The Black Marque

 

I’ve always been fond of this piece because it has such a long history. The inspiration was doodles my dad had drawn as a kid in the top margins of schoolbooks we still had in our home library. He was a more talented artist than I am, and it showed even in his schoolboy work. He had his own motorhead obsession in those early years and sketched wonderful cartoons of incredibly long-hooded motor cars bearing the name ”Zig Zag.”

Never forgot the name or the drawings and developed my own premise for an art piece. When I was about 20, I dreamt up “Zig-Zag Drive” as a new technology for night driving by famous writers. Upon veering to one side of the road or the other, powerful springs would steer the car back onto the road. I completed one actual water color of my own featuring the dashboard, laid out in the form of a typewriter, so that even a drunken writer could still operate the vehicle. I lost the watercolor somewhere along the way. How things go when you’re constantly on the move.

It wasn’t till after I did Shuteye Town that I finally decided to do a real homage to my Dad’s Zig-Zag Marque and my own misspent college years. Was never entirely satisfied with it because it seems unfinished. I was supposed to return to it after the graphics were done and fill in the transitional and climactic writing that would have made it more of a detectable genuflection to The Great Gatsby, closing on Daisy’s green light at the end of the dockstreet. It was filed in my head somewhere and just needed typing. Then my contact with Instapunk Rules got badly compromised and I never got to it. But maybe it’s not supposed to be finished yet. A few miles left to go, I suppose, before I’ve completely made it up with my Dad…

The Black Marque (Yes, they’ll let you see it if you persist and hit the bottom prompt on the second screen to see it despite the perilous security risk it poses…)

As a nation we do delight in tearing down our own most spectacular successes, don’t we? The dark side of aspiration is envy. Especially vulgar in American hands for some reason.

Hump Day Woolgathering

What I jotted down in my iPad Notes app at 6 am…

Toward a New Paradigm of Science

Primacy of the Terminator’s Arm Paradox

Archetype of “Old Science” as Victorian bookkeepers with sleeve garters, green eyeshades, and quill pens scratching on parchment at their copy desks

Melville’s Parable of “Bartleby the Scrivener”

The Search for Syntropy

The original definition of Quantum Computing:  A system that processes all possible approaches and outcomes simultaneously

The Facts of Life in Our Universe. 

• 95 percent of the visible universe is beyond the ability of our technology to see
• 95 percent of the universe as a whole is not visible but consists of dark matter and dark energy
• The existence of other universes (multiverses, parallel universes, etc) is purely speculative but not disprovable
• The array of constants that underpins the universe we experience is an exceedingly rare combination of set points, the absence of any one of which would produce nothing but a chaotic void

My Contribution: Restoration of the infinite, even divine, powers of two words scorned by the pedagogues of writing in the 20th Century: the verb “to be” and the noun “thing”.

Now it’s time for a nap already…

The World is too much with us…

In practical terms, the time and effort I expend on Facebook is kind of a sunk cost. The work itself is kind of lost to me, since I haven’t had a printer for years. Why I gave into temptation last week and bought some of my own work back from Meta. The excuse was easy. A small format book was only $75. And by any measure, 2025 was a very historical year. The book came yesterday. At least it shows me specific dates on which posts I might like to look up again for recapture can be found at my FB page. That date search feature still works thus far. Here’s a glance at the new book.

160 pages. Not complete but representative.

Of course the presence of this one is also a reminder of all the years I don’t have, enumerated in some detail at an Instapunk Returns post called “A Big Missing Piece.” It’s a very big piece. I have two other slivers of it from past years. The three together are about 500 pages out of more than 5,000 pages for the lot.

At least they’re tangible. A kind of physical proof. Not as important as what I learned from creating the content, a process still ongoing. 

One more physical proof I dusted off in the last week or so. The portrait of Doctor Dream I had transferred to a canvas stretcher is one of quite a few physical artifacts I’m hanging onto. Like the print books, it helps to be able to put my hands on them.

Why now? A time for looking back. Today is our 20th wedding anniversary (I haven’t shown her this yet). A big deal. We’re still here. And my life does not consist of bitter regrets. Rather the opposite. Gratitude for the whole roller coaster ride is what I feel. I sometimes wonder how many, or few, of my generation feel the same way at this stage of life. 

