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home run

home run

Every weekend it is the same thing
Escape
Write the project that will spring you
from this pointless
chasing of your tail
around and around
exhausted
and
going nowhere

But the project isn’t just money
though there’s supposed to be
money
It is most of all supposed to be
fix yourself
help democracy think clearly and act wisely
set yourself and the world on the right track

A grand slam
A slam dunk
Wondrous salvation
Escape
from dukkha

What if instead of escaping suffering, discontent, loneliness, frustration, dissappointment, dissatisfaction, and other broken longings
you escaped attachment to your own longing?

The vague longing desires in all directions vaguely
You attach it to specific desires so you can pretend you can answer this vague never-ending ever-gnawing root desire
And on and on it drives you on

What if you accept that the vague longing is too vague to be resolved with any specific good?
Except you can’t help but note that an infinite longing could be adequately answered by an infinite satisfaction of the sort provided by infinite Love.
Or could it?
Infinite Love would overwhelm all longings, including the vague longing; It would make them seem like insignificant ripples in a deep abiding pool of calm kind cool-and-collected delight.

We have a problem
Every day we get up and say
oh please no
please not this
please
leave me alone
set me free
let me think
let me breath
let me be
Don’t hassle me
with pressures
that have nothing
to do with me
Don’ pester me
with catastrophes
that I never even
needed to know about

What does God think?
What should we do?

And the country seems to fall apart at the seams
And the Hurt scoops us out from the inside out as if with a dirty jagged ice cream scooper
And we feel
like failures
lost causes
jokes on the water
floaters in the toilet
troublesome flies that’d be swatted were it worth the effort, and will be, if we stumble into the potato salad, thus making our swatting worth the effort

Why are we here?
What should we do?

….

I have this great idea
Swallow this poison
And seal off all exits
Let the poison spread deep and wide
Let it grow with you
Until you can’t say
what is you
and what is the invading evil

Then all you need to do
is dig down
into your pit
face the poison
resolve the Hurt
untie the knots
release the broken soul
And let the Light do the rest

Don’t you see?
I’m helping you
I’m giving you a gateway
to great enlightenment
All you need to do
is not choke on the gift
How hard can that be?

….

What is the freedom poem?
What is the magic song
that lets us live and stops us dying
our every day away?

Where is the freedom poem
that rings from crest to crest
And echoes through the valleys rough
with scratches in the dirt wood and stone?

….

I can hit a home run
I can knock it out the park
I can fix everything
with one perfect touch

….

A wisdom meme
is an irresistible formulation
of Something Deeperism:
A continuous self-critiquing & -improving
organization of one’s feeling/thinking/acting around
and a
poetic (not literal, but still meaningful and essentially True) interpretation of
Pure Love —
Infinite kind delight / Joy in suffering-with while giving always more and more wondrously

The wisdom meme
will make both individual enlightenment and shared wisdom
impossible to dodge

So beautiful will that meme be!

A home run
is a wisdom meme
that lasts forever
but
I still want my baby
And our nice little life
by the seashore
safe and sound
And I want the Hurt
to leave me alone

Salvation does not guarantee
a happy home
or
the end of swallowed evils

Salvation guarantees not happiness, but joy
Salvation brings only itself
It will be
what is best for everyone
in the circumstances it finds

A home run
includes movie rights
and your soft hand on my taut belly, telling me I’m
safe, loved, appreciated, home
Salvation
includes only Love,
and its proper consumption, use, and realization

….

Where to now,
Jesus & The Saints
?
What’s the way forward,
Buddha & The Sangha
?
What’s a man to do,
baby girl and my reason for living?

These cords wrapped rough around your neck
they remind me of old twisted roots swerving out
like shoulder blades in the dusty summer earth

Long ago along the wharf walked wailers under oil
A barrel burdened on bent back, leaning to the toil.
What whale had hurt and spun in rage within a salted water
that men might stand in dignity before their wives and daughters?

Was I wrong to be what I was when young and supply strong?
Now a softly mounting self-collecting python fat and long
becomes a pillar in my innards, claiming all my space its own.
That’s what I was asking for. That you would take me home
Free me from these evil errors that never leave one alone.

….

When Master John impaled young Walter Jones
upon a flattened dusty basement shag
The boy fought but lost to the alter stone.
So hide you a while in yourself gagged.
When Walter Jones grew up a man at last
he laughed and drank and twirled with witty words,
forgetful the sacrificial past.
But all he’d ever known, felt, seen or heard
as mist spread through the space he called
himself. And wetter darker stormier
it grew writhed cut. From inside out it mauled.
Would shut him down as he’d feel more for her —
whoever he longed to be a man for.
Now how to let love in? To ope wide the door?
I see him clutching dagger cross-legged nights
stooped over the killing stone.
I hear him blather sacrificial rites
to no one, pretending he’s not alone.
It’s a sticky predicament. What God
would sully Godself on such sordid stuff?
The problem is old. The danger still odd.
Through wood and rock, the valley jostles rough.
He prays for his woman while preying on
a dream of her who’d sanctify his song
his song so creaky broken cruel and wrong
obscuring a heart that stays oddly the same as ever
Another tadpole sloshed by God and/or the weather.

….

Much we tried; all manner of art and trade plied
to be our magic selves.

Author: BW
Editor: AW
Copyright: AM Watson

IDF – Question 10

IDF – Question 10

Today the interactive design foundation asked us to pick an SEO phrase and use it in five different sentences in five different parts of speech.

We, who just really don’t know what to do with ourselves and cannot tell if this puking nausea is coming out of us or into us, told them to go fuck off:

Pure Love must be a great God, creating, sustaining, shining through, and ultimately overwhelming, absorbing, and absolving every particular thing. (subject)

When caught within the drab and dull, the thud and cough of ​resignation: sink into your pit and push out from within, reaching with everything you have in every possible direction for Purest Love. (prepositional phrase / adverbial phrase)

The mindlessly whirring ad campaign quite forgot Pure Love, and so wasted another big slab of time, energy, focus, and most of all soul. (object)

Since only Pure Love knows what actually matters, to the degree Pure Love does not guide one’s thought and actions, one thinks and acts meaninglessly. (subordinate clause; followed by prepositional phrase / adverbial phrase).

Lost children of a fallen star, ignoring Pure Love’s call, too aroused and confused by infinitely cascading edreams to notice Beauty, we seek rewarding careers that demand all our creative energies and also offer good salaries and great benefits packages. (adjective phrase)

BW/AW

What is Love? #5

What is Love? #5

What is Love?
Everyday, blood whisking through
Artery tubes and veins too
Keeps us pumping, thumping strong
Keeps us jumping, right or wrong.

