I hate lies, and I hate just about everything that doesn’t hate lies. We live our lives enmired in lies — in hoke, in smoke, in hints and allusions and innuendoes, in juice and hustle and jive — and it is entirely too easy to become one of the liars, de facto, without really intending to. My post on linking is one of the best things I wrote this year, and it’s apposite to the discussion I’ve been carrying out all week:

People are so used to marketing trickery that they expect it everywhere. The challenge for anyone seeking to change minds in the Web 2.0 world is to take away that expectation. Transparency doesn’t mean I am obliged to disclose to you the color of my underwear. Transparency means that if there is any possibility that you could entertain the smallest doubt that I am effecting some kind of sleight of hand to trick you into doing something you otherwise would not do, I have to give you the means of eradicating that doubt to your own satisfaction.

On Christmas, because of the latest episode of puerile posturing, I said to Teri, “I believe in Christmas. I won’t let it lie to me.” Later it came out as, “I believe in humanity. I won’t let it lie to me.” And the final form, I think, is, “I believe in life. I won’t let it lie to me.” That’s the architecture of this year’s Christmas story. Now all I need is the story.

I smile to myself at all the ways my life has conspired to put me where I am right now: A philosophically-adept obsessive writer, enraptured by the most beautiful and rigorous kind of ethics, with a background in high-volume, high-tech publishing problems, who works as a real estate broker and who spends much of his time thinking about the marketing of everything. Where would I be, by now, but here? It’s funny for me to watch people try to whimper-whip or brow-beat me into echoing their lies — after I’ve told them every way I can think of that I would rather die than take a position I don’t hold down to my last atom — but that’s just part of the same thing.

On top of everything else my life has taught me, I end up knowing everything there is to know about how people get sucked and suckered into being yet another one of the life-liars, without ever really intending for that to happen.

In that respect, I am the best friend you could ever hope for, if you’re paying attention. I live my life as a challenge, deliberately, but most of us don’t want that kind of conflict in our lives. I don’t like it, but I also don’t hate it — and I rebel against any implication that, by my silence, I am accepting or going along with the lies. Much of what I do here consists of pointing out how to avoid becoming entangled in error — willful, intentional, self-destructive error. Certainly this post is of a piece with that objective.

Every bit of this is easy for me. I’ve been training for this job for thirty years. The hard job is yours: You have to renounce that world of cloying, addicting lies. In the world of lies, all you have to do is “play ball” — all you have to do is go along to get along — and, just like that, everything is yours — buddies, laughs, trinkets. You won’t like much of what you hear here, but that’s no surprise. No one wants to have his corruption called to mind, again and again, so you have to shut your mind to the voices you can’t shout down.

This strikes me as being a very poor choice in every possible respect. I can’t think of anything that can be gained in exchange for giving up your sovereignty that could be worth it. We talk about “selling your soul” to gain eternal life or vast riches or unequaled artistic talent. But what really happens is that people renounce their own minds and run in herds for nothing — for the false security of not having to stand alone. And then, when the herd turns on them, they have nowhere at all to turn.

The world I live in is not easier than that one, but it’s better. You may not have any buddies, but you will have the opportunity to make true friends — people who will not lie to you, for you or about you. You won’t share in the herd’s tittering xenophobia, but the absurdity of unminded human beings is comedy enough for anyone. As for the trinkets — how does it profit a man to gain the whole world if he loses his own soul?

It’s not kind of me to express things this baldly. I believe I am just, but, because I am just, I know that softening the truth is just another kind of lie. There is no benefit to either of us in my trying to make things easy for you.

But do consider this: You are all alone. I can’t see you right now, nor can anyone else. I am a master of this medium because I understood all of this, perfectly, thirty years ago. I can muck around inside your mind like this, and you’ll let me, because you are alone, because I can’t see you — can’t see what you shrink from and can’t see what you long to embrace.

That’s a comfortable way to take on difficult ideas, actually, since there is no way anyone outside your mind can hold you accountable for a commitment — unless you make it manifest. But at least in potential, that is the lie that precedes all the others. Every single one of us wants to live as a hero, holding firm — proudly, defiantly — against every possible form of domination. And yet so many of us cave and cave and cave to the most pitiful of demands.

What accounts for the difference between the life you imagine and the life you actually lead? I think it’s whether or not you have made your commitment to human sovereignty manifest — given it an existence apart from your imagination. It’s a simple enough thing to say, out loud, “I won’t back down.” But until you actually do say it, you will back down, again and again.

I hate the lies, I hate the herds, I hate the mobs. I feel shame for the way people behave when they’re running in mobs. But I love you more than you can ever imagine the way you are right now — with your mind open to me, even if only in secret and in solitude.

I conceal nothing, and so I have never hidden the fact that I am a subversive. Why am I doing this, why am I talking to you like this on New Year’s Eve? The answer is, “So you’ll remember.”

Again and again you see people trying to shut me up or shout me down, trying to smear or insult or browbeat me into telling their particular flavor of lies. And again and again you see them getting nowhere. There is nothing that I’m doing that you cannot do just as easily. All you have to do is say “No” — and mean it — and other people can have no power over you.

Tomorrow is the first day of 2009, and I want to be in your head all year long. Every time someone tries to maneuver you into doing something you know is wrong, I want you to think of this post. Every time people try to court or cajole or bribe you into telling a lie, I want you right back here. Every time that you feel that you’ve stained your soul, I want you to remember this night. And every time you stand firm for what you know is right, no matter what pressure is brought against you, I want you to think of this moment.

You can’t shut me up and you can’t shout me down. But if you have the guts to pay attention to me, I can show you how to live the life you have always loved so much in your imagination.

I wish you health, wealth, happiness — and the most scrupulous kind of honesty — for the New Year!

Courtney at the speed of life

A Ramblin’ Gamblin’ Willie story

“Lord-a-mercy!” I said in my thickest southern drawl. “Somebody tell god to take the rest of the week off. He has made perfection, and there ain’t no topping that!”

The beautiful blonde woman scowled and blushed at the same time. It made her look seventeen again.

“Where is you charming husband? I can’t believe he’d ever dare to leave your side.”

She shook her head gravely, and maybe that was my cue to lay off. Or maybe not…

“Well, tell me what you boyfriend looks like, then. So I’ll know who to run from.”

She chuckled. “No boyfriend.”

“Well, then, the next man that asks, you tell him I’m sprouting gray hairs in patches and I carry a little paunch. I’m half-a-step slower than I never was. I’m ugly as sin, and I stink something awful toward the end of the day. You tell him that’s my description.”

She drew a finger across her eyebrow, the hair so fine it was almost white. Her eyes were blue and deeper than a quarry lake, alive with the light of mischief. “Am I to take that as an offer?”

I nodded gravely. “What fool could pass on perfection?”

She smiled a wistful little half-smile. A woman with a secret, a woman with a story to tell. “I think it was you…”

I wanted to stay and talk but somebody pulled me away. It was a New Year’s Eve party at my sister’s house. I was the guest of honor, the prodigal son returned, and I hadn’t seen some of the revelers for twenty years. I kept getting bounced around the room, passed like the torch of sobriety from one drunk to the next. But my eyes always sought her out, sought her supple perfection amidst all that was chaotic and deformed. She moved like liquid glass, like a cat, like a leopard. Her hands preceded her always, and she caressed everything with long, slender fingers. It was as though she had the power of vision in her fingertips, and she saw more than you or I will ever see with mere eyes.

She moved, and she graced the universe with her touch, with her glance. She made me hungry, hungry in a way I haven’t known in more years that I care to think about, hungry for things I walked away from a lifetime ago…

And then she was gone.

I jerked my head around stupidly, peering into every corner, but I knew she was gone. I was surprised at the loss I felt, and I thought about just letting it drop. But then I grabbed my coat off a bed and busted out into the freezing night.

I hollered up the icy hill, “I’m following you, pretty lady! I ain’t gonna let you get away!” I couldn’t see her, but I knew where she was. I always knew where to find her…

I never chased her up that hill, and I never chased her down it. But for three nights in a row, a lifetime ago, she stood with me all the way down at the bottom of that hill. All the way down at the river. Tossing pebbles into the water. Weeping with me for my dead.

It was the Summer I discovered sadness. It was the Summer when everything changed. It was the moment of glowing perfection just before the dawning, when all of life is a stark silhouette, a black mystery against a golden aura in the instant before the sun ruins everything by making it obvious and banal. It was the Summer I left home.

Of course, no one ever really leaves home. We just walk away, coming back less and less often. And every time we come back, there’s less and less of the indiminishable everything we thought must always be there. Relatives die off one by one. Old friends move away. Schools and houses and buildings are abandoned, cackling through broken-toothed windows as we mourn them. Until one day, one very sad day, there’s nothing left at all, nothing but the memories we carry with us indiminishably, inextinguishably. Life begins but it never ends, and at the speed of life events have sequence but no duration, no expiration.

It was the Summer I discovered sadness. It was the Summer my grandfather died.

I had already left home once. Not for keeps, but I didn’t know that. I thought I was gone for good. I thought I was the top rider in a one-man rodeo, couldn’t nobody stop me ’cause nobody’d dare to try. I was nine parts foolish vanity and the tenth part groundless pride, but it was a fine and perfect pride. I taught haughty to flamenco dancers on the side, and they paid me in silver dinares. I pretty much figured I wouldn’t bother to go back home until I could return suitably laureled, hailed by herald trumpets.

In fact, I was living in a building too far gone to qualify as a tenement, but I was too stupid — and too proud — to be miserable. And then I got the word that my grandfather had died and I had to abandon all my worldly possessions — about twenty-nine dollar’s worth, net — and scurry back home to see him waked and buried.

I hadn’t known. I was the working prototype of a young idiot, and I hadn’t really known — in my guts, in my bones — that people could die. You read about it, you hear about it, you see it a dozen times a day on TV. But until death comes to someone you know, someone you love, someone you never doubted would always be there… I was numb and useless that first day of the wake. Couldn’t do anything, couldn’t even cry.

She was there at our house that night, there for my sister. Courtney Lancaster, the little girl on the hill. She was my sister’s age, a year-and-a-half older than me, and she’d always been around the house. Silky blonde hair in french braids, wrapped up around her head like the girl on the Swiss Miss box. In khaki shorts with cargo pockets and starched white blouses. And later in painter’s pants and denim work shirts with tiny mother-of-pearl snaps instead of buttons. In parkas and pea coats and watch caps and miner’s boots. In sandals and Summer suits and big floppy white hats. Her skin would tan to a golden brown in the Summer and the fine white hairs on her legs were never touched by a razor and I never thought a thing about it. Of all my sister’s friends, she was the one who seemed least like a girl. And therefore, by my standards at the time, most like a human being.

But now she was all woman. Her dad was a consulting engineer and she had spent a year in Europe with him. Knowing what I know now, I would have understood immediately that there was a man behind the metamorphosis. But at the time, I was stunned, even outraged. She was wearing camel’s hair slacks and a creamy white silk blouse, very fluid. Her hair was brushed and brushed and brushed until it seemed to glow with a light of its own. She wore no make-up, no jewelry, nothing to hide or cheat or disguise, nothing to detract or diminish or disfigure. I could hardly bear to look at her; I kept having to look away. It wasn’t lust, it was simply radiance. She was too blindingly beautiful to be looked at for long.