The coaster at King’s Island in Ohio. The only stand-up coaster in the world at the time. 

I rode it twice in a row. My ex-wife insisted on going, waiting in line for an hour, 

then chickening out. When I returned, she’d had another change of heart and 

wanted to prove to herself she could do it. I will never forget the look on 

her face as we reached the top of the first hill, shackled into our 

stand-up positions; her terror was palpable. 

But she was glad afterwards.

Facebook is a part of the long ride. Fun, frustrating, and productive. The experience is not missing, even if I’m short on proof.

Facebook’s worried about my memory…

Last evening, FB notified me I had a lot of memories with Jeffrey Malashock on this date. They started with the usual easy calls from a year ago, then plunged suddenly into six years ago, one after another for a while, including this, which is when it finally started making sense to me.

Cooder’s  always been a favorite of mine, but when you 

see the context below you’ll understand why he’s here.

Here’s how the spate of posts unfolded in the Memory planche, newest entry first, like a blog:

The Monica ❤️ was from the semi-quasi-daughter I helped raise from 12 

and taught how to write and how to drive. We still kibbutz in each other’s 

lives. One of the blessings of midlife failure.

Hmmm. Something’s pulling me back in time… After the Reichenbach Falls 

I put the book aside and failed to read the next story for a couple of weeks, 

the Empty House, where you learn he didn’t die. Nathan Dreyfuss was worse.

I wasn’t 10 yet when I did all these. Like eating popcorn but more filling. 

Faves were Lord Nelson and the Swamp Fox. Why now though?

Early onset second childhood? April 24, 2020…?

This is the truck later resuscitated as the wheels of Johnny Dodge 

on the night of the Punk City Massacre in 1985.

My Grandpa Miesse made me a sturdier replacement. Fell off that one too,

From my Napoleon Solo period. I used to write up reports of my heroics on 

each episode. I even wore the coat and tie and shoulder holster rig into the 

woods called Little Egypt out back. Danger danger danger.

Will and I didn’t have go-karts to play with down at the shore. Except at Wildwood, 

where we always got thrown off the track for trying to wreck each other. 

The gliders had to fill the gaps between rowboat shifts.

Last hit song I heard on the radio at home was Guantanamera. The Box Tops 

were a small step toward joining my generation. The big step came when 

I heard the first Doors album at low volume in the dark after lights out.

Monica bringing up an old dispute for old time’s sake.

I guess I provoked Monica first. Think this pic is here because South Street’s ‘

Theater of the Living Arts’ was ‘The Razor Café’ of the Punk City era.

I was there. He was a revelation. At one point he sat in a tattered old armchair 

on stage and talked and sang like a guest in your living room. 

He’ll be my big close here in a minute or two…

Also saw Vikings QB Joe Kapp on the verge of a road rage dustup in 

Harvard Square. That horseshoe scar on his face is scary up close.

Baseball has been lost to me for a long time now. I saw Schmidt when he was still 

getting ritually booed for his strikeouts. He was from Dayton. I admired him 

even more after I lived there. A modest titan of the game.

Where we came in… When in the stack of memories I finally two and two together and 

came up with COVID, which I haven’t written enough about, at least not personally.

April 24, 2020. Found this at Google:

I had a derisive mask I used as a profile pic for a while during the national lockdown. We survived okay because we don’t go out much anyway, we never got the SHOT, and the big learning point for me was that not only was academic science corrupt, but medical science was even worse. Glad I learned it but distressed so many don’t seem to have figured it out yet.

I think I actually wore it once to Delaware on a no-sales-tax run.

There’s a placeholder for my post about COVID in my ‘Death of the Republic’ website, but I was too distracted by post-Jan6 lawfare to go back and fill the hole. What I did do was this website: ‘How to Have Fun During the National Shutdown’. Still worth a look, I hope, for its movie recommendations.

The trip down youthful memory lane. Those years seem so far away in so many ways, except when they’re right up my nose when I wake from a troubled dream. What COVID was for everyone, I suspect. Why the Spanish flu dropped right out of history after the epidemic was over. The world population suffered a brief upward blip in deaths and a longer downward trend in important cultural effects. 

As promised, I’ll forego more pontificating for now and hand the floor over to my favorite drunken genius of my adult years, which thankfully ended some time back…

That kind of a night

This is the last thing I’ll be doing this morning before my wife wakes up and the official day gets underway.

