IDYLLOPUS PRESS IS A VALIANT LITTLE ROWBOAT

Sometime I still write fiction. Sometimes I still write poems. Below is a piece I wrote that has been sitting in the computer for a couple years. A “song” I thought I’d go ahead and self publish now.

Emerald City Blues - A Bone Song

When they spoke of inland seas, ancient ferns, trilobites and dinosaurs, it was before the frozen multi-colored map of the then-Now, the political U.S., indivisible stars and bars representing the 48 plus Steward’s permafrost Folly and Ukulele-land , all ages of earth depicted in refrigerated geographies, so that Kansas in its sovereign statehood owned that mosasaur, and guess-who in its sovereign statehood produced this Araucarioxylon arizonicum. They forgot to talk about plate tectonics, of Rodinia preceding a place which was Pangaea, split itself, demented, misplaced where East meets West, then inadvertently rediscovered itself in a Spanish revival of Noah’s Columbine dove sent out to probe from where the trickster raven didn’t return.

“Oh beautiful, for spacious skies,
For amber waves of grain,
For purple mountain majesties
Above the fruited plain.
America! America!
God shed His grace on thee,
And crown thy good with brotherhood
From sea to shining sea.”

Them bones. Them stones. A highway under construction becomes an archeologist’s dig, so everywhere one looks in this vast desert, defying the apparent barren, are them bones, them stones. Where there once was water, the flood withdrawn, earth dry again, there are rocks, there are bones. Where bones were sometimes hidden, by others given a rest from all seasons, there lie exposed, uprooted, as a harvest planted in the dark of the moon, potatoes and carrots and turnips and bones. Bone to eat with, bone to drink with, bone which lived under all our houses, bone a pavement under my feet. From land’s end to land’s end, where salt oceans washed over wind-rustled shark-toothed buttes, and mammoth swamps exhaled birds, condensing coal forests, there are bones. Milk marina earth for oil, come up with bone; put on the tired, old dinosaur suit and clown around it’s all right children, nothing here but us bones, go back to your books regurgitating Chronus’ Old World gods onto the Formica wood of your new world school desks, back, way back, no, further back, back it out of the high octane myth of America, across the ocean, back it out of Europe, beyond the Christian plague, the Roman muscle-brain gymnasiums, back it right up to twilight myths of ancient Ophian leviathan twining about the Pelasgian cosmic egg, while we dig these old bones, a tooth out of a bad gum, replacing your New World American bones with Old World Classics wrapped in leather on a bookshelf out of which Pyrrha’s ancestors descend, springing to literary life once again with every cold stone turned over your educated shoulder. Keep those car engines idling, we’ll have these bones tamed into metaphor before your morning coffee cools, and the highway will proceed as planned.

“Oh beautiful for pilgrim feet
Whose stern impassioned stress.
A thoroughfare for freedom beat
Across the wilderness.
America! America!
God mend thine ev’ry flaw,
Confirm thy soul in self-control,
Thy liberty in law.”

