all embraced fully the French way of cuisine, and who all so selflessly contributed their most excellent of culinary efforts to this ultimate final gasp of dîners, a kind of dernier souper to end all such occasions, were that actually possible.

There was said to have been one traitor, just one who betrayed the center, but others reported later that all of the twelve, through their wanton fires, were all cut of the same cloth. And there were even others who postulated that even the center himself had betrayed the larger purpose, and then yet others wrote some books about something, and the fires were forgotten, the chefs were all but forgotten, and the great spread of fine food itself was nearly forgotten.

Later on, much later on, there was a celebration of fire and fine foods and fine chefs, and the center receded into the background, as must always be.

August 24, 2024 [17:34-18:30]

Landfill, by Robert Fuller

Most people probably didn’t even notice the shadowy figures climbing up the mountains of detritus and discarded fragments of humanity, wading through heaps of decaying rubbish that stunk to high heaven; or if they did, they most likely dismissed them as more of the usual scavengers trying to make a meager living off what everyone else so casually threw away. But that’s not at all what this particular crew was, or what they were doing. The more astute of the observers, anyone who actually did notice this team, would certainly have picked up on the fact that quite a number of them sported what seemed like thin metal rods, with a handle that they held with one or both hands, and, if it was visible, a kind of coiled disk at the end nearest the rubbish heap. It was mainly Robin Sherwood and his crew who sported gadgets like that.

But there were some other doodads and doohickeys that appeared to be more fanciful-like, much more ornate in their design and application than the ones just mentioned. And thus, for the more astute observers in the general vicinity, they would have noticed a full-on ballet of interleaving rods and other gear making their way, step by step, with attitude, pirouette, arabesque, sauté, chassé, and even an occasional en pointe and ballon, as if it were some kind of reenactment of Stravinsky’s Rite.

And it was like a totally alien caper, cavort, frisk, frolic, or gambol that you were unlikely to see ever again. It was a shame, some casual observers thought, that there was no camera crew capturing this masterpiece. Some imagined it set to their favorite soundtrack, others to their own other favorite music morsel, but none of them ever got it figured out just so. The headphones used by the crew had been enhanced by the actual soundtrack that they had been using for this documentary film—there were numerous drones that captured every one of the choicest camera angles of the thing, but they were tiny enough that they would never be seen by anyone in the distance—and these headphones, which doubled as indicators for the metal detectors in-hand, were set so that if an actual detection signal came in, it got precedence. And Robin Sherwood was the one who was keenest on receiving such signals; he had his reasons.

But it was Max who had authored the actual soundtrack, which featured an eclectic mix of rather brash-sounding cacophonies that mingled with various lush, pure chords that might have been guitar, until they became something else, and sometimes these diverse sounds seemed to compete with one another, yet at other times they merged in ways that couldn’t have been imagined until just that moment, and so it was what Max did, had done—was still doing, in the sense that he was live-streaming new materials into the mix every chance he got—that kept this squad, this gang, so fired up in what they were doing. And Max was right there with all of them, splitting his duties between his own treasure hunt of the metallic sort and his other, more ephemeral treasure hunt of the sonic variety.

So, the main members of this ragtag group were, in addition to Max and Robin Sherwood, Murray and Williams. Robin Sherwood was fixated on pieces worn on the wrist; a reliable source had informed him that certain rogue elements had recently made “deposits” into this particular “bank” in their efforts to keep the authorities at bay. Max, on the other hand, was agnostic as to what he was seeking, so in addition to whatever musical gear he somehow managed to have on his person, he carried both the “plain” gadgetry and also the more fanciful doohickeys, just to hedge his bets.

Murray and Williams, it seems, were mainly along for the ride, just in case anything of interest surfaced, but between them, they did have a rather ancient-looking version of the “plain vanilla” type gadget. Neither one seemed as if they thought they themselves would actually find anything of value, but you never knew. Yet they would be proven wrong later on in the evening, once Theo and Paul and Vincent and Alma and Esther finally showed up. Adding a crew like that and their efforts, it was anybody’s guess what might happen.

Esther and Alma kept giggling every chance they got; they seemed to have an inkling of finding something soon, and how valuable it would be. They both sported the very latest in those more ornate doodads—they even had a kind of sunflower visual going on—and they somehow just knew that they would be the ones who would locate the choicest chunks of what they so gigglingly referred to as “booty”. But just then, Robin Sherwood’s detector alert rang loud, into everyone’s headsets, so jarringly interrupting the so masterfully crafted soundscape that Max had so thoughtfully provided for everyone.

And then there was a riotous laughter, unlike any ever heard before or since! Robin Sherwood had managed to unearth a measly Military Quartz Analog in horrible condition! The laughter never stopped. Until Alma and Esther struck gold.

August 25, 2024 [17:17-18:18]

The Marble Cartel, by Robert Fuller

Well, it was kind of a primary school squabble, at least that’s what most of the teachers initially surmised. There were two factions who went at it every time they could, instead of quietly playing in the sandbox, or running around the playground, like normal kids used to do. They faced off in the most remote area of the schoolyard, right at the far edge of the parking lot where most of the teachers parked; there was a secret area nearby where, as legend had it, the ground was level and the rolling was good. And these two teams, known as Team Freddy and Team Jason, they had at it every chance that presented itself.

Now, these were cutthroat teams, let’s not downplay that element of what was going down. And they were all playing for high stakes, although initially it started out much more modestly than that. It was maybe a penny a point for starters, and within a week became a nickel and soon thereafter a dime, and before you knew it, there were some hardcore types who would sooner bet all of their lunch money, the whole bucket, just to do what they could to help their team best their rivals.

But what most of the team members on either side had no clue about is that their team leaders were not really into all this penny-ante stuff, playing kids’ games, knocking little glass spheres out of a chalk-drawn circle, for “keeps”. No, what these ringleaders had in mind was something far more lucrative than that. Each of them in turn—Jason, and then Freddy, as they were known from a certain slasher film of dubious renown—had invested part of their proceeds, from these innocent enough games, and they had scoured the local hills and ravines and canyons and whatnot for places where they might find hidden treasures of much greater value than what their penny-ante childhood games could ever net them.

They were looking for outcrops of minerals that would have formed through the metamorphism of limestone and various fossilized materials, and other types of biological debris, recrystallized into a totally new thing. Some of these specimens, as legend would have it, even included rare gems embedded into their very structure. And each of these characters in turn, Jason and then Freddy, found their own secret holdings of these kinds of precious items. And that was when the playground wars really began in full force.

All of the teachers and their assistants were fully aware that there were these games that certain factions within their student populace tended to play, as opposed to doing what normal children tended to do on the playground, but none of them knew anything at all about either the secret stashes of minerals or rare gems, nor of the secret tunnels that the two factions—mainly one of them; the other had lots to do to try to keep up—had dug like moles through the hills above the playground in order to try to cement control over these precious resources, which they planned to try selling at a premium on the black market.

It was that one last game, which was in this case for keeps, where Freddy, whose online handle was “peaceful ruler”, or “elf”, managed to best Jason, or “healer”, one on one. There was a picture of an inn or tavern, in a farmer’s field, and the game was cherry pit, and it was “elf” who took all the spoils. And “healer” never heard the end of it.

August 26, 2024 [15:15-16:16]

Polterheist, by Robert Fuller

They were no stranger to ghostly or even ghastly happenings. In actual fact, the Smith family came from a background where such events were even regarded to be commonplace. So when they had moved into Apartment 5 of the street location in question, they knew at least something about the way the building in general had been depicted, cinematically-speaking. But none of them had any particular fears about anything that certain types might speak of as “supernatural” in one way or another.

It was Emma who, she being the practical one, first suggested to Joseph that perhaps it might be most prudent to secure their family jewels, so to speak, in a secure location within the labyrinth of their sumptuous spread. There were two great rooms, Emma pointed out in her practical way that she had for pointing such things out, that perhaps it might be best not to hide these family jewels, so to speak, in such obvious places. Joseph, on the other hand, having veto power as he did, said firmly that these critical items of their family and religious history should indeed be interred within the greater of the two great rooms, hidden just under the floorboards. Emma had no choice in the matter. She even tried suggesting the library as an obvious alternative, but her every word was squelched.

Emma was fixated on the screen; she was sitting on the couch. There was nothing much on the screen itself, apart from the usual crime shows and the boring ads that tended to annoy most everybody when they weren’t rushing to the kitchen for a late-night snack. Now, she was sitting on the divan in the more modest of the two great rooms, and she was aware of a disturbance near her, somewhere in the abode, but she gradually became aware that it wasn’t in her room of choice, it was a few rooms over, through the larger great room, in the gallery, just beyond the library!

