Diary of an Adamant Seducer Reboot
Some of the things that happened previously in Diary of an Adamant Seducer still happened, but some didn’t.
I won’t tell you which.
Because it doesn’t matter
and if I tell you, you’re bound to think it matters which events previously recorded we now consider to have occurred and which we don’t.
And that would be a terrible misunderstanding
and just completely mess up the narrative flow
which would be artistically irresponsible
Retreat!
Retreat!
Everybody back to before everything fell apart!
Retreat!
Hey
You can’t do that
You can’t retreat back to an earlier place in the book
Retreat!
Move it!
Move it!
Kempt and Tim are on their new planet’s nearest moon. In a space station docking a sprawling space ship as big as the moon. They’re loading the ship with helper robots and equipment to clean up the radiation; and with medicines and radiation-resistant food, clothing, and shelters. They thought it the least they could do, and, as the project presented many interesting problems in engineering, magic, and their overlap, a fun collaboration. I mean, one should do the right thing, but there’s no reason you can’t enjoy the fun stuff.
Susan, Amble and the children are also on board. Amble is editing the (let’s be real: completely superfluous) weekly space edition of the SAWB Journal. Susan is assisting Kempt with some of the more difficult calculations. The children are playing with an amazingly tolerant robot dog. So well programmed that it doesn’t even snap when the youngest yanks on its rubbery tail.
Back on earth, everyone suffers.
Arch and Tun appear wearing gaudy and oversized golfing clothes. They make a silent show of thwacking titanium golf balls into the glass walls that are keeping everyone alive. Kempt is confident that the latticework within this very special glass will hold, but nonetheless crosses his arms, shakes his head, and snorts in disbelieving (how can they be so ridiculous!?) disapproval. Tim’s more magical than even Tun and Arch — at least within timespace –, and he’s keeping the little missiles from even actually reaching the glass. Still, one can see the discontent furrowing and folding his tiny face. Why don’t they say anything? Because. Because here comes Amble, so everything is already about to go way too far, and they are sensible enough to begin waiting for what is about to come to end.
“What is this?! I can’t with you! My children are here! How irresponsible can you be?! What is the point?! What is the point?! I’m calling Bartleby!”
And so here’s Bartleby. And if Tim wasn’t holding the entire fracas within a magical forcefield, this absurd violence — Bartleby has been in the last few minutes, among other terrors, a rock monster, a dragon, and a ball the size of a closed fist but as dense as the moon (it would’ve broken any lesser titan’s jaw, but Tun is just rubbing his chin while howling vindictives) — would almost certainly damage the space station and/or kill everyone on board. I tell you, I don’t know what to do with these guys. They have too much power. All three of them. And that nut Amble, who is very human and very breakable, is just lucky that there’s Tim there to hold him in suspended animation and Susan there to hold his hand and explain to him that it is for his own good. I mean! It’s too much.
In time the three super idiots lie down exhausted on the hard shiny platinum floors. “You wrecked our demonstration” says Tun to Bartleby. “What were you demonstrating, what morons you are? I think the demonstration was a complete success,” replies Bartleby. “Oh har-dee har har! Har-dee or Big Boy! Har-dee har harpoon! Har-dee har harpy. Har-dee dee-dum with hair pins,” begins Arch. And continues on in that vain for some time, eventually concluding with, “will you get a load of this guy?”
Tun: The man’s a natural born comedian! He’s gonna keep us in stitches all day! Unless we kill him first!
Tun sprang to his feet and was about to throw a blacksmith anvil at the still-prone Bartleby when Tim put everyone except Susan, Kempt, and himself in suspended animation.
Tim: Kempt, I’ve been thinking. What if we gather all the information that had existed prior to the great conflagration of planet earth and create a new universe, with a few slight tweaks that will keep the whole thing from falling apart?
Kempt: Is that something we could do?
Susan: We can’t destroy the world as it is now. That would be tantamount to murdering hundreds of thousands of people.
Tim: It would be a parallel universe. We would simply transport the survivors to it.