The Daughters of the American Revolution, progeny of dispossessed royalty one and all (“…taking refuge in America…”), produce the staff of Moses their ancestors bore. Dispossessed, yes, but by God, most certainly, for them to find peace-on-earth, good-will-to-all. Thus came to the priestly city of Salem, gave thanks for the divine dispensation of Smallpox which cleared the way before them of Adam-savage Redmen (“Who is the color of earth is closer to the Fallen, is the color of sin and childish intellect”), leaving whole villages and fields of Three Sisters ripened corn and squash and beans for the taking. Three cheers and a tithe for the colonial Angel of Death. Tame the wilderness, subdue the earth, make improvements, Moses leading, Westward ho, how to fit the map of Europe over the face of the New World so it’s familiar domesticated moo-cattle instead of giant free-ranging herds of bison, so it’s the cross of Christ’s shadow stretching over the plains replacing days of free-ranging herds of bison, and New Salem, New London and Paris in every county millimeter-measured to a surveyor’s satisfaction. What’s your name, is it Peggy or Sue? Amerigo Vespuciland? The Great American Sahara romances Abraham’s untold sands state-side. The Greek parthenon gives class to Tennessee. Rome moves to Georgia. And finally, when there is no more land to take, the Indians reserved, bison, condor and eagle slaughtered, where natural resources meet their end, and Kali does the hot dance with fornia, for the children of the great migration into new India, transplanted and ever disenfranchised, ever looking for a familiar neighborhood and the haven which never quite materialized, make a Main Street USA, miniature America, the perfected hometown, (Go to Shopping, Go to Dining, View your Wish List); visit friendly, nonthreatening woodland animals in Critter Country (Go to Shopping, Go to Dining, View your Wish List); experience the nostalgia of the last horizon in Frontierland, the nostalgia of adrenaline in Adventureland, the nostalgia of brave new lands to mow in Tomorrowland (Go to Shopping, Go to Dining, View your Wish List); and to watch over it all, Sleeping Beauty’s magic, sort-of-towering, faux-rock European castle where her story is told in a charming, miniature Corporate World diorama.

Where bigger is better, It’s a Small World. Getting smaller and smaller, cut down to size, nice and manageable-like, the mechanical puppets in ethnic attire hold hands and sing in Fantasyland. Fence up the savages and it’s a perfect family trip from sea to shining sea, the melting pot. Plunge in. Emerge transfigured by the great American dream.

“Oh beautiful for heroes proved
in liberating strife
Who more than self their country loved,
And mercy more than life
America! America! May god their gold refine
Till all success be nobleness, and ev’ry gain divine.”

“Gold,” was the whisper. Snaking its way down the north Georgia creeks. Damming the rivers. The beavers nick their teeth on it. Gold. Mountains of gold. Valleys of gold. Gold in them there hills. Black Hills. Sun’s rays spilled upon the earth become gold. Give me your tired your hungry your meek who will inherit the earth your Spanish investors conquistadors thirsty for god’s water, Coronado, Cortes, Juan Ponce de Leon, what’s-his-name who survived the Civil War, went from Missouri to California, wrote, “Struck it rich! I’m coming home!” what happened to him, no one knows, took a detour to Mexico they speculate and was killed for all that gold, gold, slain by Montezuma’s ghost no doubt. Gold which tells fortunes, forecasts a fountain of youth, eternity bubbling its yellow heart, one sip and it’s Midas frozen flesh for all time. Finding boxes of bones covered with deer skins, feather head dresses and whispers of gold, it was asked, “Where are these things obtained?” At “Apalachen.” Very far away. At Apalachen. At Apalachen where was maize and more maize. No gold. Just maize.

And probably bone.

Life for the living and death valley for the birds, where is mother is also the supposed barren grave. Such a wealth of desert articulates a contradiction of terms, except a speculator knew a deal when he saw one and seized even the horizon here.

“Oh beautiful for patriot dream
That sees beyond the years.
Thine alabaster cities gleam
Undimmed by human tears.
America! America! God shed his grace on thee,
And crown thy good with brother hood
From sea to shining sea.”

Perhaps once a week, time now to read music. Pass out more schoolbooks, rarely used, raw with scent of ink and chemicals, crisp open, spine stiff, bleached white shine of paper upon which was music for reading, the strings of the staff soundless plunked by mute minds. Verses printed beneath. Hymns for schools. “Our country tis of thee” “Oh say can you see by the dawn’s early light” and other culturally relevant ditties: “This land is my land, this land is your land, from California to the New York Island…” “Can she bake a cherry pie, Billy Boy? Billy Boy?” The teacher’s pitch pipe buzzes. Train of voice, staggered and weak, leaves the station. Teacher pilots a wavering melody. Map in hand she goes and sons and daughters of free men, stolen men and slave women, tears of treaty children question together can she bake a cherry pie, Billy boy, tasting no cherries, maybe the teacher grasps the significance of Billy, the pie. Can she make a feather bed, Billy Boy, Billy boy, Can she make a feather bed, charming Billy? Yes she can make a feather bed, while a-standing on her head, She’s a young thing, and cannot leave her mother. How old is she, Billy Boy? Twice six, twice seven, three times twenty an’ eleven. Pitch pipe buzz. Go Tell Aunt Rhody The old grey goose is dead. The one that she’s been savin’ To make a feather bed. She died in the millpond From standin’ on her head. Pitch pipe and read text guess melody in the train of teacher. She leads, impatient foot tapping a waxed linoleum heartbeat, irregular, senile, songs filled with bones, This land is my land this land is your land.

