Love at a Reasonable Price

Why did I get born?
What was I trying for?
And now what?

I live in the forest, just a few knotted ancient oaks from the Bandersnatch.
I remember the good old days, when the Jabberwalky and I would talk late into the night
about the world, about all possible worlds and all possible logics, all possible maths
and how those possible maths would relate to all possible worlds.
But then that silly kid, egged on by his know-nothing father, invaded our quiet wood. He left my friend dead, and with his head went galumphing back, over the light-green meadows, across the sparkle-twisting rivers, around the sleepy green pond, to the kingdom of men. We’d never bothered people; we never even thought of them very much. We stayed here in the tall dark forest and shared beautiful thoughts.
I find it harder to think beautiful thoughts without the Jabberwalky. Bandersnatch is a nice guy, but he doesn’t have nearly JW’s scope of thought; he mostly likes to talk about the weather, which is not meaningful enough to sustain much real conversation.
It’s hard to think beautiful thoughts by yourself. Your thoughtpaths loop around, get confused and lonely, peter out – go to sleep, basically.
I don’t see the point in anger and hate, but I cannot help feel a deep sorrow and regret and something like a lumpy, scorching frustration over this vainglorious killing of my only real friend.
Anyway, that’s my life lately. Maybe someday it’ll get better, though I can’t really see how.

And the worst of it is the feeling that in some sense all our beautiful talk of the infinite possibilities and their connection to the infinite realities was ultimately no more enlightening than the skimpy, empty-boned weather-based chit-chats I have with BS. How much I wish I could go back to JW and shout, “but beneath the amazing contours! what lies beneath!? and how do we span both?! and where are you? where were we ever?!”
Oh well

What is the use of me?
What good thing can I even do?
I really don’t know what to do.

We walk the covered steel foot bridge above
the wide green rippling Neckar. I’d dich asked
To click film pictures. Sunshine spread on us,
on graypaint rail, on slouch-slung barge – all basked.

Your redshapes sleeveless breeze-bent summer dress.
My poofy khakis and whatever else.
I’m taking pictures of us for the rest,
because we’re big deals – say I. Your laugh felt

like sharp fun upward-curving. And my hopes
ascend. Glubglub eyes don’t process ‘nopes’.

I’ve decided to go back to Heidelberg.
I was there before; it was October 1998 through July 1999.
The hardest part will be looping back in time and reinhabiting my 20/21-year-old body/brain while keeping all the knowledge and skills I currently possess. I’m also not sure how to get the blueprint of the first time I was there. And, now that I think of it, the hardest part might be a slight health improvement I’ll make to myself (undeviate my septum), the larger one I’ll make for a girl I meet there (undo her tendency towards cancer), and notice and make minor and large improvements to the flow of history, all the while mostly goofing off. I’m not sure where to begin with the technology, really. Well, I know where to begin: I’ll do an internet search. I guess the only practicable plan is to dedicate a weekend to the math and science and just see how far I get.

I’m gonna go back to Heidelberg. I’m not going to let the Supreme Court steal the election for Bush, but that’s for later. In fact, I may loop around Heidelberg over and over again for a decade. I tell you what, I’m gonna do a lot of touching up, and if I make a mistake, I’m gonna rewind and redo. But mostly–and this is key to my whole argument: mostly I’m going to be hanging out.

Think of it this way: I can’t get up with tea and cigarettes nowadays; I can’t spend a couple nights a week dissipating with cigarettes and Hefeweisen in a smoke-clouded basement dorm bar; I can’t pass hours smoking and drinking tea in college coffee shops in beautiful medieval buildings: I can’t spend most of my time goofing off, and I cannot handle any nicotine or caffeine, nor can I handle nearly as much alcohol as I feel like handling. That’s the problem. Also, there’s a hopelessness in time’s arrow that just keeps sinking in deeper and deeper and bumming me out further and further. No, I clearly can’t stay here; I have to go back to Heidelberg.

I’ll have the same friends. I’ll pursue the Spanish girl who said I was so dreamy looking – I’ll be up for it this time. I’ll be friends with the French girls but will otherwise leave them alone. I’ll drink and smoke, but more moderately and with more enjoyment. I’ll do the November weekend trip to Amsterdam, but with way less weed. I’ll have a nice time. I’ll be young for real this time.

