Love at a Reasonable Price

Thank you God
that I didn’t grow up in a war tide
Thank you God
that I didn’t watch everyone die
Thank you God
that I didn’t grow up in Russia’s world
Thank you God
that I didn’t learn to fear true words

I don’t know, God
what Trump and king-us-wonks
will here sow and grow
but I’m grateful for your songs
of freedom
for a land where we did show
our hearts our ideas our dreams

What do you want, God?
now the strange promises assemble
now the dark premises congregate
how will our wisdom ever be able?
how might Goodness push at Fate?

What can we now, God?
So tired and divided
So sure and sternly decided
So ready for victory
and unready for the story
felt and held with muck and blood
so long so easy, clear of the mud
clear of everything that stings
the body and thereby wrings
the soul out of a man
out of a me
out of a would-be
out of a could-be
out of a please-be
out of where I’d stand
to be a soul
in the whirl and tussle
of the tales we told
when we were allowed
for a brief shining space
to not be broken or cowed
it’s been a nice gentle place
it’s been a nice gentle time
we’d keep it if we could
but if we must lose the sunshine
we’ll still be glad as we should
still glad for all the fun we had
way back when democracy was obvious
way back when future held all of us
way back when God was inside
not forced down from outside
way back when we were young
a nice song, glad it was sung
a nice time, hope it’s not all done

Where are you, America?
Where are you anymore?

Put your arm thing around my shoulder
by Sludge Monster

What Good am I so Terrified
We enter the album
We enter the fear
We enter the fun controlled armchair spinetingle panic
We feel the swirling guitar drum pirouette
A few up-down swing chords are the suspense of looking back into the pitch black terror
Our narrator is ashamed of his fear; he told the crowd he killed the beast.
He lied.
The album begins with fear and trembling and bad faith
All in good fun
The forgivable failings of the silver screen
Anyway, who is up for a real monster?
They test us before we’re ready
If we were ready, they wouldn’t be monsters
[Contrast Kierkegaard’s fear and trembling in good faith — a leap of faith into God with the wariness befitting a finite creature seeking connection with the infinite; and fear and trembling in bad faith — a leap of faith into some (oh so finite) narrative about how you’re an OK dude]

Bad Trip
The fear continues
The music of being chased in a movie
The little bursts of sharp notes; the worried singing forward to the instruments (white foam on forward-falling waves); the blazing chords and again little bursts, the charging whispery percussions —
and for this we hear, I don’t like what I see … your son’s a freak … I had no choice
We feel like we’re running from a werewolf, but the narrator is ruing a past evil
“I ate his bones for the memories; I thought he’d be more care free”
The bad is trip is not the fear of the monster, nor the regret of being a monster eating another perhaps monster; no, the regret is that the bones of “your son” gave me a bad trip — by eating them I got his bad memories
What kind of a story is this?
It’s too lonely
when it unravels itself
like so many slopped-out intestines
onto this sawdusty packing house

A Dark Web
“They had a job for us; it meant a lot; I said yes; we’re on our way up”
The spare guitars and drums lead us down the dark winding staircase
Oh but no, I guess we’re outside, because we’re going to catch our death and should go back inside
Why do I in moments feel like that’s Casey on the drums and I’ve wandered back into At latl in the boxing ring?
A soft song, a soft python wrapping its gently expanding pressure all around your cute little self, so snug in the whole-embrace
Sometimes you are murdered by “a dark and terrible web” that “gained its consciousness” and “now steals identities and makes the real ones dead” — but is that so bad? Such a bad way to disappear, to be stolen and erased even as your swallowed and co-opted and misappropriated for dastardly deeds?
Maybe it is bad!
But I’m so tired, so tired by the easy going hopelessness of it all
A mouse struggles in the snake’s embrace until there’s only the peace of falling fast asleep in the forgetting land
“I am am I will I will …”
But then you just aren’t, cause you’ve caught your death and now its stealing gently gliding
The abuser and his victim

What about
An abuser who wins a nation by finding a gap in the defenses of those who’d rather not worship their own abuser
?
Off topic

To return

New Year New You
We’ve been proven cowards, and we’ve regretted sampling the dreams of our victims, and we’ve watched as a dark forced murders us as it appropriates our identities to use to further its evil rampage.
It’s only fair that we should get a little intermission music; and some peanuts.
We are overdue!
We need to be affirmed like this!
And this is reassuring, this is schmalzily reassuring music! Here’s a place where we can be hugged by the noise and accept these encouraging words!
Here we get our due!