What is Love?
The monster it hurts us,
Hump-backed old sack
Teeth green sharp mismatched.
The monster it lumps out,
Yellow squid eyes searching.
Long scaled fingers lurching
Down to us, to undo us again.

What is Love?
What will sustain us?
What could contain our
Fiery fever, deep-seated reason,
Heart on a table, gut in hand.
So warm, so refreshing
surely progressing,
Making us strong.

Love does it suffer?
Love does it wallow?
Love is it hollow
Like a snug valley
Where we belong?
Love is it fiercesome?
Love is it boisterous?
Can it be wrong?

Come on and hold us,
Come here and show us
What we’ve come from.

AMW

Standard Theory of Pure Love 3: Supposing it were true

Standard Theory of Pure Love 3: Supposing it were true

I wonder what it would mean if people actually mattered.
Not just to me or you,
but really–
whatever that means.

What if love was realer than everything else?
And when you died,
what you were that was love
remained;
and everything else
didn’t–
because it never had been
anyway.

What if this life really was primarily a spiritual exercise?
And if you keep holy love as your center, all is well
no matter what.
And if you don’t, nothing is quite right
no matter what.

What if that’s not just something people say to break the ice
or win the round?
What if it’s truer than all the threads
that weave together
to argue it away?

What would I say to my friend if it really mattered what I say to my friend?
What if “really mattered” isn’t just an indefinable concept;
what if it also points towards a true knowledge
that I know
though I cannot perfectly define it,
or that I at least know something of
and know something of how to let it win
even though I can only get better and better
at holding, knowing, describing,
and sharing it,
without ever quite
catching it
in words
or even feels
or even maybe
acts?

What is the point of seven billion human beings?
What is the point of a busy world forced silent by the overhead catastrophes?

What is the point of getting together
or breaking up?

Why be Einstein sketching the edges
or Shakespeare painting from the inside out
or a skinny bum sitting on a heating vent,
sipping from her diet coke
and telling the air to leave it the fuck alone!?

And what is a human soul when dogs have feelings
and even gnats whisper a trace of thereness?

Who’ll stop the sides from falling into the center,
the stones breaking out
of outward blossoming walls?

You? Me? Us? Them? The god? God? Who? What?

I’ll wager you one life
for a life worth living–
one where I am really here now
and know it
and have reason
to be
and am
OK
with it.

—-
Attributed to the same old committee
Copyright AMW

What is this?
Well, it has to do with Love at a Reasonable Price.
In the first section of that evolving ebook are two stories from the town of Pine, Michigan–where Pure Love was once peddled and where in time a Pure Love Research Center grew. And at the end of the second store, a Pure Love researcher says, ”
To understand Charles’ and I’s research, you have to be at least somewhat acquainted with the standard model of Pure Love.”
So then we thought we’d write a Standard Model or Standard Theory of Pure Love–like how there is one for physics. But we’ve been having our troubles. So now we’re just writing poems around the topic, hoping to sink in at an appropriate place. So far the poems are all free (so far all poems are free: see “Poems” category on the right hand side). These poems and all other writings in Love at a Reasonable Price are listed and linked-to here:
Intro to Love at a Reasonable Price

Access to the whole evolving ebook, along with Love at a Reasonable Price for sale here:
Buy the Books

Wandering Albatross Press’s most physical products:

Buy Cat Totes!
&/or Objectively Cute Baby Onepieces! (advertised here: An ad for an “Objectively Cute” baby wrap

Biographical 3: Confessions of a Pure Love Salesman

Biographical 3: Confessions of a Pure Love Salesman

[Chapters of Diary of an Adamant Seducer]

[Update November 2021: We’re back at Diary of Adamant Seducer. We’ll try to bundle it into a book someday. For now the chapters are linked to above. See Buy Our Books for the books we’ve already completed.]

I’ll lend you line from a happier time, when Bartleby Willard and Ambergris Whistletown were only a little inside out; it is the time just before now, the time right before they fled to the sea.

Bartleby Willard, thin, of an inhuman see-through hue like a bug larva, but without the vaguely jumbled gray insides of a bug larva. Bartleby Willard, who you can see through but fuzzily, not very satisfyingly. Bartleby Willard, wearing anyway a baggy disheveled light gray suit, and so pretty solid-looking. Bartleby Willard, with purple eyes and forest green hair and rubbery-see-through face and hands.

Bartleby Willard, who writes himself and who for some reason has described himself into such an awkward and implausible being — one that seems like the scribbling colorings of a child who, clutching crayon like dagger, attacks the hollow figure with reckless zigs and zags. (Bartleby’s suit is colored in in that jagged, inconsistent way; his hair is a bit loopier — like the toddler colorist here imagined lost gusto at cartoon Bartleby’s outlined hair [classic rockabilly: parted on the right with a great swooping mass resembling a curling skunk’s tail above and dipping into the tall wide forehead] and — looking away from the page — circled a loosely held forest-green crayon around a couple times in the vicinity of the cartoon hair || and now mark this sloppiness: strokes of gray bleed into his black shoes and his see-through hands and neck; loops of green mar the top of his head. And everywhere he goes, these crayon-lines bleed into our wholesome solid reallikeseriouslytotallyreal-world).

Bartleby Willard is pacing to and fro in place: arms behind back, he takes one half-step forward, then quick-steps lag-foot to meet lead-foot and — raising only his heels — quick-pivots around to face the direction he just arrived from; he then takes a half-step back to where the iteration began; and repeat …

The character is exhibiting all the symptoms of “heavy distress”. Witness how he colors his flat-chested, narrow-shouldered self: unkempt: flippant crayon-colors executed with a scratchy slashy, madcap hand. And then analyse his gait: quickly pacing to and fro like preoccupied people do; but in a tiny tiny space, as if to scream to the heavens: “I am trapped! I am trapped! I am trapped here!”

And do the others help? Does anyone help him? Who throws him a smile? Who hints him a subtle, unobtrusive, forgive-and-forget understanding? Who leans slightly forward while slightly squatting, puts hands to knees, and makes a flat leaning platform of shoulders and back to share Bartleby’s burden? Who remembers him in their prayers — not just formally, but heartfelt? Who cares about Bartleby Willard, one more would-be-author in this monstrous, heavy-breathing would-be-world? No one here; no one there.

He’s moved frantically from the near-fore to the near-aft and back again over and over in the two places where one would’ve thought he might find a sympathetic soul: (1) The Skullvalley After Whistletown Building, where Tun Whistletown and Arch Skullvalley rule their vast publishing empire with debonair negligence and Kempt Whistletown lovingly — albeit a little distantly, glumly even — engineers various publishing-related contraptions; and (2) The Hall of the Mountain King, where Amber Whistletown sulkily awaits his interview with the Mountain King.

