June 4, come and gone, Tibet alas, the earth quakes

I sent something like this to the local paper several months back, and received only silence in return. Well, OK, the writing's a mess, but it could have been pounded into something readable.

The politics are a convoluted stretch. But I still find plenty of irony in the constant and continuous pass made by any media for any real thoughtful attention to what's going on with the big picture. For archival purposes, then, here's what I thought might get published, if only because I was the news maker concerned (a small teapot tempest), and was offering a personal remembrance, which is the style of one of their columns:

* * *

I remember very clearly where I was on June 4, 1989, because everyone was calling me for guidance about what was going on in China that day. I was some years into a gig as a Chinese language teacher; in the fitful throes of an abortive career as an academic and Chinese scholar.

I was painting the ceiling at the actual moment, making a bedroom for my daughter who was born a short while before, 2 months early, 2 pounds – she just made Phi Beta Kappa in her Junior year in college by the way - and not thinking much about China, or about current events in general.

I had studied classical Chinese poetry in college, which wasn't much use in the event (we're talking 2000 years old), and I was focused hard on learning the modern language. Travelling to China, hanging with my cohort of Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation funded young teachers, mastering my pronunciation -- I put things in a classical perspective. I was shocked.

The next year, a small group of concerned citizens were brought together by some Chinese students in Buffalo who needed our help to arrange for a commemoration of the tragedy in their homeland. We were holding some funds spontaneously generated in horror and sympathy, and mayor Jimmy Griffin (R.I.P) stood in the way of our using the Rose Garden in Delaware Park, which had been the site of a spontaneous gathering the year before.

The mayor explained patiently to me over the phone that he didn't want people bashing heads in his parks. I patiently explained that this would be a peaceful commemoration, and that (unlike in China, I thought to myself) Americans had the right to gather and speak out. There was an excuse about a wedding being planned for the same time. That didn't check out, so we initiated a lawsuit and went ahead with planning.

The Police were helpful (I think they had labor differences with Hizzoner). The Shakespeare in Delaware Park folks were helpful. County Executive Dennis Gorski got us a band shell. I snuck in late at night to steal the electric from Shakespeare, purloined key in exchange for dressing room privileges at my nearby school – I was now headmaster. I got the city indemnified on the schools' insurance, and we hired the great David Jay to sue on constitutional grounds. Tom Toles depicted that we had a good cause – 'no democracy protests in Delaware Park either??'

An untimely divorce squelched my academic career – you can't go through those rigors with child support. So, I'm the other side of the single mom saga, and Buffalo doesn't understand dreams because as Obama knows, there's too much pain. My kids are great, thanks to their Mom, and I'm sliding out from under the IT world which keeps the kids fed if not Dad in his element.

Here's what I wake up to find: The powers that be clearly think that American Capitalism has got to take over in the face of all forms of ignorance afoot in the world. We apparently think this while simultaneously believing that life begins scientifically at conception while evolution is false.

I remember where I was -- fixing a computer in a Catholic church in Rochester -- on 9/11. I watched in horror with people who knew how to pray. I remember the coincidental smoke over Buffalo on the way home, and wondering if it was all over. I've since learned that the perpetrators deserve only my pity, but I'm really worried about China.

They too seem to feel that the world has to be one way. They always have, and they've always been right, for a lot longer than we've been a twinkle in some Chinese guy's eye. They seem to have turned the tragedy of Tian-an Men into a nationalist cause, keeping chaos at bay goes the argument, and are high on beating us at our own game, as we flaccidly fall prey to deregulationist creationism. We don't know the difference among commodities and competition and where the government's role is. We don't know who we are or what we want, and they only know that whatever happened back then made their life a lot better.

I was once inside the Communist party headquarters and watched with some fascination as my host wrote a message on a white board which simultaneously displayed on every board in every location of the "world's largest University," where all 300,000 cadre get educated upon "election" to local and regional office. There's still only one party there.

Remember those loudspeakers playing the same tune all over China? I woke up to them every day while studying in China, back in the day before they had cars and before the world had Internet.

We need to become friends with China. We share rich and liberal traditions of poetry, scholarship, culture, discovery, science, commerce, entrepreneurship. We both need to stop selling arms, and sucking oil. We can do better than this. Let's free Tibet, but not bash heads doing it.

I'm in love with the Pope these days, having spent my entire life immersed in Catholicism, but never able to buy anything about the medieval organization. Beyond that particular church, I always look for the gun and decide that isn't Jesus. I always look for the anger and hatred and fear.

I didn't see anger in the Pope, and I don't see it in the Dalai Lama and I don't see it in Barack Obama either for that matter.

Remember when the walls came down all over the world, following on the example of the young Chinese? Remember when we let deregulationist claptrap take hold because Reagan sounded so good? (I think Stockman's in jail, trying to do good, but hoist, as they say, by his own whatever) Remember when Hillary believed that universal health care was a no brainer beyond the pale of competitive economics, as should be electric, oil, college, education and the rest of mistaken "Goods"??

I'm afraid I love China more than the Chinese, and it makes me very very sad.

Chapter 3, from 1983

The heartbeat of footsteps,
Drawn soft through the shimmering night.
Heaven forget, be heedless of his plight.
Young ones come o'er half the oceans wide,
Bringing forth in girth the breeming tide.

I'm torn between two worlds, and always will be, I suppose. The world of literature with all its rich rewards might be the highest. Where visions are set by interactive construings of the only truly human language. There is only one reality, and it is most real in books.

But all it takes is a tale of far off life in the flesh. Sailing around the world in a gaudy yacht. Captain of a virile life. Then I spill my ashes all over my lap and am set into a deep funk. There would be experience gained there that would set my knowledge in the scramble of a little boy away from the billy-club of authority. I would have nothing to say. And it wouldn't be worth saying anything in the face of those lives I'd rather lead.

The burden of life is to be happy where one is -- and the joy. There is no-place else. When the soul takes up residence in far-off places, it loses its right to speak. Struck dumb by the voice of authority that already lives there. I learned something once by my stupid embarrassment in the presence of a wealthy scion from my hometown. I had nothing to say, and knew then my own smallness.

Why not me? I have the intelligence, the skills. I should be there. I should. There is a way, though, to convince oneself that it is ade­quate that somebody is there -- and not on a movie screen. There is a way to partake of greater lives without jealousy. There is a way to possess with­out owning, and experience without the sure thrill that makes history. I can almost believe it with my being. I believe it easily with my head. There is nothing on the other side that isn't already here. And if you need to get there you will -- or die in the crossing.

* * * *

Howie's shock came in part from a profound innocence of books, but mostly from a world which tried in so many ways to sterilize its security. To lop off the groping and clinging tendrils which reach out from the muck of the earth and embrace even the crystalline pinnacles. His world was buffered by an intervention of invention. An imposition of will where only the most sinuous of those shoots could reach. It was a tower of plastic, the malleable stuff so far from its organic roots of carbon rings and chains that it must be considered the purest product of will.