Gross Job
Ah, but it couldn’t last
drum sticks bang together getting ready for the tumble
Choo Choo train rumble-forward-down-the-track drum and guitar
Almost like surf music, but the waves fall forward too fast — too fast to escape!
“they got one job / they come at night while you’re lazy / they crawl up in your head”
Oh, yes, those terrible monsters, those terrible little pincher-bugs, that terrible Khan, of course, the music must shove us into the hopeless confused whirl that ends in
gross
but not for us
cause now
we’ve forgotten
forgotten the very horror that rules our hearts, minds, bodies — forgotten what it was we lost when we became a desperate cockroach scurrying to simple pings of stimuli
a cockroach isn’t gross to a cockroach

Put your arm thing around my shoulder
birth of sludge monster?
I guess not; I guess just a resurrection gone wrong
like the hero of The Fly being zapped gone and then back but now not the same?
Or like a science-based resurrection — a recreation of the molecular order that had been our old friend?
Doesn’t matter the exact details
The song is so loving so poignant that it leaves the genres behind and becomes
a sad slow-melting spell
about loss
and the well-meaning attempts
to recover
life
and love
but
now
we can’t
fix it all
and sometimes
we’re left with a broken body
but still
our old friend
“welcome back my old friend / it is so good to see you again / put your arm thing around my shoulder / it takes a while to regain composure / you’ve got me for support / you’ve got me for transport / turn your head up to the sun / being alive is so much fun / feel the wind on your back / ”
And the music and electro-distorted voice so soft like gently falling rain or like a mother tugging her child into bed,
so sad
such a sad song
Does he want to be back like this?
“just different here and there / try not to stare”
Did Lazarus want to be raised from the dead?
Is it wrong to call the dead out of the land of shadows and silence?
“still a little groggy / been a while since he’s had a body”
What is the important part of your life?
If you come back as a sludge monster with sad eyes rising over a gentle green mountain stream, is it better to not come back at all?
And if Dean’s back all mangled-forms and sleepy-eyed sorrows, what are his friends to say?
But the right thing to say is always
welcome back my old friend / it is so good to see you again / put your arm thing around my shoulder
A sad song, a difficult song, for the riddle it poses forces us to admit we’re not strong enough to carry this life, and yet if we don’t say “put your arm thing around my shoulder” to everyone always, we’re just being absurdly mean and boring, so boring

Reverse Polarity Touch Mainframe
The gentle trickling stream music and the careful, persistent vocalizations, some kind of eulogy
for human fallibility?
for those moments when it seems like you must act but aren’t sure how to?
And did you have to act after all?
A slow waltz around a veteran recount his battle
“water on the circuit / any way you work it?”
“are you sure, so sure / this is right?”
Really stretching out the “sure” into a so Sho-ore
A little one-man play about the time the space commander shorted the mainframe?
Or maybe the moment when you have to connect wire A or B to terminal C or D, and the one connection saves everyone and the other destroys everyone?

Comments Section
The music continues the sad, dripping, sliding, lamenting style of the previous two songs
And the narrator speaks of not knowing the facts “so worked up / so darn sure / close to giving up / close to shutting the door”
Another lament about certainty misplaced?
Another lament about being creatures with limited insight but who honestly feel like they should make decisions, make choices?
What is a “Comments Section”?
Like a movie comment thread?
People getting worked up in the echo chambers of fan threads?
Details aside, a song about the slow sorrow of some basic human failing showing itself, some basic sore spot worn raw and obvious once again?