She had heard scratching in the walls, as if they were taken over by some kind of living thing that wanted to scratch everything out of those walls! Emma knew that the “family jewels” were right there where she was sitting, or in the next room over, yet she could not help but pass through the greater of the great rooms, through the library, and into the gallery. It wasn’t in either room in particular that she noticed this, but between the two rooms, she saw that all four of her children were there, transparent as she thought they could ever be, and they very quickly what she called evaporated into nothing, and then she began to notice that all of the best masterpieces of art were missing from the gallery, all the ones that she had known to love and care for, and then, in the library itself, she saw with horror that all of the bookshelves had been emptied of whatever they had borne before all of this had happened!

She shrieked, created quite a disturbance, and Joseph came immediately to where she was, and she asked him as quietly and carefully as she could where the children were. Joseph said right off that she had seen ghosts, and she said, Yes, they were the ones who looked like our four children; and she took a deep breath or two, and gestured to Joseph that the entire library was missing! And in the adjoining room, the frames had all been stripped of what used to be artwork!

She swore she had never seen anything at all like this. And Joseph approached her solemnly, and gently, and he touched her carefully, as he never had before. And he brought her quietly over to the untouched floorboards, and he lifted a few of them up, gingerly, and he said to her as well as he could, “Look, Emma, take a good look. The plates are still here.” But look as she might, she couldn’t see them.

August 27, 2024 [16:16-17:17]

The Oldest of the Old, by Robert Fuller

History serves to show that Poetry, rather than the historical, is the last chance for enduring truths, its pinnacle embodied by a ring of fire on the summit of a mountain, subterranean baths, souls in torment as the origin of the divine sweat of the holy lake of the universe, a few hogs covered with earth, without any great art, thrown in the water like a heron without wings, where the sun never rises, like the blowing of a trumpet to epitomize darkness, in bones, beds, saints’ hut circles, where the new shoes of a medieval man walk across thorny brambles, rocks, and pungent plants.

Light and darkness, an abstract barrier blocking the view of the divine soulless mass of gross matter, introduced death beyond the sunset of the soul of the philosopher; a cosmos-in-miniature, a legacy of ideas and imaginings, a buried dream expressed in song from a cave, as various folk tales full of darkness and the sound of streams, the wailing of the whole nation, a plank stretched between mountain ridges, the serpent or demon that destroyed the valley, souls falling from the bridge, to lie on stone mounds and barrows by the black god of harvest.

And yet in our thinking, ‘But first of all, worst of all, the wiggly livvly,’ a split between body and spirit, ‘she side slipped out by a gap in the Devil’s glen,’ obsessed with clerical writings, by the image of the deep valley, the woman who leads mankind astray, murder and theft are given mythic power, a blast of wizardry, charms, and enchantments, serpents coiled around living death. Then, a ray of light, a delicious sweetness, everyone’s destiny delivered into gold and paradise, with different herbs and flowers and fruit and darkness and a narrow slippery bridge, over serpents and dragons and human choirs, towards the place where the sun rises as lamentations in a wilderness of black summer, the torments of the good, now deserted, in a cave round and dark.

An open boat, animated by something of the cosmic drama every summer, excludes musical instruments, to follow the tracks of the gods to Purgatory, with mythological walks and revelatory journeys. And an intense silence: it comes to meet us, behind us.

August 28, 2024 [16:16-17:17]

Giants Straddling the World, by Robert Fuller

Old jealousies never die. Unwieldily neckwear that may have been worn at Uncle Shanghai’s fragrant kitchen, a hero’s journey to another world, empty carcasses saying, “But you have the script.” And that’s how it was. These ogres wrote their own scripts, or thought they did, with their legs splayed just so, and with no backup to speak of. And everyone had by then totally forgotten their ill-formed sound bites. And the neckwear, that was what really bit them. Their legs spread wide, knowing nothing of what was happening to them, they of course tried to fight, contend, struggle with whatever it was. But it was their neckwear, pure gold, that got them.

They tried walking with long, extended steps, like some kind of silly walk, but they always tripped over their Moonstars or Passion Diamonds or their Ruby Slippers, and it always came out as awkward, not knowing how to just walk, as ordinary persons do. They had to strut themselves down the catwalk of their narrow beings, as if. And more and more people saw right through that crap. And the gold neckwear was just so much glitter any more, and it strangled them, even if they didn’t know what was happening.

But their scripts had been written by their forebears, the ones who wrote all that excess of monies into their little skulls, made them feel like all that, even though they were nothing. How exactly does the monarchy perpetuate itself, one might ask. It is by what glitters, what strangles them by their necks over time, their necks having grown so enormous that the neckwear sucked the breath out of them, gave them nought but thick, clotted blood, of the age of man; a hero, earthly, secular, worthy; a long period of time; the affairs of life, the middle enclosure; a deadly nemesis. Wealthy out-of-town low-lifes with a taste for blondes.

“These types, you see,” as Murray was explaining to Williams at the usual joint, “these types will stop at nothing to get what they want. And they will do everything they can to keep their monarchy going over time.” And Williams, he took a sip of his drink, followed by Murray in due course, and then Murray continued in more subdued tones, saying, “But their plans are doomed to fail.” Williams did a kind of double-take, nearly sent his drink down the wrong windpipe, but once he recovered, he was all in, and all he said was “Certainly.”

And then, after a few more sips, it was none other than Williams who chimed in, saying things about there being people with money who were not good with the status quo, and who were looking to change the whole equation. And he went on for a while, getting all chatty about the topic, you see, and Murray was being rather tight-lipped for the time being. And he took a good long sip of whatever it was he was drinking, and he told Williams in a barely audible whisper that the change would happen with or without the monied people he, Williams, had been referring to.

Now, Williams was at the moment perplexed, not yet getting Murray’s drift or general line of argument. And then Murray began explaining about how all of these self-important types were, whether they knew it or not, busy digging their own graves. And Williams of course wanted to know why that was the case, if it indeed was. So Murray carefully explained that these so-called giants who were straddling the world, well, their legs were spread apart, and the world was too big—infinite—and the neckwear and other bling they wore was busy this very minute, strangling them and any and all of their progeny.

Every month thereafter, there was a new crew sent to colonize Mars. No one ever heard from them again. The door to another world. Empty carcasses.

August 29, 2024 [18:18-19:19]

The Machines Saw..., by Robert Fuller

He counted the tools pressed against his back, saw the tiny city within. The small shiny sphere broke, deafened by grinding wheels and gears, the murky mistiness of voices multiplied countless times like a gigantic drum, busy with his work; he began to drift into sleep, an ignorant man with a paperweight, a very evil city, an old legend shut up in a glass for eternity, waiting to escape; it began to buzz behind pictures in the walls, like a gyroscope hidden someplace, a time machine telling the truth after an eternity, suspicious at the time; the buzzer sounded and sounded again. The men went down the walk in a kind of glassy rigidness.

It was warm, it was too hot in the fields of grain; he was falling again, up to the graying mist of his own world. He went out the side door, to pick which knob to set, beginning to feel thirsty, began to walk again; nothing happened, like an endless tunnel. He raced to the top of the sun, but it looked the same as always. He clicked the “on” switch. A small hill rose to a wide forest for an instant, and then vanished.

The thing that kept their world together was a complete puzzle to him. He said, “I forgot my wings.” He put the box on the desk and walked to the door, amazed, in a small circle of light. The world settled down to a rigid state. The stock market crashed. Dissenters were destroyed, hanging, a row of small hooks along the wall, off the roof and into the darkness, vanished into the black. He headed toward air currents at increasing speed, came gently to rest on a roof, swallowed by the night, the lights of the city, the violet hue of the night; small clouds of bright light drifted past.

August 30, 2024 [19:19-20:20]

The Man Without a Language, by Robert Fuller

It was strange. You couldn’t even refer to him by any kind of name; he had wiped it out of his memory banks without a second thought, and so he might not have responded to you even if you knew what his name used to be. The words that used to inhabit his interior, they were all gone; they had left him for good. This was a man who used to be fluent in multiple languages, and who wanted above all else to be able to say, clearly, in one language or another, what could not be said in so many words.

He tried to say what was on the tip of his tongue in so many different ways, in languages he knew better than anyone else, and even in languages that he had hardly any direct knowledge of, or fluency in, yet, try as he might, all his most valiant attempts to say any of what he really wanted to say, they all fell flat, and he was left with nothing but a bad taste in his mouth, a taste so bad that not even the sweet wine that he was so fond of could make those tastes, those memories of failure, go away.