After dinner, she started flipping through my records and asking me questions about them. It surprised me, sort of, because I hadn’t known until then that it could be possible for a woman to be both beautiful and serious. The old Courtney-in-khakis could be serious, but Courtney-in-camel’s-hair? My sister was a little put out, too, even though I wasn’t doing anything — not then, anyway — to swipe her friend.

She spun up Dylan’s “Blood on the Tracks”, easily the best album since “Blonde on Blonde”. She stopped at “Simple Twist of Fate” and played it over and over again, and I thought my sister was going to tear out her hair. For my own part, I was charmed by her attentions, but I had other things I wanted to do.

I had my mom’s car keys and I spun ‘em on my finger. I said, “I’m going out for a while. You wanna come?” I didn’t know why I invited her, and I didn’t know why I was so delighted when she nodded and said she’d come along.

I knew of a liquor store where the clerk was drunk every night after eight o’clock or so. Never carded anyone, and couldn’t read the numbers even if he had. I scored us a quart of beer and drove her all the way down into the heart of the bottom. At the bottom of the hill there’s a little park platted out in the flood plain of the river. It’s good flat land and it makes a fine softball field come April, when it finally dries up. In the late Summer it’s dry as dust and the river’s hardly deep enough to soak your shoes. It’s dark and quiet and there was never anybody down there at night, nobody but me.

That first night we didn’t talk all that much, just nursed the beer and kicked some rocks around. I wanted to talk about my grandpa, but I kept choking up and I didn’t want to cry in front of her. I knew she had something she wanted to tell me about, too, but she was having troubles of her own. But we managed to find serenity in the comfort of an easy silence in the quiet of the night — crickets chirping, the river burbling, and, far off, the high white whine of the highway.

I dropped her off at her folks’ house, the fieldstone ranch house at the top of the hill. Without looking up from the steering wheel, I said, “Thank you, Courtney.”

“For what?”

I blew a puff of air at my nose. “I don’t know. Thanks for coming to the wake, thanks for being there for the family, all that stuff. But that’s not what I mean.” I took my time thinking and she let me. “What I want to thank you for is not posing. Does that make sense?”

She laughed. “Not a bit.”

“You’re not a pose, you’re not an act, you’re not a show. You’re just who you are all the time, so I don’t have to try to figure out who you want me to be. I can just be myself. All the time. I always liked you, but until tonight I didn’t know why. You’re whole enough to be quiet…”

“Maybe,” she said with the light of mischief in her eyes. “Or maybe I’m just empty. Nothing to say, and the good sense to say nothing.” She laughed, and she was beautiful in her laughter and she knew it.

She ate with us again the next night and she went out with me again. This time I didn’t even bother about the beer, I just drove straight to the river. We sat cross-legged on top of a picnic table, facing each other, bouncing a tennis ball back and forth between us. I was able to look at her, partly because I was more comfortable with her, and partly because it was so dark she could hardly blind me with her beauty. We sat there for most of the night, telling lies, telling jokes, telling the brutal truth in raucously funny ways. I can’t remember a single thing we said that night, but I’ll always remember it as the happiest night of my life. I can find my peace in solitude, in a cave or a canyon or just on a lonesome old road. But that was the one night of my life when I found a perfect peace in the company of another human being. My gift, my treasure, from Courtney Lancaster.

On the third day we buried my grandfather. Seventy-four years in the same one parish, and the monsignor himself said the words. Afterward there was a big blow-out at the house, a 16-gallon keg and a fat guy in a red satin vest with an accordion. Everybody who’d cried for my grandpa for three days wanted a chance to cheer, to lift a cup from sadness and raise it up to joy. To praise my grandfather for his virtues, and to praise those virtues of his that live on in those who loved him. And if you need to clear a knot of grief from your throat, a good way to do it is to make some noise.

We stayed for a while, but not too long. She left with me and I knew she would. I expect you can guess where we went.

It was a somber night at the river. The sky was shrouded in clouds and the air was sticky and close. I stood by the water and listened for the whine of the highway and I could hear her rustling behind me. I couldn’t bear to look at her, and I didn’t know why. That was when she told me about her man, the man behind the metamorphosis, the man she’d met in Europe. The way she described him he sounded much older, but we were so young that everyone seemed much older to me. She was flying back to join him the next day, a sort of trans-Atlantic elopement. Her parents were fit to be tied, but what could they do?

I had plans of my own, and I laid them out for her, still not daring to turn to look at her. After a while I tried to talk about my grandpa, about all the things we’d done together over the years. But my voice was rent by sobbing and I knew she couldn’t understand me. After a while I couldn’t understand myself, and I just stood there weeping, grieving for a man I’d never learned to love until it was too late.

I could feel her right behind me, could feel her breath behind my ear. I knew if I turned she’d hold me, and I could bury my grief within her. And I knew if she reached for me, I’d turn. But she didn’t reach and I didn’t turn. And after a minute or an hour or an eternity, I crouched down and grabbed a handful of pebbles. I started tossing them, one-by-one, into the water. In a moment I felt her move away.

A long time later she said, “I need to get going.”

I tossed her the car keys. “Take the car to my mom. Someone’ll give you a lift up the hill.”

“I can walk up.”

I nodded. “Or you can walk up.”

“What about you? What are you going to do?”

I smiled at her and the clouds parted and a glimmer of moonlight lit her radiance and blinded me everlastingly. “I’m going to miss you every day, Courtney Lancaster. I’m going to miss you every day from now until forever.”

She started to say something but I shook my head. I pressed a finger to my lips. “Walk away,” I said. “Walk away and don’t look back.”

She leaned over and brushed my cheek with her lips and as she pulled away I felt the downy fine hairs on her cheek and I caught the scent of her. No fragrance, just the essence of heaven itself.

And then she was gone.

I stood there tossing pebbles into the water until the dawn broke over the treetops. Then I walked along the bank of the river until I came to the highway bridge. I scrambled up the embankment and I started walking down that lonesome old road. And I never looked back…

She was waiting for me when I got to the top of the hill on that icy New Year’s Eve. The house was bigger than I remembered it, bigger and more imposing. It sat on four or five acres, surrounded by a split-rail fence. There were no stables or corrals, but everything about it said equestrian. There was a covered walk-through between the house and the garage and behind it was a huge fieldstone patio. Her dad had built a big brick barbecue and faced that in fieldstone as well. That was where I found her, sitting by that barbecue. She had built a fire and the heat of it kept the cold at bay. The flickering light chased the years away from her face and she looked to me like the little girl, the full-grown woman, who had blinded me in the moonlight twenty years before.

She smiled at me as I stood before her and I was blinded yet again. She said, “I’m glad you followed me.”

“You knew I would.”

She bit her lower lip. “I hoped you would.”

It was my turn to smile. I said, “I hate to be lied to, and you always tell the truth. Even when it’s the hardest. That’s what I’ve always loved about you.”

Maybe the word shocked her, I don’t know. I went on before she could stop me. “I have always loved you, Courtney. Every day, just like I promised.” I smiled a tight little smile, but the truth is there was a wetness in my eyes and a burning spot in my throat. “I loved you every day, and I never once let you know. You and my grandpa, I thought about you both every day. I wanted the two of you to be proud of me, and I wanted for you never to be ashamed of me. Everything I’ve ever done, I wanted to live up to you, to you and my grandfather. Doesn’t that seem stupid?”

Her own eyes were wet and she did nothing to hide it. “I don’t think so.”

“Courtney, my grandfather has been dead for twenty years. I haven’t sent you a card or a letter for twenty years. Not even a phone call. My grandpa can’t count my worth and I never gave you the chance. I walk around making this catalog of the absurd, but the true fact of my life is that I measure myself against two ghosts, a dead man and a lady who vanished. I have to laugh at myself, too, when I’m stupid. It’s only fair.”

She nodded and that was good enough.

I heard a noise behind me and I spun around to see two small creatures in bed clothes creeping up on us. The back door to the house was half open and I strode over to pull it closed. When I returned the two creatures were snuggled under Courtney’s arms. She said, “Permit me to introduce Samantha and Jennifer.”

Samantha was about nine, and she had inherited every ounce of her mother’s beauty and a drop or two more. She was dainty and ladylike and she wore a flowered flannel nightgown with tatted lace at the collar and cuffs. On her feet were fuzzy pink slippers.

Jennifer was seven or seven-and-a-half and she held title to every last acre of Courtney’s tomboy arrogance. She was beautiful in her own way, but she was more brash than anything. Her nightgown was an adult’s fleece sweatshirt, and she hadn’t bothered to pull her hands through the enormous sleeves. She had walked out on the freezing flagstones bare-footed, which I wouldn’t do on a bet.

I bowed to the waist and Samantha giggled. Jennifer snorted, and who could blame her?

Courtney said, “Why aren’t you guys in bed? Where’s the sitter?”

Jennifer scoffed. “Asleep on the sofa. Where else?”

“Oh. Great… Well, get it moving.”

Samantha wheedled, “Sing us a song first. Please.”

“No,” said Jennifer, a glint of evil in her eyes. “Make him sing.”

Courtney was about to intervene but I said, “I’ll be happy to. This is a song your mother used to like. I’m only gonna sing the first and last verses, ’cause I don’t care for the rest of it.” I cleared my throat and started to sing “Simple Twist of Fate”.

They sat together in the park
As the evening sky grew dark.
She looked at him and he felt a spark tingle to his bones.
It was then he felt alone and wished that he’d gone straight
And watched out for a simple twist of fate.

Courtney smiled at me and I thought my knees might buckle. Jennifer said, “You sing like a duck!”

I gave a solemn nod. “Proudly, like a duck.”

People tell me it’s a sin
To know and feel too much within.
I still believe she was my twin, but I lost the ring.
She was born in Spring, but I was born too late.
Blame it on a simple twist of fate.

Courtney coughed softly. “I was born in the Spring.”

“I know it.”

“What about you, mister?” Jennifer asked. “Were you born too late?”

“Why, no. I was born just in time. If I had been born even one minute later, who knows what might have happened?”

“What?”

I shrugged with my palms open at my shoulders. “Who knows?”

“He’s teasing you,” said Samantha.

I nodded. “You’d better go to bed, kids. You’ve met your match.”

Samantha giggled and Jennifer laughed derisively and I wanted to hug them both. Courtney dumped them off her lap and pushed them toward the house. I was sitting by the fire when she returned.

“They’re great kids, aren’t they?”

“They are.”

She smiled a tight, bitter little smile. “Their father didn’t seem to notice.”

I looked into the fire. “Where are your folks?”

“Colorado.”

“Your dad building a bridge?”

“A string of bridges. A brand new highway from Nowhere to Nowhere Heights. Your tax dollars at work.” She laughed. “Mother wants him to retire, but I don’t think he’s ready.”

I said nothing, just let the crackling of the fire fill up the silence. The night sky was clear and bursting with stars. The air was crisp and clean and very cold. After a long time, I said, “I’m at war with death.”

She smiled wryly and said, “Are there many casualties?”

“Go ahead. Make fun of me. I deserve it.”

“No,” she said. “Talk to me. Tell me what you never tell anyone.”

I nodded gravely. “I always have. I always will.” I took my time thinking and she let me. “I didn’t know what I was doing, when I started this. I wanted people to stop dying, but I didn’t know what I meant. It sounds stupid, right? People die, it’s a part of life.” I grinned despite myself. “The last part.”

She laughed like glass chimes tinkling in the Winter wind.