That same buffer would -- might -- have served him better in the form of words. The plastic (in the other sense?) world of imagery where all the web of existence is intensified. Or are they two sides of the same coin? Surely a crenellated tower is a product of will. Why, then, am I so certain that on its ramparts the breathing earth must still condense her breath, and not on those other ramparts of gleaming alloy. There are some works of literature -- most of those that endure -- whose earth-born stoniness vibrates in its roots. There are cruder and crueler words, though, whose mirror held up to nature reveals only ghoulish death behind the mask of Cinderella. You have to look hard, but it's there.

Or perhaps the difference is always and only in the man. If we deter our secretly cherished holocaust and Armageddon, these plastic moldings may one day too be looked upon with awe for the life they contain. There is no escape or release from the tendrils of being but the final one. There is now, even when man intervenes his will too strongly -- yes plastic, celluloid, indoctrinary fictions -- these too vibrate with the pulse of life. It is the attempt at escape that may be dangerous. In the foolish way that a drowning untrained swimmer grasps for the air only to drive himself under.

Howie could be shocked, but he was not innocent. His shock was never moral outrage, and he had made forays beyond the false security of the fortress impregnable that was home. He'd felt the infusion of mother's milk pouring through rents in mountain's mammary sides; the caress of rain which pulls away a gentle blanket of snow; and even, in the crashing thunder of colliding clouds making their electrical discharge of energy that was only latent because they had not touched -- even the ejaculation of nature's orgasm in her darkest moments. He knew he was connected, but it was a lost knowledge.

His shock came from the discovery of the power words could have for keeping that knowledge lost. No one had told him. The untutored contact he'd made with words was never enough to find his groping way beyond the dams of conventional truths. He took them at their face -- because of their beauty in which he had deep faith, never once suspecting that each uttered truth might be a lie that covered the eternal attempt at escape. Truths are secure and, like plastic, cannot deteriorate. Howie found them beautiful on their face. He cried at the truth of romantic love when he found it. He built steamy anger at the truth of greed and pettiness. Mostly, he was inconsolably impatient before the truth of lies.

He felt these truths with those same senses that deliv­ered nature's sounds, smells, tastes, touches and broad coherence. And so he was shocked at each little breach. The world of words was beginning its dissolution and it was as upsetting as if he were watching a mountain crumble before his eyes at the behest of nothing more than a whim. When the mountains crumble, there is no life. The daisy whose life reaches out toward a million worlds and across a million eons would become a piece in a museum -- disconnected from its integral soil whose nourishment is now replaced by words. Not the literal nourishment which is easy enough to provide, but the kind that would bridge the gulf that is unbridgeable between the explanation to the side of the display and the actual meaning of the homely little daisy which may be encountered for its truth perhaps by only the very youngest and most innocent -- or the most accomplished.

A mountain of words which had held together for him only by the tight restraint of a net of truths, was being under­mined at each new glimpse of the reality behind. And so as the days passed in a mist between his subsequent incarnation there in the woods near her, he began to carry an image from a dream of his hand in hers --held over the top of a tall filing cabinet. The bliss of the dream was not to be dis­appointed when actually their hands met.

That was a shock of revelation -- that the actual could be as real as the truth he had known. It was a bliss that wore thin for her more rapidly than for him who still took that hand with infinite wonder. It had become artificial, though -- almost an obligation, and the kiss was sure to follow. The kiss that would assure him of the solidity of the ground by its involvement of many more senses than just touch.

He'd tasted his sister's tongue when they were still young enough to bathe together. It was a game more innocent than "doctor" yet initiate enough to leave anyone without a sister deprived. It was a final extension of the curiosity that compels all tikes to taste the grime of a bus's window, and know the different qualities of metals; dirt, weeds, brick -- all those qualities that are still there, though forgotten.

Still, he was shocked by Jackie's insistent tongue which parted that which in him was ever content to remain closed. He hadn't known. It was a tumultuous collapse that left them writhing on the ground squeezing the other toward oneself for hours without ever admitting that any other barriers could exist. It was an afternoon made so permanent and stationary that he was to scrawl the only diary he ever kept on a tiny square of paper that said simply "This has been the best day of my life." There were no other possible words.

That moment of collapse -- it was a moment for what went afterwards didn't matter -- gave him the one pure impulse he would ever have to invoke the mysterious power of words to enshrine what all history conjoins to produce and then throws away with the next moment. The mind which is universe iden­tical to the one outside is forever stupefied that trans­formation should go on unabated in the face of its own crystallization. A word. Not in the beginning, but to be an end.

The knowledge would later rack him with silly jealousy. This person whom he has possessed so fully must have passed that way before. But where? How can such sordid knowledge exist beyond the sanctified trust of lovers who told and gave all? He couldn't conceive that she could have ever been frivolous, nor that she could ever have loved any other. Ridiculous as it seems, it was in no way different than the battle already begun in his soul between his instinct that knew that all truths must be overturned, and his knowledge that they cannot be. He hated by now the hypocrisy that would denounce impurity at the same time that it was man­ufactured constantly. O, he wanted to see lewd magazines published and sex made free, but his own anchor was slipping over the ground made slimy.

But she rode horses and not bicycles, and didn't have to understand what wasn't given in a moment. She was a true admirer of daisies, and made them beautiful simply by her attention. Yet she assuaged his jealousy out of the same obligation that made her listen to his mechanical explan­ations. She didn't need to know whom she loved and whom she didn't. It was for his sake that she invented the mistake of her past and swore to its frivolous circumstances. It was for his sake that she uttered the word love, though only in the negative and in regard to her past. He made oathes to her from the deepest reaches of his available heart, and she was truly obligated.

He knew what he knew and hated the slow passage of time that made them too ridiculously young for that knowledge to be sealed forever by marriage. Why? It would have been that way in the past. He was willing to forget all the hypocrisy of what had been sanctified only by convention just to stop the onward rush with the acceptance of this one truth. He was throttled by an image formed early wherein he was stand­ing at the altar next to a fulsome beauty from TV. That was the promise of life, and now he was willing to overlook the inconsistencies. He'd taken the face value and made it whole in his heart. Brush away the stupid image -- this is real!

"Can you believe it? This is puerile. Where in the world could anyone find more romance and less truth? Howie, you've got to stop this."