Certain people who had been researching his particular case for years, even decades, they all had come to similar conclusions, that he was just dealing with a bad case of writer’s block and that, were he to entertain certain forms of let’s say therapy, he would soon be able to overcome the issues he was dealing with. But in recent times when he was still actually talking to his closest friends with any regularity, they would all, without exception, tell you that what he imparted to them in all sincerity, with all his heart, was that what he was trying to express in words—in any language that he knew, or in any other that he tried on for size, just to see if it would work, even if he knew little to nothing about it—simply could not be said. And so, over wine and cheese with his closest friends, he, the writer of so many words, said gradually less and less, until his fount of words became a trickle, and then dried up completely. And all of them, to a person, swore to anyone who would listen that his treasure trove of ideas was still as intact as it ever was; you just had no real way to find the key to accessing it.

But he was not by means mute; his inner monologue was still as hyperactive as ever, and he delighted in playing his own variety of mind games, as if playing chess against himself; if nothing else, it kept his mind sharp. Yet what his mind did in such games was to silently say what he had been trying to say for so many years, yet couldn’t. And it was in this silence, once he really started to listen to it carefully, that he heard how he could say what could not be said.

His closest friends dearly wished for him to tell them what they knew he had become attuned to, in words they themselves could understand. But it was all to no avail, at least at first. He was conversant enough in the language of dreams that he could draw what he had seen, in the form of an overpowering, massive structure, one that led to the firmaments and perhaps beyond. He was able to draw various styles of hieroglyphics such as had never been seen previously, and his close friends all knew what they meant, mysteriously.

What his friends were most impressed with, and shocked by, later on, once this man found what he had been looking for, for so many years and decades, was that their friend had synthesized a single tongue from his analysis of all those tongues and dialects that had seeped into his ears from that massive structure that stretched so far into the heavens, and he was finally able to say what could not be said. What was even more shocking to his close friends is that after all of that, this man had nothing to say, was mute... And that’s when they truly got his message. They understood everything he had been trying to say, everything that could not be said.

August 31, 2024 [16:30-17:13]

VALISE, by Robert Fuller

Enigmatic, exotic, electric. His keepers had names for what he was supposed to have been caught carrying, which they said was something like an attaché, although it wasn’t quite that eclectic, it was at best a portmanteau or even a mere handbag or wallet, maybe even just an envelope, for that matter. And there was really nothing in it. This model didn’t even sport a false bottom, so that he could hide all those secrets they seemed to claim he was hiding. But from whom!? You couldn’t hide anything from anybody these days! They were all busy spying on you and everyone else, maybe even themselves when they weren’t careful enough!

It was all part of a System, that he knew, and it wasn’t at all conducive to what he had come to know as Intelligence, the recital of poetry at the vernal equinox. Living, not required to think anything, a sailboat of madness, a phonecall from a kids’ cartoon, the threshold of consciousness, back in the briefcase, the double helix against a black background. Active as a grinning, well-dressed, hollow-eyed, good-looking suit who like to drink Irish coffee, who we barely remembered, the last picture he sent us, that we never saw.

Vast madness enjoyed a wonderful time, half-way across the street; now it ends, somewhere in the world. There was nothing to say. A liquor store clerk was a rock star, the dream of saying he had never died, like the light of a dream of a beautiful child, somebody else talking, like a realization after eight years of madness, driving north in the miracle of warm chocolate, in utter stealth, as if by accident. The fish symbol, replicating in human brains, would penetrate the world, until the flashpoint of the immortals. None of us knew, beyond the secret handshake...

September 1, 2024 [16:30-17:13]

The Tale She Told, by Robert Fuller

She couldn’t even say her name. They were there, asking her for that, and for other details, and for her, it was a jumble, a confusion, even an amalgamation, an amalgam of things far in the past, and she just couldn’t see at all through that mirror, not now, not under these circumstances. And if she were to look there, she really didn’t know what she would see. Yet the authorities kept on asking, asking, asking, and she just couldn’t answer any of it. Her identity was not what they thought; it was greater, far greater than that. And she sensed that they knew that, but she had no way of breaking through the game they were playing.

Because, she knew, they all played such games. Without a single care, in many cases, as to who or what they might hurt. So when they, her keepers, finally let her be by herself in the squalid cell they had appointed for her benefit, she was at first just fully shaken by what they had put her through; at some point she was angry, angrier than she had ever been; and then her resolve came to bear upon her situation, which she knew was not one of her own making. And then some of the long-ago images and stories started to come back to her.

She then began to know her name again, and where she came from, but she would never tell her keepers, not under any circumstances. She had waking dreams of the frontier, of pioneer tales that her forebears had actually lived, and that she had heard about, from the eldest of those who were still there at the time, and in her squalid cell, she relived all of what her ancestors had been through; how they had lived their lives, and what they had meant, and what they would continue to mean for any who would listen.

Esther—and she now took upon herself this name, which may not have been her own, but possibly one of her forebear’s—saw clearly that she came from a line of strong women who suffered things they should not have suffered, but who brought to the lives of those around them a strength just as strong or more so; and Esther knew that she had always been a brewster, a crafty sort who delighted in crafting ales that would delight the finest palates of such fine libations, and she knew that her forebears, who worked the kitchens back in those days, as a kitchen chore, had done much the same, but without as much acclaim, and she sat there in her squalid cell and knew that she had to escape and tell her story!

She made something up, the very next time her keepers confronted her at the bed in her squalid cell. Since she remembered that they had been asking about details about a certain crime or altercation or other similar event that she had no knowledge of, she simply told them what they appeared to want to hear, but she was careful to tinge her account of what they wished to hear with a few sordid details that clearly implicated some of their own in this heinous crime that had supposedly happened on their watch!

It was just a few moments after that that she knew she had at least a few of them in her clutches. There were a few sidebars here and there; there was a great whispering within their fold; and she knew the house of cards was about to come down when a certain lieutenant within their ranks began to confess to just about everything that they’d held her on.

So, without her even having said her name—if, indeed, it was even hers—she walked straight out of that precinct without even her attorney present at the time, and she strode into the twilight fast becoming night, and she sat there for as long as she could, and she saw that the aurora borealis fast became as if a painting, a starry night with no bounds, only freedom, nothing else. And she wept.

September 2, 2024 [17:30-18:13]

Do You Know What They Call You?, by Robert Fuller

No one ever found this out about me, but there was a code, a universal code, that I had cracked. Everyone I knew was busy with their own lives, with any or many of the minutiae of these lives, but I had long since dropped out of such dramas, in a manner of speaking. And I had, once that happened, begun more and more to dedicate myself to understanding what the others were saying; what they were saying about us, as need not be stated, but also to tell them, to be able to tell them, what we were saying about them.

No one else was doing this work, so someone had to, and as it turns out, it was me. I became conversant in the various forms of communication prevalent in the animal, mineral, and vegetable kingdoms, as outlined per Linnaeus, circa 1735, but, that not being sufficient for my quest for understanding, I also found ways to decode what the fungi, microorganisms, and even the infinity of the very cosmos was telling us, and how—even though we wouldn’t or couldn’t understand, or even listen. So I devoted what little there was of my fragile life to that purpose, to such purposes.

I had some friends of mine, who were adept at various types of engineering, fashion for me a workable syrinx, for it was the birds, who had been brothers and sisters to the ill-fated dinosaurs, who had so much to tell, and also to hear from the likes of my modest little self. They worked out the prototype in a mere few weeks or so, and the production model was ready for me in just shy of two months. I had done field-testing of the prototype in my backyard, and my avian friends appeared to respond, but what I had failed to anticipate was that I was still as yet unable to completely grasp what they themselves were saying, although what I communicated to them was, as far as I could tell, more or less understood by them. At one point, I even tried kneeling down to peck for seeds, but my beak was too fleshy, and my claws weren’t sharp enough to properly scratch. But that lack of understanding, physically speaking, was not by any means the main impediment to our communication channels. The main issue, it seems, was a lack of translation software. I had thought that what I had heard over the years was something that I had somehow understood, but I was mistaken, and my avian friends knew it!

So I went back to my engineering friends, imploring them to please supply me with an adequate means of translating what the avians were actually telling me, as opposed to what I wanted to hear, and they hooked up at the water cooler one fine day, and they came up with a plan, a reverse engineering, you might say, of the syrinx they had just recently devised. And it was indeed ingenious, in terms of how it worked.