When my grandfather – God rest his soul – and his poor addled brother would sit together in a giant, low-slung offwhite Cadillac less and less expertly-steered by my grandfather, his brother would invariably make some sleepy, sticky-mouthed, galumphing, blurry-eyed comment along the lines of, for example, how he should’ve planted more peaches and less apples. My grandfather never said, “yeah, but the real problem was that you were never a competent businessman”, but rather: “too soon old, too late wise!”

A related insight: “Youth is wasted on the young.” It really is. Even on the basically sane young, and even more so on those of us straight outta la la land.

Some may see this current resolution of mine as a radical move. However, I believe that upon closer inspection, returning to 1998/9 Heidelberg’s simply the natural evolution of my general, lifelong project of always doing whatever I feel like doing. It turns out that as time goes by my body/mind ages and the world gets heavier and heavier with some Evil that’s tarred with many names, perhaps all our names, but in any case definitely with my name. This hampers my freedom; this skews my stride; this confuses my passion; this isn’t working out. And so I’ll have to return to Heidelberg, as discussed.

Signed,

Duder G. Duudalo

No one knows his real name.
Let’s call him “Mr. Awesome”.

Mr. Awesome gets up at 5AM.
He’s not tired; he’s ready to go.
He goes out on the porch and stares out at the rising sun.
The sky’s strafing oranges, reds, blues, grays, purples, everything.
The air feels soft and easy.
His porch is covered by a wood shingle roof.
Big green happy maples and oaks frame his view of the rocky beach.

Mr. Awesome takes a sip of iced tea.
He lights his first cigarette of the day.
If you or I were to smoke cigarettes, we’d feel kind of crappy all the time, and our breathe would be tobacco, and our fingers too, and we’d grow cancers faster and overburden our poor hearts; we’d smell like ashtrays and get all kinds of flack.
None of this applies to Mr. Awesome.
Somehow, smoking really makes no difference to his body, his appearance, his odor. How? It’s part of being awesome.
If Mr. Awesome feels like having a few cigarettes with his iced tea while gazing meditatively out at the brightening waves, then he will, since he can with impunity.

Mr. Awesome’s wife shows up looking curvy, satisfied, and relaxed in only a long white, billowy, halfway-buttoned blouse. The Awesomes are happily married. It is now 6:30AM. She walks up from behind and rests her thin forearms on his broad shoulders. He’s perfectly poised on a little bench pulled up to the front of the porch wall. Off to one side on the wood-plank wall sit a pack of cigarettes, a lighter, and ash tray. On the other side is a mason jar with iced tea, ice cubes floating cool in the top quarter with a lemon wedge bent in its center. I know that many of us can’t even really get away with caffeinated tea anymore. We have to sip decaf iced tea without any cigarettes. So it may seem crazy to think that what he’s doing is OK. But, again, this is related to his awesomeness, which we clearly lack — at least to the enviable degree he overflows with the magic stuff.

His beautiful, sweet-smelling, soft-skinned wife kisses the back of his neck. He slides the long fingers of one strong hand into her lithe fingers. How well they knit together! How much sense it all makes!

With a pensive nod towards the whooshing surf, he follows his wife into the kitchen. It is time for breakfast. They have organic sweet potatoes and collard greens with pasture-raised eggs. He continues to sip his iced tea, which, though very strong, will not in any way jangle his nerves or disturb his sleep. They talk and laugh like normal people, even though they are actually much more awesome than other people are. His wife is smaller than him. He is well-muscled, but not particularly tall or broad. I’d call him “athletic”. His wife is too, but of course she has all these womanly curves. I suppose before too long they’ll start reproducing. That will go well too, I’m sure. You may think a comment like that a little ironic, or spiteful; or that I’m somehow mocking them and their powerful awesomeness. That’s not so! I’m just trying to tell you what kind of a world they comprise.

His wife wears her hair long, rolling, flowing, overwhelming almost. He wears his full but trimmed. His wife is happy and laughs with delight when he makes a funny observation about the seagulls who floated into view that morning. He can’t help but share the giggle, now that she’s gotten going. And so they laugh. Their kitchen is all-natural wood and filled with bright carefree summermorning sunshine.