See the New World painted on the paper world of treaties tossed by righteous freedom. “So real you’ll think you’re there!” From Kansas buttes to Emerald City Missile Silo Blues beyond the wild prairie grass turned to poppy sleep and dream forever beneath yellow wheat roads, a personal history of the universe, the little I’ve observed, even less that I’ve critically absorbed with any success, which as far as you could be concerned has nothing to do with you, and you’re quite possibly right. But that’s where I grew up. And that’s where I grew up. That’s where I slept. My towns, my schools, all my teachers. Places and people which prepared me for my life, to live my life, life being that which happened to adults, orderly actions, contemplations, acknowledgements and reflections, whatever came beyond the magic threshold between legal adult and minor player. Given tools. The most important thing, to have the king’s English and good tools. The life one was supposed to make of them I no longer recollect. But I remember that sidewalk, remember that flower, remember that cloud. Can she bake a cherry pie, Billy Boy?—remember that too.

There were trees then, which someone’s god began to mow down, clearing a path for the highway. Old growth trees in stands so thick if you held your hand before your face you couldn’t see it, only the densest black, unfathomable. Look out this ship’s screen door into the predawn dense ocean blue, into the blackest black of a remnant stand of oaks across the railroad track, sinking through the depths past sharks and great barnacled, moaning whales, time tsunami curves with the quake of the first felled tree so millions of years and life forms fleeing from the impact of that great concussion leave me at silent chasm’s edge, sound moving slower than the light which will always be striking right about now, which is how I can remember the cracks and groans of Thunderbird and Whale’s struggle, muffled, in bones and stones. A collision of worlds within worlds. That is how these universes began, what I’m talking about. Couldn’t see the forest for the leaves, as they say. Say too, some, that, as with the Cedars of Lebanon, one day all the trees will be gone and that’s when the universe will end, because the trees went on forever, which is why others say instead there are as many trees now as there ever were because there is no end to them. To find the forever green, primordial forests of the giants, what you must do is cross the great desert, and if you keep on going, one day you will find them, like a New World. New World of old growth. Like a legendary hero in search of the end of the world, over the great desert ocean, walk on, walk on, though if the trees continue being felled, as they have, then it will be impossible to reach the other side ever. And the ancients will live.

Pages 167 - 180 of Unending Wonders of a Subatomic World, or In Search of the Great Penguin give a fair nugget of what I have to say on American consumerism. Or at least one aspect of it.

I’m going to recycle a few of those pages here this week and put them under the tag “consumerism”. The subject is a complex one. It requires some build-up. So, for the next couple of days one may not see just what this all has to do with consumerism. But I’m winding up for the pitch.

* * * * * * * * *

The sterility of the modern grocery store, oriented to fostering must-eat-my-cake-now compulsion, sells fruit so far removed from the primal plough and alluvial scene as to forget nascence, forget death, forget all points in between in favor of the toy box. The Pieta smiles, embracing her stuffed animals.

“Want a Ding Dong?” Faith, biting in, waggled another cellophane wrapped treat in front of Chance.

“How can you eat all that crap? What’s wrong with you?”

“Nothing wrong with me that isn’t wrong with millions of Americans who have eaten millions of these buggers. Complain to the company who makes them. Tell them you don’t want them corrupting your friend, Faith. Send them a photo while you’re at it. Sell no more Ding Dongs or Ho-Hos to the woman in this picture.”