“What’s the matter with Bartleby?” asks Thundration (“Tun”) while, tube-arms folded across plank-torso, he — long neck leaning one way, sharp chin jutting forward and stretching opposite way, small eyes and pursed lips bunched together around some common irony — gazes out one of the several floor-to-ceiling windows lining the eastern wall of the SAW Bookmakers common office.

Of these windows: windows that one and all overlook and give witness to the East River’s melt into the Upper Bay: the bottom of the channel they call a river draining into the top of a bulge they call a bay, which so-called bay will quickly hiccup through a narrow, gush out a widening, and then fall forever into the slosh-tufting immensity of the North Atlantic || keep well in mind that these particular waters have been long coddled: they spent many a slow, shallow, sunbaked day in that great unseaworthy wading pool called “Long Island Sound”: keep that in mind as you assess their fate and, for wisdom-is-compassion’s sake, contemplatively mingle your lots with theirs.

“The boy’s worried he doesn’t know what Pure Love is — says he can’t be a Pure Love manufacturer, importer, exporter, marketer, and/or salesman if he doesn’t even know what it is to love everyone with an infinitely kind and effective love.” replies Archangelbert (“Arch”) while handing a very small “M” with two tiny MickeyMouse-like feet to a word-centipede comprised of “R E A S O”. Arch is on his blue-jeaned knees, supporting himself with one long, bow-fingered hand as he leans down and forward to the eager word-creature, or — seen from a little wider layer — eager letter-community comprised of eager letters with identity-overlaps and -subsumings akin to eager ants in their eager ant colonies. Each letter of the word-centipede is about the size of a small pink eraser like you used to have in your cartoon-themed pencil case.

Kempt sits in a sturdy wooden chair in this clearing (all the desks are pushed against the wall opposite the entrance door) on the southwestern end of the SAWB common office’s beautiful cross-hatch, Celtic-arena flooring (well, it was beautiful! Before all that scraping of heavy square-legged oaken desks!). He wears square-cut but not-baggy light-beige canvas slacks (a little frayed along the bottom edges) and a black T-shirt with a bold gold lion face in puffy-ink on the front (I don’t know where he got that shirt).

Leaning forward, resting slight forearms on slender thighs, Kempt watches entranced as his newest invention — these small, living, breathing, relatively intelligent letter-units/word-centipedes — wander around the floor, dropping and picking up letters to form new words and — in much weaker, more spread-out, visibly-wobbling bonds — simple sentences. Conceiving of and creating life and watching that life slowly find its way has put Kempt in a very zen place; he’s even stopped yelling at Arch for giving the poor little things the wrong letters, which confuses them.

“What?” Tun bursts, his too-long too-thin too-tubular arms and legs flying out, forming a much too-long and too-drawn-out X in front of the window that overlooks the courthouse with Washington’s swearing-in statue. “Whoever told him that Skullvalley After Whistletown Booksellers Extraordinaire needs to understand the whats-its and hoo-zaps it unloads on the hapless hopeless folk!? They don’t care what they’re swilling — just so long as they’re swilling! Bring ’em the trough and clear out!”

“I know — that’s what I sez: I sez, Bartleby, whip-snapp — that’s fast-slang for whipper snapper — look BW, wisni, I sez: at SAWB Bookbinders Spectacular we sell things; we don’t dry ourselves out on fancy pants worries like oohh I don’t know what I’m sell’in or ooohh, I don’t know how what I’m sell’in’s gonna impact the ooohhh people!”

Kempt said nothing as he watched “I” and “don’t” wander towards “understand”, which in turn gave a little jump of surprised joy and then dashed to join the duo — for to say something, to get something of their chests, to speak it out loud and clear.

So Bartleby spins.

And here ends that story and its time — its merry, oom pah pahing, pale beer frothing out of clanked metal steins, heavy chested girls in uplifting bodices wide-mouthed and head-tossed laugh-howling, worried little magicians in black cloaks and black stovepipe hats stooped on busy street corners and peering through narrowed eyes that flicker-hesitate and then lunge from side to side, giant wooden ships sloshing into a square-stone harbor and tumbling out unkempt adventurous lads like a leather dice-shaking cup rolling out a game of dice, smooth-bellied zebras zigzagging through the tall pipelike grasses time.

Well, actually; because things are never as simple as they start out declaring themselves; and so, all in all,: hard to say. You see, this basically funloving frolicsome fretting happened a bit ago; directly thereafter Bartleby Willard and Amble Whistletown, disheartened, once again dispersed, fleeing with their separate vessels (actually, Bartleby jumped on the back of a sea serpent) to their separate seas; but now, well now I’m not quite sure what they are up to or what the current mood of this, our blessed project — the manufacture of letters and love — is.

….

What, I wonder, does a Pure Love salesman confess to?

“I’m up in the attic, looking through the musty trunks, hoping to find an heirloom to pawn or a conversation piece to parade. I’m wishing through the ravages of war and its compromises: the soft white flesh that seemed so inviolate before everything was sudsy dishpan water flung into the air. Pure Love for sale! Pure Love for sale? Here, give me a fiver and I’ll give you not just the promise that it’ll all be alright, but the holy stuff that runs through our hearty heathy skirmishes and squeamishes! Yes, the hissing bustling contraption over there squirts out dollop after dollop of infinite joy, infinite kindness, infinite potential, and infinite redemption! And so I grow rich on the back of God Itself! What’s to confess? Who’ll condemn or forgive one who takes from the unbounded Good? With my riotous potions, I’ve left all portions behind; beyond both law and lawlessness, no eternal judge can e’er measure me for the final fitting; so as a phantom imagined in a child’s mind vanishes when that child grows beyond his childish superstitions, I vanish beyond myself: I supernova into nothingness, and Nothing becomes my name. Was I wrong? Was I right? But I wasn’t even like that: I was just telling you a joke I’d heard along the concrete white sparkling edge of the curving dam. Hold back deep waters, mighty suburban dam! Keep them frigid at your inkwell floor and mild on the rippling, scatter, sunning surface. … Or am I wrong? Do I clank and clap, march in place, make band out of mother’s pots — not for fun or earnest reflection, but to hide a fault? Oh, confess me to myself, You who know what I’ve become!”

Author: BW; editor: AMW; copyright: AMW

[Chapters of Diary of an Adamant Seducer]

– – – –

From Before:
[Update November 2021: Forget about this! It’s from Before! Not from Now! Why is it even here still?]