They called this new device, which was like one of those unobtrusive hearing aids that hardly anyone notices, an Earinx, and they made use of Very Large Data to ensure that the translations would be done as correctly as possible. So when I was test-driving their prototype, sitting in my backyard enjoying a cup of coffee, a pair of the plain grayish birds arrived, and began scratching for food, or drinking beaks of water I had left for them, or munching on sunflower seeds that I had scattered there for their enjoyment, and they kept moving rapidly, as they always do, pretending not to notice me.

My syrinx was already in place, and the new prototype Earinxes were firmly in ear, as well. So, as politely as I could, I asked my avian friends, “Do you know what they call you?” They looked around quizzically, as if they hadn’t even seen me, then they both stared right at me, as if, and they began chasing one another around the yard, hardly saying anything, until they both stopped right by the water dish, each took a sip, and both did their contented crackling sounds that I’d heard so many times in the past, to my delight.

But it seems that something may have been lost in translation; the Earinxes hadn’t yet been properly field-tested, perhaps. I heard the sounds of crackling contentment that came through gaps in the Earinxes, not yet properly fitted.

But what they told me in response to my fairly straightforward question was especially baffling to me. It sounded to me, and they spoke in unison, just like the raucous “Caw!” of a raven, and then my Earinxes heard intense avian laughter, and then I dreamt of swirling clocks and belltowers, a cacophony that was unlike any I’ve heard before. And the ravens were there in full force.

And when I awoke, in shackles, at first, the clocks were gone, the ravens had moved on, and then the shackles evaporated and there I was in my own backyard, and my friends were still laughing. I made a minor adjustment or two to my Earinxes, let the static clear away, and they were still laughing their contented crackling laugh of contentment, wondering if I would understand at any point, ever. But then I heard them whispering, and what they said, what they finally said, moved my heart. One said what sounded like “tau-hee”; the other? Sounded like toe-heel. I danced.

September 3, 2024 [14:14-15:15]

I Dreamed, by Robert Fuller

There were some who said, who claimed that I danced. But it was all a dream of mine, and there were flocks and flocks and flocks of birds in these strange dreams of mine, and they were tumultuous in their demeanor, yet all they wanted was a single seed or so of nurture, which I gladly gave to them, along with a few sips of fresh water, and they went their way and I mine. But no one danced. They may have scritched and scratched for food, but that was merely their dance, not mine, and whatever they did was strictly their own business.

Yet there were still those who claimed I danced, when in fact I knew not even a single step. Maybe I moved, but the birds made me do it. And they will testify to it, every single one of them! Did I dance? Did anyone? The birds will not tell.

What I dreamed was that perhaps I had danced, but only in a dream, where perhaps I had danced or I had not. And the birds all flocked around me, and they all said in their own dance that I had not, because only they could. And they began to laugh in ways that birds were not known to laugh in, and they asked me to dance. And I dreamed that I could, and yet I could not, and they flew, and they flew, and they flew, and their dance in my dream was so far away that their wings and feathers splashed into the far sunlight that was so far from my dream that I woke up, yet was still dreaming that I was dreaming that I was dreaming that I woke up, still in my dream of dancing and laughing and flying in ways that had never been known.

September 4, 2024 [19:19-19:44]

The Unmoneyed, by Robert Fuller

What the birds told me, told us, because the peck peck peck of their beaks could not lie, was that what they saw, what was in our society, and the seeds they found, they were that the peck peck peck of our overlords, that was what was killing our society. We listened. And our avian friends were there for us, at every step of the way.

They pecked pecked pecked at what held us all down, and they perched where they were wont to do, and then they settled down for the night. And we listened listened listened while they perched perched perched. And pecked.

And they found gold. And gold sunrise somehow arose, and they all said what they would say. And what they pecked at, it was seeds, and water, and they kept at it, and their gold became what we would, should be, and they kept pecking at whatever may have been holding us down, and they sang as clearly as they could through their syrinxes what the rest of us knew to be true. And we, some of us, listened listened laughed and listened, until nothing held us down, and we flew flew flew to where they were were were and then we were there, and there was nothing.

And it was then that they showed us this thing they had found: there was no dough. They laughed laughed laughed. And we may have cried cried cried. We wept. And they flew away, laughing all the way.

September 5, 2024 [17:00-17:30]

Lying in Weight, by Robert Fuller

The Emperor of the Nation, the Earth, and Universe, and everything else Far and Wide and Between was fastidiously busy playing with His Sharpie, creating new Diagrams showing His Executive Plans for cheating at His Next Royal Game of Golf. But, sadly enough, His Sharpie had malfunctioned, and it made a Royal Mess of the napkin from His Happy Meal, which He hadn’t even been Eating, as He Had Gifted it to His Very Royal Daughter, and who some even suggested He Had rather questionable Relations With. No, rather, He Was Lunching on His 13th Cheeseburger Dumpling in a row, along with the 666ml of Soviet Coke that He had been using to Wash It Down. It was a Cheeseburger Dumpling eating contest, which usually, as the Emperor often mentioned, had been won by a no-name person no one had ever heard of, called something like Baloney Wurst-nut, or something something like that that no one could even digest, “even if they had a Royal Stomach, like Mine!”

And when some of the officiating personnel began looking into the “game tape” of that contest, they began to notice that the Royal Emperor of the Known Universe had been stuffing every other Cheeseburger Dumpling into His Very Royal Shorts, which had ample room for reasons which many could not for some reason explain. And then they ran the game tape in higher resolution, and they discovered that this very Royal Emperor had been cramming untold Cheeseburger Dumplings, Very Highly Classified Happy Meals, and countless other Top Secret McDocuments, into the Secret Sanctuary of where His Royal Shit ultimately Came Out. And it Stunk to His Very High Heaven!

But He claimed Executive Time, Executive Privilege, and He Worked on His Very Godly Golf Game, which God Said Was Good.

And then it all came back to Him. He was on His only many-eth, of countless Cheeseburger Dumplings, or His Very Royal Daughter’s Happy Meals, and that fake news Baloney Wurst-nut had dropped out of the running, but then, all of a sudden, His Royal Excellency had to Burp. Yet he couldn’t. And then His Royal Sharpie hit the wrong vein, and His Bubble Burst, and there He Was, Lying, as ever. In Wait. But no one cared, any more than they ever did, or would admit to. And life went on. The medical personnel tried to inject the Royal Cheeseburger Dumpling Essence into His Vain, but His fake life was too far gone, and He was Busy Eating His Daughter’s Happy Meals and using his newer, smaller Sharpie to create yet more diagrams for cheating at Golf.

And when his sycophants were waiting for His Body to Rise Back Up out of the tomb, all they saw was a tiny Sharpie, and it was so Stormy and Dark that no one could tell what the Weather was. And there was no Point to it. And there were Cheeseburger Dumplings that rose up until Baloney Wurst-nut Himself said that He would Eat them All. And He Did. And the Weight sunk and sunk and sunk until it Died. And it was a fake body, a fake soul, a fake anything else you might ever imagine. And it had the magnetism to sink everything else with it into the depths, everything that it had been associated with, and it sunk and sunk and sunk and went even lower and burst its Sharpie—and with it, everyone who had drunk that particular flavor of Kool-Aid. And that was that.

September 6, 2024 [14:14-15:15]

The Journal, by Robert Fuller

Gannets and pelicans, pelicans and gannets, they would fly or swoop through my digital diary, if not daily, then close. Box elders were featured when space and time permitted, and so were garlic mustard, striped wintergreen, porcelain berry, and ghost pipe, but my time was not my space, as I was soon to find out after someone hacked my digital diary and whatever minutiae I was writing became someone else’s news of the day. This mysterious creature, you see, not only hacked my joyful, jaunty, jobless, jejune journal, it also hacked the live news feeds of two roughly parallel news organizations, roughly parallel in the geographic sense, yet separated by a good 2,200 miles.

So, if I was some kind of journalist—I was writing a digital diary, a journal, was I not!?—then I would have to become the more investigative type, the type that would find disparate threads and find ways to tie them all together. There was a syrup, a sap, that might just be that very substance that was the glue, sticky as it was, that held it all together. There were pelicans and gannets, and I had written now and then about various yellow-green flowers and “feather-leaved” fronds, and there were of course lakes of salt, bird and wildlife sanctuaries, and I was always sweetening the deal with my various culinary pursuits and other such interests.