“You know what’s in that crap?”

“No. But whatever it is it’s made them tons of money catering to people with tastes like mine. It’s all a matter of opinion. Now will you lay off and let me enjoy my food?”

There is always more than one path to take, which some take as a world of options, when instead it’s the problem of not being omniscient, and is a breeder of contention which is also called opinion. Mortality and an average life span of the middle 70s (42 if you are an Afghanistan male, 46 if you live in Mali, 82 if you’re a French female) means the opportunity to exercise relatively few choices. Omniscience means not having to make choices, which translates into also not having to formulate opinions. Which means if there is a god who can number the hairs on a sparrow…no, sorry, if there is a god who can number the feathers on a sparrow and knows when each one falls, though good with the fast wrap on data, he or she or it probably doesn’t distinguish much between the sparrow that just fell dead out of the tree at 421 Timberlake Lane in No Town, USA and the one that just slammed into the plate glass window of the Harms’ bedroom on Locust Court. He, she or it recognized two sparrows down which meant fodder for another science project. Break the sparrow down into basic elements via decay and grow something new.

Of course, the Big Calculator could very well also be concerned with quality and not just quantities, and bored with Faith and Chance might have skipped back a state today to ride instead with Eddie Means and Rachel Lawrence who were currently taking the scenic route into mountainous areas of Tennessee, where they would see television antennas in place of hopeful resurrection crosses occupying the center of one-quarter acre graveyards; Jump off Baptist Church; Jack loves Wanda scribed in black spray paint on cut-away rock along the side of the road; miniature Cowan, Tennessee where rested two mysterious gray Rolls Royces in a dirty unassuming yard outside a gray shack; Desiree Lounge: Boiling Fork Creek: feed stores: second hand shops; Top Hogs and Sows bought; farmers in coveralls; trucks; trailers; farm equipment; VFW; tobacco crop; Brewersville and children riding bikes; unincorporated McBurg; blue sky with salmon pink fringe of cloud above corn field; Lawrenceburg; Sugarfoot Records: Davy Crockett monument in the town square of Lawrenceburg; Davy Crockett souvenir shops; cows; fog over trees in the distance; after the rain the sun again silver-gold blazing the road’s edge; and the Natchez Trace grocery.

For Faith and Chance, that road not taken in Tennessee which Eddie Means and Rachel Lawrence did take, may as well have been as far distant from them now as Earth to its moon. As far away in time and space as Sputnik launched in 1957 which made two satellites in the sky that year, not one. The road was as far away from them as every silver roofed farmhouse they zipped past, every human who lived in those houses who they didn’t see as they weren’t out on the road with banners waving hello and goodbye to Faith and Chance, they were doing what they would normally or not normally be doing on this Wednesday, which was Faith’s No Wedding Day. The Personal Perspective Units that nature made for itself out of human beings, one supposes so it could examine itself from lots of different angles in a human frame of mind and experience that much more about itself (quixotic, considering that humans thought they knew a lot about nature but were relatively clueless, most of them, about its workings, except that everyone could see it birthed, it lived, it died), anyway, those Personal Perspective Units were all about as far distant from each other as the Milky Way from the edges of the Universe, which is to say they were distant as far as one to another being able to leap the barrier of each their own unique perspective-and-experience-interpreter that is known as the brain. Humans in many ways aren’t very efficient. Takes a lot of energy and focus just to brush one’s teeth. A being that has to learn the fundamentals of squeezing toothpaste onto a toothbrush, that has to keep an eagle’s eye on the water it’s pouring in a glass to make sure it doesn’t spill over the top, that has to shut off the conscious mind for eight hours (more or less) daily lest it go nuts and die, well, seems a far stretch for that being to glorify itself as being at the top of the food chain, doesn’t it, next under god et other omniscient alls in the universal scheme.