For the nonsubscriber: Above is the start of the third fictionish writing in Bartleby’s Diary of an Adamant Lover. For more on this book and what all else’s going on in this blog, see the words beneath these words. To skip formalities and let the passion for consumption drive you headlong into our seller’s net: Buy the Books/Chapter

About this project:[

We’re letting Bartleby write his book; we’re even publishing it for him; it is two loosely bound sketchbooks:

(1) Love at a Reasonable Price: Stories of his magically timeless time here at Wandering Albatross Press interspersed with writings from that time or from now but somehow connected to that time–stories about manufacturing, marketing, distributing, and selling Pure Love;
and
(2) Diary of an Adamant Lover: Stories of his current time here all alone with the quiet squeaking floorboards and the rats thumping in the ceiling: Stories of his cries for help in the ruins of Wandering Albatross Press, the black and dark time after the hope and before the answer. We’re splitting it into two sections: Biographical (writings that mostly relate the current movements of BW, AMW, and the rest of the WAP gang are ex) and Essayish (writings that mostly stay within a certain thought entertained and cultivated by the author and/or his editor).

Both books sold as they evolve here:
Buy the Books/Chapter
Chapters listed and linked to as they arise here:
Intro to Love at a Reasonable Price
and here:
Intro to Diary of an Adamant Seducer.

You can also find the most recent posting of each book by clicking on the appropriate Category (Categories are on the right hand side of this blog).

This blog will consist of extracts from the book’s chapters as they are released into the lumiferous aether. You can buy BW’s book as he writes it here. You can also consider this blog a long advertisement for Wandering Albatross Press’s some-such-several wonderful products; like . You can also view this blog as it’s own thing–a good unto itself–and as such a sweet, chaste little kiss running through the infomaterous aether (the theory of a lumiferous ether through which electromagetic waves move is no longer widely accepted and its originators all long dead; it is very much in the public domain and so publishing houses, such as the beautiful WAP, can use it any way they please). But insofar as this is a commercial venture, we still need it fundamentally grounded not in profit-motive, but in kind delight. So cross your fingers for us; say a prayer for us; keep a gentle but stern, a wary but hopeful eye on us. Help us to try. Or at least let us try.

Author: Bartleby Willard, fictional character

Copyright holder/editor: Andrew Mackenzie Watson (of the Sand Springs Watsons)

Chapter 4: BW Dreamtime #1

Chapter 4: BW Dreamtime #1

[Chapters of Diary of an Adamant Seducer]

[Update November 2021: We’re back at Diary of Adamant Seducer. We’ll try to bundle it into a book someday. For now the chapters are linked to above. See Buy Our Books for the books we’ve already completed.]

Warning Warning: I’ve revised this piece a lot and I’m not so sure it requires or benefits from a Warning or an Embarrassed Afterward. Yet, vacillating between possible interpretations and reluctant to undo all my fine stitching, I’ve left both these sections in the piece.

Warning: This story has some lewd language and some crackling crazed lonely frustration. I wrote it all by myself during my residence in the uppermost room. After crunching winter gives way to snappling spring, I often notice how much crunching winter oppresses the very soul. After the Bandit Sprites upped the wood-framed, paint-peeling window and, fluttering on all sides, guided and secured me as I pawingly backward-tiptoed my way down the shaky top branches of the enormous, black-chested old oak, and after this same dark-forest-based band of generous and legitimately grieved rebels gradually and painstakingly introduced me to human society — to fist-before-mouth clearing one’s throat at the solid oak dinner table; to the flutter of fans and eyelashes at elaborate soirees thrown by the town’s luminaries; to uneasy shoulder-fidgets with hands thrust in pockets and eyes vainly searching a friendly flash –; after this long, costly, forced integration, I reflected on what had been, and, upon reflection, my heart broke over my erstwhile loneliness and how the complete-cocooning of lonely lonely down deep lonely partially hides it from the mind but not at all from the heart and the fingertips.

I’m going to try again to soften the soft porn into something even softer and to shave off a little of the most grotesquely baroque catcalling, but I feel a need to let this piece testify to the time of its birth — an awkward time marked by extreme intellectual, emotional, and bodily frustrations –, so I’l have to retain a lot that — bristle brush on bare foot — discomfits. Oh, man was I ever a mess! Not at all like my nowadays, where every strand is safely secured and beautifully integrated.

But more than that: I endeavor to preserve the essence of this rough romp not just as testimony to a time that held and shook me in those kitten-in-a-sack days beside an isolated bend in the small goosebumpling stream; but also because I’m convinced that many of the jangles the more jangly aspects of this piece catch into and spread-sparkle-out exist not merely in me and my yesterself, but in human life as a general phenomenon and in the spirit of the times. Which brings me to a larger point:

Though the Truth is perfectly blessed and incapable of any offense, in our physio-mental forms we largely skippity skip across the Truth like small flat river-rounded rock-wafers sidearmed by flush-faced young boys discussing weaponry, sports, and girls. Therefore, art’s reflection of the human moment, though properly centered around the radiant radiance at a human’s core, is sometimes justified in speaking indulgent half-truths — sometimes this enables a work to better chip out a story about how life might sometimes feel. For more on the topic of allowing non-Platonic Forms into art, while still yet holding that any given speck of art should find its foundation in and ultimately reduce to Beauty = Truth = Goodness = Justice = The Overflow of Pure Love, see below, where I add yet another inch to this preface.

Another inch to the preface: I here and now quote from an introductory remark to a story that isn’t this one and that’s not yet been released into this blogbook, but that, especially as touches the remarked upon circumstances, shares some features with this piece:

In the “Samples” section of this site, you can read a story about a hard-driving production manager at a Love manufacturing plant [no you can’t; there is no Samples section; that was an old idea; this story will, revised and perhaps reintroduced, probably appear in “Love at a Reasonable Price” before too too long, but it isn’t there now]. That this man, for all his charms, is a little sexist and anti-intellectual, is the fault of neither author nor publisher. Employees of Love manufacturing plants are just the same as the rest of us—imperfect yet essentially beautiful creations. And we at WAP believe that within the safe folds of fiction, characters should be allowed to be themselves (fiction being a type of poetry that doesn’t claim to contain any truth except poetic truth, and that is therefore not as dangerous as scientific treatises, political essays, religious revelations, mystical experiences, or any other writings that claim to be in some obvious and fundamental way “correct”; this maxim being sometimes rather tragically undone and voided when dogmatic philosophies masquerade as fictions).

….

BW Dreamtime #1

What hey, Bartleby! How goes it? You draw yourself up into existence. Yes! Now you’re a sparkler! Now you’re white hot hotter than hot! Now you’re the inside of an empty lair! Not the dank cool air! You know what I mean! So get on up, Bartleby.

You add layer upon layer atop this essential something that makes a living creature more than the sum total of its thoughts, feelings, actions, and story times. You’re making yourself up, Bartleby.