Dude, Look
Steady drum
Ethereal chords misting-up and falling down around the drum
A soft, haunted, worried narration
“they’ve got magic and technology”
The dude’s an idiot because he doesn’t see that “they put on a dark ritual / it is misguided and it is spiritual”
“I don’t even care if we die / I just need to know that you rec-og-nize / there’s an ugly-eyed creature chasing you and me / this is anything but a hyperbole”
Feels political evil, feels like stating the obvious about a the authoritarian play running through the US American right
But sad more than angry; that confused exasperation of those of us who think Trump II is a crazy risk to subject our shared system to: such great risk, and for what???
Feels like political evil; could be here and now, could be on Mars with the crazed Martians preparing to feed our heroes to a giant monster in a pit for a ritual killing to make things right with a God they’re fundamentally misunderstanding

Concerns about raising the dead
A soliloquy, acted with a gentle persistent pathos, framed with spare guitars that build around gurgling base
You feel the Frankenstein’s monster tromping in the dark stone-walled and -floored castle keep
“You should try me again sometime / I’m not so far gone — no not yet”
“I can change my mind …. I must just come around”
“Folks get prickly / they don’t really like this change”
The footfalls are the mad scientists?
Guitars gushing up around the steady drum beat
what is this ending bit with the repeated guitar “waah” over the steady drums?
And then the narrator’s voice takes off with the sound, with no language
Is this really a man who can change his mind?, really a man who’s not so far gone yet?
We have our doubts
What is all the point of his great ambition?
What is the point of mad scientists and fervid politicians and everybody so sure of their calling that they allow themselves to reason away what is deeper and wiser than reason — the common faith of a gentle Love that’s infinitely greater than all our great ideas?

Angry Ghost
Catchy, makes you sway
trippy
Easy grooving
But the story of this angry ghost is a little worrisome
“and the souls of insects” has something to do with ghosts?
The ghost doesn’t seem angry; seems like one of those sad ghosts that comes back to try to connect and help their loved ones
“try not to think of their powers / can’t make sense of what they have won / try not to make sense of the towers / there is nothing that can be done”
what is weaving in and out of this narrative?
A song about letting go?
What is the mirror that can’t be cleaned?
What is dirt like you’ve never seen dirt before?
What is the stain, the sin, the sad hurt that keeps the dead tethered to this world?
The dead should move on to the infinite Love that explodes all mundanities to smithereens
Go on, sad ghost, go on, go on home — we’ll be alright here for as long as we must remain cardboard cutouts slowly turning to mulch in these rising waters

Anger Goes Away
Spacey drifting synths, like landing on Mars in a black-and-white rickety cardboard and spray paint landing craft
The narrator says “with my unpracticed powers, I will restore you”
I guess he’s going to use a carbon shifter, a guitar, lightning, and power cells
“I engage the power cells / watch the surge go down your spine / and the anger goes away”
It seems like Frankenstein jolting his monster into life, but instead of “it’s alive!” we get “and the anger goes away”
Music is laser arches and lightning bugs
I guess all is well that ends well

Live blogging the new Sludge Monster album
Put your arm thing around my shoulder
[Originally posted May 5, from about 1:30PM-2:30PM]

What Good Am I so Terrified
round round
up down
seeking
what?
“what good am I so terrified”
the narrator runs scared over the racing suspense music
we dodge and turn
through the moving pictures
the dark night

Bad Trip
“I don’t like what I see”
music still racing, worried, The Strokes a little like
We are worried we are swirling
we are not sure what is going on
the music becomes mechanical bubbles and spaces out with flutes
we are reaching with the narrator after
“visions intensified”
What does he see?
What’s the thing with the demon voice?
And what was he compelled to?
And are these flutes fluttering in at the edges and into the center for a moment here and there?
A bad trip?
Drug?
Vacation turned monster movie?
Hope turned heartache?
He said he had no choice.
But that’s what people always say after its too late to choose better
Still, here we don’t know
Maybe there were real monsters, demanding real action, and even with the dust cleared, the mistakes made, and the bodies lying this way and that, we’d have to say that, to be fair, we couldn’t have handled the situation any better: a truly unusual, remarkable, difficult situation — what with the fast-approaching monsters and the quick-narrowing options and the low visibility and moral ambiguities and one tough call following another so you’ve no time to well-consider any of them