“Hey, I can see myself!” If that’s what makes a superior being, well, consider then that not a single Personal Perspective Unit could see their face or rear end without a mirror. The majority didn’t want to see their rear end if they did have a mirror. A good number at one point or another determined if they never saw their face again that was just fine with them. Though it must be differentiated between those who said, “Agh, no more mirrors,” unable to accept nature for what it was, and those who understood a mirror just got in the way of being able to see nature for what it really was.

As far as anyone concerned knew on Monday, plans for weddings more often than not following through (a wedding being the kind of ball that once speeding down the lane confuses commitment with the done deed) come Wednesday night Faith and Marshall would be frolicking in a hotel, Faith dressed up in veil, white Victoria’s Secret corset, lacy panties, garters, thigh high stockings and three inch platform shoes. But a lot can happen in three days. A plague can awake after sleeping for several hundred years, a mutant mammal be born with an opposable thumb, Caesar be murdered, Shakespeare determine that “To be or not to be, that is the question”, sixty-thousand die in an earthquake in Lisbon, Portugal, the first publication of Samuel Johnson’s dictionary appear on the stands.

“Next time you see a good prospect for a convenience store, pull over,” so said Faith to Chance, some thirty-five miles into Arkansas, desiring a bottled chocolate soda, starting to feel spaced and numbed out from too much sugar and carbohydrate and reasoning she required another shot. She was still in that zone of life where you don’t have to worry too much about the immediate impact of not flossing regularly or eating time bombs passing themselves off as food. The saying “This too shall pass” covered a lot more ground for her now than it would later. The effects of abusing the body consistently wouldn’t begin to evidence themselves as real “Uh ohs” for five, ten, fifteen maybe twenty years, more or less, and maybe not much at all if one’s DNA didn’t come loaded with quirks passed along from generations of progenitors, sins of Faith’s fathers and mothers passed along to the seventh generation which meant she would pay for something she had nothing to do with other than being a distant relation.

Life is like that. The luck of the draw. There are people who play dodgy and artfully irresponsible with billions of other’s banking monies and investments and never pay for it; who could, can and do skate through minor indiscretions such as making fortunes off mirage companies that wipe out the life savings of scores; then there are those nit-picky recalcitrant types who get jail time for sitting down on a corner with a sign that says, “You’re not doing this to me any more, thief.”

Yes, the luck of the draw. Play now, pay later? Maybe. Maybe not.

And think of all the things that could happen to take a person out in the meanwhile.

“You not in love anymore?” Chance asked the predominately silent Faith.

Flicked off the tip of her tongue, Faith replied, “Don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Maybe not. But one wonders why you’re so quiet, Faith.

“You mad at me? Is it the Ding Dongs? Are you that fond of Ding Dongs, you’re offended by my trashing them? Or addicted to them?”

“What’s your problem? I’m not mad at you.”

“Wow, look at that vulture.”

“So, what the fuck was wrong with that last convenience store you zipped on by?” Faith seethed. “Didn’t meet your approval? Maybe you’re waiting for one to hop in the middle of the road? Am I doing to have to wait for Utah for my chocolate soda?”

A lot can happen in three days; a lot can happen in an instant. If Faith and Chance had somehow happened to be on some very wrong day driving the Ferrari thorough Hiroshima or Pearl Harbor, Baghdad, Dresden, New York, or a small Afghan village, in the space of a split second their whole outlook on the world could have changed, blasted clean off the map. And they’re not even military being paid to kill and be killed–they’d be nothing but Collateral Damage. Oh, and an example to the rest of us.