Kempt: But then there’d be two of each of them — the traumatized survivor version and the don’t-know-how-good-they-have-it version.
Susan: And which would have the soul? And would the souls of the billions departed have to return from the celestial kingdom and reanimate their old bodies.
Tim: That’s not how souls are.
Kempt: Do we know how they are? How much have you been holding out on us?
Susan: Could you, for example, take us back in time, so that we could prevent all this?
Amble (allowed now out of suspension): But wouldn’t that be killing the people that the survivors became, and replacing them with the people that they would’ve been?
Susan: Who let you out of suspended animation?
Tim: The godlike ones are controlled. So he shouldn’t be able to get into too much trouble.
Amble: Oh Susan, you make being a mortal better than being a god. You make being a mortal the greatest gift ever. Just let me journey through this arc of shared timespace with you. A moment falling through timespace with you is an eternity of joy. You reveal to me the paradox. It is you that makes it true that no sentient being is as lucky as a lucky mortal. Dying is only bad if one’s never lived; and to fully live one must someday fully die. Why? Why is it like this?
Susan: Love is infinite. We are born and die into infinite Love. Life is the illusion of limits. It is fun and beautiful, but one should not remain in the illusion forever and ever.
Amble: Oh Susan.
Author: BW
Editor: AW
Copyright: Andy Watson
you can’t change yourself
just to please someone else
but you could like you know
find somebody
who you like
and who you want the best for
and who is wise enough to ask for what’s good for them
and so that can
that could just
it could be a healthy catalyst
so long as you already want the change for your own self in your own way
uh
Chapters of Diary of an Adamant Seducer
I have spent my life among them.
If they talk with each other, they cannot help but find agreements and slide their certainties together. They cannot think or feel all that differently from those around them. They are much more the mirrors of collectively-wrought thoughts and feelings than they imagine themselves to be.
If they would admit to themselves how much they are owned and operated by the people and systems around them, they would work much harder for wholesome community and good government.
If groups form and stop talking to other groups.
If they no longer have to converse with people with different ideas at church, in the neighborhood, anywhere. If they can retreat every day into a media that won’t buck their group’s worldview.
If they can largely wall off other perspectives and are pressured by their friends and family to despise what little other-thought they may accidentally here and there consume.
The echo chamber takes over.
I have spent my life among them.
I don’t know what to do here and now.
Because Donald Trump lost a fair election.
And while in power he had eroded checks and balances, good government, and faith in any possible objective and shared reality.
And a good way to destroy a democracy is to call fair elections shams while working to make the next elections less fair.
And is that not what we see now?
A storm gathering.
It is evil to undermine democracy.
It is evil to hurt a system that helps people peacefully, honestly, and openly share power.
And also foolish.
Because if you lose power in a functioning democracy,
you retire to a gentle landscape.
But if you lose power — and power never lasts forever —
in a corrupt state,
then you retire into the mire, possibly the dungeon.
Also all the while the nukes keep piling up.
It is only a matter of time.
Unless.
Unless what?
What?
How?
Anybody?
Ideas?
I hear only us all shaking in the wobbling branches, hanging on for dear life and screeching angry certainties this way and that as the winds blow us hither and thither.
I’m tired.
And you are too.
The primary job of the citizens in a representative democracy is to serve as a final check on madness in corruption in government. They do this by together agreeing to prioritize their shared fundamental values of honesty, clarity, accuracy, competency, effective kindness, gentle resolve, and shared joy. These are the values without which none of our worldviews means anything to any of us. How? How can we come back again and again to the beginning and work slowly and carefully up from there? We don’t need to pretend we have it all figured out. We just need to demand a setting where honest, open, fair, thoughtful government is rewarded.
But you see
There’s no trust
There’s just no trust anymore
There’s no trust that we can meaningfully share reality
There’s no trust that the other side can and/or will do the right thing
people are dangerous
only fools say that this or that kind of a person is dangerous and this or that kind is safe
what is safe and good and worthy is honesty, clarity, accuracy, competency, effective kindness, gentle resolve and shared joy. It is wisdom: thought and action bounded by the fundamental virtues and nourished by a constant push inward towards the Love within and outward towards the Love shining through each sentient moment: that is what is safe and good and worthy.