I can't help it. It is the truth. It's tangled and overburdened, but there is the actual thing. It's actually much more difficult than revealing the inner recesses of other forbidden paths I've trod. This is the most forbidden; the absolutely shameless admission of the transgression of the ultimate sin of ...Of what? Stupidity? Innocence? No, not these. They have some charm. But this is the ultimate sin of being so foolish that you tell the reader you don't know what you're talking about. You make a claim for know­ledge, and then you reveal this? Better let a monkey type Shakespeare. Not that I haven't since learned. But to have been so gullible. Anything I try and portray through my writing might as well be taken for the ecstatic claim of an idiot to have found the answer to all questions in a moral tract by Jerry Fallwell.

"Or in a daisy?"

Hardly the same thing. The daisy speaks for itself. So does Jerry Fallwell in that sense. No? No, gullibility is a sin. I don't know how I missed that teaching for so long. You just don't go around believing in Santa Claus after it's not cute. If you're prone to, then you'll always be a fool and hardly worth a chuckle when you want to be taken ser­iously.

"Did you believe in Santa Claus?"

Sure, when I was a kid. But wait a minute. I remember the cruel transition now. Oh, I didn't believe in Santa Claus any longer than any other kids. I wasn't that gull­ible. But like the kiss that leads instantly to collapse if it is meant too sincerely the first time, I instantly doubted God after Santa's fall. I remember that.

"You mean like the kiss that leads to blind and innocent groping on the ground. Be honest now."

Yes and no. I haven't finished that story yet. No, I'm talking about a fear of gullibility that went to the quick. How was I to know that God -- the God I knew had a white beard and was the strict antecedent to all human attributes -- how was I to know he wasn't a put-on. I tried desperately to convince myself. I wanted that gullibility. But it poked at me.

"How can you see a bird flying," I asked Jackie, "And not believe in God? All the beauty of the world is too perfect. Did you ever look at a snowflake, or even think about your own existence. The perfection of your body; the hands, the eyes, the way it all works. I mean why are we here? There has to be a reason."

I desperately -- really desperately -- wanted to believe in God. And I did believe. I prayed, and I felt my prayers were answered. I entrusted my soul to the wisdom of the ages, for at least I knew that God hadn't been invented in anyone's knowledge. There must be a God. I wanted these things that I asked Jackie to be enough, and was perplexed that they didn't move her that way.

In the end, it may have been her own family tradition of atheism. My family was atheistic too, though I couldn't have known it, nor could they. But if you have a home, then that is enough.

"Nobody had to make them beautiful. They just are beautiful. I think we evolved from something like them and that's why they're beautiful."

"Yeah, but in the beginning. I mean WHY? I can't believe that birds and bees just happen. There has to be a reason."

My love for her was growing pagan. Oh, there were no longer any scruples. The dogma had long since eroded. But there was that one last threshold beyond which a truer damn­ation than the one I'd been brought up on seemed to lie. It wasn't the threshold of the flesh. As soon as I'd learned through Jackie of the power of the moment when all is made perfect -- when all of one's life; its accidents, mistakes, and marvels, are proved beyond any doubt, reasonable or unreasonable, to have been designed to create you -- oneself at the moment of your perfection -- just then another and identical power was made manifest.

That power is the darker one which causes all items in your touch to turn dusty. The bad luck. The rain come to quench a sunny heart, and the demon sent to pull the crucial timber from the construction of one's plans. When all the world turns staring on its one worst accident -- mistake.
These moments provided no impulse in me to check them with a word in a simple diary. Perhaps they should have, but that is not what we wish to hold on to.

That might have been a way out. A balance to the egotism which held on to that one greatest moment and got mixed up in jealousy to hold me poised on a razor's edge. There can be no more stale existence. By the light she had lit in me and by her subtle but insistent refusal to be possessed, she held me poised on my unwillingness to forsake my personal God whose reason had to be for me; and my desire for confirmation in her ungodded truth.

I managed somehow to trap her for long hours at the other end of a phone line, by a brooding need for an answer that she knew I didn't want given. I don't know how. I can't remember what words could have kept anyone tied to that childish melancholy that managed to make its cause the object of its release. Listen, won't you? Understand that I am alone in the world, and that if you leave me now, you will have forsaken your only claim to humanity. It was pre­posterous.

Before this time, there was no aura of depression around me, and no hidden ecstasy as its cause. I was a child in every way fulfilling the ancient pattern of guarded growth into an adult world that still made sense. I'm convinced that there has been no age before nor could there be one hence, when it is possible to have such guarded growth. I wasn't a particularly good kid all the time. There were many wicked deeds done at a secret remove from the realm of authority. But there was never any need for contact in the wider world.

The community provided only that aspect of life that was wanted. Playing, sleeping, eating and all the other activ­ities that are considered desirable in a world where work is at the remove of gray business suits, gray long rides, and gray greetings that need a ritual transformation before they re-enter the truer and more colorful home life. The wicked deeds of youth were all the natural ones, but they never brought me into contact with that other world that would cause such shock when the plunge of adolescence has so sud­denly to be made. Filth was restricted to the city. Wicked­ness was kept innocent by the boundary of the playground which screened for attitude as well as activity.

Thus the outward breach of authority never touched the more central authority which kept all truly wicked urges under moral lock and key. But this is all a wrongful attempt at explanation. I can't know why I would so easily set off bombs and never touched a bottle of beer. Why I would tres­pass wantonly over all the laws that would restrict my plea­sure and my curiosity, yet never steal a candy-bar. It wasn't that I had the money to buy them, or that they were provided at home -- they weren't. But that was for my own good, and there managed to be instilled a fierce pride in the deprivation.

It was a selfish childhood geared specially toward proving my own specialness. The only rule that could not be broken was that I would not become like everyone else. They were beneath the promise of my clan. Ultimately, they were beneath the promise of an ordered world where other people made horrible mistakes, got involved in car accidents, had dreadful diseases and more dreadful problems. Where my own immunity was based on no sufferance but on simple belonging to a stable and comfortable center. Even as I cringe for the exposure of its selfishness, I am intensely grateful for that family.

But what is the value in being sheltered from the more real side of life? Can it do anything more than compress disappointment that would be released in one explosive anger and hatred of the world. That only slowly but inexorably would be turned inward to hatred of oneself? Yes, because where there is life and love there is the possibility of growth. And there is truth in the vision of eyes that have been kept unnaturally blind only to be opened at the last moment -- after all the other changes had already taken place. Equipped for a bright world and borne into a dark one, if he is not defeated, the weakling innocent may recover some of the brightness that was promised. Or even by lending it in his defeat, may cause some odd remembrance in those who have long since learned that you have to play dirty.

"Are you really this innocent, Howie, or are you trying again for sympathy? Sympathy for your persistent child­ishness.''

No, I'm not innocent. I might want sympathy, but I want to deserve it. I want to show that the bright world promised in my youth was cruel not only to those excluded, but even to those whose citizenship has been confirmed. I want to say nothing for myself, except as I may be judged fairly.