“But that wasn’t it,” I went on. “I’d see homeless people pushing shopping carts and sad, tired people shuffling along and little kids who wouldn’t look up from the ground, and I’d think — what I want is for people to stop dying before their time. But that’s what doctors do, isn’t it?

“And I got older. I hope I got wiser. And I got better and better at seeing what I’m talking about. And better and better at talking about it. And I got to a place where I could mesmerize people, just like a revival preacher, just like a snake charmer. And I’d talk and I’d talk and I’d talk and people would watch me and they’d say, ‘This man is crazy. This man is possessed. This man is god. This man is the devil.’ They’d look at me and say, ‘This man is right.’

“And I’d look back at them and I’d know I’d said just the opposite of what I wanted to. Because I didn’t want to tell them what I know, I want them to tell themselves what they had always known, without having to be told. And one day I realized that I had known all along what I wanted…”

She waited and waited, and finally she said, “Well?”

I shrugged. “I wanted them to stop dying while they were still alive.”

She nodded in recognition and I knew she would. And I knew the idea was new to her and I knew she’d known it forever, just like you have.

I pointed one by one at all the houses on the top of the hill. “There’s a story in every one of those houses. A story you’ve never heard before, except you know it by heart. And every one of those stories is tragic, and every one of them is comical, and every one of them is universal. Every one of those stories is different, and every one of them is the same. And every one of them is about nobody but you. You’re presented with the choice to live or die, and the story is which you chose and why.”

She didn’t feel pressed to say anything at all, and that’s the most amazing trait I’ve ever observed in any human being.

I said, “At the speed of light, events have sequence but no duration. Every point on the line of time is the same one point, and events occur in order, but they all happen at the same time. No before. No later. Just now. Forever.” I smiled brightly, because the idea is boundlessly funny to me. “I think about that, because all these stories seem so universal to me, and I wonder what universal might mean. When I write a story, I can freeze the people, I can freeze the events, I can leave it there like a trail marker, something that lasts forever. And when people respond to that, it’s not something I’m telling them. It’s something they’ve always known. We’re all made of star-stuff, millions and millions of years of accumulated nuclear waste. What if universal means something we all own from the birth of the universe? We seem so temporary. We’re born, we live, we die. But what if there’s a piece of forever inside each of us? Maybe that’s the thing that admits the truth. Maybe that’s the thing that discovers, again and again, the things we’ve always known…”

There were tears in her eyes and I was glad of that. There were tears in my own and my voice was broken; the best I could do was a sort of a croak. “I want to live forever, Courtney. I don’t ever want to die.”

She smiled at me and I saw her lovely hand on the arm of her chair and I wanted to pick up that hand and press it to my lips, just hold it there, forever. But I didn’t, and I knew why I didn’t. I said, “But I die with every choice I make. When I choose something, a vast array of futures open up before me. But a vast horde of other futures collapse and vanish, everything that might have happened, but won’t. All these lives in front of me. All these deaths behind me.” I laughed. “The stories are about nobody but me. I’m presented with the choice to live or die, and the story is which I chose and why.”

She traced a circle with her finger on the arm of her chair. She said, “You could stay here.”

I tried not to move. I tried not to react in any way at all.

She gave a nervous laugh. “I didn’t mean that the way it came out. I meant you could stay here in town, couldn’t you?”

I shook my head. “You’ll always be the lady on the hill. And I’ll always be the man with one foot in the next town.”

She said nothing, just stared into the fire. After a long time, I heard the report of a firecracker down the hill. I said, “I hadn’t intended that.”

“Intended what?”

More firecrackers, a whole string of them. “Happy New Year, Courtney.”

She smiled. “Happy New Year.”

“In a story, I could make this so much more… elegant.”

“Tuxedos and gowns, I would hope. And champagne.”

“No,” I said. “At the stroke of midnight, we’d each down a tiny little snifter of Grand Marnier, then smash the glasses in the fireplace.”

“And then what?”

“And then we’d kiss, the orange nectar still thick on our tongues.”

She said nothing for a long moment. “Do you want to kiss me…?”

“Here’s another story. Imagine a drunken hummingbird who’s gotten himself hooked on Grand Marnier. Wouldn’t that be funny?”

She said, “Why don’t you come over here and kiss me?”

I shrugged. “You can’t reach and I can’t turn.”

“I don’t understand that.”

I smiled, but it wasn’t a happy smile. “Of all the people we went to school with, you and I are the only two who haven’t changed… They’re like trees bending in the wind or boats buffeted by the seas. But we are monoliths, and after twenty years we’re barely even weathered. That’s an accomplishment, isn’t it?”

“I see.” She smiled a tight, bitter little smile. “I’ll always be the lady on the hill, and you’ll always be the man with one foot in the next town.”

“That’s right.” The tears were rolling down my cheeks, and I didn’t try to hide them. “We made the right choices, both of us, and we have to live with them. Death is what happens when you make war on your life. Death is what happens when you betray who you are… A life defiled by a thousand small deaths, or death defied by an uncompromised life. That’s the story, isn’t it?”

I smiled at her and she looked up at me and she was the only woman in the universe, forever. I stood up, and she stood before me, just inches away. The fire lit her radiance and the depths of her beauty blinded me everlastingly. I said, “I’m going to love you forever, Courtney. I’m going to live forever, and I’m going to love you every day.”

She started to say something but I shook my head. I pressed a finger to my lips. “Walk away,” I said. “Walk away and don’t look back.”

She leaned over and brushed my cheek with her lips and as she pulled away I felt the downy fine hairs on her cheek and I caught the scent of her. No fragrance, just the essence of heaven itself.

And then she was gone.

I turned and walked down the hill, walked all the way to the highway. I walked my way down that lonesome old road, all those lives in front of me, all those deaths behind me. I walked away and I didn’t look back…

But you always know where to find me, don’t you? If I ain’t making cheese-burgers from all your sacred cows, then I’m running your fingers through the matted hair of yet another wretched untouchable. But at the speed of life events have sequence but no duration, no expiration, so I expect you can always find me unguarded in that moment of glowing perfection just before the dawning. Down at the river. Tossing pebbles into the water. Weeping for all my dead.

I’m kicking this back to the top of the blog, as well. I think this is a good example of the kind of behavior that has been denounced for millennia by would-be bosses, but I also think this approaches an ideal expression of how human beings should behave. Plus which, it’s the stuff I’ve been talking about all week, boiled down to its essence — and I think it’s good Sunday reading besides. I live to be proud of my life, and the moments that gave birth to this essay are among the proudest of those I’ve lived so far. This is the best I have within me. This is a seed I long to see cast to the winds, to grow wherever it can take root. –GSS

 
Psalm

Art is demanding, and that’s good. But art is petulant and importunate and presumptuous to a fault. Art is that damned nuisance of a snoopy neighbor who keeps knocking, knocking, knocking on your cellar door. Art goes straight for the places you forbid yourself to think about and rummages through your most terrifying secrets like a burglar tearing through your underwear drawer. Good art makes you hate it as you devour it, shun it as you immerse yourself in it. Good art makes you restless and jagged and ragged and inspired. Good art makes you shiver. Great art makes you cringe.

Art is a vanity in precisely this way: I presume to recreate reality in my own image and likeness, and I have the effrontery to demand that you not only acknowledge that reality but prefer it. I presume to seize the universe and squeeze out of it a tiny seed of truth. And I presume to plant that seed within you — without your consent, perhaps without even your knowledge. And I presume to nurture this new universe I have caused to grow within you until you scream — if I am good enough — scream from agony and delight. And I presume to do all of this for no purpose of yours, but only for reasons of my own devising. And at the end of it you may thank me or damn me, but you will never have been more than the means to my end: I sought not you but only to spawn myself anew within you — immaculate conceptualization. Art is a vanity because it is the means by which the artist postures as a god — and not a very merciful god.

I see all of this and yet I embrace it. I am as much art’s victim as you, although on my best days I am lucky enough to have a bit of my own back. But as a species and as individuals we are unwilling to forswear the worst of our vices without that resounding blow to the head that art alone provides. Our artists are vain and petulant god-impostors, but they do for us the job we demand of gods: They fill us with awe and wonder and terror and they give us the excuse we seem to need to repent of vice.

As a species, as individuals, we are born enormous and we waste the span of our days and our years shrinking, shrinking, shrinking until we vanish away to nothingness. And while it would be vain and petulant and importunate and presumptuous to a fault for me to call any work of mine art, nonetheless I am come to you to give you a most resounding blow to the head in the hope that it will give you the excuse you seem to need to repent of this awful vice of shrinking.

I love humanity in principle but I loathe much of it in practice. And that is the sort of statement I normally rebel against. The implication is that there are two universes, one perfect but unreal, one real but inherently imperfect. I don’t believe in unreality and I don’t believe perfection is beyond our reach. I love what humanity can become, but for the most part has not. One of the reasons we revere great artists is because they have nurtured the seed of greatness that each of us carries within us. One of the reasons we despise great artists, sneering at their human imperfections, is because we despise ourselves for having failed to nurture the seed of greatness that each of us carries within us. I love to envision a humanity that rejoices in its potential for greatness and therefore never has cause to despise itself.

Is that not a godlike vision? Do not dare call it a merciful vision. I seek for you not ease, not comfort, not quiet, but their polar opposites. I would wish that you work ceaselessly, obsessively, beyond every standard of human endurance, to writhe and seethe and bleed giving birth to your greatness. And I would wish for you to undertake all of this at once, without delay. I have seen enough of this shrinking, and I want it to stop.

Is that not sufficiently demanding? I presume to dictate to you the terms of your existence, and I do it with the utmost effrontery. I demand not just that you repent of vice, I expect you to punch out some hefty virtues, and no half measures. I am importunate by any interpretation and I am petulant beyond dispute.

Is that not presumptuous enough for you? Surely it is, for you and I both know the nature of those most terrifying secrets, but I alone am presumptuous enough to reveal them. I am no mere snoopy neighbor, no mere rummaging burglar. I am you, you in your most furtive and delicious and concealed and coveted moments. I am you in principle, never in practice. Perfect but unreal, burnished to a glow in the utter secrecy of the imagination, hidden from every eye in the universe, even from your own. I am the seed of that greatness within you, fully grown in another garden.

Is that not vanity personified? Indeed. But exactly. I am vanity personified, the word made flesh, the world made fresh. Infuriatingly fresh. I am a resounding blow to your head with a cold, wet fish. I don’t want to knock some sense into you; that’s not possible. I want you to unlock that horrid dungeon of the mind in which all the sense is imprisoned. You know what I am because you know what you are — in principle. I want you to be what you are in principle in practice.

I want you to stop shrinking, shrinking, shrinking and instead nurture the seed of your own enormity. I am not another empty-headed little door-to-door salesman peddling self-esteem or self-improvement or self-advancement or self-delusion. I am a thundering god-impostor and I demand from you self-love, the total worship of the ego by the ego. Self-love cannot be bought or sold, it can only be earned at the price of enormous effort. And I demand that you make that effort to deserve your own adoration.

The words that are running through your mind right now are the words by which you have made war on your life since your childhood. Those words are the means by which you endlessly shrink away to nothingness. You will not grow merely by ceasing to despise your potential for greatness, but you cannot grow as long as you persist in this hideous self-annihilation. You are born to live, no less than any tree or bird, and you have the potential to live in a way impossible to the plants and the animals, to live a life of beauty and meaning and achievement. But you cannot live that life while you are pursuing its destruction.