People are dangerous, especially when backed into a corner. They begin to justify all manner of violence. They’re doing what is right for them and their family and friends. The say the situation is hopelessly corrupt, so they have no other choice. This is the way down, down, down, and down. They are right that that is the problem with corruption: it rewards evil and punishes goodness. But they were wrong to scream fire in order to better undo those safeguards against the pooling of too much power into too small a space. That is evil, and that is part of what we citizens of a wobbling yet still essentially functional republic must carefully, calmly, gently, with our hearts and minds intertwined at that critical spot where they do in fact always agree push against.
Break your backs, why don’t you?
Pull your lungs out, why can’t you?
Beach me, beach me on her bloody back, why won’t you?
Of course we had to quit whaling.
It turned out it was cruel.
And cruelty, no matter how exciting the surrounding circumstances, is always dreadfully dull, boring, so boring, so very very boring.
Author: BW
Editor: AW
Copyright: AM Watson
Bartleby is dressed in a starched white high-collar button-up; red, green and blue plaid pants; and simple cartoon-style brown leather shoes. No one cares about or even understands the press card in his short-brimmed grays-and-browns reporter’s hat, but still he pulls it out and presents it to everyone.
“Bartleby Willard, reporter. Here’s my press card.”
“What?,” comes the bemused smile of a middle-aged Treewoman — her flat, gray face surrounded in a soft hood of reddish orange fur. She’s fresh off the reed boat and is now snugly perched atop a giant wrinkly branch over the rocks that jumble along that portion of the bank. The intrepid newsman, his erstwhile shiny brown shoes slightly scuffed from the prerequisite rock and tree scrambling, sits crosslegged next to her.
The word “reporter” doesn’t exist in their language. Bartleby created it by smooshing together concepts. What he really said was. “Bartleby of Willard, professional-recorder-and-teller-of-current-happenings. Here’s my proof-of-and-right-to-be-a-professional-recorder-and-repeater-of-things-that-are-happening.”
After quite a long discussion of the ins and outs of Treespeak’s grammar, what professions are and aren’t existent in this world and the one from which Bartleby has come, and how to make these yummy cakes and delicious tea that Sheonay of The Tree Growing Over The Cave had so kindly offered, they get down to the matter at hand:
“And what, Sheonay of The Tree Hanging Across The Rock Hole, what, in your opinion, is the cause of this Great Sorrow that has so thoroughly undermined the once lively and laugh-filled Water Folk?”
“I don’t know, can’t in my mind/heart discover. One day, spin back two years, we go to see them like always but they don’t speak, they don’t look up, they sit and stare down, you try to reach through their haze, but they cannot come out, they are trapped within the glum. I don’t know. No one know’s. Just is. Two years almost. Long long time. No children born. No one leaving the hut. Eating just enough mealtree fruit — not their favorite, but we cannot fish, not our way, too scary, wrestling against the water, could fall in: eating just enough to keep alive. Watch them eat. Slow. Empty. The animal takes over enough for that. But the person, the folk: never comes out, banished deep inside each one alone. We don’t know why. Strange. And bad.”
Bartleby had had a frustrating morning pointing his tape recorder’s microphone at the universally silent and downward-drooping faces of the Water Folk. If this slight, long-faced people, encased from long-nosed otters head to
wide webbed feet in a darkgreen oily (water-beading) skin made of just the slightest rubbery lining of an extremely compressed blubber: if they knew what the problem was, they weren’t talking about it.
Back at the SAWB headquarters — transported now from Somewhere Sometime Wall Street to a mountainside where heaped-up interwoven jungle greenery gives way to a drier, more sparse and scraggly wood with tufts of grass breaking through the sandy stony soils — Bartleby’s typewriter clicker-clacks out a few observations:
Down-cast faces. Water Folk of all ages sitting on the furnitureless floors of their little floating huts — either legs crossed with hands limply resting in their laps and heads tilted slightly down; or with knees up and wrapped by their long thin webbed fingers, foreheads resting on their forearms.