"By what standards? You can't set up your own and expect people to abide them."

The standards aren't my own. I'm not important. I want to know if anyone can ever believe that I believe that. If they can, then I might be able to believe it myself.

"Hunh?"

There is nothing right or good about my life except as caring people made it so. They couldn't care if I refused them. That’s a bond more strong than any I know. And yet, if I believe that I am the person these caring people tell me I am, then I am lost. My caring in return has to touch others who don't care. The comfort that love gives is a responsibility to use it -- not just in return -- but to impose the fantasy on the world.

"Sounds to me like you think you're pretty important."

No! I don't want to believe that. I'm no more impor­tant than a grain of sand. But there are no obstinate, brooding grains of sand. They don't refuse their place. If I refuse mine, then I blink out of existence like a grain of sand that refuses to move. There are no such grains of sand. And that is the lure of egotism. To believe that it is possible to deserve a birth on the crest of a ripple, and thus refuse the wind that would bury you again. Or to be­lieve that you are just there and that there is nothing you need do. Humans are not grains of sand. But I am not impor­tant.

"Then why do you go to such lengths to reveal your life?"

I need to be believed.

"You need people to listen to you?"

Maybe through me. Look. It doesn't matter. I have to do this. I'm sitting in front of my block of wood, for whatever reason, and I have to make it into some shape that stirs my soul. There are other ways. You could even leave the block as it is. But that wouldn't mean anything to me. I've already gotten out my knives and chisels. Stop it! You're killing me.

"Am I now? Well, I'm sorry. You were saying?"

I was saying. I don't know why I've always been such a damn fool. I don't know why I've always taken for revelation what is and should be commonplace. I don't have the be­ginner's mind of the Buddhist. I haven't worked for my gullibility. And yet now I want someone to listen to the way things look to me, and furthermore I want them to find there a revelation. I'm trying to be sure that I haven't just planted my revelation as it appears to me. It's important, because that's the position I occupy. Because I can't help myself. Because it's only by doing this that I gain the right to go on.

"What a justification! I was hoping you'd get back to the story. Now you worry me. Don't you know that you are mocking every adolescent writer who ever tried to write? They have always failed."

"Shut up! No. I don't know that. I don't want to know. I'm not sophisticated. I haven't even read Shake­speare. And it's too late now. I am what I am.

"OK Popeye. I just couldn't help myself."

Contemporary Chapter 1, to be honest

There are silly and, well, crazy notions afoot about parallel universes, time travel (same thing) and in general the idea that in some other – I’m telling you it’s fictional – place there is a chance for propositional reality. But in fact, I mean in actual fact as the definition goes, there is only ever one reality, and if you don’t live it as if it were fictional, then you waste it.

We wasted the gift of oil, largely because it came at the same time as the still as yet unresolved struggles we will now never finish to come to terms with the Jesus literality, and its corollary which became the inevitability of scientifically technological advance.

Like Time’s Arrow, we supposed, there was only ever one way toward advance, and the other way toward the cave of the Hemlock drinker’s apologist.That led to a kind of confusion among technology as comfort, technology as health, technology as improvements toward insight as through a glass to find things not available apart from it. Through but not in. Through but not by means of. Through but not finished, ever.

So, this, naturally becomes Chapter 1 of a story which could go any number of different ways, but which happened to go this way. This particular way and no possible other.Lubricious as the oil was, it at least and inevitably led to a kind of clarity upon awakening from the hangover. That there had in actual fact been other ways to use the gift. That we could have first set up the sustainable camp, with latrine far from water draw, acceptable over infinite time, before we took to the water slide and screaming fun. But, in plain fact the greed of the easy fuck took over from the slow and sidling making out from blush to actual love even if the far side was still a disappointment almost every time.

In the "big" cities, there was a new magic, not anticipated by anyone except the unsung artists, who'd previously been paretoized by the Big Apple (no longer so called, even way back when), and said lubricosity, non-sexual, but with something of the same effect, Dr. Ruth. Because virtual was never going to be facetoface, and because these city centers were so well populated, artists, as they say, came out of the woodwork. And because the downloads, so called commoditized virtuosity, there came again some reality and realization of the power of live. As in LIVE!

Performance art of all sorts took over almost completely from technically mediated virtuosity, laying down of tracks, pixilating, pixaring, Andy Warholing, and Motherwellian distortions of what you could do faced with media, or faced or listened to directly. (Well, Motherwell was always immune) The time travellers were still obsessed with unmedicated pullout from the crowd, so called, not ever about to admit that the pain of the starving artists was just simply real pain, from being misread, misunderstood, mislead, and, well, starving.

Performance necessarily favored the mind and a kind of post blue jeans authenticity, which had to understand the power of prayer, not so much to Jesus anymore but to the collective whatever that absolutely prevents time travel from all but the bozons, muons, bozos, mutants, and other subparticles not worthy of mention once catalogued. The rest of us are eternally subject to the literatti, our friends, and whomever, ahem, Whomever, it is that the rest of us pray to.

These literatti, in the new big cities, were expansive and never limited or limiting to those serious contractions of reality: religion, ethnic identity, nation-statehood, but were rather defined by same in such a way that the beauty from other - from outside the particular what would be vanity toward narcissism from inside - becomes almost excruciating.

Toward the end of the oil glut, there were two - three if you consider the various containers - so-called superpowers. Super Nation States, and each was as ignorant of their own history as the other. Of their own cosmopolitanizing traditions as mediation against ethnic strife which always in those days meant ethnic cleansing. Murderousness, rapacity, so very near the surface of unschooled hearts. Speaking of which, schooling too had become a time's arrow kind of idiocy, where even culture itself and certainly long-since Jesus had become a technocratic pursuit.

So Howie entered the city, famously with a hard-on (sorry Schuchat), as always, and plied the backalleys of unfamiliarity, wearing blue jeans for familiarity and a kind of free pass outsider indication - he only saw one other all day - which were actually safer than home, considering the bears, hyenas and really really big cats.

Off the high speed

I gotta tell you - even way in the country here, I no longer need or want "High Speed" since Verizon (unsolicited ad) has towers and a device which will swap to any of my computers, to beat the DSL at EVDO RevA. Plus I move back and forth, as you can see from country to city, so hey, get (un)wired, folks. Try it, it's great - truly!!! Whoooeeeee!

Bird Flow

He strapped on his twiddle hat - a silo-striped multicolored propeller beanie - just to announce that he knew how nuts he looked. Of course the effect was just simply to look nuts and everyone thought surely he was (gracefully, there weren't so very manybodies, and the way had already been paved by old, so Howie called him, Stoney Lonesome, like the wicked witch toting Toto, but a really old skinny guy and with wavy white hair under his bulking Styrofoam helmet). But it was actually a helmet and fit the arrangement: a cheap electric bike purchased from Northern Supply. The cheapest windmill purchased from West Marine. Ditto a rollup solar array.