We turn in around 10:30 or 11:00 pm, and I can usually sleep for between an hour and a half and two and a half hours. This morning I woke up thinking of Glenn Gould. He’d crossed my mind yesterday because I’s written an Instapunk post about one song by a girl singer I’d never heard of before. She’s in the memory banks now for that one song/video I thought made an artistic whole beyond the song itself. (Wrote a fairly lengthy post some years ago about a particular video of Philip Glass’s The Hours, in which I brashly proclaimed it the best music video ever made. The one-song meme had reminded me of Glenn Gould’s Opus 1, which I really like and hadn’t heard in a long time. Then I forgot about it without looking it up for another listen. 

“Glenn Gould.” That was what I woke up with in my head. Not Opus 1 though. In the scheme of things that was dismissible as a poke at critics by a genius with no need to prove anything. “Composition. Yeah I can do that. There. You happy?” The thing in my mind this morning, though, was another, more obscure Gould recording, this one a component of a longer treatment about the man’s enormous esthetic reach. What I went looking for was a video project called “32 Ways of Looking at Glenn Gould” or some such title. The one I remembered and succeeded in finding was this:

The clip shows us an incident that probably did happen and was confided to someone by Gould. He’s in a diner and his highly trained ears are automatically tuning in and out of the background blur of conversations around him, creating a spontaneous composition very like music for the one man who could hear it play. I’ve known that the mind is extraordinarily adept at adjusting the volumes around us (once heard a tape recording of a corporate meeting I was in — unbelievable how loud the paper shuffling, coffee cup clatter, and incidental voices were compared to what I’d been hearing…), and I’ve had recent conversations with my wife about that. She’s reluctant to get a hearing aid, because all most of them do is amplify all sound, turning even passive listening into a cacophonous assault. There’s new technology that claims it screens out the background noise to highlight voices rather than dishware. Haven’t convinced her yet…

She’s up now, so the official day has begun. Still, I’m going to finish this account because there’s no news again this morning but the cacophonous Trump-bashing on all sides. Any real work I was working on is done for a few hours at least. Time for coffee and catchup with my girl…

Soldiering on. The phenomenon shown in the Gould clip is how I actually think of  The Boomer Bible and its Intercolumn Reference (ICR). The text of the books is all deliberately oral, meant to be heard not read silently. They are also simultaneous, all aware of one another in the whole, which the ICR documents in terms of specific echoes or resonances. The experience of The Boomer Bible, ideally, is of a lead narrative declaimed by the book the reader is hearing backed by a constant many-voiced murmur of all the other books, with volumes of the resonant materials rising just slightly as they are highlighted by the ICR. What I have vaguely referred to elsewhere as lighting up the book as a whole in a realm above the physical page’s ink and paper. I actually had that experience when I was compiling the ICR over a period of four weeks in which I lived and dreamt of nothing but the connections that built the internal architecture of the book’s ideas.

I’ve used the same aural phenomenon for simpler purposes in satirical pieces, notably in video spoofs I’ve done for my ‘XOFF News’ sendup of Fox News hosts. Which sent me to my Johnny Dodge YouTube Channel to see if I still had an example of simultanous voices as content. The answer was yes, but there’s more than one YT channel (for defensive purposes in CensorLand USA), and it took some time to reassemble these four snippets videoed directly from a much spiffier original still imprisoned in my wife’s computer.

This is where I get into trouble, distracted by couldabeen, mightabeen, shouldabeen, couldtheybe-type ruminations. Two of the clips above were buried in a hideaway at the Johnny Dodge Channel called Random Thoughts, where it was clear I was playing around with extemporaneous musings unrelated to other stuff. I’ve never played much in the deep end of the playwrighting pool because that’s a whole different set of agents and obstacles and corporate ladders I’m not equipped to deal with. Aside from some brief spoofs of Scandinavian plays in The Naked Woman I haven’t tried to write an actual play, no matter how oral works like the Boomer Bible and various chunks of ST99 are. There had been a screenplay that was useful as a precursor to Punk City and probably the origin of the St. Nuke character and maybe even the cartoonish setting of Shuteye Town 1999. Is there still a chance for a “the play’s the thing” adventure?