I am a student of the base and the squalid. But I am a poet of the glorious, the immense. I imagine for myself a radiant universe and I people it with giants. In my work I write about this failure of humanity or that error, this vice or that sin, and it would be easy enough to suppose that it is humanity itself, the stuff we’re made of, that is imperfect. But I know this is untrue. Humanity’s failure is not a failure of materials, not a failure of design. It is a failure of nerve. At least until now, we have lacked the courage to become what we truly are, reasoning animals.

I gaze into the squalor and I would wish that people stop indulging their stupidities, stop gathering into herds, stop pandering to their craven appetites — stop behaving as animals. But there is no end to the vices we could forswear and it would never be enough. We require not an end of vice, but a commencement of virtue. We need not to stop behaving as animals, we need to start behaving fully as human beings. All the time.

Good art makes you shiver, gentle reader, and great art makes you cringe. The very best art makes you change, and I am vain enough to hope that this day and these words will mark a change in your life that will last forever. If you will dare to be as enormous in practice as you furtively imagine yourself in principle, you will have a treasure that no one — no artist and no god — can ever provide for you: A life that you will not have to affect to despise by shrinking, shrinking, shrinking away to nothingness, a life that you can revere — openly, joyously, gloriously. And if you come one day to the perfect complement of this day, the day when you birth for yourself a universe as radiant as the one I would plant within you, I hope that you will share your self-reverence as I have shared mine with you.

Living is what you’re doing when you’re too enthralled to notice. Dying is what you’re doing when all you can do is notice. Our destiny is not to die without ever having dared to live. Our destiny is to thrive. Without shame. Without apologies. And without one instant of shrinking. I worship what you can become. I beseech you to become it and rejoice boundlessly in your enormity.

Greg Swann, 5/20/96

Kicking this back to the top from February of 2007, although the underlying essay is much older than that. This is the shortest statement I have made, so far, of the ontology of human behavior. –GSS

 
Russell Shaw has mentioned the film The Secret a couple of times. Cathy bought the DVD, and we took the time to watch it tonight. As an expression of the right attitude to take toward life, it was right up my street. As physics, metaphysics, epistemology and ontology, it struck me as babbling word salad. The Law of Attraction commended me to The Eyelid Show, as television often does, so Cathy saw the whole thing, and I saw about half.

What the movie would seek to ascribe to a volitionally-caused physics (this is solipsism, right there), I would argue is simply the secondary consequences of particular habits of mind. Russell wants to freely and very generously share all that he has learned in his career. To do this, he needed me as his amplifier, and the two of us needed Allen Butler for his technological prowess. A great many other very talented people will be involved in this project. Are we drawn to each other by a Law of Attraction, or all we all simply oscillating in our own minds at around the same frequency — birds of a feather?

I wrote a book about the ontology of human social relationships, but it’s dense, tough sledding. Appended below is a easier-reading summary of some of these ideas. I wrote this as a speech for my Toastmaster’s Club in August of 2001. In the weblogging world, I’ll throw out details about our lives, but that’s really just so much plastic fruit, local color. This is the world that I live in, the world I wish everyone lived in…

Shyly’s delight

Manifesting the secondary consequences of splendor

I have a Labrador mutt named Shyly. She’s about three years old, but because she’s a Lab, she’ll always be a puppy. Always busy, always involved, always eager to be right in the middle of everything.

Shyly is the world’s greatest master at expressing delight. She has a fairly limited emotional range — sadness, boredom, territoriality and contentment. But at expressing delight, Shyly is unequaled. When I come home, even if I’ve only been away for two minutes, Shyly races back and forth through the house, her every muscle rippling with undiluted delight.

It’s an amazing thing to watch, funny and charming and sweet. Shyly’s joy is clean and whole and pure and perfect. Uncontaminated by memories of past pain. Unfiltered by guilt or shame or doubt or self-loathing. Untainted by envy or anger or malice. Unaffected by affectation. Shyly’s delight is impossible to doubt, and the day she fails to express it will be the day she has scampered off this mortal coil.

“What,” you may ask, “does this have to do with me?”

Here’s what:

Friedrich Nietzsche said, “god is dead.” By this he did not mean that there had once been an omnipotent universe creator but that he had since expired. What he meant was that the manifestations of modernity had rendered religion unable to provide significant moral guidance to educated people. Unexpurgated religion had become inoperative as a moral lodestone.

This is actually non-controversial. When we make reasoned arguments about what one ought and ought not do, we do so by reference to philosophy or psychology or practical consequences, not to religion. Even members of the clergy do things this way, precisely because it is not possible to motivate educated people to take certain actions and refrain from taking others with promises of heaven and threats of hell. Received knowledge is no longer well-received.

I have a problem with this, actually. Reason is a much better guide to rectitude than is divination, surely. But half a truth can be worse than a lie.

I think god is not dead.

I think god has never yet even been discovered.

I know god. I have an on-going experience of god. I live in a state of the most devout, most enthralling worship of the one true god of human existence, the god humanity has always yearned to know and yet has never found. In the best and most perfect minutes of my day, in the cleanest and purest and most exquisitely splendorous days of my life, I am one with my god…

This is a fact: You are alone. This is the horrifying Existentialist wail, “The Scream”, the badge of honor of those who rationalize their lack of honor. But their despair and ennui notwithstanding, human beings are organisms, and all organisms are discrete, separate, unattached, unconnected. This is true of an amoeba and of my dog Shyly and of you. What is unique about you, compared to Shyly, is that you have a reasoning, recollecting mind, and therefore you can discover and acknowledge that you are alone.

Here is another fact: The “you” that is the real you is invisible to me. Shyly is who she is, and she can’t hide who she is. She can’t conceive of disguising who she is because she can’t conceive that she is. She just is.

You, by contrast, exist most fundamentally as you only within the silence and solitude of your mind. You have a body and I can see it. You do things and I can observe them. But I can only observe you doing those things that you choose to do in my presence. I can know you only by what you make manifest, reveal in your actions. Anything that you might choose to conceal or withhold is unknowable to me.

The you that is you most fundamentally — your soul, your spirit, your self, your ego — is never evident to anyone but you, by your own introspective consciousness.

Moreover, the actions and behaviors that you do make manifest — these are never more than secondary consequences of your life.

Every action that you take in your life is first taken by your ego upon your ego.

Not only are you alone with yourself, the sine qua non relationship of your life is with yourself. With your self, with the you that is the essential you, which only you can see, only you can know, and only you can act upon.

You are all there is to your life. The universe is everything there is, but the universe of your experience starts at your skin and goes inward. The actions you bring to the world outside of you are secondary consequences, and all of the events that happen outside of you are only as significant as you make them. By your choices, inside your mind.

Clouds don’t darken my mood. I darken my mood, then blame it on the clouds. Shyly’s delight doesn’t cause mine.

Do you want to see god? Close your eyes. Imagine yourself clean and whole and pure and perfect. Imagine yourself completed, burnished, glowing in exaltation.

Do you want to worship the god who is clean and whole and pure and perfect? Then be it. Be that god.

My Shylygirl can do things that are wrong, but she can never do evil, and I’ll tell you why. It’s because evil is taking an action that you know in advance is wrong. I’ll say that again: Evil is taking an action that you know in advance is wrong.

But I’m not here to threaten you with hell but rather to bring you the promise of heaven. So I’ll give you the complementary definition of rectitude: Rectitude is doing everything you know to be right.

In every choice you make, in every action you take, in each of your thoughts and in each of your deeds, you are acting upon your self. By your attitudes and your habits of mind and your internal and external behaviors, you are acting either to complete and burnish and exalt your ego — or to dismantle and deface and destroy it.

This is an inescapable ontological fact. This is what it means essentially to have a reasoning, recollecting mind. Skyscrapers and symphonies, on the one hand, and squalor and slaughter, on the other — these are secondary consequences. Every action in every human life is first taken by the ego upon the ego.

So do you want to worship your god, the only god who can exist in the universe of your experience? Then be that god. Behave always, constantly, in such a way that you will have earned and deserved your own self-adoration. Act always to complete your self and never to dismantle it, always to burnish it and never to deface it, always to exalt your ego and your body and your mind and your life — never to destroy it.

You’ll have to do this by yourself. The world outside your mind is at war with these kinds of ideas. Your pain, your guilt, your shame, your doubt, your self-loathing, your envy, your anger, your malice — these are the attributes of your character the world loves to see you manifest. These it will support and rationalize and subsidize. But to argue that self-destruction is not a worthy use of the precious gift of human life, to argue instead that the purpose of human life is to love one’s own self and to be a self worthy of one’s own unlimited adoration and devotion — merely to utter these words is held to be the worst kind of heresy.

And don’t be fooled into following false flags. Self-worship does not imply the abuse of others. This was Nietzsche’s egregious error. To the contrary, rectitude is doing everything you know to be right.

Nor is the modern canard, “self-esteem”, a substitute for self-love. Self-love is the joy and reverence you earn and deserve by the relentless pursuit of everything you admire, everything you desire, everything you aspire to. Self-esteem is the high regard in which you presume to hold yourself in appreciation for the accomplishment of absolutely nothing.

We are talking about self-adoration, not self-absorption. Egoism, not egotism.

But we are not talking about religion or philosophy or psychology. We are talking about ontology, what you actually are, in fact, irrespective of what anyone thinks about it.

I stand before you as witness to my god. I speak not from divination, not from revelation, but simply from direct introspective observation:

If you want to know Shyly’s delight, live it.

If you want to manifest splendor — unlimited, uncontaminated, untainted, unfiltered joy — then be the person who has earned and deserved undiluted delight — mental, physical and emotional — earned it and deserved it as the enduring secondary consequence of your choices…

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A Costco family Christmas

A Ramblin’ Gamblin’ Willie story

“Okay, so one day we’re driving, and we’re just about to get on the freeway, and I look up and the sign says, ‘Squaw Peak Freeway.’”

The Kid said that. Maybe eleven years old, tall and thin. Tousled brown hair and the most beautiful gray eyes I’ve ever seen. He was talking to the Mom, mid-forties, fair and tall. She had long brown hair and eyes of a gentle, laughing green.

She said, “That’s what the sign says.”

“But my whole life I thought it was called the Pipsqueak Freeway. That’s what Dad always called it. That’s what he still calls it.”

The Mom was laughing silently, trying very hard not to laugh out loud.

“It’s not funny! I asked him why he called it that and he said he named it after the mayor.”

The Mom was still trying not to laugh.

“Oh, sure. Very funny. Every day after school we used to stop at the Post Office, and I was seven or eight before I found out that it’s not really called the Edgar Allan Poe Stoffice. I didn’t even know who Edgar Allan Poe was.”

The Mom was stopped short by her laughter. She stood there behind her shopping cart trying to catch her breath.

“You think it’s funny. I think it’s funny sometimes, too. But I never know when he tells me the name of something if that’s the real name, or if it’s just something he made up.”

“You have a lot of room to talk,” said the Mom. “The other day I said I needed to get four quarters and you spent the rest of the day telling people that I want to put warts on forks.”

“The Fork Warters, semi-notorious villains from the nether reaches. Or maybe they’re just a really bad rock band.”

“You see? You sound just like him. Where is your father, anyway?”

“He took off. He said he had Santaclaustrophobia.”

The Mom said nothing, just smiled and pushed her cart along the aisle.

They were Christmas shopping at Costco, which used to be called The Price Club before some genius decided that made too much sense.