Down the massive hill of Stoney Lonesome his road, his life, windmill blades folded and rolled inside the flexible array out the back almost precisely like a witch's broomstick. Twiddle head spinning. One of three spare batteries switched to braking and regeneration, just because the physics of getting back up the hill didn't quite work, and it's a really really really big hill.

The Finger Lakes of New York are compsed of puddles between the cats clawings of not-so-ancient glacial advance and retreat, and riding east and west is simply impossible. But Howie's house was on the spine of a smaller lake, the one from which Genny Beer used to advertise its pure origins. Hemlock killed the great teacher, and the carpet guy who apparently went in while fishing early in the AM. You weren't allowed to swim in Hemlock lake back then.

So, bizarrely, the arrangement worked! The windmill gets stuck on its stick and staked almost anywhere, and always by morning all systems and batteries GO! Sunny lunches out did the same with the array. And following an UP, there was usually a down to take the batteries back up one by one, although there was always plenty of pedaling -- and the bike was not light -- on the way back home to the hilltop. Physics never quite allowing a full return on investment. But there were still plenty of cars around willing to let him lasso the magnetic tether (necessary for rapid release in the case of shitbird longneck-drinking redneck hillbillies), apologies to Stephenson. Howie's tether included a sliding polarity quick release deadman's strap.

Most people drove electric in those days, fueled simply, by an array of windmills and small hydro plants cooperatively mini-gridded and water reservoir storage celled, so almost everyone could regenerate by morning. Howie was off the grid, and didn't want to exchange chits with anyone. Howie's feelings had been hurt, simply again, by too much mockery and suspicion of someone who thinks and makes connections and tries stuff out.

There were the birds again. There are the birds, resolving themselves into some impossible media player stoned-again swirling ooze, though only, apparently, black and white. Howie wondered - fantasized actually - about the twiddleheaded cockatoo colored one mixed in, some kind of hybrid from freak migration sex who still could flow with the flock but worked your brain like some out of touch pixel or single-photon sensitive rod or cone out of whack.

Kinsey devoted his entire life to futile attempts to prevent the imposition of artificial boundaries on the stuff of nature. Most everyone assumed he was sex obsessed, as Howie assumed, wrongly, of himself. So I'm pretty sure, as Howie was not, that he was the only one actually to see - to perceive - this boundary crossing freak of nature.

I.I.I.I.I.I.I.I.

There was this single fleck of color most of the time moving along, and some of the time flinging free and out and away. Howie wondered about the necessary bipolor diagnosis and dujour medication to keep the twiddlehead tethered, as it were, and flying with the flock, wherever the hell they were, well actually weren't, headed.

Howie wondered incessantly, which of course depleted his batteries and left him pooped and down the hill and sleepy and not quite ever lonely, but not either ever quite really, well, happy. The pills could help. Would have helped.

The birds grew fat and numerous on yet another kind of gypsy moth infestation. Midsummer looked autumnal, apologies Kunstler, with denuded trees, and swarms of random moths resolving themselves, energy transformed, into bird formations, not random, but not, as indicated, headed, or headed anywhere other than to eat the masses of gypsy moths.

Howie's onetime girlfriend had played skinnily on the african drums thickly among them, and then their cloudlike swarms would resolve themselves - the moths - into maddening shifts of the entire atmosphere, crazily up, down, over and out, and Howie couldn't get past the ipod cliche logic of his, well onetime, girlfriend, almost technicolor and clearly beyond attractive to every single fucking guy who could pound a drum, which decidedly did NOT include Howie. His feelings were hurt, as moth to flame, he could not but possess, entirely, the object of his passion, and was never quite up to the competition. Arms loose and flailing leaving breasts perky levitating over ohmygod tight and as they say gyrating ass. Ouch.

Down down down to the river resolved from onetime gasoline cars first to strings of linked streamlined standard height conefront conerear omnimobile trains, and now once again actually to trains, powered up the hill in a virtual sense by the drag down the hill of the leading cars, but in actual fact by arrays of huge huge windmills gathered near the hills, and largely underground-for-evaporation reservoirs of plentiful plentiful water, for drinking, water, clean, pure, made from the driven snow, ahhh! Regenerative downhills in any case, and it really didn't take very much, so long as the home to train commute didn't much exceed the golfcart variety.

There were those alcohol or diesel-heads who liked the roar (although electric gave a better kick), and whose retro-bumpers Howie liked to latch onto distantly and stealth-like because they really might shoot him, just because they always made it up the hills. But mostly everything had resolved itself and worked just fine without undo effort, and his fellow commuters were used to him now, so long as he discreetly removed the offending helmet on the way in the door, after depositing the bike where bikes always go, up front under the conehead.

Howie gathered universal chits because he knew how to fix stuff, and people were happy to part with their chits as long as he wasn't, and he wasn't, any threat to their daughters or most especially their fool quotient, because whatever he charged was a fair good deal less than anyone else wanted or needed to charge. Enough for travel to the big city on a blue Monday (cheaper) or so.

The big city in this case meant Buffalo, way repopulated in refutation of Pareto because Pareto requires absolute lubrication which was forever now lacking and so the big cities became big beyond measure - perhaps 10 million actually measured, but beyond in the sense that they were immoderate, and now instead of one Big Apple, there were perhaps 25 of them strategically located, or if there were a head, allocated back in the right places where wind and water and low friction communication would have them even without any head. What they used to call a no-brainer. Largely squandering God's gift of oil.

Howie fairly jumped, off the train to be first to retrieve his one among only two bicycles, the other, he thought, having been there for perhaps weeks and would eventually be retrieved by the soon-to-be lucky pensioner one of perhaps 5 still on the government, well he called it still anyhow, dole. Sent to the recycler, almost worthless because this one was sportif for muscles only, the absence of which Howie's potbelly betrayed. Sex dispossessed and homebrew euphoric. Had the rider died of a heart clench?

So there was still excitement in the Big City, this one of Howie's youth. And there he was, and there I was, and I must say I still get a thrill seeing him, remembering as I do his ill spent youth, and just how hard his, well, muscles actually were. That was before he went off the pills and well before I just couldn't take it any more. That was well before things calmed down and life became good again, and the kids grew up, and they are so so so successful and a pride to a mother's heart. Swelling again now. Swell.

Hello Howie. Hello and hello and hello and oh how I wish I could love you my love.
Can you tell how angry I am? Can I tell you how angry I am???

Chapter 1

There are silly and, well, crazy notions afoot about parallel universes, time travel (same thing) and in general the idea that in some other – I’m telling you it’s fictional – place there is a chance for propositional reality. But in fact, I mean in actual fact as the definition goes, there is only ever one reality, and if you don’t live it as if it were fictional, then you waste it.