And the testimony of a few Tree Folk:
“No one knows why.”
“Everything was like always, and then suddenly it wasn’t. It was like this.”
And so on. Lots of typing, with a typewriter purposely designed to click and clack loud and metallic.
“Bartleby!” roared Tun, “We wanna run the piece about the Sorrowing Water Folk in the evening edition! You got sixty-three minutes! Make it sing! But leave time to edit yourself a bit before handing it off to Amble.”
Amble’s not there. He’s dancing with Susan and the children on the open-air platform meeting hall of the Tree Folk. It’s the monthly dance. Everyone goes. Bartleby will have to edit his own article.
Personally, I, your omniscient benevolent narrator, feel that there’s really no need to run morning and evening editions of a paper that’s glanced over by a few thousand Tree Folk, maybe a thousand Mountain Folk, and absolutely no Water People. But Bartleby, Thundration, and Archangelbert are trying to make the most of a difficult situation. And maybe there’s something in the old adage: “Once a news rat, always a news rat!” Nonetheless: I mean: Two papers!? Every day? Are you crazy?
Author: BW
Editor: BW
Copyright: AMW
Chapters of Diary of an Adamant Seducer
he had to let it happen
he had to change
couldn’t go on
stealing baubles out his pockets.
all those desperate lunges
and last grands stands
the drinking in the courtyard
the screaming at the sky.
there was a time for all those
dramatic gestures
that a man makes to himself
that he might believe
what?
that he’s a man?
and why
must he be the great man
just
to be a man?
and why
must he be a man
to be worth love,
worth respect
worth anything at all?
there was a time
for working through
the confusions
the jumbles, tangles, knots and strands
but now he finds in the world
a love that he should match
if love it would his way unfurl
if she would fall where he would catch.
so change
little monkey
gobbling sticky fruit
high on the bended branch
chattering at the turning leaves
and your fellow beasties.
change
put it together
for her
in case
she feels
in case
she tastes
in case
she knows it
like you do
all through and through.
change
be ready
because
it would be good
if you could tell someone
those pieces that lay hidden
until you tell
someone who cares
enough to hear
what isn’t said
what doesn’t belong
what no one
cares to know
Author: BW
Editor: AW
Copyright: AMW
In the closing of the world, when the great but empty powers, through a mixture of corruption, error, misunderstanding, and sabotage, threw their many nukes around the smoldering globe, the members of Skullvalley After Whistletown Booksellers retreated to another world, far from this old earth, where they’d been so long content in the company of creatures animal, human, and humanish.
Their world was now a rolling wasteland, and the few remaining survivors lived short, radiation-enfeebled lives in little tribes scattered across the pock-scarred face of a charred and poisoned nature.
From his giant observatory perched atop a sheer-cliffed mountain peak, Kempt monitors the images and data sent by his thousand land-, sea- and sky-roving drones (approximate delay: three years, four months, two weeks, three days, seven hours, twenty-three minutes, and nineteen seconds).
Susan and Amble stroll through the dark panther with their three young children, who – half human and half troll – seem perfectly adapted to this warm, wet, wide-leaf-shaded band of ancient rain wood. Panthers, here through an amazing tale of convergent evolution and /or celestial laziness, thrive in this soggy heat like nowhere in the universe. Every few minutes one can be glimpsed swiftly sliding from behind one great grey undulated tree trunk to the next. The oldest girl and boy – eight and five – chase after the smooth slipping shadows, but never get anything except – with a little arms-outstretched squawk – a face full of loamy jungle earth. The baby clings to his mother’s supple side. They are bathed together and bound through the warm soil-odored mists.
Thundration Whistletown, Archangelbert Skullvalley, and Bartelby Willard are in the wooden chairs, at the wooden desks, and pacing the wooden floors of the SAWB newsroom. There’s nothing to report and no one to report it to, but this doesn’t prevent them from moving quickly between rows of desks, clickety clacking orchestras of typewriters and bellowing high and muttering low about deadlines, scoops, and humdingers while the ink-spewing printing press rolls out the morning edition.