In order to disappear from view, Faith and Chance need not be navigating a Wellsian time-traveling machine to Fat Boy’s Ground Zero, or jockeying a light beam of Einsteinian relativity back to the Big Bang which would annihilate even as it brings them potentially into existence. They are not riding upon or under the fleeting shadow of beaucoups dollars worth of Missile A on a rendezvous with its Missile B factory line brother, creating a double your fun mega-watt flood lamp junk-baby (go Boom, and that’s what I call a real light show, yeah). They are a tiny spider on a web of roads, a spider that becomes a speck, a micro-micro-microparticle, the further out one goes, the wider the scope, so that the Ferrari and Faith and Chance have disappeared (no need of a bomb) even before we have reached a height grand enough to scope the imaginary boundaries of Arkansas, much less America, nationalism, patriotic fervor, the world, this solar system, the galaxy at large. Not to say that small is insignificant. Millions of dollars cross counters in the effort to rid shoulders of a flake of dandruff, or the cause of a fleck of roach shit. Invisible bacteria and germs terrorize the world (they kill not merely to end lives, but to disrupt and end a way of life, with every atrocity they hope that larger life forms grow fearful, retreating from the world, forsaking friends and even purportedly USDA inspected meat; they stand against us, because we stand in their way; we must starve them, pit them one against another, drive them from place to place until there is no rest). Small stuff can be big. But Faith, Chance and the Ferrari are not in that league of small stuff. They are so insignificant that no one cares to find and convert them to Christianity for sake of their souls or kill them should they not submit; no one cares to find and make of them soldiers of neocolonialist Global Corporate Economics or kill them if they protest acculturalization (for one thing, Faith need not be converted and Chance, if ever noticed, amounts to a minimal amount of solanin potato green which is quickly excreted from the body and not harmful); they are so insignificant that no one has as yet bothered to caress them into being with dragnets; they are so insignificant that Faith’s cell phone hasn’t bothered to ring once, ever, since Monday (oh, yeah, she cut it off). Which leads one to wonder if there is hope for them as god-remembered metaphoric hairs on the head or barnyard swallows. And what can be said but there’s always hope of making an object worth discovering, creating a need for that project, projecting a consumer. As in, if trace elements of water in the cold reaches of space elicit scientific excitement with the prospect of life, imagine the furor if Faith and Chance were spotted tooling around Arcturus.

In the New Physics (confounding to the layman as New Math once was to the parents of mid-twentieth century schoolchildren) an object can be invariably found if one has the will to discover it. Yes, absolutely, which is how matter aids and abets the battle of the scientists in confirming conflicting research, manifesting great confusion. Oh, joy! Will wonders never cease?!

But no one was looking for Faith and Chance.

Site Search Tags: consumerism

More on the consumer from The Penguin.

* * * * *

“Find me! Find me! Look at me! I’m here!” is what an inestimable but probable better portion of human beings are thinking daily in a vague, don’t know who I’m even looking for to be looking for me way, when they’re not beckoning respective omniscient personal gods to give a hint of recognition they’d been born, damn it, however it happened that I became a conscious being I can’t begin to imagine, I don’t think I asked for this, but now that I’m here I’m assuming that one day it’s going to be explained to me. “Find me! Look at me!” they broadcast to their real self, the complete self, the one that knew what the fuck was going on, that felt at one with, well, themselves. The self that would know exactly what it was supposed to be doing here on Earth and would do it and know why and what for without things fucking up which must be why things fuck up is because you’re somehow not doing it right. “Find me!” maybe this time the magic book will make me right, or the magic shoes, the magic hair, the magic teeth, the magic place, the magic whatever, didn’t matter, much of every day being a stage where damn it the match is going to light fire is going to happen, the magic switch will be thrown that makes everything sensible and right from that moment on.

Adonis had come to Psyche in the dark, hadn’t he, had found her, and said don’t turn on the light because I’ll disappear, so is it any wonder it was natural to so many to broadcast through the dark of their heads, “Find me! Look at me!” Maybe that was the problem, the look at me part. OK, so don’t look at me?? But I want to see you. I want to see you looking at me. Wouldn’t hurt if I cut on the light just once to make certain I’m not with a monster, would it?

The magic of the everyday attempt to make a mark by which to be found not working, Robinson Crusoe still sitting on the beach next to the big SOS, build a bigger temple, make it a place to go on Sunday, god will have a better chance of finding you then, he’ll know the day he’s supposed to show up, know the place, and won’t be pissed off with you wanting him at hand every second to tell you “Why?” and help things go your way.