As I said, where I got into trouble. I’d also stumbled over this video from the Johnny Dodge Channel when I was looking for the XOFF News stuff. 

By now it’s three in the morning, and I was seized with the fancy that with some wordsmithing and clever cutting and pasting (and some new stuff of course) I could make a real stage play out of the equally, definitively oral work from ST99 called “The Lounge Conversations.” 

So I wound up jotting this wee-hours noodling into my iPad Notes app:

**********

The Lounge Conversations - A Play in ‘n’ Acts

“Our Town” Template dramatizing my book The Lounge Conversations

[Actually a mashup of Our Town, The Time of Your Life, and The Trial]

Interrogator/narrator with Daniel Pangloss in custody, orange jumpsuit natch, stage left introducing and stage managing of the scenes

Main stage is a barroom set from Shuteye Town surmounted by three large HiDef screens capable of showing scenes from all over Shuteye Town (drawn from original ST99 artwork)

Scenes are blackout pieces from various barroom subway stations featuring iconic Pangloss in duster with vodka flask, engaging in Socratic dialogue with customers.

Plot of the play:  Pangloss is being held by federal authorities and investigated for hate speech transcribed from the actual recorded conversations dramatized in the play. In the end he escapes, as the center screen above the bar set shows a “No Security” (Ref Rolling Stones) style black and white video of a punk band come extract him from custody…

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=GCGkDTAQ-0s&pp=ygUhU3RvbmUsIG5vIHNlY3VyaXR5IGVudHJhbmNlIHZpZGVv

Our Town Opening:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=KoFo9XxdpVE&pp=ygUYU3RhZ2luZyBvZiBPdXIgVG93biBzZXRz

Our Town Full Play:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=18tIdWbq5Jc&pp=ygUYU3RhZ2luZyBvZiBPdXIgVG93biBzZXRz0gcJCcMKAYcqIYzv

Image cues…

**********

The prisoner Pangloss was already lurking in multiple places among my Image files.

He was already leaning against the bar in a dozen subway stations…

I aleady had a design concept for the overhead screens above the barroom set…

Not for football this time but for glimpses of the station platform, 

Shuteye security cams, other stations, the lounge, the restrooms, etc.

 

That brings me up to the present moment pretty much. End of my hopefully not too depressing description of how time gets away from me on my customarily broken nights of sleep. I live with it. I still get real work done. Most of the time anyway.

And just to be sure you didn’t skip the link to the big rescue scene at the end, here’s the inspiration piece I saw myself when they played it at the Spectrum in Philadelphia at the beginning of the “No Security” concert, ahem, some years back…

Lunchtime.

Not fretting about the Pope’s politics

Something I used to do more often than I do now. Turn on Voice Recorder and sound off by myself to myself. The FB POST I did about Chris Christie disdaining Trump’s experience of theology reminded me of these old YouTube clips in particular. Why I feel some kinship with Trump about his midnight outbursts. He wakes up with some idea and because he’s a showman he has to get it out there. Not always the politic thing to do, obviously, but it’s a glimpse of the opposite of what of the 25th Amendment drones are targeting. He’s still capable of getting fired up about things, he’s still there, still free-sociating. The little explosions he shares are not his identity. They’re notions that capture him for the moment, but they have their little life too, and help keep the big things that most people think are the big things accountable to the whole universe of possibilities and permutations. Imagination pops off, and maybe gives rise to some other idea or opportunity that wouldn’t have been surfaced any other way. Mistakes are one of the possibilities, but all explorers court risk and some are good at negotiating risks. That’s the bet we make by trusting them even in their flawed humanity, as Steve Bannon keeps reminding us is the state of Trump’s humanity.

Flawed humanity is an oxymoron. We all have a case of the flaws. The most dangerous among us are those who have it all figured out from soup to nuts, which can only be done by those who have locked themselves into a self-sized world where nothing matters but your own list of bullet points proving how right you are.

So here are some clips of me talking to the sound of my own voice with no one around to hear. I mostly don’t disagree with what I’ve said here, and the overstatements are attributable to the intention I recall having in recording them. There are so many people out there who are not culturally literate at all and aren’t even up to faking it, just dismissing it or ignoring it. They have inferiority complexes, they hide their ignorance, and are afraid of those they suspect of having a key to some secret society of knowledge.