A Dark Web
Dreamy guitars, spaced drum beats
A speeding up down the channel, caught in the current
That’s no channel! It’s an irrigation ditch — you shouldn’t play there
What’s he saying?
“I am I am”
“I will I will”
“I can I can”
Groovy, but “you’re gonna catch your death” / “nowhere to hide”
fun teenage monster movie sexy fun goes gory fun
What has “gained its consciousness this dark and terrible web, and now it steals identities and makes the real ones dead; it took my best friend, a kind and trusting soul, who could read the future’s promises, and was taken by a troll … dang ”
What happened here? The web is a spider monster’s lair?
The web is itself the monster?
A monster that gobbles your body from the inside-out and inhabits your saggy flesh?
And this friend with a trust greater than his prescience, and so now just another victim in the catalog of the not-quite-main-characters
Where are we now? We are “dang”; but it’s too late to change where we’ve landed; the movie’s ended

New Year New You
Show-tuney
Bobble your head, dare to dream of a “New year, new you”
All the possibilities!
But who wants to chase geese?
Who has that on their wish-list?
Only dogs, mostly just dogs
Is a dog grinning and swaying side to side in this alt-rumba?

Gross Job
“they got one job; it’s crazy / they come at night; while you’re lazy / they crawl … up … in … your … head”
Oh not those monsters!
The ear ones! The brain stealers and melters! Gross!
And so like getting older alone in the woods or on the park bench in your boxed apartment in your sardine can

Put Your Arm Thing Around Me
Spacey, dreamy, long chords, distorted voice alien planet landing gentle and careful touchdown with wide landing feet
Some kind of love “my old friend”
What has happened? He was anti-mattered and reassembled?
“a little different here and there” / “try not to stare” “Put your arm-thing on your shoulder / it takes a while to regain composure / you’ve got me as support”
Ethereal, longing, loving, these broken pieces put back together
Oh, the beginning, was “he’s a lot like his old molecules / just different here and there” Is it like The Fly when you come back together in a way that doesn’t go well?
No, it’s just him; but “anti-matter to matter is weird”
And the music is sparse, the voice electronic and spaced, gentle, putting on a brave face, “welcome back, my old friend, it’s so good to have you back”
Oh! Why?
Why the crumpling-up of our forms, the cruelty of change, of hurt, of broken
and yet
what a friend we have in Jesus and everyone else who just says, “it is so good to see you again”, and leaves it at that — at the only thing any good

Reverse Polarity Touch Mainframe
Are we waltzing, are we twirling around the dance floor?
A few piano key-notes to walk down the wide winding stairs in our showgirl outfits with real ostrich feathers
“water in the circuit / any way you work it / how is joy so close to terror? / are you sure, so sure this is right?”
The danger of human certainty, of rash human actions, of rushed human contact
I am wondering where we are in the slow waltz down through the hall, trapped in the info world I guess in the tunnel of ideas connected to off/on impulses

Comments Section
Movie intermission
Easy going Notes zig zag up and down slow and spaced wide the cha cha beats travel up and down but we’re just waiting to hear from you
A voice finally walks in, with a motion in between speech and song “sitting back / making sense of the struggle / don’t know the facts / a little late to the ? / so what the / so darn sure / close to giving up / close to shutting the door”
And back to banging and sawing now with the guitar suggesting upward and downward What did we learn? Must we comment?
But we want to participate in the culture!
We want to push back on the stimuli! We want purchase on this shared dreamscape! We want to be heard
We want to sound like somebody
no, we just want, to not be so alone, so much like fodder for losing, maybe better to shut the door, maybe better to make like a snail and slime back inside

Dude, Look
“Du du dude, you are an idiot / du du du why don’t you see that?”
“They’ve got toxic sludge and radioactivity / there’s an ?ugly-A? creature chasing you and me”
“du du dude, you drive me wild / du du du you are a child”
What is going on here?
The music is stalking the listener
What is the “dark ritual” they’re putting on?
“I don’t care if we die / I just want you to recognize / there’s an ?evil-eyed? creature chasing you and me”
Well, for those of us who wake up at four am worried about the United States sleepwalking into a Trump-centered, but willing-wonks-organized dictatorship; this song feels like our last many years, like, “COME ON! WILL YOU OPEN YOUR EYES!”,
but I mean, it’s also a common lament of monster movie watchers — the fools not realizing that the monster is stalking them, that the creatures are coming for them, so obvious to us with our popcorn and soda with our arm around our girl or just on the empty ragged sofa where nothing ever happens