After they’ve finished their breakfast and tidied their kitchen back into catalog-cleanliness, he heads up to his study. From now until 1PM, he will write awesome. What will he write? Well, you know about Shakespeare, you know about Einstein, you know about Tolstoy; you know about Gödel; you know about Spinoza, Plato, Euclid? Something like that, but all together, and shot through with Mozart tumbled-after by Beethoven and Bach. I cannot really describe how good it is; it is all quite beyond me; all super classical; and of course much more encompassing than this list of famous longdead Old Western heroes (please don’t hold your narrator’s incomplete educations against Mr. Awesome). Plus, it isn’t just literature, science, and math with a musical soul. It is also useful. It can run computers, but not just computers; it also works as a human philosophy, as a way to connect our experience to a set of insights and principles that guide us to truly better ways of thinking and acting, both individually (ie: towards individual salvation from empty nihilism-/romanticism-carousels) and as groups (ie: towards group-living that is win-win, that allows everyone to live happy, productive, and wise and in harmony with themselves and the world). You could say he’s a great genius, but I prefer to stay by what we’ve already established: he is awesome; this incredibly beautiful and yet still practicable artistry of his is really just another flowering of that, of his awesomeness.

Am I really impressed with him? I mean, he’s awesome.

At 1PM, he and his beautiful wife (who’s spent the morning painting melodic poems more potent than any siren’s wail and more helpful than any preacher’s salvation*) eat a delicious cold pasta dish (spelt noodles tossed with cooked green beans, raw tomatoes, fresh herbs, and olive oil) and share a very fine Bordeaux. They indulge a little in the soothing thrill of the wine and hang out in rocking chairs on the porch, rocking back and forth, chatting, laughing, and otherwise tossing the time about as if it were a red balloon. Around 2:30PM, however, they stretch and take a walk down to the water’s edge. Tossing their clothes to one side, they leap into the frothing rolling archways of the shimmering sea. It’s true that most of us cannot mix lunch, wine, and swimming parties and expect good results. However, for them it really doesn’t matter. They can get away with most anything. Their bodies are beyond hearty. So they’re perfectly free to splash about, swim, laugh at the bright bold day — whatever they want to do.

Oh, but now it is 4PM: time to get serious. They get dried off and go into the secret lair in their basement. To be briefed. Crime fighting takes place from 4PM to 8PM. I know they say that crime doesn’t rest and you have to be ready to deal with situations at all times — particularly if your job is to stop troublemakers from troubling everybody. But, again, it makes no sense to apply this logic to people so amazingly awesome as these two.

You know like Batman? How he fights bad guys with swiftness and strength? That’s kind of awesome, but real awesomeness is different. It goes like this: there’s a problem in the world and the Awesomes melt into the dangerzone and cool everything way down. Is the incident occurring right at 4PM their time? Of course not! But bending time is no harder than cooling everything way down. They go to the where/when of the trouble, they calm everything down, and they make the people who are doing bad things notice that they don’t want that kind of a life anymore, so they stop. Batman may stop the Joker; he may get the Joker imprisoned; he may neutralize the Joker. But the Awesomes would cool the Joker’s anger, his pain, his greed, his mania; they would cool everything down until the Joker saw that he was so very bored by carrying on like a crazy jerk all the time. And that would be the end of the Joker qua super villain and the beginning of the Joker qua pleasant, thoughtful, generally helpful citizen of the world.

Of course, the Joker is a fictional character. The Awesomes address real people with real problems: murderers, rapists, crime lords, corrupt politicians — even that mild-to-medium incompetence mixed with self-indulgence that to some degree mars all our lives: even that they can push against, even there can they insert their magic calm.

So that’s the story of Mr. & Mrs. Awesome. They do what they want, but what they want is much more good than bad. They do what they can, and that’s a lot.

In the evenings and weekends, they goof off, socialize, take walks, and so on.

[Editor’s Note: *more helpful than any preacher’s salvation
See “Razor-Back Woman” on John Stewart’s 1969 album California Bloodlines.]