We wasted the gift of oil, largely because it came at the same time as the still as yet unresolved struggles we will now never finish to come to terms with the Jesus literality, and its corollary which became the inevitability of scientifically technological advance. Like Time’s Arrow, we supposed, there was only ever one way toward advance, and the other way toward the cave of the Hemlock drinker’s apologist.

That led to a kind of confusion among technology as comfort, technology as health, technology as improvements toward insight as through a glass to find things not available apart from it. Through but not in. Through but not by means of. Through but not finished, ever.

So, this, naturally becomes Chapter 1 of a story which could go any number of different ways, but which happened to go this way. This particular way and no possible other.

Lubricious as the oil was, it at least and inevitably led to a kind of clarity upon awakening from the hangover. That there had in actual fact been other ways to use the gift. That we could have first set up the sustainable camp, with latrine far from water draw, acceptable over infinite time, before we took to the water slide and screaming fun. But, in plain fact the greed of the easy fuck took over from the slow and sidling making out from blush to actual love even if the far side was still a disappointment almost every time.

Bipolar

Diagnosed! (not 25 years ago!)

Chapter 2 - from 1983

There was a jangling of nerves which matched the crash of the alarm. A near wet-dream that left Howie awake in a confused state of loose-ends. It would have been depressing, and left him dull for the morning, if he had not planned to be awake by 4:00 AM. Quietly down the stairs, feeling just a little excited because no one does this sort of thug. It was an idea. A kind of revenge on the stupid world. And the excitement would last for many weeks. Up the ass of the stupid world for not knowing anything about the world at four in the morning.

To the basement, where he would pump up the tires as well as his awareness. Feeling that paradoxical lethargy that couldn't grip a pencil, but can force great strokes into a pump until the fingers, too, regain their awakened state. In his bicycling shorts. He would ride hard until the morn­ing chill was gone. He laced up the pointy shoes that looked like ballerina slippers and stumbled out the door on his heels so as not to make noise with the metal cleats that were fixed under the balls of his feet for gripping the pedals.

It was incredibly barren at four in the morning. Not the barrenness of a late drunk, when the world has gone to sleep, but the barrenness of a still world about to arise. He usually passed only a couple of cars before reaching the country-side. The dawn would stop him dead on the side of the road. From a hilltop, with nothing but drive -- or escape -- in his stomach, he would hallucinate the rosy dawn. Ail tired from the ride and the chill, when his breathing began to calm itself and the wonderful calm of fatigue would settle into his limbs -- then the world would awaken, and he too felt renewed.

The true night-time occurred in school. He would have showered and eaten his breakfast in time to be just late for the bell. There were nightmares of falling asleep as his name was being called. There was the impossibility of tell­ing anyone who he was. When his name was called, he usually had the right answer. That was from the desperate discipline he had evolved for taking stock of the immediate situation. The learning was painfully simple, and he had no energy to delve beyond the requirements of the moment. A quick mind developed to escape the drudgery of having to work on the solution. It was just those right answers which also made it impossible for him to identify himself. He was impossibly square. Bicycle riding in the morning is like reading Shake­speare at lunch. That was the nature of high-school.

There came to be a plan in his bicycle riding after a while. It started unwittingly, but gradually took on a scheming quality. All that aloneness that drew him out at desolate hours to empty roads along which he could never be released but would be compelled to return for the morning bell; all that aloneness might have had, were he to know, as its object something more easily found among the ranks in school. He came to have a reason for not announcing his morning rides. The consequence was that he lost his nobil­ity. It was no longer the lack of comprehension of those around him that forced his mouth shut, but the deeper shame that they would understand all too well. It was a true loss. He could no longer relish his aloneness nor its secrets.

She (yes she) was riding a horse one morning near the top of a hill at dawn. She had turned off the road along a farm track toward a small peak. The dawn was breaking in a halo around her, which left her and the horse in a black silhouette. Nothing was recognizable.

The aura was that of a girl, however, and Howie's pace was broken as he whirred silently past. He would have been embarrassed if she'd seen him, yet she would bring him back to that spot many times. He hadn't seen her for a week, and supposed that she had only been riding that once. It was a silly thing, and it ruined the composure of his rides. The dawn was lacking in its magic. He didn't know why, but it didn't feel as simple. Now there was the confusion of a fantasy meddling with the lonely impulse of his morning drives.

On a Saturday, when it was dangerous to ride -- not physically dangerous, but psychically dangerous because others would be about on their day off -- he had stopped on the road near the spot where he had seen her. The fantasy had worn off, and something of the stark beauty of the dawn was promising to return. He must have been breathing hard not to have heard her riding over in the grass.

"Hullo."

If the sun had greeted him he wouldn't have been more startled. As it was, he had no time to be anyone other than who he was.

"Good Morning." The red of the dawn and in any case the flush of his early morning exertion would have covered any blush that was forming. When he looked in the mirror later that morning, he knew how ridiculous he must have looked in his cycling clothes. There are none more unflattering. But this had set her at ease -- like coming across the school heartthrob in his job at his father's grocery.

"I'm glad to see someone else out here to watch the sun rise. If nobody comes, it might get forgotten, don't you think?" she asked him.

He was more than a little put-off by the horse. He didn't know what to do with it. "I come out almost every morning," he said, immediately wondering that he could let that slip. "It's fantastic to be out riding when no-one else is around," he tried to recover, but fell deeper. Now for-ever his solitude was broken on those morning rides. His shyness had proven an ineffective shield. Well, then what of it?

"Do you really come out on your bicycle every day?"

"Well, lately I have been. I'm kind of in training."

How could he let that one slip? No-one could have pried it from him. It was a crazy secret that he hardly dared to admit to himself. But here in the anonymity of a chance encounter, it slipped out. A chance encounter which in reality has the only power to bare our souls.

Damn it, I can't do it. Can I call you Rick?

"Sure, Howie. But what do you mean? I was beginning to get interested. Oh, I know -- it couldn't have happened that way. You're making your own life too big. Is that it?"

Well actually, she sat behind me in class. And he told her about the bike rides. But it might have happened that way. I mean, that's the burden of this whole business. It might have, but it didn't. 0 how am I going to get the reader to trust me? How?

"Wait a minute, Howie. You're not writing this anymore. You're telling it. This is your life. Remember? That was your idea, not mine."

I'm a little mixed up. My pen fell in the bilge. That's a good sign that I ought to give up.

"I may be getting a little ahead of myself, but doesn't that go against the burden of your argument?"

I'm not sure. But I'm ahead of myself too. I haven't moved onto the boat yet.

"Whoops"




Jackie was her name, and she sat behind him in class. And she did ride horses.