Well, America, some people fight in the mud for democracy and freedom and not having to be afraid of government reprisals if you speak out against your government; all you’re being asked to do is pay attention, be honest, avoid obvious errors, push away from thugocracy and related incompetencies (you’re good at what you prioritize: thugocracies prioritize holding power, and shoving everybody who disagrees down into the dirt deeper and deeper past the point of pain deep into dying alone and broken) and chose the imperfect-but-workable over grand schemes of infinite perfections and grand pouts of “it’s all the same / nobody loves ME good enough anyway”; that’s all you’re being asked to do — please do it

Concerns About Raising the Dead
A high lamenting voice falling down onto the steady rocks of base and drum
“You should try me again sometime / I might just come around / I’m not so far gone, no not yet / I might just come around / I can change my mind”
This is the rat-maze-looping thought of a mad scientist This is the dark jagged walls hanging at odd angles to frame his desperate seeking after that great victory science for infinity’s sake
Who raises the dead? only “the almighty”?
Or can a human with a clear hand restart a life lost? Is death but an interruption that doesn’t ever end? And might we crunch courageously to a reopening of the eyes and mind?

Angry Ghost
“I’ve seen hurt like this before / can’t get this mirror clean / there is an angry ghost making your ears bleed many times”
How is this ghost “in the shower”, “on the pillow”, “traveling on his commute” “between breathing and the floating air and the souls of insects” ?
“I am one of those sensitive dance kids helping a mom and dad remembering what they had”
“I’m ready to be buried deep in the garden”
The words drop like slow molasses
The music goes round and round like a witch’s cauldron is stirred “confused by it / abused by it”
What is going on? How can a banshee move so gently and softly like this song flows, as it circles in eddies, and then breaks free to go easily carefully forward “hurt feet / sunburned head / look of despair / look of despite / and the ways they lie / the ways they lie / my knees feel weak / my heart feels funny / when you give love / when you …”
He “can’t get this mirror clean”
He’s not “seen dirt like this before”
The ghost and his musical home feel more sad than angry
But sorrow has a way of lashing out, especially if one’s audience can only see you as ugly, as drifting, as tatters, as cruel rags

Anger Goes Away
Merry go round? Quiet siren? Sad siren?
“Dusting off my carbon shifter, I pick up my guitar / and I’m connecting the lightning; I feel the charge shock my lips / I engage the power cells / watch the surge go down your spine / and the anger goes away / and the anger goes away”
Does it, though?
If it drifts away and dissipates like this wide-spreading music, does that mean that the anger is gone? Or has it just grown tired and quiet, temporarily forgetful of itself but not gone away?
What healing magic can we expect from the electrical reanimation of a stitched together mess of corpses?
I don’t know, but we don’t disbelieve the narrator, we don’t dispute his claim that the anger goes away, that the mad scientist and his mad creature have resurrected one another into the gentle joyful fold of sentient sympathy of aware eye-in-eye insight into the Love within each one
We think, OK, sure, sounds good, the anger, okay, sure, it can go away, the monster and his creator don’t have to be sharp edges dangerous jags crooked lines, they could be happy, calm, gentle, abiding in the Love that makes life Real

Live Bloggers: Bartleby Willard & Amble Whistletown
Copyright: Andy Watson

You know how some authors publish books and then other people buy the books and read them and are struck by their merits and enthuse about and gloat over them privately and also speak of them to their friends and acquaintances in glowing terms along the lines of, “You should check this book out! It’ll shift your perspectives, widen your horizons, enliven your soulfire! You should give this book a try. I am proud of myself for having discovered it and for being ripe for the Beauty of its multitudes, and I am excited for you to read it and then infer from my recommendation that I am intellectually savvy and spiritually aware!”
?

We were thinking we would like to do that, to publish those kinds of books. But what kind of books are those? And is it possible we’ve already published one or two of them, but nobody knows because everybody’s just gotten so in the habit of never reading our books that no one knows about our great literary accomplishment(s)?

Hard to say. We’ve written a lot of books, but that doesn’t necessarily mean we’ve written any good books.

Let’s go over our books and see if there’s any that simply need a little publicity to take their place upon some high, exalted rung of world literature. Or maybe we have a book or two that’s close to being timeless art and just needs a little tweaking.

Our first two books, First Loves: Love at a Reasonable Price Volume One and First Essays are generally understood to be failures. The former a few people started but no one finished reading; the latter no one started to read.