But how now? and wil I nil I! How can I be real if I’ve no conscious watching? It’s all well and good for a fictional creature to be allowed into the general melee of What Is, but how is he any more there than an old dresser drawer that someone made and gave away as a gift and that means a little something to a conscious mind here and there but is itself not conscious at all? I can give myself ideas and feelings and What Is can accept me and shine through me and know me as I really am — just as It does for every other little drop of detail in this infiniti of detail-rich universes that are the outward manifestations of some deepest darkest driving Light. But still I’m not there, still I’m no real boy, still I’m a pinocchio who’ll never get the magic, trapped forever in a still-life that others can imagine into motion but that does not really move. I don’t move at all! Oh, let me be a part of it! I want to stand up and look about!

All right, Bartleby–it’s all right. When was it? Do you recall when the illustrious founders of the Wandering Albatross Press and their fellow citizens formed themselves and their city? They too drew themselves out of the mists of history and stone that always swirl together to form the present. But you weren’t there, were you? No, you’re new to this place. You just remember–what is it you just remember?

Coming down from the mountain, flowing down the mountain like a waterflow, the mountain flowing into me and me into it, the children on the shore laughing and throwing scattering pebbles into the water, the children on the shore flowing into me and their parents who stood on top of the bank, facing the other way, worshipping the sun and the moon, their own passionate parts, the love of their friends and families, the call of the mourning dove,–any false idol they could get their still misty, still forming and unforming hands around. But they couldn’t really hold anything. To this day they can’t, none of us can. It is our salvation.

All right, Bartleby, it’s all right, you needn’t impress us with your prophecies and wisdom! We like you just fine as you really are–a dirty faced little peasant boy with grubs in his pockets and hair. Come on down from your mountains, be real with us for a second! Not even Moses spent every second showing off! Everybody needs to stop lying once in a while. Oh, but that’s not possible. And neither is lying. Just always this mushy gooshy in-between truth. Smash, Bartleby! I’m sorry for this! I wanted to have the place tidied up, better organized, and more wholesome before you got here. I goofed around too much.

I, Bartleby, glopped around too much in the time before I created myself and so now I am apologizing to myself as I create myself in the desert that is now fading and giving way to the moorlands, their thick gray sky and scraggly, prickly, ground-hugging greens and browns.

When Bartbley entered the grand old kitchen, he thought of knights and battles, of swords that didn’t hang on wood-panel walls but that were held high above your head and brought down onto the body of some other living human being. He was nineteen and the kitchen made him think of men who fought bloody hell and in so doing made bloody hell and loved and hated and ate and drank and screwed and slashed and sooner or later got bashed down dead in bloody hell. He felt inadequate.

I am drawing up plans. I’ve entered into this place and I’ve seen its rules. They are stuffy and lonely but people need rules and they always hurt very badly, claw very deep, make wounds that fester and leave you alone to die with your nose pressed against the glass looking in at a happy scene of people feeling comfortable and being pleasant without soiling themselves by pretending that suffering and meanness don’t exist or don’t matter or don’t hurt or are just fine anyhow. How is it that it is like this for me? Is this window pane a trick? Are we all glassed in by trick windows showing us scenes about people who are neither wretched nor evil? But why? Just to give us the idea that such a life is possible and freely available to human beings and our wretched evilness is our own damned and damning fault?

I’m sorry, Bartleby. Forgive my constant flippancy, my inability to take anyone or anything seriously enough to care one way or the other about them. It’s just how we’ve grown into this place, like a tree that grows around a wire fence or rock or some other foreign object that’s incapable of either halting growth or allowing growth to continue without perversion. We didn’t know how to react to the options they gave us–either a God who made no sense and was mean and boring or a smiling, fopastic and/or positivatic, proudly meaningless but yet somehow still vain and morally self-righteous relativism. So we just sort of farted, or exploded, or splatted, or splattered, or whatever these loud and dramatic give-ups that underlie our words and deeds are. Let’s do better! I want to do better! If only there was a “better” I could both believe in and understand!

You’re right, I should shut up and quit boasting. The world has as many philosophies as it has moments of conscious thought. And …

But no “and”, because I’m shutting up.

But here, roll out the parchment again, trace your fingers over thin black lines on tan and browning, edges&creases-blackening, crumbling, curling surface. Remind you of something? The lines are the marks we and all other moving bodies and moving minds leave upon life–they are what can be seen, heard, tasted, felt, remembered, reverse-engineered. Notice how the lines long ago deep seeped into this flayed, liquor-soaked, and stretch-dried goat hide; and mark how now, in our era, these careful, nimble letters crumble to dust along with their barbaric paper. Likewise! Likewise do edifices created out of some combination of thought and action and inevitably interwoven into this too-crumbly material world,–likewise do they disappear along with their homeland. But not the happenstance of them! Not the act of writing, of doing itself. That stays forever in what has been. As, to be sure, does God’s recollection of the configurations that were, are, and will be. So, watch it! Privilege and responsibility! Watch it!

Sorry, you’re right. Here, why don’t you tell me about your plan. It might help to clarify your thinking. At the very least it will hush me up and so allow the air time to revive, reproduce itself and once again fill this candle-lit room on the second floor of an old mansion (see the candles flicker and blossom as the air recovers!). Look at that view of the moors when the clouds let a sizable chunk of the shiny but tarnished moon button through. It’s really something, all those black silhouettes of rolling hills and the faint sketches of a curly black chest hair growing in flowing, lightly- and unpredictably-undulating patches.

Thank you, thank you for the invitation to speak. I want to make bold my plans.

Oh, look at you when you stand up in that tight-fitting shirt and those well-worn jeans! You’re a pretty one! I bet there’s lots of pretty young women who’d like to have you try and prove that you can sparkle with enough wit and honesty to be worthy of a trying-out. Then all you need to do is to hold and complete them well enough to be worthy of their love and respect; then you’re golden–all set, not lonely dead inside anymore. Wouldn’t that be nice?

I’m pretty?

Sure you are! Your lines manly without being harsh. And your musculature! It isn’t ferocious; it doesn’t knock down doors with one swing of an anvil-sized fist. But it is pretty and it could maybe even convince if you knew how to get backbone into your backbone. But I feel a squeamish squirming faltering in you. I think I turn away. I think I am a young woman who’d thought there might be something worth holding onto in that soft dark hair who is now bored, unhappy, dissatisfied and so not even going to listen to your next sentence; I think I’m already waiting you out, looking past you, looking for a way to make my way across the sea of chit chat atop which plastic cups full of light yellow beer and exuberant but largely unsubstantiated friendships float. I’ll find a man who I can honestly believe has a decent chance of being able to prove it to me, go there with me, become it with me. Goodbye, joke of a man.