I found a reference to the “river maple”, which piqued my curiosity, and then I saw references to ‘Baron’, ‘Elegans’, ‘Flamingo’, ‘Pendulum’, and so these things started seeping into the words of my digital diary, and then I noticed that they were mirrored in those two News Journal publications that were over two thousand miles distant, in their own parallel universes—as the main part of the news feed—so that the usual dreary, depressing news of the day was no longer there.

So I called a few friends of mine and asked about things like heartwood, prayer sticks, bowls, pipe stems, charcoal, wood flutes, Sun Dance ceremonies, syrup, and winter food, and they all assured me that those were all real, and all in the true spirit of things, to be sure. And so then I dreamed, dreamed of Cinnamon Teal, Franklin’s Gull, of Redhead and Tundra Swan, of Black Tern, Snowy Plover, and Marbled Godwit—and then I felt them dream in turn about me, dream me into life.

September 7, 2024 [15:15-16:16]

Scaramouche, by Robert Fuller

Legend has it that there was a masked man who liked to dance through city streets and that there were some who were there who may have heard him singing opera arias, although most who were there swore on their holy books that he had never sung even a note, but that he gestured in various ways that suggested that he was doing certain things which he was not. On the other hand, some of those who were present readily admitted that, Yes, he was just gesturing in various strange ways they couldn’t quite understand, yet they swore they heard music when they saw what he did, incomprehensible as it was to them.

One of the things onlookers witnessed is that this masked man appeared at one point to actually smash a telephone, and there were some who were there who claimed to have heard its brittle parts hitting the pavement in glassy waves of sudden sound that struck them viscerally, although other factions claimed that it was nought but a minor sleight of hand that caused nothing much in the way of audible disturbance—nevertheless, it was deemed to be rich in invention, heart-warming lyricism, and full of a suggestive power over the human psyche almost verging on perversity.

Some heard minuets, some boleros, although most said the streets were silent as they could be, but this masked man danced in various inconceivable ways through the city streets as if he actually heard such dances—and others for which the music had never been written—and there were those who were there who heard such music, and marveled that the likes of it had never been heard until just now; and they were all totally mesmerized by the movements of this masked man; and then there were some, and then many, who began to place masks and deliriously colorful costumes and garbs on their persons, and who then wove through the streets, in what became a great burgeoning parade of masks through and beyond the city streets, with no end, and no obvious purpose.

Soon, it was true, nearly everyone, even some of the infirm, joined the parade, or whatever it was—and there were some who brought trumpets and cymbals and bass drums and flutes and even their own operatic voices—and they all followed the masked man to a place where there was a bottle of wine, a dagger, and a mirror, all laid out on a bed, way out in the outskirts of the city, next to a sulphurous river bed. The masked man opened the bottle with the dagger, looked in the mirror, and fainted, falling on the bed, and everyone else in their masks did the same. There were some who hadn’t yet fainted who swore later on that the trumpets and cymbals and bass drums and operatic voices were still sounding, and continue to sound, even to this very day.

September 8, 2024 [15:30-16:15]

Apple and Agave, by Robert Fuller

Flowers, crystals of water vapor in the cold, flowers born, borne into fruit from a forbidden tree, large flower spikes with slithery teeth, that cut both ways, as a serpent moves, born to hiss and slither, and mislead one to truth. No one gives a fig about leaves, even succulent ones, that is, until the rosette dies, cut with a trinity troika trio of diamonds. No one dies until the ice flowers have melted, not until the spring of eternity has arrived at the forbidden tree, and then the serpent speaks its hiss that no one, not even God, understands, since His tower had made everyone mute to each other.

Parts were covered, the ones that made the tree of human generations sprout from what was a mistake, supposedly, one that was engineered by the One who supposedly made the first ones—the ones who made that very same mistake—from dust. But the apples and the agaves knew not such a One. The agaves mentioned that some among them could live sixty years before they would ever flower. The apples said that their five-petaled flowers were as a group—an inflorescence, with its center as the “king bloom”—and they were clearly able to show how they had formed from the flower, part by part, and without any need whatsoever for any divine intervention.

And serpents, being carnivores, had no need for apples, as the apples very well knew all along. The apples said, “Just ask the earthworms, slugs, the fish, the amphibians, or the insects, rabbits, and birds: ask them what snakes eat.” But, on the other hand, there were certain agaves who knew snakes, to one degree or another, such as snake agave and black snake, the leaves of one thick, and patterned in clusters, the other a distillate used for mezcal.

So it was that this supposed divine intervention was mixed up, and told in the wrong direction. The agaves knew serpents, and the apples did not. Yet in the case of both, they were alchemized, most particularly in their purest heirloom forms, into ciders and mezcals that tickled and tingled the palates of many, and made them forget what they had been so wrongfully accused of by the ones who made all those stories up.

And so it was that Adam’s Apple and Agave’s Eve met in a magical place of both, a garden ripe with both, where both flowered and fruited, a place called Mezcalifornia.

September 9, 2024 [16:16-17:17]

Things Heard In Whispers, by Robert Fuller

No one really knew. There were things happening. The walls were speaking. And they were real. Some of us spoke. We were all mute. We couldn’t be heard. But someone was murmuring. And what they said. They said in whispers. We heard it all. But couldn’t repeat it. Yet there it was. Right by our faces. We were decked out. With luscious lip content. Hair to die for. Gowns full of life. Shoes with spiked heels. Yet no one noticed. And then we arrived. Right on that stage. There in full view. And we were there. Some averted their eyes.

Clowns filled that stage. Life did as well. We breathed it in. Life gave us life. We danced with clowns. They danced with us. Flowers filled the air. We breathed it in. The clowns became flowers. Their petals fell off. We danced with them. They became clowns again. And then we wept. Their shoes fell off. And they became shoots. Sprouts of new life. And then we breathed. Breathed it all in. And they became flowers. Became flowers once again. Their masks became dust. Their garb became nothing. Their nothing became something. And became flowers again. Became like nothing else.

But flowers were clowns. And clowns were flowers. You can’t understand that. Until you are either. With your flappy shoes. Your petals of dust. Your pollen of understanding. Yes, that you must. You must become that. Must be that, Yes. You are that already. You are that Blessed. Drop your flappy shoes. Your petals, you must. Flower your clown face. With pollen and dust.

And someone whispered something. Which no one heard. But someone said something. Heard by a bird. What said the bird? That, no one heard. Later it became flowers. And flowers became clowns. And then we understood. What the bird heard. Whispered into the wind. And no one heard. But the wind whispered. Right into the bird.

How flowers became clowns. And birds became wind. And wind became wine. And wine became clowns. And birds nested there. And whispered their songs. Their eggs became wine. And nested in vine. Wind, waves, wings, song. Wind flowers were clowns. And they flew away. To the deep pool. And they touched it. Threw a pebble in. Birds scratched the surface. And flew away again. Flew back into flowers. Flowers back into clowns. Clown eggs became wine. Wine turned into wind.

And winds became fierce. Flocks of birds flew. And clocks circled madly. As you would too. No one was there. Yet I was, sadly. And clowns became ravens. And ravens became clocks. Flower petals blew away. And clowns became scarce. No one knew anything. Until I told them. Clowns, birds, and flowers. That’s what I said. And the clocks disappeared. Their eggs didn’t hatch. And so time disappeared. And so did we. The wind whispered this. But no one listened.

September 10, 2024 [01:01-02:04]

Decay and Regrowth, by Robert Fuller

You dream, maybe even in your dreams you burrow and tunnel your head through rich soil, wondering what is there, and you then wish to become one with it, whatever it is. And then it grabs you, you as you really are, and not as you might want to be. And you wake up, and your ordinary life continues as such, until the next dream. And you feel you are fainting each time this kind of thing, this sequence, comes back up again, and you each time feel the blood draining out of you more and more, until you are pale and tired and just want to dream, to sleep, to dream whatever it is that wants to dream you, as you are.

And the soil is rich and untroubled, and it is full and kind, and it is your own mother as she really was. And you sleep for what you think is the last time, after some number of finite human years that went by so quickly, and you find yourself deep in the soul of the soil, nothing but a root system, an inverted brain, and you find all your kith and kin there as just that, and what you are is quaking, it is telling you your own story, what you always were, and chemicals pass in many directions, giving signals of your underground and overground true self, through mysterious fungal passageways that no one in your new circle can truly understand.

Annabella, Elsinore, and Aurora were neighbors, and even Osiris himself was there in the general vicinity. And they all always spoke of how you, as you now were, should remain rooted here, right here. And, not knowing how you had arrived here, except that you had what was your last sleep, you listened to what they said, you took it seriously, and you reconnected with all those who had passed before you, and you delighted in what you and they really were, for thousands of years, many countless thousands.