So then we combined the more readable stories (of the manufacture, marketing, and sale of Pure Love) and essays from those volumes, along with advertisements for Pure Love, some poems, and a few other readable writings from our websites. The resultant book was titled, A Readable Reader, and though almost no one has heard and believed this proclamation, to this day (four years and three days after the current version’s publication date) we believe this book to be readable, and perhaps even worth reading. However, the writings within this book are from like twelve to five years old; they count as a reader-friendly collection of our early works; and as such, it seems kind of sad to lead with this book — as if we’d not managed anything any good in recent years. Furthermore, how often do collections of stories, essays, and Pure Love advertisements capture the hearts and minds of sizable portions of the reading public?

Our fourth book Superhero Novella was published (most recent version) in February of 2020, making it actually our third book, yet it is clearly our fourth book because it was written in the summer of 2019 — years after the bulk of the material in A Readable Reader. Superhero Novella was a stunning almost-success. Its few readers — including its author and editor — agreed that it had great moments, and some memorable characters, but that the protagonists were rather too similar to each other and to the narrator, and that in some spots the story drags a bit. There was also at least one criticism of the hero as being too flawed to gain the sympathy that make readers want to travel with a hero through his or her tale. But we feel like there were lots of protagonists worth hanging out with and rooting for, and that even this at-least-once-maligned hero turns out to be alright in the end. Anyway, for this book to sell like hotcakes, we’d need to redo some of the characters. Picture a shower floor that has not been pitched correctly. You have to take up the tiles, and do some combination of chipping out the cement and adding in new cement to get the pitch correct, and then try again with the tiling. Now imagine a shower maker who has never learned how to work with cement in any convincing way. And so, unsure of how to create full-and-well-alive characters and thus wary of any attempts at dismantling and recreating characters and the fictions built atop them, we’ve set this book to one side for some time. Anyway, whoever heard of a best-selling novella? I mean, sure, could happen, has perhaps happened here and there. But for unknown authors, leading with a novella in this time and place seems like a good way to remain unknown.

Our fifth book — and here we’re confident of the ordering of the books — was Fixing Frankenstein, a fluffy bit of fan fiction. Or is it? Maybe there’s some value in rewriting this classic work of fiction with a narrator with a drive exactly opposite to that of the eighteen-year-old Mary Shelley. Where young Mary demanded tragedy, middling-aged Bartleby demands happy endings; and Fixing Frankenstein is a study in the tension between these two literary impulses. Furthermore, the rewriting of King Lear to a quick and happy close is poetically fun and not without intellectual merit. And finally, who else is going to send the protagonists of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein to prevent Goethe’s Werther from killing himself in any tongue, let alone in the original language of Die Leiden des Jungen Werthers? However, we’ve never read this book all the way through, and there’s a lot of hyperlinking from the original storyline to our interventions and back to the original story line. We’re not even sure the book technically works; nor have we given it a thorough aesthetic once-over. So we should read it all through sometime; and the fact that we don’t ever get to that read-through suggests to us that the book will bore everyone. Still, maybe it’s good; we just don’t know. And so we set it to one side and move on down the list.

The first part of Diary of An Adamant Lover (book #6) was written like 2015; and then we picked up again at some point; and then in the summer of 2023, we created a second half that is most charitably described as “experimental” and least charitably described as “more of the same old philosophical obsessions and political bellyaching”. So, well, hard to say. The first part moves along nicely, we think. And then, well, we thought we could wake the nation up to the dangers of Donald Trump while simultaneously providing us all with a philosophy that would reinvigorate democracy by helping us to share the essential reality by remembering that deep within we already share both Reality and the universal values that connect that Reality to our various realities. And so the book, well, the book — also, we wanted to speak of the Hurt. In short, the book is an interesting snapshot of our shattered little souls and so some kind of art — but does it have mass-appeal? We don’t know. We’re tired. We’re lonely. We set the book to one side.

The seventh book Bartleby Willard and Amble Whistletown have released into the wide world is Manchild of Elfland, part 1: Rumors of Love. Now this book has a plot and also, we believe, distinct characters. It’s a fantasy novel, but with Bartleby’s incessant metaphysicking, but much not so very incessant. So it’s Bartleby Willard, but it’s also maybe a popular novel. Right? Maybe. Let’s read this one through, make a few final edits, and then see if we can’t drum up something of an audience. Yeah, Okay, sure.