Timothy sits alone atop a darkgreen, waxy, fleshy, wide-arching jungle leaf, still damp with the afternoon’s rain and trembling ever so slightly beneath his ever so slight weight. He’s summoned his wife. She’ll arrive as quickly as light can. I don’t know if their magic can break that physical law or not, but she wants to take her time anyway. There’s this book she always wanted to write: A Compendium and Analysis of Comparative Magiks. Soon enough they’ll buzz together through the many climes of this fertile, overripe, virgin world.
The animals are not unlike earth creatures, but – excepting for the panthers – they aren’t ever quite the same either. A land without people and their heavy-handed progress, great mammals yet roam the savannahs, lumber the forests, and brave the icy mountain sides.
In time the Hall of The Mountain King, no longer proud to be a kingdom within a country, but instead sorry to be a kingdom within a total collapse, will relocate to one of the many beautifully chilly mountain ranges. But the non-magic folk are stuck on earth in their hovels and with the sickness they call, in their simple broken ways, ‘the melting’.
This is not my fault. None of this is the fault of your narrator, who never claimed any special wisdom, and whom the Fates granted neither exceptional insight, nor extraordinary power, nor heroic luck.
There was, they said, the Water Folk were want to say, an evil mist that floated upon the waters, carrying lonesome despair to every soul it gripped. I cannot speak to that. I really cannot say. But true it is that the Water Folk have been brought low by some inexplicable traumatic terror. Where once they’d dove and swam, played and spearfished all up and down the rocky banks of their Big Town in the Wide Bend of the Great River a mile or so before it merged with the Green Sea, now they cower all day long in their thatched huts, staring mutely at the woven willow-branch floors as the mighty river rolls on crinkly beneath the flat hulls of their permanently-moored houseboats.
They’d’ve starved long ago were in not for their loyal friends the Tree Folk, who, braving the swift current in small, flat-bottomed reed boats, pole their way to the wooden porches that surround the thatched-roof huts that float in the center of the river. The Tree Folk bring their ancient allies a pulpy, fleshy fruit that tastes a little too much of meat and not enough of fish for the tastes of the alredy-sulking, eerily silent and dull-eyed Water Folk. Sometimes a Treeperson will try to cheer up a particular friend of theirs among the Water Folk. A Treeman will slap a Waterman’s back. A Treewoman will sit down next to and side-hug a Waterwoman. A Treeboy or Treegirl will smile shyly and pour their round big grey eyes and into the narrower, longer, inkblack eyes of a former playmate. But the Water Folk just blink, or look away, or blink and look away. So then the Treeperson gives up and, round furry face reflected in the rippling blue-green-gray surface of the clear deep river, pole their way back to the safety of the many broad, bending branches that overhang the river and easily convey their lithe agile bodies to the canopy, where the Tree Folk reign unchallenged.
I guess the Water Folk eat the fruit, which has enough water to also keep them from dehydrating. I guess they dejectedly gnaw and slowly slurp the fruit when they are alone in the night.
Author: Bartleby
Editor: Amble
Copyright: Andrew M. Watson
Chapters of Diary of an Adamant Seducer
You know what I am
A monster, predator, dragon
A lost puppy dog
You know what you are
My victim, prey, princess
My safe stable reliable safe friend
You know how it is
Deep
Wet
Soft
Always
People
They are just
People
Animals
With Feelings
Tryin’ to fit
and hold
Big Ideas.
Come round
Come round
Show me
What we know.
Author: well
Editor: uhhh
Copyright: AMW
Chapters of Diary of an Adamant Seducer
You’re the one for me.
I know it every moment.
I feel it all over and all through.
I love you.
And only you.
In this way.
Where a man meets a woman
Where a family is made.
I love you.
And Now?
Because
I don’t know
How I can be
the one for you.
Please
Tell me,
God.
Tell me,
How I can be
The one for her.
Author: uh
Editor: eh
Copyright: Andy uh Watson eh puh