Do you know about Costco? It’s a warehouse-sized store that sells huge quantities of stuff at wholesale prices. There are other companies that exploit the same basic idea. Another big one is Sam’s Club, where the motto is, ‘When mere WalMart just isn’t enough.’ It’s like mainlining heroin for shoppers. You start out with a shopping cart that’s bigger than a dog’s kennel. You work your way up to a four-wheeled cart the size of a pick-up truck bed. And eventually you take home skid-loads of merchandise from the loading dock. Costco is absolutely the most American store that could ever exist.

Do you doubt this? If you go to an ordinary supermarket, you can buy a one-pound jar of peanut butter. Particularly peckish? Buy the two-pound size — there’s nothing bigger. But at Costco, the very smallest jar of peanut butter is two-and-a-half pounds, and you have to buy it as a two-pack. Five pounds of peanut butter, enough to feed a normal adult for a month and a boy the size of the Kid for at least half a day. And you can buy the whole case if you want, four two-packs, twenty pounds of peanut butter. Fill the shopping cart. Stack up cases on that four-wheeled cart. Take home a truckload of peanut butter if you want. Try that at an ordinary supermarket.

And people really do shop that way. They’ll leave the store with nothing but hundreds of cases of soda. Those guys who sell bottles of water outside the baseball stadium buy their water in huge bulk at Costco. Years ago, owners of ghetto markets would buy their stock at sales in suburban discount stores, because it was cheaper than the deals they could get wholesale. No more. Costco has that business now. A few years back I heard about some street guys who had become infant-formula entrepreneurs, buying pallet-loads at Costco in the suburbs and selling it by the can, below retail at a small profit, to inner-city mothers. The police thought they were selling hot milk, so to speak, but it was just the American tradition of John Jacob Astor — buy it where it’s cheap, sell it where it’s dear, pocket the difference — all made possible by Costco.

The Mom wasn’t that kind of shopper, though. Her cart was loaded with some food and a lot of gift items. The Kid was helping to load the cart by begging for every last thing that caught his eye.

As for me, I don’t buy anything at Costco. I never buy anything I’m not willing to carry. But I love to go there, just to watch all that stuff leaving the store. I had been tagging behind the Mom and the Kid for a while, enjoying their chatter.

The sound system was playing “Oh come all ye faithful” and behind us a man’s voice was singing the song in Latin. “Venite adoremus,” he sang, pronouncing the ‘V’ correctly — as a ‘W’ — which church-choir Latinists never get right. He said, in full voice and seemingly to no one, “Who can sing this slowly?” But he was right on the beat for the next “Venite adoremus.”

It was the Dad of the family, of course, and the Mom stopped and turned to wait for him. He was tall. Not as thin as he used to be. Not as fat as he’s going to be: Costco’s immense supply creates its own demand, after all. Brown hair peppered with gray and grass-green eyes ablaze with mirth. He said, “I love this song, but no one can sing it that slowly.”

The Mom ignored this entirely. She said, “Do you have any idea what you might want for Christmas?”

“Zamfir.”

“What?”

“A CD I just saw. The greatest hits of the Beatles performed by Zamfir on his magical pan flute.”

“What’s a pan flute?” the Kid asked.

“It’s a folk instrument from the Andes. It’s been completely ruined by Zamfir.”

“Can you please be serious?” The Mom said that.

“No. But what about a complete set of Chia heads? I was looking at them and thinking, ‘What about a Chia toupee?’ Wouldn’t that look cool? How about a Chia jacket? Or just a big fuzzy green Chia vest, like that vest Sonny Bono used to wear.”

“Who’s Sonny Bono?” the Kid asked.

“The talented half of Sonny and Cher. Cher had a big voice and big teeth and big hair and a big… personality, so she made more money. But Sonny Bono wrote ‘Needles and pins,’ so he got to go to heaven when he died.”

“What’s ‘Needles and pins?’”

“Pop tune. Ask me again when we get home. I have five or six versions of it.”

“Christmas present…?” the Mom said.

“What more could I want than the two of you?”

“He’s hustling us,” the Kid said. “Isn’t he?”

The Dad said, “Wouldn’t think of it.” Both the Mom and the Kid rolled their eyes.

“Your son wants to know why you’re always giving things comical names.”

“I never do that.”

“Dad!”

“I never do that. I’m very serious about names. I want for everything to have the perfect name. Take you, for instance. I wanted to call you Anaximander.”

“Anaximander…?”

“Either that or Anaxagoras. Or both. Just think of all the junk mail lists you would have been left off of, had you been denominated Anaximander Anaxagoras.”

“What’s ‘denominated’ mean?”

“It means to be plastered numerically on currency. I’d much rather be drunk on love.”

“Huh?”

“It means to be stuck with the lower berth in a fraction.”

“What?”

“It means to be named, honey.” The Mom said that.

They were still wandering slowly through the aisles, but none of the three were shopping. The Mom said, “You love doing that, don’t you?”

“If I didn’t have me around to keep me amused, I would surely despair.”

The sound system had changed to a different song, a rock tune masquerading as a country tune.

“These lyrics make no sense,” the Dad complained. “‘What kind of name is Amadeus?’ What’s that doing there?”

The Kid said, “What kind of name is Amadeus?”

“Latin, of course. ‘Love god.’ Singular imperative. Kind of a mild order, but not really a command. Shakespeare has Benedick say, ‘Serve god, love me and mend.’ The form commends without actually commanding. Very different from the hortatory subjunctive: ‘Hoist the anchor!’ ‘Man the battlements!’ ‘Once more unto the breach!’ ‘Bell the ding-dong cat!’”

“Dad, what are you talking about?”

“Grammar. ‘Venite adoremus’ is similar. ‘Venite’ is plural imperative, ‘come, y’all’. ‘Adoremus’ is first-person plural subjunctive, the jussive subjunctive, ‘let us adore,’ ‘may we adore.’ ‘Let’s bell the cat!’”

“Tace. Nunc.”

“Precisely!”

“What did he say?” the Mom asked.

“He told me to shut up, now. In the singular imperative voice.”

They walked along a little further, both the Dad and the Kid looking every which way at once. “This is too crazy,” the Dad said. “We should push Christmas off a few days.”

“What!?” the Kid demanded.

“Just to let the crowds clear. I mean, what’s our hurry? How about the Feast of the Epiphany?”

“The what?”

“Epiphany. The twelfth day of Christmas. January 6th, your first day back to school. You could go to school, come home, do your chores and your homework, then sometime after dinner we could open presents. What do you think?”

The Kid was aghast.

The Mom said, “No skin off my nose.”

“You don’t even have a nose!” the Kid insisted. This was true. The Mom had the kind of tiny Celtic nose that convinced the noble Romans that Britannia was theirs for the taking. To the Dad he said, “We’re having Christmas on Christmas. Early on Christmas.”

The Dad said nothing, just pulled the Kid under his arm.

“Hey, baby,” the Mom sang along with the sound system, “see the future that we’re building.”

“Here we go,” the Dad said. “I think I’m about to find out what I want for Christmas.”

“Our love lives on,” she sang, “in the lives of our children.”

The Dad said to the Kid, “Now you know where little brothers come from.”

“Huh?”

“I think we’ll name him Nebuchadnezzar. Or maybe Zamfir. Or both.”

The Mom dug her elbow into the Dad’s ribs. “And that’s something,” she sang. “Something worth leaving behind…”

The Dad smiled warmly. But he said, “Look at all this stuff! It doesn’t look like you left anything behind.”

The Mom smiled warmly in return. But she said, “Tace. Nunc.”

A father for Christmas

A Ramblin’ Gamblin’ Willie story

“Shame about the bike,” I said to the strained young black man at the bus stop. His head was down and he was staring hard at the ground.

He grunted, a sound that conveyed two ideas: “I heard you” and “I’m not listening.”

“Just as well, I guess. A bike like that…”

He looked up for a moment, piercing me with hard black eyes. “What about it?”

“Oh, you know. Wouldn’t last too long, now would it?”

He scoffed, and that was that. Or so he thought…

What happened was this: I saw a bike going in to Toys ‘R’ Us, about a week before Christmas, and that’s the kind of thing I just have to follow up on.

It was a girl’s bike — a girly bike. Sixteen inch white wheels. A white frame speckled with iridescent pink and purple flakes. An iridescent pink and purple flaked saddle. And matching pink and purple flaked streamers cascading out of the white handle-bar grips. It was the kind of bike Toys ‘R’ Us loves to sell: Thirty-five dollars worth of bike with three dollars worth of plastic ornaments is priced at sixty bucks. Ten dollars extra for professional assembly.

The bike had been dragged into the store by my companion at the bus stop — tall, thin, with an expression of anger etched into his face. Maybe twenty years old; certainly not twenty-five. He was wearing a Michael Jordan warm-up suit and Michael Jordan basketball shoes. That sounds very casual, but we’re talking three hundred dollars, maybe more. At first I thought he might be bringing the bike in for a minor repair, but something about the way he was dragging it — sideways by the saddle — made me think again.

I didn’t go into the store, but I stuck around to see what would happen. Sure enough, he came out bikeless and stalked over to wait for the bus. Three hundred dollars worth of Michael Jordan haberdashery but no car.

I said, “A little girl has a bike like that, she’s just bait on the hook. Doesn’t have a father around to stand up for her, does she?” He didn’t answer, and I hadn’t expected that he would. “A little girl gets a bike like that, she thinks it’s the best Christmas present ever. But then she takes it down to the street, and all the little fatherless jackasses crowd around. The little five- and six-year-old boys start breaking off the streamers one at a time, just to hear her shriek. Then some older boy will have to prove he’s meaner, and he’ll tear off both streamers all at once. And they’ll ride that bike up and down the street, with that poor little girl running behind them, crying, trying to get her bike back. But what can she do, really? She doesn’t have a father around to stand up for her, does she?”

He rubbed at something in his eye. I’d like to think it was a tear.

“But that’s just the way of it, isn’t it? People never kick so hard as when they’re down. They don’t want to take your stuff away, they just want to take it and break it. So nobody has anything. Any little treasure you might have in your life, you have to squirrel it away where no one can see. Not so they won’t steal it, but so they won’t destroy it. Deface it. Desecrate it.”

Despite himself, he spoke. He said: “Word!” Indeed: Word.

“But what good is a bike if you can’t ride it? If that little girl takes her bike down to the street, it’ll be destroyed. Not for any good reason, but just so a gaggle of fatherless jackasses can giggle at another tragedy.”

He glared at me, his lips a tight line. I was pissing him off in the worst way, telling him the undeniable truth.

“Won’t last long, anyway. A month. Two months. Six months? I don’t think so. One day one of those fatherless jackasses will ride the bike around the corner and the bike will never come back. An older fatherless jackass will turn it into a vial of crack, and that will be that.”

That got to him. Bus riders have to pay the Michael Jordan clothing bills, don’t they? “Why don’t you just shut the fuck up?”

I ignored him. “Besides, there’s no one to teach that little girl how to ride a bike, is there?”

He stood up and leaned way out in the street, hurrying the bus along.

“She your only daughter?”

“She’s not mine!” he blurted. He sat down, his elbows on his knees. “Or maybe she is, I don’t know.”

“You gonna get her anything else?”

For the briefest instant his face was awash in shame, and that was enough. A street guy. A would-be bad-ass. Maybe a part-time drug dealer. Probably a fatherless jackass himself. But he was human enough to be ashamed of himself, and that’s a start.

“You know what she needs, don’t you?”