Author: B Willard
Editor: A Whistletown
Copyright: AM Watson

It turns out
You hadn’t known
Certain things you can do just fine
Certain situations you can come out smelling fresh
But then
just too shy
reveal the gap
wandering with the hole in your belly where light should be
held up by strings like a skewered man, eyes wide with shock while he stands and turns to speak one more time
right there
how long can you live right there
before the skewered man’s lips part as if to speak, but only a gurgle comes out
and he collapses —
having discovered himself much too shy for life

you’re not going to
it occurs to you that you could
you could say, nope, not doing that
but you’d rather not rule it out of hand like that
because if you decide not to, then you don’t get to
so you say, well, we’ll see, maybe a little
but you know you’re growing the flame inside and the flame is happy because it is going to get to, get to burn you up and forget itself
except that never quite works, does it?

How to make things better?
How to make things better for everyone?
Is history cyclical or can wisdom gradually win?

Everybody blames Amble Whistletown, but Amble Whistletown is like totally tangental.

Hardly even there is he!

Everybody’s try’in to make out like Bartleby Willard is the bad guy, but I’ve not seen a convincing proof that Bartleby Willard is either the ultimate or the proximate cause of anything!

You come at us talk’in all this smack, and you’ve not even worked through so much as a formal proof for how it is possible to attribute any outcome to any individual causer!

I don’t see even see a convincing description of where one thing begins and another ends!

Nope!, nor even a real attempt at such a mathematical universe!

And you wonder why we don’t take your accusations seriously.

Truth is, most formal proofs collar God as the ultimate cause of all things.

And the proximate cause — what does that even mean in this interwoven flowing jumble?!?

Yeah? What does “proximate cause” even mean in a place like this? Suppose we pulled the trigger. The ultimate blame falls — as always — squarely on God since only what is itself not caused by something outside of itself can be the ultimate origin of anything. And we’re only free to the degree our conscious moment syncs up with God’s. So, like, ergo!

Mmm hmmm. Ergo, fools! Ergo!

Yup.

[Editor’s Note: I believe the argument advanced above is that to find the ultimate origin of anything, we need to trace everything back to something that was not caused by something else, and that’s a pretty standard description of a key aspect of the Great God. And that, furthermore, humans are shackled to the chain of events — including the tumbling-together of their own ideas and feelings — except insofar as they can organize their conscious moments around God and meaningfully interpret God into feeling, thinking, and acting; which implies that a human is free only to the degree they can interpret what is prior to feeling, thinking, and acting into feeling, thinking, and acting — but to this degree they are not themselves, but are instead God. So we’re free to the degree we are God, rather than we are ourselves. So all blame falls to some degree on God as the ultimate cause and — insofar as the actions are holy and good — on God as the proximate cause. And therefore, people should stop talking all this trash at Bartleby Willard and Amble Whistletown.]

Authors: Bartleby & Amble
Editors: Amble & Bartleby
Copyright: AM Watson

We need to pull it together.

Oh, yeah, that’s for sure. Too much of us is much too far afield.

Too disjointed, disconnected, uncoordinated!

Too distant from the clear bright center of the conscious moment.

We to rein it in, have to pull it together.

Absolutely! That’s the ticket! We’ll keep pulling ourselves together, getting more and more compacted.

Yes, pull it together, moving ever more towards a dimensionless point.

That’s it! Pull it together until we reach the irony of the event horizon and disappear into black holes so collected and compacted as to have no dimensions, and maybe, since this is primarily a spiritual, intellectual, and emotional self-organization, no mass either.

Oh, happy day!, when we’ve pulled ourselves together until we exist as nothing but dimensionless points — spiri-mathematically described, but otherwise nonexistent!

Yes, pulled-together! Cool, calm, collected, organized right down unto zero, unto

…

And here our narrators disappear.
I guess they finally got their shit together.

Conversants: Bartleby Willard and Amble Whistletown
Copyright: Andy Watson

How do we go forward?
Past the drinking.
Past the dreaming.
Past the meaning to help.
Into life overflowing,
shared wisdom,
the joy that giggles