You were roots, trunks, branches, stems, white bark, black eyes, and leaves, which fell off Pando the way leaves did, yet when you became any of these, you were always as you were, just being Pando. Leaves fell and decayed, just as in nature, and they fed the earth, its soul the soil, and other living things fed on that and the roots became stronger and the chemical signals under the living soil kept on the way they did, and you were whatever part of that living organism that you could be, and were, and continued as, and all of yours were there with you, sharing that same root system, and you lived and breathed much the same as you had last time around, but now you were in a different form, and you were rooted, and you slept yourself awake.

September 11, 2024 [18:18-19:00]

Epochal Loudspeakers Drenched In Lightning War, by Robert Fuller

Talons of an evil bird, inverted gull wing in fog. Shrieking vulture, battered city. A world swollen with refugees, pockets of resistance struggled grimly. Slaughtered civilians, bitter truth. Forces used woods to hide, tanks could not do everything. Old scores, churches afire. A thin frontier defense system, forces hopelessly inadequate and unprepared.

Sheep rounded up one by one, shown all over the world, battlefield to battlefield, had to be carefully concealed for another five years, thousands of prisoners and refugees on dirt trails, huge clouds of dust: a murderous pattern of stalemate that had bled the nations every day the sun came up.

A grand design, a warrior’s dream. A smoking, screaming mass; tanks made of cardboard. A desperate confusion, clerks digging trenches. Splendid horses; trumpets sounded: Like a history book. Miles of panic, much greater destructiveness. Armies split into fragments, like so many beasts. A great siren, full mobilization orders.

Party hacks who rubber-stamped terror from the skies. Obedient tools. Among picturesque houses, an assault in the darkness before dawn. A mystical faith that blood was to be shed. Few voiced doubts or asked questions. Secrecy and deception, a nightmare of bodies that had died in a nearby schoolhouse.

One man scurrying along a rainy street, apprehensively, into a city, to post a sign in a shop window, to buttress an ancient wall, in a single afternoon that never materialized. The weekend newspapers posted news in the cities at a café table in the early days of the holiday.

Strollers outside the city were bundled into buses, read the morning news.

September 12, 2024 [17:17-18:18]

Involuntary Intrigues, by Robert Fuller

It was the usual joint, the usual pair of eccentric characters, sitting somewhere in a dark corner in the back, chewing the fat, it may have been Williams and Murray, but you never knew, since these types of characters tended to be so interchangeable, each with all those pocketfuls of witty wisecracks that would get characters like themselves worked up in stitches, even if they never laughed, you could tell it in their eyes, each wanted to outdo the other, but they never could, because there was always some new wiseass remark that was even more tasteless and guffaw-inducing than the last equally tasteless one, which had by then already been long since forgotten, until the next time it was mercilessly recycled.

Let’s say for the sake of argument it was Williams and Murray, and that, for a change, which was known to have happened, they were actually talking about something more serious, which is why they were sitting sipping their drinks in that dark corner in the first place, keeping what they were going on about all hush-hush just so the other regulars wouldn’t get too nosy about matters which were none of their business in the first place, and which they wouldn’t, in any case, find the least bit interesting.

So perhaps it was Williams, the more elderly of the two by a considerable amount, who continued a thread from earlier chit-chats, who, sipping it was either a cold lager or a bloody Mary or some red wine, continued on with, “So, y’see, people keep parts of themselves hidden, everybody does that, and no one can be a totally open book in any case, there isn’t enough time for that, and even if there were, no one remembers everything that happened to them or that they at some point thought about, and...” He trailed off for a moment, and the other fellow, may have been Murray, just let him, and then he continued, “The web of even a single life, in all its complexities, is just way too complicated to be able to summarize in any way that makes any sense.”

So let’s say it was Murray, who had been listening intently, chewed on all of that for a moment while taking a swig of his, let’s say, double or triple IPA, and, after much thought asked the other fellow, “Is there something I should know that you haven’t been telling me?”

“No, it’s not like that, not like that at all. And, if you really think about it, most or all of us are hiding things even from ourselves. Or we’re just completely unaware of aspects of ourselves. We were talking, a few months back, about those wrens, those Bewick’s wrens—like the car—who hid their nest, their eggs, and their young, in that cubbyhole in your backyard, and kept flying back and forth to feed them. Protecting and nurturing their young. So then being hidden, in a case like that, doesn’t mean secretive, all cloak and dagger, it just means that they’re doing what’s necessary to raise their young so that they can teach them how to be in the world in those forms, those bodies, those spirits.”

Now the other fellow, may have been Murray, wrinkled his eyebrows, as if, and after another swig of his double or triple, and after being lost in thought for a minute, countered with, “Well, certainly, you don’t even for a minute suppose that people hide certain facets of their lives, either intentionally or not, just to add a touch of intrigue to what’s going on? What’s the fun in that?” And he couldn’t restrain himself, and burst into a small fit of laughter.

The other fellow, might have been Williams, couldn’t resist, and just had to respond, “Okay, so I haven’t been fully forthright with you? Is that what you said earlier? What about all the skeletons in your closet? When are you going to introduce us?” A quick double-take in the form of a mischievous grin and raised eyebrows, followed by a squawk of “But what’s the fun in that?”

Meanwhile, curious onlookers, of the regular type, had snuck back to that dark corner, and the whole place erupted in uproarious laughter, because they knew they all had things to hide, or didn’t know about themselves, and besides, it was Friday the 13th and there was nothing much on on the sports channels, and they were always curious about these quiet types.

So it may have been Murray, who wanted the last word, as usual, who started to say something but then raised his glass instead, in a silent toast, and glasses and bottles clicked all around them, as festive as could be. The usual random conversations started up through the fog of that dark corner, and it was only then that the until-then hidden camera man came out of the shadows, and the regulars, most of them, looked as if to bolt, but then Murray, if that’s who it was, said, “Welcome to our podcast! What’s taken you so long!?” And the regulars, for the most part, decided to be copacetic, a few of them even taking their regal bows.

September 13, 2024 [13:13-14:14]

First Flash of a Victory Parade, by Robert Fuller

Prisoners await a grilling by security officers. Their homes in the central part of the country had been annexed, and their jobs sent to a community center in a railroad station, without a trial. Anyone judged to wait nervously, to be intellectually undesirable, hiding anything, was executed on the spot.

In a railway car, two officers had run out of supplies, and capitulated to civilians entombed in coffins in the rubble of a road, next to beds, shells of buildings in a bombed-out, littered street in a working-class neighborhood. One citizen recalled there were fires every day, houses hit virtually nonstop.

In the finest residential district, one starving pedestrian looks through a horse, nothing whatever to eat; others casually ignore a scene common in the ultimate days of the battle; smoke rises from gasworks, trenches, and shelters, and hastily dug graves sowed with incendiaries, killed horses, round-the-clock raids, children digging trenches, a polonaise replaced with a funeral dirge, civilians who dashed into narrow streets and scenes of carnage, burning rags under vehicles, playgrounds stopped dead in agony in a village. Motorcycles roll past a farm wagon, filing across a river, moving too slowly during an infantry assault. A soldier cocks his arm to throw a hand grenade.

Their power seemed awesome, no end of a wonderful feeling, sore feet shot to pieces, unable to wash. Dive bombers skim the trees in a bloody firefight through villages, terrifying the young, each man knifed through the gas mask in a battle they thought would last only days. The din, echoed from a sky filled with planes designed to be as light as possible, was formidable. A load of equipment, the lexicon of battle, excitedly scrawled in a diary. Thousands of tanks looked on, astonished.

Infantrymen symbolically break a barricade, the invasion, the border.

September 14, 2024 [18:18-19:19]

The Etymology of Desire, by Robert Fuller

From the stars, awaiting, that is, what they would bring, in the way of heart, soul, spirit, Alma was helping her friend with some research in word origins and in general, where she, or anyone else came from. She wished to obtain a key of sorts as to how the puzzle pieces fit together through time and space, and so did her friend. They both reasoned that, as with personal relationships, in which it was important to know where a person had been, where they were at now, and where they were going, the same was true of words, if you really wanted them to be your friends. So they both liked to dig deeply into these matters, but for now, her friend was preoccupied with other things, and so she had asked Alma to do the bulk of the current research for now.