He ignored me. His face was like stone. Dirt is not food and next Wednesday is not an umbrella, but you can’t get a liar to agree to that. When people are embracing the lie, they will not acknowledge the truth, no matter how obvious it is. It’s as if they regard speaking the truth as an impossibly huge commitment. As if saying the truth creates it. And refusing to destroys it. Defaces it. Desecrates it.

“She doesn’t need a bike, she needs a father. To stand up for her when she’s right and dress her down when she’s wrong. To put all those fatherless jackasses on notice that they have you to answer to. To take them aside when they’re older, one at a time, and explain that you will happily cut their balls off if they can’t kept ‘em covered.”

He chuckled despite himself.

“If you give your daughter a father she can be proud of, then one day she’ll bring home a son-in-law you can be proud of. And then you’ll know for sure that your grandchildren will have a father to look out for them, too.”

He said nothing, just stared at the ground. I’m sure he was listening, just trying hard not to show it.

“The great part is, she’ll do as much for you as you do for her. The government is destroying black America by making it easy for fathers to escape their responsibilities, but the destruction starts with you. All those fatherless jackasses end up on a slab, unless they turn their lives around. If you stand up for your daughter, you’ll stand up for yourself. And there ain’t no bad in that.”

I thought I saw an aborted nod.

“You give your daughter a father for Christmas, a father she can be proud of, and in ten or fifteen years, she’ll put lump the size of a grapefruit in your throat. Every day is a new beginning, and mastery takes practice. But you grit your teeth and get after it, doing what you can today and picking up the slack tomorrow.” I pointed at my chest. “The cycle stops with me. Justice starts with me.” I thumped my temples with both index fingers. “There’s nobody in here but me. There’s no one who can run my life but me. If I refuse to live, I’m just the same as dead. Haven’t you had enough of being just the same as dead? Your daughter is life. Her father — when he is her father — is life. The choice is life or death, over and over again, a hundred times a day. And everybody’s gotta take a side.”

He said nothing, but he looked at me a long time, his lips in a tight line.

The bus pulled up and he stood up at the door. He said, “You comin’?”

I shook my head. “I’m on foot. I just wanted to talk with you.”

He smiled like a man who has just gone fifteen rounds — and survived. He said, “Thanks.”

I nodded. “Merry Christmas.”

He nodded in return, a gesture of seriousness and solemnity that gives me hope for his daughter — and for him. He said: “Merry Christmas.”

Merry Christmas, Princess Peach

A Ramblin’ Gamblin’ Willie story

“Luigi!” The beautiful blonde girlchild tore her way across the packed airport corridor.

“Oh,” said her mother, a beautiful blonde womanchild. “Great…”

There is only one Christmas, isn’t there? Holly and mistletoe. A golden retriever by the fire. Mom bastes the bird while dad carols with the choir. Icicles cling to the branches of birch trees and fat, wet snowflakes tumble down, lit by the yellow glow of gaslights. Horses nicker and children giggle and lovers nestle and sigh. We’re all dreaming of a white Christmas — and we’re all dreaming.

And why not? Over the ghetto and through the industrial park doesn’t sound like a very nice way to get to Grandmother’s house, even though the highway really does go that way. There are no trails of tail-lights at Christmas, glinting and glowing in the drops of muddy drizzle on the windshield. The snow is white and windblown into drifts, not plow-piled and gray with soot. The children don’t squabble, the drunkards don’t wobble and the lovers don’t quarrel or cry.

Even at the airport there is only one Christmas, the Christmas-card Christmas of a world without airports.

Luigi was sitting across from me and he leapt up to meet the little girl as she crashed into him. She was seven or maybe eight, really too old to be picked up, but he picked her up anyway. She hugged him tightly and they both had a sudden wetness in their eyes.

He set the girl down as her mother approached. She nodded to him in a way that might have been curt, except the honey gold ringlets of her hair fell forward and robbed her of her haughtiness. She said, simply, “Brendan.”

He answered with a smile that was good-humored at the mouth and mocking in the eyes. “Best of the season to you, Chloe.”

The little girl shook her head furiously, her own white gold ringlets redeeming her mother’s haughtiness with an imperiousness of her own devising. “He’s not Brendan, he’s Luigi. And she’s not Chloe, she’s Princess Daisy. And I’m not Jennifer, I’m — ”

Luigi said, “This announcement wants herald trumpets, I think.”

“I am Princess Peach.”

Princess Daisy smiled weakly. “Home for Christmas?”

“Once a year, whether I can stand it or not.”

“Us, too. But we may have a problem with our tickets.” She gave a look to the long line at the check-in counter and bit her lower lip.

Luigi grinned. “You picked a good day for it.”

“I hate to ask this, but could you — ”

He broke her off with a wave of his hand. “Princess Peach, would you deign to grace me with your company while your mother whiles away her life in line?”

Princess Peach giggled. “You’re such a poet.”

“You’re such a snot,” he returned. To Princess Daisy he said, “I think we’ll be fine.”

Princess Daisy walked back to the end of the line and Luigi took Princess Peach’s hands in his own. “God I’ve missed you…”

“Same here.”

“You’re more lovely every time I see you.”

“Too much flattery,” she scoffed, clearly flattered nonetheless.

“Too much scorn, my lady disdain.”

“Too quarrelsome.”

“Too pretentious.”

“Too — , too — ” She couldn’t find a word and finally she said, “Brat!”

He laughed out loud and that was that.

She climbed into his lap and laid her head against his chest. “Say me a poem.”

“The only one I can think of right now is morbid, so I’ll borrow from someone else.” He stroked her hair and recited:

Jenny kissed me when we met,
Jumping from the chair she sat in.
Time, you thief, who loves to add
Sweets to your list, put that in.
Say I’m weary, say I’m sad,
Say that health and wealth have missed me.
Say that I’m growing old — but add
Jenny kissed me.

“You’ve done that one before. Besides, I’m not Jenny, I’m Princess Peach. Say the morbid one.”

He grimaced. “Don’t say you weren’t warned.”

I wish someone would send me something from somewhere.
Somewhere not too far away.
I’ve got too much of nothing from no one in nowhere.
There’s more in the mail every day.
When I’m laid on the slab in the pathology lab,
There won’t be anything for anyone to say.
I can’t take anything for granted,
I can’t take anything for granted,
I can’t take anything for granted,
So I’d like to have something today.

“That’s more a song than a poem.”

He smiled. “Oh, yes. Very danceable. But now it’s time for ‘As the Worm Turns’.”

“What’s that mean?”

“You have to recite to me.”

“I don’t have any poems. All I have are verses I had to memorize for school.”

“Luke two, I’ll bet.”

“Sister Carmela says I say them better than anyone.”

Very precisely he said, “Ahem. Prove it.”

She sat up in his lap, the more properly to declaim:

And Joseph went up from Galilee to Bethlehem to be taxed with Mary, his espoused wife, who was with child. And it came to pass that when they were there her days were accomplished, that she should be delivered. And she brought forth her firstborn son and wrapped him up in swaddling clothes and laid him in a manger because there was no room for them in the inn. And there were in the same country shepherds watching and keeping the night watches over their flock. And behold, an angel of the Lord stood by them and the brightness of god shone round about them and they feared with a great fear. And the angel said to them: “Fear not, for behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy that shall be to all the people. For this day is born to you a savior, who is Christ the lord, in the city of David. And this shall be a sign unto you. You shall find the infant wrapped in swaddling clothes, and laid in a manger.” And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising god and saying, “Glory to god in the highest and peace on earth to men of good will.”

His eyes were glassy again and he said, “You did that very well.”

“Mother says you don’t believe in god.”

“True enough. But I believe in Santa Claus. He’s the driver of the airport limo who brought me my Christmas wish…”

She said nothing for a long moment, just looked at him. Finally she said, “I wish you could spend Christmastime with us.”

He pursed his lips tight together. “I wish I could, too. Your mother and I were such broken people. I guess I thought we could fix each other… But even if we can’t, I wish you and I could have time together.”

She fell back against his chest and clasped her arms around his neck. “Me, too.”

He stroked at her hair and looked at nothing. After a long while he began to sing softly.

When that I was and a little tiny boy,
With hey, ho, the wind and the rain,
A foolish thing was but a toy,
For the rain it raineth every day.

But when I came to man’s estate,
With hey, ho, the wind and the rain,
Against knaves and thieves men shut their gate,
For the rain it raineth every day.

But when I came, alas, to wive,
With hey, ho, the wind and the rain,
By swaggering could I never thrive,
For the rain it raineth every day.

But when I came unto my beds,
With hey, ho, the wind and the rain,
With toss-pots still had drunken heads,
For the rain it raineth every day.

A great while ago the world begun,
With hey, ho, the wind and the rain,
But that’s all one, my song is done,
And I’ll strive to please you every day.

Without looking up, Princess Peach murmured, “What does it mean?”

He smiled wryly. “It means we may grow old, but we don’t always grow up. It’s from Shakespeare.”

“Sing another one.”

“Okay. This is also from Shakespeare.”

O mistress mine, where are you roaming?
O, stay and hear; your true love’s coming,
That can sing both high and low.

Trip no further, pretty sweeting;
Journeys end in lovers meeting,
Every wise man’s son doth know.

What is love? ‘Tis not hereafter;
Present mirth hath present laughter;
What’s to come is still unsure.

In delay there lies no plenty;
Then come kiss me, sweet and twenty,
Youth’s a stuff will not endure.

She pulled up her legs and cuddled more snugly in his lap. “Sing the bear song.”

“Why should I? You’ll just go to sleep on me.”

With an imperiousness becoming only to a princess, Princess Peach said, “Sing the bear song.”

Luigi smiled at her and began to sing softly.

I may go out tomorrow if I can borrow a coat to wear.
As I step out in style with my sincere smile and my dancing bear.
Outrageous. Alarming. Courageous. Charming.
Oh, who would think a boy and bear
Could be well accepted everywhere?
It’s just amazing how fair people can be.

Seen at the nicest places where well-fed faces all stop to stare.
Making the grandest entrance is Simon Smith and his dancing bear.
They’ll love us, won’t they? They feed us, don’t they?
Oh, who would think a boy and bear
Could be well accepted everywhere?
It’s just amazing how fair people can be.

I may go out tomorrow if I can borrow a coat to wear.
Oh, I’ll step out in style with my sincere smile and my dancing bear.
Now who needs money when you’re funny?
The big attraction everywhere
Will be Simon Smith and his dancing bear…
It’s Simon Smith and the amazing… dancing… bear…

By the time he had finished, Princess Peach was fast asleep. He kissed her hair and stroked it and sat with a contented smile on his face.

When Princess Daisy sat down next to him, she was seething with frustration.

“Trouble?”

“One of our tickets — not both, mind you — one of our tickets is on stand-by.”

“Well that can’t work.”

“It can, if it must. My mother’s meeting us, so Jenny can fly unaccompanied and I can go out tomorrow.”

He shook his head. “Here.” He dug into his jacket pocket and pulled out his own ticket. “Take this up to her and tell her to give my seat to you and book me for the morning.”

“Brendan, you don’t have to do this.”

“No, I don’t. But no one’s meeting me. I’ve rented a car. I’ll still make Christmas dinner, and I don’t think Santa’s going to miss me tonight.” Trying not to wake Princess Peach, he pulled a credit card out of his pocket. “Use this if it costs more.”

“She’ll need you to sign.”