Stop it! Get out of here! Go away! I’ll work on my plans by myself! You are not a good friend! You are not good for me to spend time with! Go away!

All right, already. Have it your way. But what’s a fictional character going to do on his own? People need people, Bartleby. Even fictional people do. You need someone, even if it is just your own self in a sort of cock-eyed and arrogantly tedious mood.

I don’t need you! I’ll never escape any of the possibilities within me; still, perhaps I can push towards something better.

Captain of industry. I walk with a quick and self-assured gait. I talk with the same sharp-edged rhythm. Even my laughs are staccato realizations of a confidence that doesn’t even need to be mean or lord it over you anymore. But can I?–can I really keep from being evil?

The concreted floors beneath my soft-soled dress shoes. The geese-in-flight configuration with assistants and well-wishers widening behind me, dragging off of me while my strong and energetic mind explains what we’ll do when. Large concrete cylinders and cylindrical steel pipes. A symphony of steel and hard-plastic containers and cauldrons bubbling and cooling, liquids in various shades of various colors flowing and stagnating in cylinders of all sizes and proportions, running and bending in all conceivable–at least in Euclidean space–directions.

Which reminds me! Make a memo! Take this down: get the lab rats to see if we can’t make better use of non-Euclidean space. I hate to see things go to waste–even things I can’t actually see but can only mathematically formulate.

(Wait! I’ve heard something encouraging about our performance in non-Euclidean space! Wait! I don’t understand it! I really don’t. What?!? Are those some kind of numbers? How do they relate to profits? How many do I have to gather up to get my baby that coat of many magical and Biblically-resplendit colors that she keeps nudging my overworked shoulders about? [Note: That joke was added November 2021, before reading the following, which i suppose was originally written like 2011-12-13-or-something-long-ago-at-any-rate.])

“Yes sir, Mr. Bartleby!”

Good, good, and I like your legs in those power tights beneath your power skirt and power suit jacket. How powerful must be the flower out of which so much beauty and power flow and around which you orbit in every direction and spot at once–electron style.

“Thank you, sir. I only wish I could love a man and accept his potential into my propensities without having to simultaneously imbibe small but potent potential-killing machines. But you know how it is–I’ve got things to accomplish. Anyway, there’s too many people in the world anyhow.”

Too true! Too many people and not enough efficiency! And who needs fatherhood or motherhood, who needs sex with a chance of sticking? Who needs all these old addictions of primitive peoples? Of course, if we’ve seen past all that, why pretend that men coaxing burgeoned thighs and women nuzzling hearty hairy burly heart-bursting chests are worth time and effort? And why imagine that love between a man and a woman is anything but the dirty fraud it keeps acting like?

“Well said, sir. Even so, I want to hold you and lead your rhythm into mine–via our ancient mechanisms, if at all possible. Though, of course the love I crave is impossible to attain–or even countenance. Still, at least now we’re wise enough to know that things like true love and real goodness and a truly meaningful life are all empty illusions. At least we know enough to not get our hopes up anymore; and also to quick-and-definitive thumb our noses at the dumb dumb suckers who do–there’s some satisfaction in that, in being wise.”

Mmmm. Yeah…Write this down: I, Bartleby Willard, having created myself out of loneliness, whimsy, and some deep rich, running, soaked-in-syrup love, do hereby declare myself a captain of industry who is not completely worthless. OK, and under that write: Let me be more precise. How long has this economy dragged on, using up the world and everybody’s time, energy, and focus to make more and more things we don’t need, forcing us all to work all the time just to have enough money to buy the things we do need, while concomitantly corrupting us into lusting and working after what we don’t need–often don’t even particularly like or even want? How long must we wear ourselves out making and brain-breathing junk and thereby so thoroughly exhausting and eroding ourselves that–humans turned burnt-out and stripped-down old cars on the side of thoroughfares in economically desperate, inadequately policed cityscapes–we end up spending all our leftover time and energy and focus buying and using junk? How long?! I don’t know, but I for one am not participating.

[November 2021 aside: When my father drove through NYC in the 70s, abandoned cars lined the highways, desperation bled from its pores. What will happen if the SCOTUS forces New Yorkers to allow guns to flow unchecked through every bit of this bunched-up, crowded, throb-dreaming city? Will it go back to danger-time? Will everyone who can take off and leave everyone who can’t to the violence and the trouble? Or not? Who knows? Do they care? How much time do they spend on the NYC subway? Do they understand that dogmas never reach either human realities or Divine Reality? Do they know that God is completely free of dogmas? Do they? Do you, dear reader? Do I, dear writer?]

“I work out at the gym three times a week and take walks on my lunch break. I avoid sugar and grains and genetically modified foodstuffs. I look and feel and feel good. My breasts. Did you notice how full and round they are? As if they had some kind of purpose. Though I can’t guess what that might be. Perhaps they’re needed as a bridge spanning our wishful edges. Maybe they’re a clue that men and women can share a certain type of love. Or did I just say they couldn’t? But of course they can’t. Still we will force love into existence, we’ll do it by pushing into each other with everything we have and then, somehow …. by harnessing the great power of existential stands … you know? …. ”

Mmmm. Yeah… So then write: You know how mean and gross everyone is? You know how they say they love each other but men just like pretty women and women just like men who know how to fight with at least apparent effectiveness and have the tools and know-how to hold them tight and knock them out, or who at least wield enough power over the reigning baubledom to sluice off a significant stream of baubles for themselves and their affections? You know how they say a family is love but parents just sneak off to little alcoves in the hills where they can hug each other and their children and pretend that only caring about a handful of people while ignoring everyone else is some kind of a great virtue? Well, I’ve had enough of that shit.

“It’s just no good this way, sir. No one’s good enough for me and I’m not good enough for anyone. You look very nice in your well-tailored suit, and your body seems shaped to share with me–to take my kisses and caresses and make sense out of them. But even you, mighty captain of industry, leading a throng of well-paid auxiliaries through a mess of pipes, fumes, drips, and hard-hatted, sweat-drenched worker-men, even you aren’t quite good enough for me. I’d get bored, turn my head aside, think I could do better, feel like I was being wasted, needed more, someone who wasn’t so this, was a little more that. And though I’m still young and my body engaging and my mind and heart formed to fit your mind and heart like soft, slender hand in elegant evening glove–still you’d not love me. Not for very long. And the moment you spotted a sag in my body or a slip in my mind or a wavering in my heart: excuse! ‘Good, now I get to dump her and stop wasting myself on this unworthy sea shell!'”