There was one central word that Alma was to research—although the research might very well lead to other related topics—and that word was “desire”. Often the two of them would research the origins of much less commonly used words, and for good reason, but they had both discovered through the years that words you thought you knew very well came from places you wouldn’t have imagined, and that often the unearthing of the backstory of certain words would bring them into a completely different light.

So, as Alma dug into this one word, she of course had to notice the prefix “de-”, which in quite a few languages meant “from”. And in Latin, the rest of the word “desire” after the prefix referred to “heavenly body, star, constellation”, so she went out into the night air and imagined herself as something like that, and then she noticed the cypress next to the lonely dirt road, with a single, lonely star shining as brightly as could be, and she almost didn’t even notice two people walking toward her, who maybe just were friends, or they may have even been holding hands.

And then, as she began to remember what her friend had told her months ago, that she had stepped into a night sky that quickly became a magical canvas, something started to happen to her, and her vision blurred, became as if brush strokes, and she felt that the entire night sky was now a painting, and that she herself was painting it, and that it wasn’t yet finished. And then she slowly swirled around and saw the rest of the landscape materialize as she painted it, from deep memory, and there were more and more heavenly bodies, and stars, and she could even begin to make out a few constellations, and even a steeple and some houses, and as she painted them, she swirled and began to dance madly, with full abandon, and she heard music unlike any she had ever heard, and the fragrances and tastes and touches of her painting threw her completely off guard, and she began to feel lost in it, and wondered what her friend would think of this, if she were to ever know of it.

And then, after she swooned over her creation for a while, she began to notice that she was in a different time, a different place, and even her clothes had changed. And she strolled through cobblestone streets she didn’t know she had remembered, past couples and many a café, and she even found her way to some gardens, past tombs and mausoleums, and then to a lion’s gate, and she felt mistral winds, and lavender, and olives, and truffles, and wine all around her, with the winds carrying her as if she had wings, to waves and song. And she didn’t know quite what to do, but it was there, at water’s edge, that she all of a sudden saw her friend, but didn’t recognize her at first.

Through all of this, she had never really stopped painting, and she began to add touches of olive and truffle and lavender and wine colors, all brushed in brush and knife strokes of wind, and the night became starrier and starrier the more she did this, yet she had no idea how she did any of this or what it really meant. So she sat down to gather her thoughts, right at the water’s edge, and then noticed that her friend was really there, right in her own painting, and then she finally understood.

September 15, 2024 [18:18-19:19]

A Season That Needed No Chilling, by Robert Fuller

Christmas Champagne on the quiet Western Front, a glass of the coldest, near a woodshed, in an orchard: relaxed, a machine gun propped at his side, a sentry sits out his routine peacetime shift with newly recruited cooks on sentry duty. A peasant takes his daily constitutional as leaflets tied to balloons are prepared, about unfaithful sweethearts; in the spirit of the message, even the toughest straying wives refrained from the most passionate broadcasts of music and propaganda, popular favorites, a super-patriotic dream of oompahs, more entertaining to a jolly neighbor than the image of a soldier only a hundred yards away.

Mandolin-playing buddies, self-conscious and cheerful, gave the impression that the quick collapse of windows papered for blackout were escort offers to fetch the old man’s dinner in the dark, safely to her front door. A welcome paradox, with early morning walks, a deluge of words, rabbits raised in severe winter weather, stubble-faced troops being asked to die, afraid of molesters, coping with a propaganda campaign, the conquest of a platoon of turkeys with bayonets in anticipation of dinner, of Christmas.

A barnyard gate frolic, advancing in the wrong direction, even revised plans inadequate, received at dinner before the worst of winter set in, stepping up the hysteria, in a snowy courtyard: a last will-o-the-wisp scheme discussed in fashionable restaurants. “Oysters, lobsters, chicken, pâté de foie gras, pheasant, cheese and fruit, coffee, liqueurs, etc.” A bizarre mixture of excitement in a setting which recalled a convent and foreboding and the paradox of a heavy lunch of boredom upon the troops, divided and dispirited, a twilight war, with a skeleton crew, all those casualties prepared to pass a quiet winter holding back the truth, fighting ennui deep underground, their most deadly enemy boredom.

Bad weather, the perfect symbol of the mood, pushed by the strong wind, covered with frost, the devil was eating his heart out, horrid visions of arriving late.

September 16, 2024 [17:17-18:18]

Who’s Gonna Find Out What’s Happening?, by Robert Fuller

I’d been thinking much too much again, apparently, and I was increasingly perplexed about virtually everything, but the thing that really got me was the thought—no, the actuality, the reality—that I didn’t remember being anyone or anything before I was me, and whatever I was would not remember having been me after I was no longer me. So in the much larger picture, you see, I was naught but a cipher; “I” didn’t know what, or even if, I was before I was, and after I was, there was no “I” to know or remember what the other “I” was, and no one would know if what I was when I was would in any sense persist after I no longer was.

So a matter of this depth, of this urgency, you see, in my mind required an emergency gathering of the rest of my intimate circle, the people who, like myself, sometimes or often or always thought too much about matters such as this. My contact list had a dozen others who found themselves in a similar predicament, so I immediately called for a conference call with all of them, and, thanks be to whatever higher power, they were all available within the hour.

We never referred to each other by name, each of us having understood that names, as with anything else, including our very bodily forms and life circumstances, were, or may as well have been, completely arbitrary. Why do I look like I do, live where I do, do what I do? And what does any of it really mean? Many just take such things for granted, but those of us in the Baker’s Dozen were never wired that way, and so it was an impossibility for any of us to simply accept the way things were as if that was actually the way things were. We had to dig deeper.

Once everyone had joined the conference call—and we had had a few others like this one in the past—we jumped right in and got to business. Now, we were running about ten minutes late, because a couple of the folks, who I can’t mention by name, were detained by unforeseen circumstances, which are of no importance. Now, for some reason, the screen layout, for everyone in the call, was set up such that I was in the center of the screen, and everyone else was arrayed around me, in a kind of rectangular circle.

It was probably just a quirk of the software we were using—probably even the programmers themselves don’t even know how such details are decided, in any given case—but we all did find it kind of odd. I, for one, had no real desire to be the man in the middle, as if I was somehow some kind of focal point for the meeting. Yes, it’s true, I was the one who had called this particular meeting, and I was also the initiator of the first meeting, but that was just because once we all understood what was at stake, someone had to do it.

And I had absolutely no desire to be followed by my peers—who, like me, had a tendency to think too much about matters that were generally of no concern to hardly anyone else—like some kind of guru or leader who was in some sense “in charge” or “in the know”. No, we were all just here asking and addressing questions that were important to all of us, not necessarily trying to find answers, but merely airing those questions so that we could all contemplate them, and maybe come to some better understanding of this: What is going on here!? What is all of this that is happening? The beings, events, experiences, and so forth that appear, ephemerally, and just as quickly disappear, as if they had never been. We all wanted answers, but all we got was questions.

In actuality, the main thing we all struggled with was trying to find the right questions. The central issue, it seems to me, that kept coming up was the notion that there was some kind of mysterious force that was somehow making all of this stuff happen—or at least was able to create the illusion of all of this stuff that was apparently happening.

I brought the group back, every now and then, to the matters I mentioned earlier: I didn’t remember being anyone or anything before I was me, and when I was no longer me, there would most likely be nothing, no one, who would have any memory of the “I” that I once was and then no longer was. But was that actually the case? And was there any way that whatever it was, whatever it is, manifesting all of this machinery of arbitrary and sometimes patterned and sometimes chaotic complexity, could somehow signal to us, we who were bewildered and perplexed, what any of this was about!?

So I sat in the center of the screen, embarrassingly enough, surrounded by my fellow travelers in these central questions of life, and then I started to hear voices that made no sense; none of them sounded anything at all like those of my twelve friends gathered around me. And every one of the voices I heard were metallic sounding, as if through one of those cheap and ancient phone devices that hung on the walls of our ancestors in the ancient past. They were modulated in strange, tinny ways, like a badly-tuned shortwave radio, so I was only able to hear half, if that, of what these voices were saying.

There were crackles and squeals, and an occasional intelligible word or two every now and then, but I wrote down every bit that I could understand on napkins, using shorthand whenever they spoke too fast, and then, when I ran out of napkins, I quickly got a roll or two of two-ply toilet paper, and took down what was said in scroll-like fashion, while everyone else in the meeting looked on with great perplexity and consternation.

We ran out of our allotted time soon enough, but before we did, I assured all the others that they would soon receive the answers.

I had a few tablets, scrolls, and parchments printed up, and when they were ready, everyone on the list received their new way of seeing things, their new set of answers. We started a new cult.