Author: BW
Editor: AW
Copyright: AM Watson

YOU KNOW WHAT?!
This one went on to become a novella: Superhero Novella (available at the Buy Our Books! tab)

Why am I here?
I feel tired
I feel old
I feel gone
They say the city will make you feel brand new
but I’m not sure they’re talking to me
I feel like I was born on the sandbar between the beach and the widesea
I feel like I was born in the sandstorm between here and nevermind
The city will make you feel brandnew, but I feel so lonely
The city will tell you the worldtale, but I feel like the old shop
and now I’m cobbling shoes
and now I’m tightening trousers
and now I’ve got a great deal on cabbages
and now I’m going home to see the Mrs
and now I don’t care about anything
except going home

to 2001 in the autumn after the problem
I need to go back to Germany
I need to go back to smoking and drinking
I can’t continue with this bullshit
Listen
I can’t stand this anymore
I need to go back to 2001
The last 17 years didn’t cut it
I need to go back
I’m lonely and bored
and that’s just the beginning
I need to go back
Let me go back
I can’t continue where I am
It hurts so much and goes nowhere
Listen to me
I need to go back
2019 is not working
Let me go back to 2001 and start from somewhere actionable
Don’t leave me here in the hopelessness
and there’s no cigarettes anymore
I just can’t

I miss being a kid in the early 80s
I miss knowing that the world was going to be OK because USA was for Africa
USA–with all our black faces and all our white faces–was for Africa
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M9BNoNFKCBI
I miss the worlds I used to hold
I miss the safety of the cluster
Now I’m dying every day
Now I’m falling into the dirt all along
Now I’m sorry but don’t have a fucking clue
what I’m talking about
I used to be the world,
I used to be the children
I used to be the ones who make a brighter day
I used to be the sunrise

They say that we overstepped ourselves
and the damages that wound the world are our reprove
They say we thought we were more than we were
and now we must deal with the consequences

But I just want to go home and be with you
I just want to go somewhere safe that isn’t lonely
I just want to be a person

They say I’m a sinner
but I never was anybody
and I don’t want to be any kind of thing

Where’s the song that will save our own lives?
How can just you and me make a better day?
We’re all just people, whatever government raised us

Please hear me

The good is the Light within everyone.
The goal is for the Light to guide us individually and collectively better and better.
The way that happens in individuals is a mental space that allows for more awareness, honesty, clarity, accuracy, competence, kindness, shared joy.
The way it happens for groups is a shared space that allows for more awareness, honesty, clarity, accuracy, competence, kindness, shared joy.
To the degree individuals and groups lack the space for awareness … shared joy, lower impulses win and keep power, and we say the individual or group is “corrupted”.
Good government is respectful, thoughtful, conscientious, open, fair, not-bought.
We need to get better and better at that.

Let’s make Democracy look great!
Let’s make this a place where kindness and creative zest win, and everyone wins, and we have fun while being decent!
We can fight corruption and intolerance by growing a joyful politics: “Oh, how fun to keep sketching new approaches, trying to bring things towards what we all know is preferable: more shared joy, with the solemn understanding that everything is shared, so it may as well be the joy that comes of being present within oneself and with one another! This is fun! I’m not angry with you! I’m thinking with you! I like you! This is fun! Let’s think of different approaches, compare, analyze, discuss! Constant improvement is fun! This is fun!”

Let’s expand our influence throughout the Americas by becoming fully bilingual and encouraging student and business exchanges with Canada, Central America, and South America. Let’s inform the margin-traders who own Puerto Rico’s debt: “that debt is now absolved; you’ll have to accept losing that particular wager”; then let’s make Puerto Rico a state and work it into the hub of our Latin-American outreach. Also, everyone should study some Spanish in grade school, but there should also be lots of programs to learn Chinese, German, Arabic, Urdu, and other international languages; with exchanges of course.

Creativity is worth so much! Both economically and joiedevive-ily So let’s up art, music, dance, literature, Shakespeare, philosophy, drama, but also fun math, logic, computer science, physics, engineering, nature, social justice, comparative religion clubs. I guess some people will also be able to find a way to enjoy chemistry, and we shouldn’t stand in the way of their personal journeys.

How can we encourage the growth of peace and tolerance?
What to do about nuclear weapons, terrorism, global warming, antibiotic resistant bacteria, global pandemics, and so on?
Hmmm