"Did you really ride eighty miles before coming to school today? I can't believe it."

"Sure." He made a quick mental calculation. Yeah, it's got to be forty miles out to Gowanda and another forty back. Later he checked on a map to make sure. Well, 67 miles. Close enough.

"Wow. Don't you get tired?"

He never knew how to respond to this sort of thing. It was just what he wanted, of course, but it always left him with unclear feelings about himself. Usually, he'd begin with some self-defeating remark, but by the end of the conversation, he'd have made certain that the other person knew perfectly well the extent of his feat. Exaggeration came naturally, though without malice of intent. He was just trying very hard to get people to believe him.

"Not after the first few miles. I ride for about twenty miles before I find my rhythm. At that point I'm really dead, but if I just keep going it gets automatic. Well, by the time I get home I can barely walk, but it's a fantastic feeling."

If anyone let him, he would go on for hours talking about himself, not out of pride really, but just because he wanted someone to know. He'd get all caught up in the telling until he'd made something out of the telling even for himself -- especially for himself. Things were more real in the telling.

"The roads are deserted in the morning that early. It's incredible. I mean, you can hear everything -- the birds. That's when they get up. It's so fantastic to watch the sun come up. Really fantastic."

But, like all good listeners, she had been hearing her own story -- interpolated. It was sometimes an effort for him to let someone else tell their story. He wasn't always a good listener, or rather his personal interpolation took shape before the story was finished. But he was kept quiet by her femaleness.

"I've been out riding -- I mean horseback -- at dawn too. I go up in the woods on some dirt roads I know. It's so beautiful. You can smell the ground waking up. The smell of wet leaves, with little scurrying sounds all through them. 0 I love the little bunnies. I've seen a fox once. Lots of deer."

Howie was getting embarrassed. Bunnies? This was getting too personal. He almost crawled back. But he, too, knew the beauty of the woods, and it bothered him that the bicycle was limited to the pavement.

"I wish I could get off the road, but I've got to get into the country, and I can't drive a damn car. You can't walk in bicycle shoes, either.

"Bicycle shoes? What's wrong with sneakers?"

"They have a steel sole, so the pedal doesn't dig in. You'd get really sore feet if you wore sneakers. Besides, they have a kind of a clip on them so you can pull back on the pedal without slipping out. It's amazing how much more efficient it is to ride with bike shoes."

He would go on about the intricacies of a bicycle's construction. She was fascinated not at all by the information, and not so much by his obvious knowledge, as by the obvious involvement he had. He really wanted her to understand. Of course she didn't, and that would only frustrate him enough to try again from a different angle. He knew how a bicycle worked -- the best way to work the pedals, how to use the gears to keep a steady, eazy rhythm, how the structure was made perfect for an even distribution of stress throughout its miniscule weight. The theories of ball-bearings and tires -- where most of the friction was built up. That's why he used sewn-up, glued-on tires. Most people don't understand, so they think it's a bother. You can't tell the difference if you're coasting along slowly, but try getting up some speed down a big hill. You take right off, man. Really, there's a big difference. Really. He wanted her to understand.

And she wanted to. It was the silent obligation of his unspoken entreaties that she understood, which attracted her to Howie. He wasn't very desireable. Handsome enough, but something which he felt too, that made the girls look at other guys. He wore his aloneness like a suit of armor, and beneath it what attractions he had were not enhanced. She didn't like him in a helpless way. She just felt a kind of obligation.

Eventually, he found out where she lived. There wasn't really an invitation or anything, but his bicycle gave him a bit of freedom, and he rode out there one Saturday. He rode up to the barn, hoping to find her there before having to ask at the house. He'd brought along a pair of sneakers, and wore denim cutoffs, though they're murder on the crotch and chafe your thighs. It was early, and he wore the scarlet flush of the wind which he couldn't help feeling made him cute.

He found her there. He was trying to like the smell of manure. He knew he could, but he had grown up in a household where chemical smells were preferred, and he had to watch where he stepped no matter how nonchalant he wanted to be. She was at work on "Snoopy" with the brushes.

"Hi ."

"0 Hi, Howie. Gosh. Did you ride all the way here?"

His cheeks were already blushing from the wind. O, it was nothing. Really a pretty easy ride. He tried to pet the horse, not quite knowing what you do with horses. It was so huge. He felt crushed to be near it.

"Is this your horse?"

"Yeah. This is Snoopy. Say 'hi' Snoopy."

"How 'ya doin' Snoop?" A goofy horse-look tried to find its way onto Howie's face, but didn't quite manage. He'd ridden a horse a long time ago -- as a kid. But this one had an English saddle. He didn't quite want to get into that. "I always thought English riding looked kind of silly." I mean why not just ride the thing.?

Jackie wasn't into the kind of long explanations she'd gotten from Howie. "When I learned to ride, that's the way they taught. All serious riding is English-style. You just bounce around in a Western saddle. That's for cowboys. I don't know, it's just the way I learned. I like riding that way. It feels right."

"Well, I don't know a thing about horses. Wow, look at all this stuff. OK if I take a gander?" He liked these kinds of phrases that you might have picked up from your grandfather. Whenever he got a kick out of something, he took it on himself; certain that it would enhance his bearing with others. Anybody was an authority except him. He would act like likeable people, and didn't really notice that nobody got a kick out of the thing when he did it. It was somebody else's garment, and didn't look right on him. But it made it easier to say things.

He loved the old machinery hanging about in the barn. He'd always longed for a barn like this, where he could tinker away and build things. In his own house, there was only the basement, which he'd taken over for as long as he could remember. He always had something going on down there. Chemistry sets and go-carts and gadgets -- things whose basic principles he could exploit until he got something new. He was limited in his knowledge and materials, and so tried the impossible with what was at hand.

Now here were engines of all sorts -- wheels, wrenches, saws; even a welding outfit. "Does you father farm?"

"No, but my grandfather used to. Hey, you want to go for a walk or something?"

"Sure."

"Just a sec. I'll tell my parents."

Oh no. Now he was going to have to meet her family. He couldn't have imagined bringing her to his house. He'd be deadly embarrassed. "Is she your girlfriend, Howie? Howie's got a girl friend. Howie's got a girlfriend." Girlfriends were like drinking beer. Immature people had them. They flirted and they shifted around. It just didn't seem real to Howie. He overheard stories of weekend exploits. Once he heard someone saying with vicarious bragging, how so-and-so had come running out of the woods dangling a spent rubber, after carrying the girl away over his shoulder. He didn't like that. It was disgusting somehow. He really couldn't conceive. Sex without love. It hurt his sense of meaning deep down.