Mmmm. Yeah… So get this down: Love between human beings is always greedy and pretending relative freedom from greed just makes it meaner and more perverted. The love of the Saints and mystics is selfish too–it lets them be joyful and good while the rest of us are yucky inside and out. I will make a better sort of love. I will make pure, pure, pure love. Be sure to capitalize “Pure” and “Love”. I will brew up batch after batch of Pure Love and I will market it honestly and sell it for a fair price. I will be someone who isn’t completely awful; I will be the first of my kind; I will be someone who isn’t awful through and through. Did you get all that?

“Yes sir.”

Sounded kind of ridiculous when I actually said it outloud. But how does it look on paper? Sometimes writing statements down has a way of sanding rough edges and setting glistening dew beads into vagueries, obfusications, and hand-waving pauses.

“Hard to say, sir. We are walking at such a fast and useful pace that my penmanship is affected and the words look a little jarred and desperate.”

Maybe if we had a better idea of what made human beings so awful … it has something to do with how they are all scam artists: charlatans feigning insight into what is good and beautiful and decent and full of life. Something to do with how they make like they’re actively pursuing this knowledge of what is worthwhile–like they actually mean to actualize it, to actually bring worthiness into existence … something to do with their cheap scaminess … so bad, bad, bad, people are so bad bad bad … Yes, get that down, write that in the meeting notes, draft it into memos, bring it before the board and the stockholders and the consumers–really rub my knowledge of their depravity in, run it in, don’t let them think I don’t know …

The Pure Love factory whirls all around the busy and important people. Liquids and gasses flow and slosh. Solids push and pull, spin and fling, narrow and widen, begin and end. Men dripping sweat manipulate large objects with burst after burst of precise, powerful, all body movement; women in cool perfumed air, sitting tall and proud on plush round rumps, can-can their sweet slender fingers into and out of the metal-cup keys of rat-a-tat-tatting metal typewriters. Bottle upon countless bottle fills with Pure Love. Wooden file cabinet after light brown stained wooden filing cabinet fills with typed reports, memos, documents of all lengths and cadences detailing the business of Pure Love.

Why all the fuss, Bartleby? Why the creation of a fictional reality in which you can be a mighty industrialist inexpensively massproducing Pure Love? We all have that kind of Love within us, the kind that just loves and does not ask for anything in return. The kind that loves everyone and no one above another one, that accepts everything and everyone while all the same requiring more and better kind active awareness from every drop and every collection of drops and every collection of collections of drops …. We all, each of us and together as everything, have that already. We are it. It is our Alpha and our Omega, our beginning and our end, our parts and our whole. Reality is nothing but this: from one perspective, 100% Pure Love (the undifferentiated: the whole: prior to all specifics) sitting infinitely and eternally still and pretty; from another perspective, 100% Pure Love (the undifferentiated: the whole: prior to all specifics) exploding through all manner of specific thoughts and feelings, stones and songs, avowals and denials, dried sandy desert creek beds and lush green-overflowing Pacific Northwest river valleys. This whole universe-wide operation is nothing but the formless Pure Love forming specific objects out of its infinite, eternal, and not even a little bit specific self. Pure Love–by virtue of the necessity inherent within infinite potentials paired with an infinite lack of need–explodes infinitely, shaping worlds out of Itself and playing out dramas within Itself. Everyone knows that, though we know nothing else–details being what they always are: neither all that captivating nor all that knowable/understandable/believable.

Why all the trouble? The giant brick factory with great cedars imported from Lebanon to hold up black asphalt shingled roofs hand delivered from sooty English factory town? The toil of muscled men in blue jeans and white cotton tank tops (not wife-beaters! The holes for the neck and arm are smaller and the shirts fit tightly, wholesomely and healthily rippling with the muscles of V-backed and sidewaysB-chested men). The rumble of executives trying to decide whether it would be politically wiser to agree or disagree with what had just been said. The squeak of middle managers trying to eke out a decent product within a reasonable budget while making both those above and below them believe they’re on their side. And the straight-backed, rosebud-butte secretaries with their firm, upward-yearning bossoms! How their fingers fly! How much progress they record! And the recording of progress is itself progress! So you see how it feeds on itself and grows ever greater, engorged with the blood of self-love turned outward, actively seeking other-love, almost even, maybe yes perhaps believing in other and that it might need to love and be loved, that it might be the sort of thing that you could be friends with.

Why all the trouble, Bartleby? We already have an infinite and eternal supply of Pure Love. In fact, there’s nothing but Pure Love. The problem is not one of supply nor even of demand. The problem has to do with bioavailability. You best get yourself a lab coat, a few PHDs, and a blithe disrespect for everything that can’t be measured or fit into an abstract formal system.

No? Not that type of science? Well, what then, Bartleby? The great boxes of corrugated aluminum where you house your wares are fast filling their front-to-back and floor-to-ceiling steel-shelves. People are lined up for miles in front of the stores scheduled to sell your wares “like pretty soon” (I’m reading from your own business plan, Bartleby! There’s irony in my tone? You bet there is! Because that’s no way to write a business plan). What are you going to do? Tell them they can buy Pure Love and It is not too pricey and since It is infinite, one small initial investment should be sufficient? But the marketing boys have already tucked all those messages into hilarious and carefree but still heart-felt and human-oriented ad campaigns! The question is just how to make this Pure Love useful to your customers. You didn’t market this as a novelty item. The idea wasn’t just to put Pure Love on the mantelpiece next to grandma’s ashes and Uncle Frank’s work-release paperwork. You were supposed to be able to consume the Pure Love and it was supposed to make you better, stronger, wiser, kinder, more fully alive. Like you’d become yourself in a way that was OK, was Good, True, Beautiful, Just, Alive. To make the fire within burn clean and bright, using up all of you and turning it all into a full-blaze life that didn’t waste anything.

Written by Bartleby Willard some number of lonely lonely lonely years ago.
Now read-over and spot-revised by editor Andy Watson and author Bartleby Willard.
Published by Andrew Watson

Embarrassed Afteward:
I’m a little embarrassed by how young and romantically uncoordinated this writing selection portrays me, the hero of this self-writing novel. But, what’re you gonna do? We all have our bobbly youths–some just last a very long time; and some just get retroinvented along with everything else. What of my stories are from memory and what are from imagination? I know at some point I started making myself up, but which of my memories come before my initial self-invention ex-nihilo and which come after? What if I can’t remember anymore? What then? What now? For me!, for me to find some way to find my way!–?!–!?