Why I’m suggesting that it’s possible to shortcut the process, to learn a lot about a lot of fine minds and works by building their own equivalent of Jim McKay’s Wide World of Sports, “spanning the globe” to discover more than you knew existed, without getting lost along the way.

That’s it. I’ll let the recordings speak for themselves. No value in explanations of psst idling thoughts. All I’ll add is that it didn’t end there.

At some later date, I actually outlined the course material I would assemble into a Kindle book and mocked up a cover for the MS, but then it took its place in the queue along with April Island and The Neanderthal Conspiracy. These are works for which I have content materials I add to from time to time as the mood strikes me, but have a long way to go to the finish line. Having a cover makes it a thing. Actually, this one has two covers, so I know I’ve taken more than one pass at the idea. It’s a time-consuming project, though probably one worth doing…

So far, all it is is the clips I’ve shown you here, plus some list-ish Notes in the iPad utility for storing such scraps.

Who knows how many such scraps have contributed to Trump’s worldview, including a relationship with the Almighty he’s under no obligation to share with us. He’s a President, not a writer.

I’m a writer, not a President. Different jobs but hopefully aimed in the same benevolent direction…

Military Celebrations

Enjoyed reading your comment about reunions after deployment. I’ve never seen one of those except for the awkward staged ones where Dad is dressed like a Ninja Turtle and reveals himself to his daughter in some auditorium at school. Why I’m so fond of the candid clips of dogs swarming a returning service member at the front door. (Yes, one dog can swarm a loved one.) My Dad was shocked when after three years in the Army Air Corps his Boston terrier leaped from the floor into his arms to greet his return. Also why I got the idea I posted about on FB.

I have seen a few happy military occasions however. For more than two decades, my wife managed documentation of the software developed by Computer Sciences Corporation for the Navy’s AEGIS destroyers. After we were married, I was privileged to attend the launching of an AEGIS destroyer in Philadelphia.

A brief record of the day for posterity’s sake.

Obviously, no cameras were permitted during the guided tour of the new ship’s innards, but it was a quietly festive occasion nonetheless. Standouts from other public events that impressed me were 1) No littering by anyone in attendance, and 2) When the tour guide said, “Don’t touch anything,” no one touched anything. I won’t mention anything technological but, you know, wow.

We also had occasion to attend the Millville Air Show in 2007. Millville’s an out-of-the-way airfield whose claim to fame was serving as a training base for P-47 fighter pilots in WWII. Since then it has been a private airfield and home to aircraft related businesses, as well as an annual air show.

The show was much more of an event than I anticipated. I wrote about it for my old Instapunk blog, and the post is still there with its photographs, at the end of a week including posts on other subjects. If you don’t mind scrolling down to find “Blue State Blasphemies,” you’ll find a description of the special sense of community Americans can feel around their military.

That’s all. Just thought I’d share and congratulate you on your daughter’s service.

A Peek through a Shuttered Window

 Just a shot in the dark here…

I’ve recovered much of the damage done by the hacked card fiascos with the bank, but one blog site is still suspended for unknown reasons by out-of-touch Blue Host. A chunk of it is still available through the Wayback Machine, which rations the number of inquiries I’m permitted to make about my own stuff. 

Anyhow. There’s a post I’ve been looking for that I don’t want permanently lost from the Internet. It’s called “Epistle to the Millennials.” For now, and I really don’t know for how long, you can find it here.

It’s contained in a group of posts from the same month at rflaird.com. You have to scroll to get there. The post as a whole is a brief overview of my Revolutionary War roots by way of the time I’ve spent in Salem and Greenwich, NJ. 

I’d be pleased if somebody besides me at least had screen shots of the post or key parts of it. The Salem County Historical Society has been taken over by a kind of Deep State of its own (grudges dating back to my Dad’s successful opposition to construction of a 5-story jail in the middle of town) , and I don’t even have access to their morgue of the extinct Today’s Sunbeam, where my full multi-page supplement about the skirmish event still reposes. 

At the very least, I’ll be able to come back here myself and check from time to time on whether the link still works…

Where would a Revolutionary-era clockmaker reside? In a house tall enough to build 

grandfather clocks. I lived there for seven years, from ‘97 to ‘04. You know my thing 

about Time. I wrote Shuteye Town 1999 in the Reeve House. Pretty funny.

Have a good one.