“My hands are full. Sign for me. Tell her you’re my wife.”

“You’d like that, wouldn’t you?” she joked.

Not joking at all, he said: “I would.”

She may have reddened at the cheeks, but I wasn’t sure because she spun around and stalked back to the counter. When she returned, she said, very carefully: “Thank you.”

“My Christmas gift to your folks. I can’t remember the last time I saw them, but they’ve always been good to me.”

“…You’ve always been good to me.”

He gave a tight little smile, almost a wince. “The words sound like forever, but they’re really just for-now.”

“Must you attach a name to everything?”

He shrugged. “In fact I must.”

“Isn’t it just a little too cloying?” she asked. “Lifelong friends, high school sweethearts, reunited after all these years. So romantic. Isn’t that just a little too pat?”

He chuckled. “With whom are you arguing?”

“With — , with — ” She couldn’t find a word and finally she said, “Brat!”

He laughed out loud and that was that. After a long silence that seemed almost like home, he said, “I miss her a lot.”

Princess Daisy gave a crooked little smile. “She talks about you all the time. She plays those silly video games and she insists we’re in them.”

“I’d like to spend time with her, if you’d allow it.”

“Brendan, I can’t see you. We’ve been through all that.”

“Not you, her. I could take her on Saturdays. Give you a day to yourself, to go shopping, to clean house.”

“To see other men?”

“Do you think you can’t do that now? I miss her. I love her as much as if she were my own daughter. I want to have time with her. I think she’d like to have time with me.”

“Sometimes I think you love her more than you ever loved me…”

“…She erects fewer obstacles.”

“Touché! I am gored but still unsmitten.”

“I don’t want to spar with you, Chloe. Think about it. Let me know when you get back.”

Princess Daisy bit her lower lip and looked at the floor. When she looked up, she said, “We have to go.”

Luigi smiled weakly. “Such horrible words, and you say them so beautifully.” He shifted Princess Peach’s weight in his arms. “Stand up and I’ll hand her up to you.”

When they had effected the transfer, they stood face to face. They looked at each other for a long time, and finally Princess Daisy broke the silence, saying, “Merry Christmas, Brendan.”

There is only one Christmas, isn’t there? Even at the airport there is only one Christmas. Luigi smiled, and his face bore not the smallest hint of sadness. “Merry Christmas, Chloe.” He leaned forward and kissed the slumbering golden girlchild on the forehead. He said, “Merry Christmas, Princess Peach.”

A dumpster diver’s Christmas

A Ramblin’ Gamblin’ Willie story

I can be counted upon to walk, after all.

When everybody’s nowhere and even the laundromats are empty. When the respectable stores are closed and the line at the 24-Hour Slurp ‘n’ Burp is 15 deep with people craving cold beer and hot salsa and high-octane unleaded. When there’s one lonely mailman in an immense empty truck delivering insanely last-minute gifts sent via God-Help-Me-If-I-Screw-It-Up-Again Express Mail. When the streets are empty and the highways are empty and the parking lots are empty and, for once, even the bars are empty — I can be counted upon to walk. You’re at home with the yule log blazing, with a glazed ham baking, with a Bordeaux breathing, with the children seething to tear into that cache of treasures parked beneath the tree. And Uncle Willie’s out walking on Christmas Eve, dragging his pencil on the pavement for no good reason at all.

“Storm windows,” John Prine sings. “Gee, but I’m getting old. Storm windows, keep away the cold.” And that’s a silly enough thought in the great outdoors. I was cutting through an apartment complex and the closed-for-the-holidays supermarket next door had left its parking lot speakers blaring. And the radio station was playing a song they’d never play if they thought anyone was listening.

I can hear the wheels of automobiles
so far away, just moving along through the drifting snow.
It’s times like these, when the temperatures freeze
I sit alone, looking at the world through a storm window.
Down on the beach, the sandman sleeps.
Time don’t fly, it bounds and leaps.
The country band, it plays for keeps.
They play it so slow…

I was about twenty feet away from a big blue dumpster and I heard a rustle. You can take the boy out of the city, but you can’t take away the boy’s revulsion for rats, and I was suddenly in the mood to be walking elsewhere. But then there was a big tumble-rumble-boom, something big knocking into the steel walls of the dumpster, and I knew it wasn’t a rat.

And I knew what it was, too, and so do you. We call them dumpster divers, dismissing them with a lame joke. We read about them in the papers when some reporter wants to convince us we’re insufficiently taxed or when one of them inadvertently falls asleep inside a dumpster and gets crushed by the compactor of a garbage truck. We ignore them, mostly, because they’re revolting, but we can’t resist being berated with the idea that they’re a metaphor for our perfect indifference, those people whom we have thrown away. The penance we pay for ignoring them, as we sit down to feast, is a moment’s spasm of guilt — sinfully delicious — as an appetizer. But in fact we have not thrown them away. Other people are not ours to dispose of or reclaim, and dumpster divers are simply people so poor that they mine as wealth the treasures we spurn as garbage. Indulge your guilt if it pleases you, but you are not at fault.

But I am not proud of you for looking away, and I make a point, perhaps a vanity, of looking where you refuse to. I called out, “Yo!” This is a universally understood term of street argot; it means: “I may have a gun, and you’d better find out.”

Tumble-rumble, tumble-rumble. The side door of the dumpster swung open. A muffled voice called out, “I ain’t hurtin’ nobody. I ain’t hurtin’ no one.” An old, old black man stuck his head out and peered around. He was so thin I could see every bone and blood vessel in his head and his cheeks were sunk in where his teeth used to be. His hair was covered by a grimy doo rag and there was an unfiltered cigarette, grey with dirt, tucked behind his ear. He stood up inside the dumpster and stood with his arms hanging from the sides of the doorway, framed like some hideous post-modern crucifixion. His clothes were rags and they were covered with filth.

I couldn’t contain myself. I said: “Holy Christ…”

He cackled and said, “Not today.”

There was nothing I could say, so I said nothing.

He saw me staring so stupidly and said, “Everybody gets what they deserve. Everybody.”

I said: “But — ” But nobody deserves this.

“I thought to have it both ways, son. So now I got it no way at all. I wanted to have me somethin’ for nothin’. But it don’t work that way. Instead, I gave up every little somethin’ I had, and I got nothin’ in exchange.”

“Nothing…?”

“I got me that bicycle over there. I got me these soda cans, forty cents to a pound. I got a culvert pipe I sleep in, it’s dry most of the time, don’t smell too bad.”

“Oh, man,” I moaned.

“Don’t you pity me, boy! I ain’t got nothin’, but I got my pride. I ain’t gonna let you pity that away!”

I smiled at that. I said, “Wouldn’t think of it.”

“And don’t you go tryin’ to give me your money!”

I said, “Wouldn’t think of it.”

“I had enough of other people’s money! Ain’t nothin’ costs so much as somethin’ you stole, and charity is just stealin’ with guilt for the gun. I don’t steal no more, no way, no how. I ain’t got nothin’, but it’s all mine, right and proper.”

I said, “How did… How did you get here?”

He chuckled, answering the question and not the words. “I got away with it, boy. I got away with it all!”

I said, “…?”

“Gotta go to school, can’t play hookey?” He thumbed his chest. “I got away with it. Gotta get a job, can’t shoot craps for a livin’? I got away with it. Gotta tell the truth, can’t tell no lies? I got away with it. Gotta be true, can’t run around on your woman? I got away with it. Can’t mess with them nasty white powders? I got away with it. Can’t be rippin’ off strangers, then neighbors, then friends? I got away with it. Just look at me, boy. Can’t you see I got away with everything?”

I said nothing, just swallowed hard.

“They said a man can’t live without standin’ firm for the things he believes in. Mister, can’t you see? I got away with it!” He cackled mirthlessly.

I stood lost in thought for a moment. I said, “You’re paying penance. Aren’t you?”

“Boy, I’m just payin’. Ain’t lookin’ for no easy way out. There ain’t no easy way out.”

I nodded, and I guess that was answer enough. He jumped down out of the dumpster and stood before me. He didn’t smell too bad. He stuck out his hand, offering to shake. I couldn’t tell if the look in his eyes was a plea or a challenge. Maybe it was both.

I took his hand and didn’t flinch. I shook his hand as though he were a banker or a lawyer or the smiling, beguiling salesman from Munificent Home and Life. I shook his hand as though he were a human being. Because he is.

He said, “Mister, you’ve got guts.”

“So have you.”

He smiled, and the smile was devoid of every trace of merriment. “Guts is what I got left, brotherman. Guts is what I had that couldn’t run out on me.”

“But you could have chased it away.”

“Could have. And then I’d have nothin’ at all.”

“Or nothing worth having…”

He smiled again, and this time there was a little light in it. “Merry Christmas.”

I nodded with a solemnity that I have never conferred upon any banker or lawyer or insipid insurance salesman. I said: “Merry Christmas.”

And you’re at home with the fire and the ham and the wine and the tinkling, twinkling Christmas tree. You’re safe from the fates that people the void, the spaces and faces into which you never look by means of ostentatiously looking away. But it’s not the grace of god that protects you, and it’s not Munificent Home and Life. If you forget who you are and do as you mustn’t, you may escape discovery, but you will never escape justice. You may not end up digging through dumpsters, but that won’t mean you haven’t turned your life into garbage. Nobody ever gets away with anything, and no one proves that better than those of us who pretend otherwise. “Silence is golden,” John Prine sings, “until it screams — right through your bones.”

And isn’t that a dainty dish to set before the king? And yet this is every bit of treasure my life has afforded me, and I confer it upon you with all the solemnity I can muster. You can spurn it, but you can’t return it. And if you throw it in the trash, you may see it again someday. I hope you get what you want. I make me no doubt you’ll get what you deserve.

Merry Christmas.

I edited 1,407 files in 1,407 folders on Friday. Not by hand, mind you. That would have been a tedious and error-prone path to an inevitable suicide for someone like me. No, I built a spider to do the job, and it took a surprisingly long time to run — almost four minutes.

But I wanted to put the Phoenix Area Headlines Scenius scene into every engenu web page we’ve built so far, and that entailed editing 1,407 files in 1,407 folders — dispersed among thousands of folders in dozens of domains all over our file server.

I didn’t really edit them, of course. Software doesn’t work that way. I sucked the files to be altered into memory, concatenated my new code on at the end, killed the original file and then wrote down my new version under the same name. I built the engenu file architecture anticipating that I might want to do things like this.

And that kind of thing makes me a hard sell on the idea of Attitude with a capital A. I definitely believe in working from a positive frame of mind toward positive goals — all based firmly in reason and logic. But it doesn’t matter how many times you say, “I can do it!” — if you don’t actually know how to edit 1,407 files in four minutes. Attitude is nothing without Aptitude.

But Aptitude is nothing without Application. We are all of us buried up to our necks in work we could be doing, and our success at digging ourselves out is entirely a function of how we apply ourselves.

Aristotle said, “We are what we repeatedly do.” For most of my life, I’ve regarded that as being the essence of human character. But there is an interesting question about those 1,407 engenu pages: Where did they come from?

Each one of those engenu folders represents a web page, and many of them are grouped together into web sites. A single-property web site might consist of 20 or more engenu folders. An extensive home search could run to 60 or more folders — 60 or more web pages linked into a hierarchical web site.

There are two people working in this brokerage — Cathleen Collins and myself. We’ve had engenu available for live work for ten months today. And in those ten months, on top of everything else we’ve been doing, we’ve managed to pound out 1,407 unique web pages for our clients.