The piece enjoys a large expanse of pages–like five or six more than one sees without the magic key that unlocks rolled-up words. I’ve placed this piece in Love at a Reasonable Price because, though autobiographical, it is from the time before time and not this current helter skelter. For more on what goes into Diary of an Adamant Lover and what goes into Love at a Reasonable Price, see below. Access to both evolving ebooks sold for a total of US$10 at this place: Buy the Books/Chapter

[Update November 2021: This isn’t true. We didn’t put this into “Love at a Reasonable Price”. I don’t know where the full version of this piece got to. Anyway, it’s like ten years later, and in the meanwhiles I’ve had to admit that I’m just another guy who can’t really want anything but his wife and their happy home. I had to admit that deep inside I just want a safe place to love and be loved. Someone who wouldn’t turn away when I told her all the things I couldn’t admit to even myself ten years ago. What is a man? He’s hardly anything at all. He’s just a collection of drives and wishes connected to some whirling engine and its driving rods. He’s just another monkey sitting on a branch, looking down at the valley, vaguely nervous about eagles from above and pythons from along, but also vaguely in awe of the fire inside and the undulating interwoven expanses outside. People are lonely deep inside. Only God shares everything they are. But it is nice to find someone who can at least hear about the things you know about, who can at least hold what you are willing and able to inhabit. Don’t be so hard on people. Be gentle and gently work to push their systems and hearts towards the better. Give them a break. Give yourself a break. Wisdom is God’s alone, yet wisdom is ours to the degree we go easy on everyone.]

[Chapters of Diary of an Adamant Seducer]

From Forever and Forever Ago:

About this project:

We’re letting Bartleby write his book; we’re even publishing it for him; it is two loosely bound sketchbooks:

(1) Love at a Reasonable Price: Stories of his magically timeless time here at Wandering Albatross Press interspersed with writings from that time or from now but somehow connected to that time–stories about manufacturing, marketing, distributing, and selling Pure Love;
and
(2) Diary of an Adamant Lover: Stories of his current time here all alone with the quiet squeaking floorboards and the rats thumping in the ceiling: Stories of his cries for help in the ruins of Wandering Albatross Press, the black and dark time after the hope and before the answer. We’re splitting this one into two sections: Biographical (writings that mostly relate the current movements of BW, AMW, and the rest of the WAP gang are ex) and Essayish (writings that mostly stay within a certain thought entertained and cultivated by the author and/or his editor).

Both books sold as they evolve here:
Buy the Books/Chapter
That page also includes a current list of chapters for each book.

Actually, the posts of Diary of an Adamant Lover probably won’t ever require a subscription. Still, with a subscription, you get a nicely ebound eevolving ebook compilation of the writings, and you get a quick buy eye-connecting “Thank you” from AW and BW as they bow their way out of the subway car with nothing but the clothes on their backs and the songs in their lungs.

This blog will consist of extracts from the book’s chapters as they are released into the lumiferous aether. You can buy BW’s book as he writes it here. You can also consider this blog a long advertisement for Wandering Albatross Press’s some-such-several wonderful products; like . You can also view this blog as it’s own thing–a good unto itself–and as such a sweet, chaste little kiss running through the infomaterous aether (the theory of a lumiferous ether through which electromagetic waves move is no longer widely accepted and its originators all long dead; it is very much in the public domain and so publishing houses, such as the beautiful WAP, can use it any way they please). But insofar as this is a commercial venture, we still need it fundamentally grounded not in profit-motive, but in kind delight. So cross your fingers for us; say a prayer for us; keep a gentle but stern, a wary but hopeful eye on us. Help us to try. Or at least let us try.

Author: Bartleby Willard, fictional character

Copyright holder/editor: Andrew Mackenzie Watson (of the Sand Springs Watsons)

From “The Pitch”

From “The Pitch”

[This is the beginning of “The Pitch”, which is part of “First Loves”, available on this site for $2.99 (see “Buy the Books”). So, yeah: basically free. The effort is clicking into your Amazon or B&N account, and then taking the time to read it. We’re not saying you should. We’re just saying it’s here if you feel so moved.]

The Pitch!

A Note on the Text:

This story is one of several dozen Olden Times IIVa1 (OT IIVa1) Skullvalley After Whistletown Booksellers (SAWB) texts, written with gritty charcoal ink on supple papyrus parchment and preserved in near mint condition by the brittle air of the Relatively Great Desert in what is now The Old West, USA.
Through how many world-cycles these wonderful tales slumbered, resting in oblivion as only decoderless information can! But then suddenly in 1832, for no apparent reason (though most commentators agree some peeved god or goddess must surely have been involved), the rich soft silky-smooth silence was shattered when self-celebrated mountainman Constantine Clement George, while recreationally blasting a mile or so outside the small tumbleweed town of Gull’s Gulch, unearthed three long tunnels burrowed into sandstone cliffs 150 feet above the desert floor. Investigating, George discovered—in chambers decorated with all the antiquated pomp of a pharaoh’s tomb—six slender clay jars stuffed with tightly rolled parchments.

George, a self-described “romantic robin a pecking at the egg forever and evermore”, initially used the priceless archaeological find as a rendezvous for “the more hightided, and of sorts cultured ladies”. But, despite one and all pledging “to herefore in the future not now nor never reveal nor hint upon nor never ever so much as wink coy as respecting the whereabouts of this sacred and holy alcove where the spirit of knowing and the dove of roosting do together combine to one another; and for if I do divulge whatsoever of these exalted hollows or their indubitous inhabitants, I pray that God may in holy and righteous vengeance strike me dead, having first, by especial intervention of the Holy Spirit — which I understand to be, by miraculous divinity, in indubitabilty no other than, but yet also in that same authenticated indubulation other than, God the Father ‘Ol Pops — ripped forthwith out my tongue and eyes, and, in due salutation of my abjection, flung them onto the floor, be it ever so becrudded”, at least some of the chorus girls, prostitutes, and — if Constantine’s braggadocio can be trusted — “some goodly count of respectable damatsells of white and blameless knickers” began to talk. And so, after Clement had enjoyed almost six months of “blameless spirituous joy”, the local authorities confiscated the site and strictly forbade “all antenuptial cavortations in and around but not limited to caves of ancient learning”.

But strange and heart-rending to report, the Gull’s Gulch authorities proved singularly incapable of grasping the value of the find or their duty to human knowledge (it is beneath me as a man of science to dwell on the incompetence of others, but it is outside me as a man of conscious to not cry a loud and forceful “Foul!!!!!” on the clearly willful ignorance and grubby-mindedness of the ruling elite [such as they were] of Gull’s Gulch throughout the entire 19th Century: !!IDIOTS!!). Things went terribly wrong and the precious documents entered a dark and dangerous time. The details so sicken my educated gut and tremble my scholarly fingers that I cannot bear relate the shameful mishandling of the single most important source of Olden Times SAWB cultural history.

{Editor’s Note:
The scholarly intro goes on in this vein for a while, and then it is signed by:

Bartholomew von Ooblichstein,
WAP Studies, Didd State University
Summer Break (hooray!) 2015

And then the Text proper begins.}

The whole thing is always copyright by AMW, whatever that is.