As he was waiting around the barn, he was remembering another barn. Just flits of memory that he chased away. But we'll give the details here so you know who he is. It was with the boy-scouts. They were off camping on an old farm that belonged to the friend of one of the scoutmasters. There were big fantastic cornfields that hadn't been cut, so you could play perfect versions of those innocent boy-scout army games. It was a natural maze with infinite possible patterns. Howie was a goody-goody of sorts in school, but in the boy-scouts he had a kind of rank. Probably because he'd gone camping a lot with his father, he knew more about these things and gained a natural respect from the scoutmaster that was grudgingly echoed by the rest of the kids.

Still, he had to keep that respect by making forays out of the bounds of the adults. It was a torn position. On the one hand, he had to keep the kids in control. He was usually ranked above a number of others, though he had never gotten any of the badges. He'd usually be in the position of responsibility toward someone of higher official rank. But he had an inborn sense of order, and something that could pass to the adults as obedience. A fear of getting in trouble. So he kept his charges out of trouble, while having to demonstrate a different thing to them in order to keep his authority. Different than what he demonstrated to the adults.

He would chummily overlook the boys who smoked; meekly joining in the furtiveness, even while siding with the adult morality in his own conduct. This weekend, though, there was corn-silk all over the place and lots of old corn-cobs.

Pretty soon, he had carved the handsomest of all the pipes, and was carried along by the unspoken plan that had formed, for a certain select group to meet in the barn late at night. These were those scouts who seemed always to want to pretend they weren't. They'd wear jeans beneath their uniform shirts, and not give in to the bullshit of rules. It was important to remain in that group, and Howie was getting excited about smoking his corn-cob.

They met in a corner where the hay kept out the wind. Howie tried to one-up the manner of those who'd obviously smoked before. There was much discussion about taking the smoke into your lungs the proper way, and mockery of those who were faking it. Physical abuse came easily to Howie, and he gained a point there. Others had bic pens for their mouthpieces and Howie managed to look a bit more established with his carved one. He'd found a hollow stick or reed, and was pretty good at whittling.

They had entered the whole new world of playing at adults, with the extra excitement of being forbidden. It was a time when adulthood had a hightened reality, and they felt the power more surely than the adults they mimicked. But little giggles escaped now and then from those who couldn't quite look serious with their pipes. It was exciting, and the corn silk managed to stimulate the right sensations.

Someone had brought along a flashlight, and sure enough, some magazines. One kid habitually snuck Playboys from his father, and had the same air when commenting on the tits that the seasoned smokers had with their pipes. This time, another kid had one-upped him with a tits and pussy magazine, however. Howie was aghast. Could things like that really exist? He thought about the picture taking -- the photographers. Someone was saying they put make-up on the tits. "Yeah, I'd like to have that job." "Man. I'd let a girl piss on my face just to see what it looks like. No really, I would." That kid got edged out a little for his comment.

Howie was reeling. He remembered when a friend of his had come home with the glorious discovery of condoms. He was a couple years younger than Howie. "Rubbers! just like you wear on your feet, only you wear them on your dick." Now this kid wasn't always reliable. Kind of an habitual liar, and Howie couldn't and wouldn't believe him. "I'm not kidding;" his friend laughed out in a tone that was meant to convince. "I've seen ‘em. Kids at school use them for water balloons. They're great for that. One kid stole some from the drug store. They look like doctor's gloves." Howie tried to picture these rubbers, but he really couldn't believe it. He couldn't believe that factories made these things. That lines of decent little old ladies inspected them on an assembly line. It was too much of a joke, and too awful.

Howie had grown up in a Protestant family and in a Protestant world, and there wasn't much talk of sex. It crept in stealthily, but never, in his world, enough to upset the intense personalness of the thing. He'd never seen his parents in any sort of sexual contact. A perfunctory kiss was all. When they told him about sex, he'd laughed at the terminology and hoped it could be accomplished in one's sleep. It was too personal.

He still didn't really believe that rubbers could exist until someone produced one in that barn that midnight. It was wrapped up like medicine in foil. He managed to inspect it rather closely without betraying his innocence, just to determine its substance. Whether it was real. Despite his disgust at the girlie pictures, he was fascinated and was getting quite hard in his pants. He knew from the times they'd been skinny-dipping that he was rather more developed than the others. It was a running joke that he was bigger and harrier than the scoutmaster. He was bitten by a touch of pride. Somebody had to try on that condom.

God, it was enormous! They were really shocked, and impressed. It was all they could do to contain their uproarious laughter at the sight. No question about it. He'd won the prize. The others were hardly out of puberty, and this really was a shock. Howie was really "in" now and was getting carried away by the momentum. He never knew how much he craved belonging, and how much he prevented it by his out-of-place obsession with meaning. Now, in this dark, cold barn he was getting sucked into the frivolities that he'd always scorned. But it was more real. It wasn't frivolous, and it didn't confuse anything -- or ruin anything.

Sure, it confused Howie when he later learned to masturbate, and would pull off to high heaven, all the while angry that he couldn't preserve it for when it meant something. That night in the barn, he was the leader. He'd had wet dreams, and would wake in wonder. It was unspeakably glorious, but he couldn't manage to repeat the dream in his waking life. Now he was in the center of a circle and someone had heard about masturbation. He said that he heard that some people take a soapy washcloth over the toilet. The kid with the playboys. His father must have told him. Again Howie was aghast. What profanity, and how squalid! Mysteries undone with so little ceremony.

But there he was. He wanted to collect it and take it home to look at under his microscope. He had the grin of collusion on his face as they all watched to see what would happen. Jerk, jerk; harder and harder. Nothing would happen. There was a lot of hope and a slight bit of desperation as the thing went on for a ridiculous period of time. Others were trying too. His cock was hard. It was kept hard by the undesirable profanity of the photos, and by its hardness. It felt good. There was a time when Howie was probably only three or so that he remembered an ejaculation of pee made against the bathroom door because it felt good. The mystery. But nothing would happen, and he began not to believe. It had become a soreness. There must be some trick he didn't know -- somethng he wasn't doing right. It was enough of a mystery to everybody else that he didn't lose face.

These thoughts were flitting somewhere beyond the reach of Howie's conscious thoughts as he waited for Jackie to come back out. He didn't want them anywhere near his conscious thoughts.

"Well hello," bellowed Jackie' s father from the porch. "Come on in for a minute."

"Hi, Mr. Berger, great barn you've got."

"Yeah, it's nice to have a barn. I like to fiddle around there. So, you rode your bicycle all this way. That's quite a ride from town."

"Howie and I are going to take a walk, OK Daddy?"

"Sure. Be back for lunch. Would you like to stay, Howie?"

He gave a quick look to Jackie, grateful for their exit, and saw that it was OK. "Yeah, thanks."

"Jan'll be back in a little while. We'll just have some soup or something. You'd better take a jacket, honey."

"It's not too cold. Well, see you in a bit."