Can’t find me yet? Apparently I’m not doing just the right thing to help you find me yet? Haven’t discovered the right mark to make. Guess I better keep making marks and in the meanwhile maybe one of those marks will attract lesser beings to take notice. Or maybe if I keep looking at the right spot in the sky I’ll discover god. If god isn’t going to discover me, looks like I’ve got to discover whatever it is that will lead me to god. Omniscient deity having made the world,certainly that deity left his mark somewhere. That’s what I need to do, but man isn’t it like looking for a needle in a haystack, having to sort out all the false marks, the discoveries that lead nowhere.

Seems if Chance and Faith were not being sought out then they were going to have to make a mark which had some possibility of being discovered and leading a researcher to its cause. It would probably have to be a mark other than the type Faith had been scribbling on bathroom walls at every stop, “Have a whale of a time, eat a dick.” (”Okay, so like I want to risk not being an embarrassment to your way-too-serious ass,” Faith said to Chance.)

This would be difficult as they had never been accused of brilliance; their light did not shine. They had no advocate screaming out for Horton the elephant to hear. “We are here! We are here! We are here!”

If what Faith and Chance could not comprehend they could not imagine, they could not possibly themselves discover then the field of New Physics was no place for them; and outside the study of the subatomic (well, there is no outside the subatomic, for if you are studying anything supra-atomic then it embodies a grand amount of subatomic) as far as they were aware most everthing there was to be discovered was already patented. Everything Faith and Chance knew had already been rolled out from under a rock and elaborated upon by someone other else they wouldn’t have known about it. Galileo had gravity, Newton got the apple and the marksmanship prize, Madame Curie snapped up radium; the French had done revolution to death. Forks, candles, furniture, taxation, electricity, clothing, sleeping, soap, hairless cats, ad infinitum, if Faith and Chance knew about it then someone else had known beforehand. Nor were Faith and Chance likely to find new uses for old discoveries, or at least put old discoveries to use in any novel way that might be noticeable, as in the ground upon which man sat being replaced by a stone or a log, becoming a stone that was carved, becoming a log that was cut up and put together with little logs, becoming Pennsylvania Dutch style, foldable, and eventually an E-Z- Boy recliner. Nothing new under the sun except for mutations. Like Adam.

A taste for fame has meant success or infamy via novel interpretations, hence people looked for crispier, spicier chicken crusts or no chicken crusts and found them and sold them and became rich because people enjoy a taste of fame even if they can only eat and not make it without the secret recipe.

Though Bigger! and Better! immediately and magically conjures consumers, a broadening of variety can be a hard sell for those who like their tried and true. There will always be recalcitrant pockets of individuals who for one reason or another must be convinced that shorts that don’t reach the fingertips in length are now part of god’s plan for your life. Which doesn’t mean they will be in agreement with those who don’t want mutant transgenic goat-spiders living down the road, or tomato-fish in their salads, who get pissed about mutant crops. Humans are kind of funny that way when it comes to distinguishing what’s sacred and inviolate. Natural instinctual response to the bioengineering of a goat-spider will likely be, “If god had wanted goat-spiders to exist, god would have made them!” Add in a few dollar signs, spider-goat materializing a greater variety of shelf goods that are (key word) cheaper, and, “God didn’t do it so it shouldn’t be done,” becomes, “If god had not intended for goats to be crossed with spiders, then god would never have made the option available. Where’s my goat-spider milk?” Especially if a picture of a happy goat-spider is thrown into the mix. “See, we’ve done it already and they’re cute as a button!”

“Where are my Ding Dongs?” says Faith.

There, there, there is where is most certainly the bonding agent for the vast majority of American Homo typicalis today, yesterday and tomorrow. “They can have my Wal-Mart, my Dollar Store credit card, my freedom to purchase, when they pry it from my cold dead hands.”

More and more multiples and mutations of more! What the brain can conceive is our duty to achieve. Long let freedom ring!

“Where are my Ding Dongs?” sayeth Faith.

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Another excerpt to follow.