September 17, 2024 [17:17-18:18]

Iron Hands on a Snowy Forest, by Robert Fuller

Children spent days camping out in the woods along a road littered with cattle and horse-drawn sleighs. Soldiers rest on wooden stretchers in a cabin, after being struck by bombs, wounded. Russian infantrymen sat immobile in their foxhole, their frostbitten hands treated by a nurse. Winter-weary comrades keep up with staff duties in the camouflaged entrance to a bunker, next to the potato masher. A clerk catches a smoke in the foreground, his arms still raised near burning buildings, with ungloved hands in deep-drifted snow, paralyzed by the bare metal of weather turned to ice, dead wrong about the arctic cold, in a forest north of winter.

He went to dream of lion hunting, never let go of his enemy’s throat, delivering a death blow to his enemies, with devastating effect, the conquest of the entire country, five days before the phantom pulled boldly into seaports, the city itself, at dusk, followed by a puppet slipping through the darkness toward the ancient fortress, a warehouse full of a writing desk, lamps, a carpet, household belongings, gold, ads in a paper, some semblance of a struggle; escorts slipped by in a fog, still rubbing their eyes an hour before dawn, fog and storms on both sides.

On a hillside, rescuers broke down doors, eager to set up a base, wishful thinking, in a temporary castle, in sad solitude strewn with half-frozen corpses tortured in new-fallen snow.

Papers were shuffled in winter ice, to chase wild geese in the far north.

September 18, 2024 [17:17-18:18]

A Man on the Verge Of, by Robert Fuller

He didn’t know. What hit him. Not at first. Could’ve been anything. Might’ve been insanity. Everyone was insane. But he wasn’t. He knew that. How’d he know? Someone told him. He got hit. Everything went black. He woke up. Everything had changed. Someone told him. Not at first. Then he knew. It was them. Nobody he knew. Everyone was insane. He knew that. Not at first. Then they talked. Nobody else heard. And he listened. To every word. Someone told him. What to say. What to write. He wrote it. As if truth. Everyone believed it. Except he himself. He didn’t know. What hit him. What to say.

There was a general assembly of the faithful that was called up that fateful day in order to reconsider what their elder had said or written back in those pioneer days. A gavel struck the plinth of podium ominously as if death itself had warmed over. The meeting was dutifully convened to the delight of all with the exception of a recalcitrant few who stayed on the sidelines so as to not be noticed by those who were true believers. There were oohs and aahs from most parts of the room and the service commenced.

The pastor spoke. His sheep listened. Some fell asleep. And some glistened. The choir sang. Some faithful wept. Most sang along. Yet agnostics slept. The pastor’s words. Sheared his sheep. Most stayed awake. In deepest sleep. He woke them. With thunderous voice. Said unto them. Make your choice. The pews emptied. He then relented. Said come back. No one repented. Hymnals were opened. The organ played. Someone sang something. Yet nobody stayed. Candles were lit. Prayers were said. Yet nobody listened. Something was dead. Plates were passed. Through the pews. No money there. Not really news. Pastor got angry. Said something rash. Nobody was there. Everything was ash.

The general assembly was silently dismantled. The pastor wept unconsolably over his sacred scripture. And then it began to dawn on him. He was not that book and that book was not him and had no hold over him. He was not even a pastor. And what was a pastor? One who tended a flock of sheep. Who were his sheep? And why were they his? They really weren’t his at all. What really was sacred or scripture? He looked these up. Sacred could be “accursed”. And scripture just meant “writings”.

So he wept. Couldn’t stop weeping. Called his shrink. Who recommended sleeping. Then he slept. Just to forget. Drank an espresso. Ate a baguette. Then he awoke. From vivid dreams. Voices told him. That nothing seems. As it is. Or might be. But you are. So just be. He awoke again. Saw nothing there. Went back asleep. Lost his hair.

The insanity that hit him hit him most profoundly was when he finally realized that the whole damn thing was only a dream. And it was only then that he met his true pillow. He slept soundly and soundly and soundly...

September 19, 2024 [17:17-18:18]

The Brilliant Exiles Who Found Freedom, by Robert Fuller

A New York group show brought together painters and sculptors who managed to keep out of political trouble, including anonymous threatening letters, increased hostility, and efforts to suppress avant-garde styles of art after the first flight of free-thinking artists, of socio-political satire of fat, bloodthirsty middle-class militarists wearing government-approved realism in the tranquility of the bathtub of a maverick surrealist painter, a powerful influence on the design of modernists, a musical absurdity of cultural bias not yet annexed by dangerously radical artists: income tax evasion of composers and conductors, refugee scientists in theoretical physics, in protest of racist policies moving to power by sheeplike conformity.

Vilified as a genius and in danger so great, for his pioneering work, which he took philosophically, he was exiled with other scientists and scholars.

A novelist declared in confusion there were mistakes in Mein Kampf while aiming a tank gun at a jobless writer posing for abandoned manuscripts hidden by a friend, a best seller for seven weeks, shipped in trunks across southern California, copies of the book publicly burned in front of novelists and playwrights en route to New York. Already known for his film “I collect the tree and he shakes the apples”, Sigmund Freud left Austria and fled to Britain.

The result was incalculable. They wanted to preserve modern psychoanalysis, gifted artists, nonconformists, in surroundings not stained by war, finding refuge in musicians, writers, scientists, and scholars of every stamp, in danger of bullyboy street-fighters and rightist regimes—the annihilation of science, a drain of brain and talent; lives, livelihood, and property.

Rejected or forbidden in totalitarian countries, perceptive people, talented people, thousands more, stand at the rail of the ship.

September 20, 2024 [17:17-18:18]

The Tale of the Coiffure Specialists, by Robert Fuller

A New York show had it all, with doos like you’ve never seen. You would never believe the feathers they wore, garish like none you’ve ever witnessed. Some were mud, some were reminiscent of a summer’s day spent elsewhere, and there were those that reeked of a lightning strike gone bad, and they looked like that, too. Yes, this was the second annual run of what was now known as CoiffureCon. And it was a doozy, it was many doos in one, one more garish than you thought the last one could’ve been. So we got a group of investigative journalists together to suss out how all this crazy misplaced hair could have happened, and why we should even care about it.

Early on, the team interviewed a certain Tommy Socket, who had this thing for a kind of primal look, where the unfortunate recipient of the hair job would end up looking like an explosion about to happen. Tommy said it was the latest rage, and he swore by it, saying that when he was out clubbing, the celebs rubbed elbows with him and wanted nothing more than to have their handlers set up an appointment so that he, Tommy, could doctor their hair. Yet when we on the team surreptitiously eyeballed his calendar, it was almost entirely empty, save for an old lady who didn’t quite have all her marbles and thought that she should start looking “mod”.

Then there were all those fancy dyes that were the rage of the day. They came in all sorts of colors, some of which would turn your stomach, and some which would even if you didn’t think they would, like puce, mauve, salamander green, cinnabar, or blood red, or even piss yellow. The intent, at least as seen in certain academic circles, was to create confusion, even outrage, among certain parts of society, as a direct visual insult to ordinary citizens.

But for those who sported such coiffures, these were really nothing more than fashion statements of a sort, nothing to be ridiculed or overly discussed, but merely to be admired for what they were, which was the honest artistic bent of those specialists of the coiffure who were so openly displaying their art and craft in public, courtesy of the willing volunteers who so selflessly volunteered to sport this unparalleled artwork. And it was not easy for these pioneers, many of whom had so selflessly contributed their pates in order to further the genius of numerous coiffure artists of various descriptions.

Tommy Socket had collaborated with Rainbow Rocket and several other coiffure specialists, in this one case, such that their subject, without knowing it, ended up with hair that extended far beyond her skull, and went in so many different directions and colors and mathematical designs that you couldn’t tell which way was up, or which color was which, or where the hair ended and the head began. And this was their magnum opus, to be newly unveiled, so to speak, at this year’s CoiffureCon.

Tommy Socket and Rainbow Rocket and all their other pals, they waited with much anticipation while their model was being given the final tuning and primping before the catwalk. The announcement was made that Cherry was to walk out momentarily. The team of artists all held their collective breaths. She was seen to begin her walk, set to appropriately seductive music, and she made a few faltering steps, and then she tumbled into the audience while the lights lit up her headdress so blindingly that for a moment no one could see. And her head, it was so heavy that she couldn’t bear it any longer.

Almost everyone in the audience gasped, except for the artists themselves. They knew what they had created.