So I’m changing my bet. Application still comes first with me. To make dinner, you have to want to make dinner and you have to know how to make dinner. But you won’t eat until you actually make dinner. Attitude and Aptitude can make you hunger for success, but only hard work will fill your belly.

You can’t do your best work without wanting to do your best. And you can’t do your best without knowing how to do your best. But no matter how hard you work, you cannot do your best work without combining the best of your will with the best of your mind and the best of your laboring.

It’s the three together — Attitude, Aptitude and Application — that slay dragons and then serve up dragon stew.

I don’t do well in despair.

Clarify that. I don’t mean that, when I find myself in despair, I fare especially badly.

What is mean is, if despair were a classroom discipline for which one could be tested and graded, I would probably flunk out.

I’ve lived through some ugly stuff in my life — who hasn’t? — but mostly I didn’t notice. I’m good at thinking — or so I like to think. And, good at it or not, I really do like to think. But I can only think about one thing at a time. For most of my time, for most of my life, I like to think about work. I like to think about what I’m doing. I like to think about what I’m getting done.

That doesn’t leave much room in my mind for despair. Or depression. Or gloom or sadness or fear or doubt or pain or worry or any of the things that people talk about when they’re not talking about work. I know about those ideas, much as I know about ideas like schadenfreude or universal guilt, things that I’ve heard about or read about but never seen from the inside.

You could say that’s my good luck, I suppose, but I’m sure it’s a choice on my part. Who hasn’t known sadness, after all? It’s not that I’ve never lived with painful emotions, it’s simply that I choose not to live with them any longer than I have to — which almost always turns out to be no time at all. I turn to my work not to escape from pain, nor even to to work alleviate it. I turn to my work because that’s what I love most in my life — and my purpose in living is to love my life.

But I come up short, I think, because I’m so badly equipped to prepare for desperate times. We’re headed into an economic recession, perhaps a depression, and I truly don’t know what to think about it. I’ve lived through several of these episodes in the past, and I worked right through all of them and didn’t notice a thing. It was all just newspaper noise to me, and not really even much of that. News — other people’s business — is a narcotic you use to quiet your mind when it’s not busy enough.

And yet, and yet, and yet…

I’m willing to concede that I might look at the world through rose-colored glasses if you are willing to concede that my way of seeing the world is simply better. That, whether my way of tilting at the clouds of gloom may be in some way incorrect — according to some imaginary arbiter — nevertheless my way is the way that things get done. It’s always raining somewhere, but if you have time enough to care, you’re not working hard enough.

So: Consider this: The Federal Reserve Bank has been pumping paper money into the American economy since 9/11. Before then, really — since the dot.com bomb. This is actual inflation — what inflation actually means — the inflation of the supply of currency. Your whole life you’ve been taught — by newspapers — to regard inflation as price inflation, but this is a secondary consequence. The quantity of currency is increased — actual inflation — and thus there are more dollars chasing the same quantity of goods, in turn causing prices to rise.

Here’s my question: Since we’ve got a good head of steam going on the currency inflation engine — most especially in the past few months — where is the corresponding price inflation?

Gold is up by double or triple, as are some other basic commodities. Oil, real estate and securities have been all over the map. But everyday stuff is still pretty cheap. The “market basket of goods and services” is probably useless, by now, as a measure of price inflation. But we haven’t seen anything like the kind of price inflation we have every right to expect, given our ten-plus year orgy of currency inflation.

What gives?

Here’s what: The idea of price inflation presumes that, as the quantity of currency increases, the quantity of goods — and the demand for those goods — will remain stable. When that happens, prices have to go up. Economics 101. But what happens if the quantity of goods is also going up dramatically? What happens if the cost of bringing those goods to market is going down — in some cases plummeting?

Generals are always fighting the last war and economists are always making devastatingly logical predictions about the last recession.

What’s different this time? Data-processing, for one major thing. An industrial revolution in China, for another. An intellectual blossoming like manna from the heavens in India. The world is a much richer place than it was 15 years ago — before the internet changed everything.

Everything that is touched in any way by the data-processing economy is better, cheaper, faster than it has ever been before. We have come so far so fast that we have grown blithely accustomed to getting many, many services of incomparable value for free.

Do you doubt me? What would you have had to pay, in 1993, for the research you do casually today, at no cost — often on a whim! — at Google.com? You are submerged to unfathomable depths in wealth uncounted and all you can do is whimper about your poverty!

Ah, but it’s not the same, is it? You can’t eat a free Google search or a free Rhapsody tune or a a free episode of South Park with all the potty-mouth words unbowdlerized. But you can find love for free in dozens of places on the nets. And you can make friends for free at MySpace and Facebook. And you can network your way into a better job, for free, in your spare time, at LinkedIn. None of those are immediately edible, either, but man does not live by bread alone.

But that’s still not enough, is it? The newspaper noise is despair unbounded, despair unleashed, despair and gloom and doom unending, unrelenting, unforgiving, unsparing and unstoppable. All that and you still have an appetite!

Fine. Let’s talk about what is — the world we can see and feel and smell and touch — and not the horrifying specters that haunt our fears.

First, the productive capacity of the world has not changed. If anything, it continues to go up, even if perhaps at a temporarily slower pace. Wealth is not money. Wealth is goods and the intellect and husbandry and manufacturing capacity to produce more goods. Every bit of the real wealth we had yesterday, we have today. A lot of people have lost a lot of money, but our store of produced goods and our fixed capital base for producing more goods is undiminished.

Do you understand? If there had been a war, and if some significant fraction of the world’s capacity for producing goods and services had been destroyed, that would be a very bad thing. That would be a cause, going forward, for concerns about systemic poverty.

This hasn’t happened. We are richer today than we have ever been, expressed in terms of our ability to produce goods and services, and — because of the spread of data-processing, because of the enterprise of the Chinese, and because of the intellectual renaissance in India — we will be quite a bit richer — by those same standards — as soon as tomorrow. I mean that literally: Tomorrow.

That’s the silver lining. Here’s the cloud: The government of the United States — and probably all of the governments it routinely bosses around — are about to set on an unprecedented course of actual wealth destruction. Remember, wealth is goods, not money. But if the federal government makes it unpalatable for very smart young people to seek careers in medicine, the supply of health care will go down just as demand for health care is soaring. Again, this is Economics 101, a class taught to everyone except presidential candidates.

Governments destroy wealth best with wars, but they destroy wealth with almost everything they do. Anything that a government does that makes it harder for an honest trader to either produce, purchase or sell a marketable good or service is a net destruction of wealth. Money is not wealth, but money is the seed stock of new wealth, so, by despoiling the currency, by taxing productivity, and by rewarding stupidity, waste and sloth at the expense of wisdom, thrift and enterprise, governments systemically destroy wealth. This is all painfully obvious — by which I mean, the less obvious is it to you, the greater your pain.

Even so, it almost doesn’t matter. The Federal Reserve Bank had to despoil the American dollar for eleven years before it could bring on this recession, and, in the end, it required a lot of extra-especially-stupid intervention from other branches of the government to bring the economy to its knees. Just exactly how strong is the Atlas that is our semi-sorta-free enterprise system? Almost strong enough to bear the nearly infinite weight of ignorance of the American government.

But wait. There’s more.

In 1961, President John F. Kennedy promised to put a man on the moon in ten years. Not to say anything nice about a government boondoggle, but they actually got the job done in seven years. And then, the Federal government being what it is, Congress promptly cut the budget for everything associated with space exploration.

Was this a depression? Only if you worked in the aerospace industry. But a whole lot of people who had had a whole lot of grounding in data-processing and micro-electronics suddenly had a lot of time on their hands and a huge need to come up with ways of feeding their families.

The result? The birth of the electronics industry as you know it. Clunky digital calculators. Goofy digital watches with huge displays in ruby-red LEDs. And then smaller, cheaper calculators and incredibly cheap multi-function watches. And hand-held games and coin-operated games and game consoles. And micro-computers, first as do-it-yourself kludges and then as little desktop boxes like the TRS-80 and the Apple II. And then — the deluge…

All of this would have happened anyway, one way or another. But it happened the way it did because there was a “depression” among people who had been very well educated in electrical engineering and the computer sciences.

Fast forward to now. Since 1995 or so, people all over the world have been quietly improving their intellectual capital on the internet. Each one of them is pursuing his or her own interests, and each one is working at his or her own pace. But never in the history of human life on earth have so many people been so assiduously devoted to improving their minds. This is an amazing thing — and it has gone essentially unheralded. Like the priceless searches we take for granted on Google, the fact that everyone we know on-line is constantly getting smarter simply seems natural to us, by now. We are on the cusp of a real Athens, a global Agora where everyone can participate and it is so obvious to us that it’s hardly worth thinking about.

And yet all of us — not everyone in the world, but everyone in the wired world — is a part of this thing, and we’re all studying and reading and writing and learning and growing at a pace never once imagined by anyone on earth, not even the haughty Greeks of ancient Athens. They built an Agora for their elite, but we have spread the refinements of the elites to where anyone can take them up, if they choose. This just by itself is an amazing redistribution of intellectual capital that has come about right under our noses.

And all of us are wired a lot, perhaps a lot more than we might want to admit among strangers. But some of us are wired virtually all of the time. There is a subset of American young people, especially young males, for whom all the world takes second place to the internet. To the extent they work in the off-line world, it’s to pay for their time on-line. They may live with their folks or with roommates, but they live as cheaply as they can, thus to be able to devote as much time as they can to their lives on-line. I am not judging these people, not their overall priorities nor what they choose to do with their time on the nets. I am simply observing that they exist — in vast and uncounted numbers.

It seems reasonable to me that, if we are entering a recession or a depression, all of us are going to have to tighten our belts. We may pass on a vacation or two, or we may drive the sedan a year longer than we had planned. Dinner out? Let’s call Pizza Hut instead. But here’s what won’t happen: Absolutely none of us will cut our broadband connections. The kids can see the damned dermatologist half as often, but we’re keeping the DSL line!

Even people who lose their jobs will do what they have to to keep their internet connections. They may give up a wired phone line, but Cox Cable will still be sending a monthly bill.

Now stop and think. Don’t despair. Don’t fear. Don’t worry. Just think. Vast hordes of people all over the world who have just spent the last five or ten or thirteen years massively improving their intellectual capital are about to have a great deal of time on their hands — along with broadband connections to the internet.

Will things get bad? Maybe.

Will these be hard years to live through? Possibly.

Are we doomed? Get real!

We are immersed in wealth we are too insensate to sense, and we are about to increase that wealth by incalculable exponents. The greatest wealth the human mind can know is the time to think — hale, healthy, fed to satisfaction and nothing exigent weighing upon the mind. This condition won’t apply to everyone, and we each of us make better and worse use of the time to think when we have it. But billions of eager, active human minds will be free to think — and free too communicate their thoughts to one another.

No one should wish for the economic storms we are about to weather — and we could wish instead that some of the thinking that is done in the next few years is devoted to ridding the human race of the wealth-destroying pestilence that is government.

But taking account that we are going to weather these storms, they simply could not have come at a better time for the human race.

You can tell me about despair if you wish, but I won’t hear you, and I won’t understand you. You can tell me about fear and worry and depression — if you insist. You can tell me all about the dark, dank tunnel in which your feel yourself entombed…

But all I can see — all I can think about — all I can care about — is the light of mind that leads us out.